sharpen the edges, and it’s a home defense weapon

Also see TVtropes. There’s several related pages, e.g. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SissyVillain

Mind linking it? I never received any sort of contact; I presume they’re v busy!

Reminds me of Terry Pratchett, and the Death of Rats.

oh man probably me too. either that or Evanescence.

i was a angsty lil’ dickhead omg

Hi. You don’t know me, but programmer salary means I can foot $270 to help out our beloved admin — you’ve seemed stressed recently.

DM me on masto or discord (same name everywhere) to figure out how to exchange? 💜

your username is extremely effective

Oh man Astroneer is so good — but I don’t think it’s up OP’s alley. There’s no quests to speak of, or even goals really, besides the 1. tutorial stuff, and 2. overall “reach the end” — besides that, it’s up to you to be self-directed.

Context: my breath-of-the-wild loving partners didn’t much get into Astroneer, unless I specifically set them goals and they didn’t have to figure anything out for themselves. :P (Well, one of them, at least …)

I think the “map marker check mark” dopamine game is a whole different thing from ‘true’ open-world … well, that’d unnecessarily exclusionary. Neither one is truer than the other. But they’re definitely extremely different.

Anyway, OP, my suggestion in that vibe would definitely be the Fallout or Assassin’s Creed serieses. Or Horizon: Zero Dawn! Great sidequest-driven, exploration-heavy, gigaaaaaantic games, all of them!

Try getting older!

A decade ago, I was extremely into hi-fi — most of my disposable income went to it. (Martin Logan electrostatic speakers and McIntosh amps, stereo JL Fathom 13.5” subs, sound treatment and reference mic for balancing and analysis …)

Now? I’m perfectly and completely pleased with my AirPods Max. My hearing just ain’t what it used to be, and I genuinely don’t hear the slightest difference. (… obviously modulo feeling the bass, hah.)

(Yes. I listen to music over Bluetooth. Not even APT-X. WHO HAVE I BECOME? 😭)

What’s this in reference to, as one Not In That Country?

When I was a kid, I was such a nerd, that I invented my own decimal timekeeping system.

Even wrote a little macOS menubar clock for it — I was dead-serious.

Edit: omg the website still works, even though I never put any real content there …

http://yreality.net/UJD/

Edit 2: Found this old explanation I apparently put together in July 2010, according to my image archive:

“Pretty fly, for a wi-fi.”

I guess I haven’t seen that many, but there aren’t any comments yet, so I win by default!

It wasn’t English class before you got here — but, unfortunately, it turned out you missed the other English classes! No big deal, though, we’re happy to pivot.

So, let’s talk about the subjunctive …

Yeah; it feels a little naive to think “bad associations with the word” come from past-tense propaganda instead of current-tense propaganda.

Like, nobody cares if you say “mother-fucker” anymore; and that was unthinkable, what, two decades ago? Less?

Without active, current, pervasive propaganda about the ‘bad intentions’ of the left, the word ‘communist’ would also lose stigma in the U.S. within a similar timeframe.

(I’m open to being told I’m wrong about this …)

This is terrible news to me, as an OCaml’eer.

There goes all my potential cool project domains … 😭

This is so frickin’ relatable.

I recently moved cross-country, leaving my beloved partners behind; and while I’m so much happier in my new location … I’m struggling to make new friends? Feels like a “30s problem,” because I used to have a vibrant, online scene of rich friendships … but now it’s just me, my dog, work, and a bunch of single-player videogames. )=

I spend most of my weeks looking forward to the next trip to/from my partners, and live as a completely antisocial shut-in, the rest of the time … which sucks, because I used to think of myself as something of a social butterfly! 😮‍💨

anyway idk hit me up if you wanna play multiplayer, complicated video games — factorio/satisfactory, complex systemic RPGs, literally anything that 1. takes more than a week or two to play and 2. isn’t single player? 🫠

I haven’t actually played it yet, but HYPERCHARGE: Unboxed has been in my Steam library for ages. That looks like it may scratch your itch …

I really miss some “toy soliders” 3D shoot-em-up that I can just baaaaaaarely remember from the 1990s … does anybody remember the game I’m thinking about? (There was definitely a series, I distinctly recall the name ending in “2” …)

I absolutely adored Invisible, Inc (by Klei — yes, of Don’t Starve & Oxygen Not Included fame — what a diverse bunch!)

It seems a little different from your usual vibe (it’s not an first/third-person shooter-y thingie; iirc it’s isometric and pixel-art?); but it’s easily the best stealth game I’ve ever played. :D

Just some feedback from someone who sounds like they may be similar to you in some ways — if you’re talking about SRS / Anki type notes … that’s definitely overkill, for programming.

(And from your description, it sounds like “overkill” is, indeed, killing you.)

You genuinely shouldn’t worry about memorizing programming topics! As a field, we all tend to search up anything we need to know, in real-time, as we run into it; everything from syntax for a programming language we haven’t used in a while, to data-structures we’ve forgotten the details of, even to terminology that’s a bit different than our particular sub-field is using daily.

Mostly, if not almost entirely, the effective way to master “programming” (which, again, is mostly a synthesis of ‘stuff that’s at the front of my brain from working on this current project for a while,’ and ‘everything i can extract from Google on short notice’) … is to just do. And do a lot. Start projects. Get obsessed. Get bored, move on, do another!

tl;dr stop taking notes and just hang your head against code! I swear, it’s genuinely far more effective.

(If it helps you to believe me, some credentials: dev for, idk, more than 15 years; entirely self-taught; have built everything from programming-languages and compilers to mobile apps to massively-distributed systems running across 500,000 CPU cores; I’ve learned, taught, forgot, and then learned again, more languages and frameworks than I can count.

You can do this!)

Same where I grew up in Alaska — no billboards, minimal advertising. The south was such a culture shock. )=