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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Careful with alarm fatigue. It’s unfortunately something your brain does without your permission. If you ever find setting lots of alarms stops being helpful, that is likely what happened. Basically, since you will end up brushing off a decent portion of those alarms as you are either still on task or don’t need to be on task yet “this time”, your brain will slowly think of those alarms as less important, no matter how important you want them to still be.

    It can help to set as many different alarm sounds as possible. Sometimes, that can make it feel like each alarm is different, and they won’t all be lumped into the same category in your subconscious.



  • Discussing it properly is fine as long as they are interested. If they don’t seem interested, then you can boil it down to a simpler analogy. Some kids very much appreciate having the full picture right away, and some need a framework first before details can be added. Most schools use method 2, because it will eventually reach all kids, and the only downside is kids that need/want method 1 will be bored the whole time.


  • Dungeons and dragons, both the paper version and the digital stuff. I remember as a kid playing some random DnD games with no context and being upset that they were weird rpgs that only went up to level 8 or whatever. Without context, that is not common in videoganes. And not knowing how much more open the games could have been than just playing them “murder hobo” style…

    I only ended up playing paper DnD at around the start of 5e, while I was tangentially aware of it since I think before third edition, I didn’t know I would actually like it back then. And it’s entirely possible I wouldn’t have. I have a processing delay, so whether or not I end up enjoying board games, or anything else involving players taking turns doing complicated thinking… largely depends on how patient the other players are.

    I also wasn’t super creative back then… although maybe playing DnD would have helped. But at the very least, I wish I would have tried learning paper DnD back then even if I didn’t like it, so I had the context when I played the digital games. I would have very much appreciated those if I understood why certain limitations were in place.

    I mean, could you imagine a DnD digital game trying to accurately represent the capabilities of level 20 characters… hitting level 20 in DnD basically forces your campaign into “jumping the shark”. Which omnipotent god are we one-shotting this week?



  • There is a bunch of different modern versions of Myst. It’s also got a VR version that is very good. Riven and Obduction are also available in VR. Not sure about some of the lesser known Myst games like exile, uru, or revelation.

    In my experience, playing them when I was younger didn’t work out great, some of the puzzles were just way too hard for pre-teen me. But they were great to play now.




  • Ah ok, they already have a built-in hand-wavey mechanic to explain it. That’s handy. Extrapolation from their inability to think creatively and only mimic, it seems like that would indeed set up for physical mimicry too. But that would probably get old fast, since it would have to be at the expense of gaining stuff naturally with levels. You’d either have to be trained everything you want to know, or have the DM set up encouters that makes sense for picking it up eventually. Maybe fun for the first couple levels, but just unnecessary tedium as it goes on.

    Certainly makes more sense fun-wise to retcon the scope of the curse to a more limited handicap. Something that fits the scope of a single hardship slot.


  • I noticed early in my 20’s that my social anxiety had gotten to a point where I couldn’t casually chat with random people. So I made an effort to do it anyway even though the results wouldn’t be favourable for a while. It took a few years before I noticed it didn’t take much of a push any more to start. I’m 40 now and while I still don’t enjoy talking to strangers, especially when just making meaningless small talk, I at least don’t have a wall of pre-dread anymore to climb in the case that I do need/want to talk to a stranger. Like if they dropped something, or if I want a product in a store that is not currently stocked on the shelf.


  • Awesome, I love the idea of building a working library of dialogue to make use of. Technically mimicry would mean having no actual understanding of the phrases actual meaning so it would have to be coincidental to say something useful in context… but it would be such a fun mechanic I would find some way to hand-wave it into making sense.

    Might also be fun to extend the mimicry to physical mimicry too. Maybe picking up something that you have seen X number of times. Though that would add even more data tracking, hehe.


  • The process of making a game on your own involves failing to make the first 10 games you try to make on your own.

    Ultimately, it sounds like you already have a good handle on everything that goes into it, and are just hoping to hear it’s not actually as hard as you think it is… it is hard. Know that going in, and assess if you will be able to do it. But give yourself a bit of benefit, getting most of the way tends to increase your resiliance to the final hurdles.


  • Back in the day, people wiresharked it all and said nothing untoward was going on back then. And a meta account in this regard is just an Oculus account. It has nothing to do with facebook.

    But yeah, ultimately, I don’t care if other people don’t want to use it. I only care if I want to use it, and I do.

    Also none of my androids came with facebook and still don’t have it. But I don’t buy subsidized from carriers, I just buy the phone I want and use the carrier I want separately.


  • VR desktop streamers, do the same thing but optionally in multimonitor 4k and don’t have to look at our hands the whole time. Also can play on a recliner comfortably. My neck is in so much better shape since I started using my VR headset to stream instead of a phone or other handheld. Plus the screens are 20 feet away, nice on the eyes. And still take up 80 degrees of my field of view. Not sure what effective size that makes them, but it’s bigger and nicer looking than a theatre screen.


  • Yeah, part of it was that smoking cigarettes was absolutely off the table. Almost no upside, all downside. And we were kids long before vapes was a thing, but that would certainly have fallen under the same umbrella. They were both addicted to nicotine for decades and could definitely attest to how hard it was to quit. They both did eventually manage, but it was pretty obvious how big of a deal it was for them, with alot of failed attempts.

    Weed is for sure not a great idea for teens, but that wasn’t known at the time. And part of it not being taboo meant that none of us ended up being habitual anyway. But yeah, certainly had they known that at the time it would have been added to the con list for it.


  • Most people still play it on a monitor, but yeah, it’s great in VR. There can be a bit of a learning curve on monitor. Kind of like the difference learning to drive rally on a monitor versus learning in VR, you can just tell when everything is going right without having to train yourself to notice little signs, you just feel it intuitively. Having said that, I still recommend going through all the training, and when you are done the training, stay with the free beginner sudewinder for a while. Make sure you can afford your first ship a few times over before you upgrade, so you have a cushion if there is anything important to learn.

    You don’t have to be good at elite for it to be fun. And you won’t be good at it for a while. But you will eventually be good at it, and it will be all the more fun then. The first time you slip an agile ship into dock in a smooth motion, amazing feeling.


  • Being so out of touch with your kid is one of the main ways to create attention seeking behaviour. Not the only way, of course, but it’s still generally a bad idea to have no relationship with your kids.

    My parents knew exactly what we were up to, and in most cases, our first time experimenting with anything like that was supervised by our parents. They wanted to make sure we knew what we were getting into and how to be safe despite taking risks like that. They didn’t really have to worry about me, I’m Autistic and have no interest in drinking or smoking anything, but my older brother and the older of my younger sisters very much partook in any of the safer recreational substances. One advantage of talking with your kids about this stuff is that when you warn them which ones are actually the problem, they have no reason not to trust your advice. There are some “not even once” drugs. There are some “you gotta try it once” drugs, and there are some “it’s not a good way to spend your money, but otherwise fun” drugs.

    Me personally, drug of choice is videogames. Way cheaper high. Though it can be habit forming, make sure it never feels like a priority over doing real-life stuff.


  • I think it won’t be quite as existential, despite how well they make it all feel rooted in reality, it’s still pretty easy to keep in mind that it is a videogame. And with default settings and leaving “flight assist” on, the space ships handle more like planes. You can always disable flight assist, or have it on a toggle, or “disable when button held” setup too. Or, enable when held, if you want to be free flying most of the time, but still have a “stop” button when you want to cancel out your inertia, or more accurately match it with your current frame of reference.

    Basically, by default, you don’t have to think about your frame of reference. The fact that it is a videogame basically takes care of that. It’s a convenient way to hide that the instance you are in is faking(incredibly accurately) everything else that is not in your current frame of reference. Despite space travel feeling pretty seamless, it’s just cuz they hide the load screens and instance transfers as just part of navigating space. Any time you are unable to touch the controls, that is a load screen. Even if it otherwise looks the same, most notably when entering or exiting a planets frame of reference and switching between the “space” graphics of the planet to the “terrain” graphics. When approaching a planets gravity well, you basically do an uncontrolled glide that transitions you from space appropriate speeds to surface appropriate speed. That speed transition is the loading screen.

    Probably the only thing that might give a similar sense of existential dread for a few seconds is if you jump to a binary star system at a time when the star you aren’t jumping to just happens to be in the same direction you just jumped in from. It will look as though you flew through that star. The odds are pretty low, even full time explorers rarely see it, but it is something that can happen.