@RogerBW@emacs.ch
@RogerBW@emacs.ch avatar

RogerBW

@RogerBW@emacs.ch

#Emacs, #Perl, #Rustlang, #PostScript, #Linux sysadmin, polyglot programming, #boardgames, #RPGs, too many #podcast s, 3d modelling and #3dprinting.
He/him or they/them.
Here's a nickel, kid. Get yourself a better computer.
If I unfollow you it's probably for my mental health/distraction rather than anything you've done. If you want to follow me, have a profile that looks as if it was written by a human.

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hacks4pancakes, to random

Kudos to the appliance repair guy who instructed me to have my husband come home from work to… turn off the circuit breaker, in this year of two thousand and twenty three when it’s literally on the wall 4 feet away and gods help me what human doesn’t know how to flip a circuit breaker it’s a basic life skill?

RogerBW,
@RogerBW@emacs.ch avatar

@givemefoxes @hacks4pancakes Strap-on beard like Hatshepsut?

tante, to random
@tante@tldr.nettime.org avatar

Kinda tired of the whole "I made a lot of money building the Torment Nexus but now I quit and am warning you about the Torment Nexus (buy my book)" redemption arch for tech people we seem to have settled on.

RogerBW,
@RogerBW@emacs.ch avatar

@tj @tante Federated Torment?

DarkestKale, to random
@DarkestKale@mastodon.social avatar

Good morning folks

RogerBW,
@RogerBW@emacs.ch avatar

@DarkestKale If you're really lucky and you have a competent administrator, meetings can pave the way for change to be done. My experience has been more "I've already done half of this because it's the obvious and only sensible thing to do, now I have to persuade you to rubber stamp the plan so that you can feel important, and if we hadn't had this meeting I'd have finished implementing it already".

RogerBW,
@RogerBW@emacs.ch avatar

@DarkestKale When actual collaboration needs to happen, I find a group of the two or three people who will actually need to do it works a lot better - ideally by email so that they can take time to think about their answers rather than having to come up with something right now in face to face, conference call, or Slack. (This has been my experience in coding, sysadmin/planning, convention organising and game writing.)

velobetty, to random
@velobetty@toot.bike avatar

I'm not sure that means what you think it does...

RogerBW,
@RogerBW@emacs.ch avatar

@velobetty Personally I've always preferred brioche.

RogerBW, to random
@RogerBW@emacs.ch avatar

Falcon 4: Lost In Time

Mission Brief

It is April 1st 3034. On this day you are to attempt to make history by piloting your model A3 Time Machine into the far- future. No one has yet undergone Future Travel successfully. It was on the day of Agidy Yelov's escape from the confinement section of the Eiger Vault that TIME Lord Pilota made the most recent attempt. She set her Time Machine to travel to Earth in the year 4000 AD but it remained firmly rooted in the present of 3033 AD. Pilota, however, suffered severe disorientation as the Variac Drive of her machine cut in, carrying her into the void of null-space for what seemed to her like seventeen days. When she stepped out of the machine no more than an instant of real time had passed, yet she had thought that she was forever lost in the nothingness of null-space, doomed to a lifetime of boredom, until supplies of food in the Time Ship's nutrition dispenser were used up. After two months of convalescence in free-fall on Spiro's Ringworld she bravely volunteered to undertake another mission, but it was decided by the other Lords of TIME, the Keladi, R'rrllk and Silvermane the Rigellian, that too much danger was involved. No TIME Lord will be risked on so dangerous a mission.

[cont'd]

RogerBW, (edited )
@RogerBW@emacs.ch avatar

Realising that you should not be requiring the use of your flyer, you have decided to ignore the fused circuit. Note that the flyer hatch doors are fused shut.

Using your powers of Psychic Awareness you scan the past for the timehole of the Eiger Vault in 3034 AD, wondering, once again, why you didn't materialise inside the Vault in the year 4000. As the Variac Drive engages you are sucked into the uniform greyness of the void. After about an hour in null-space, Falcon's Wing rematerialises and CAIN chimes: 'Attention! Falcon, we are not on Earth, where have you taken us to?' You shake your head and turn on the outside camera. The vista that greets you tests your equilibrium training to the utmost. Falcon's Wing is floating inside a pool of milky juices at the bottom of a cavernous stomach, the ridged walls of which are running with droplets of steaming liquid.

'You tell me, CAIN, I set course for the Eiger Vault 3034 AD, where are we?'

'Insufficient data,' CAIN chimes. Something has gone seriously wrong. You decide to ask CAIN for a damage report and are relieved to hear that Falcon's Wing has sustained none. The camera swivels upwards, under CAIN's direction, and reveals a circular opening with an edge of what looks like serrated bone above you. If you are to find out your location you will have to get outside whatever it is you are in. You don your environment suit and ask CAIN what your chances are of piloting the flyer out through the hole above you without crashing into the stomach wall around you. CAIN responds, 'That will depend upon your reactions and your judgement. Falcon. An average human with your flying experience would have no better than a forty-nine per cent chance of success.' Will you:

Descend on foot into the milky liquid below Falcon's Wing?

Attempt to use the flyer? [Repairing the hatch first.]

RogerBW, (edited )
@RogerBW@emacs.ch avatar

You instruct CAIN to search the holowaves and tune into a holo broadcast but it chimes, 'Shouldn't we be getting back, Falcon?' 'I want to find out what in the galaxy has caused the weather control to allow an electrical storm.' CAIN tries to reason with you, saying that you can apply to the Lords of TIME to return and investigate further when you return to 3034 AD. Will you:

Disconnect CAIN?

Do as it says and return to the Eiger Vault of 3034 AD?

RogerBW,
@RogerBW@emacs.ch avatar

You are about to reply in the same jocular vein when Skirrow, head of the Research Section of TIME, takes your arm. He seems nervous as he tells you that he believes his technicians have solved the problem of emerging in the future. 'Of course,' he continues, 'what we cannot know is how easy it will be to come back again.' He shrugs his shoulders, his blue eyes looking disarmingly innocent. You thank him tersely, wish Lord Pilota and Bloodhound well and allow the two technicians who have checked every instrument and component of Falcon's Wing, to help you into your crash-couch. Soon you are alone and a sense of grim foreboding grips you as your mind wanders across the seas of time and space, searching, using your Psychic Awareness, for the timehole in Earth's future, 4000 AD.

At last you are ready and CAIN engages Falcon's Wing's modified Variac Drive. Everything turns to grey. You can see through your grey body and through the ghostly transparent lines of the Time Ship's hull. The ship is a ghostly ball suspended in a void of absolute nothingness which stretches away in every direction to infinity. After about an hour, during which time you wait with mounting tension, the ship rematerialises and the hydraulic legs slide into position as Falcon's Wing settles with a bump. CAIN chimes, The date is March 1st, 4000 AD, Falcon. You are the first human ever to experience Future Travel.'

'Are you suggesting that somewhere aliens have Future Travel?' you query.

'Incomplete data, I cannot respond,' chimes CAIN. Suppressing a smugness at the realisation that you have, on this rare occasion, got the better of the know-all CAIN, you switch on the outside monitor.

[cont'd]

RogerBW, (edited )
@RogerBW@emacs.ch avatar

To your surprise, the camera shows the snow laden slopes of Mount Eiger. Falcon's Wing is perched precariously on a high ledge instead of inside the Eiger Vault of the future. Either there has been a small timeflux, your Psychic Awareness has let you down, or there is no longer a cavernous hollow inside the mountain. Cloud swirls suddenly about the ledge and you see something you have never before witnessed - lightning. An electrical storm is raging around the mountain tops. Electrical storms cause interference to holophone communications and the controlled weather of Earth in 3034 AD with its equal shares of rain for all save the holiday sunspots does not allow them. Either the people of 4000 AD enjoy them, or the world's weather control has failed. Your mission brief called upon you to return to Earth in 3034 AD as soon as CAIN had confirmed that you had undergone Future Travel. Will you:

Follow orders and return immediately to 3034 AD?

Try to intercept a holocommunication to see if you can learn something of this future Earth?

RogerBW, (edited )
@RogerBW@emacs.ch avatar

As you scan the past for the timehole of the Eiger Vault in 3034 AD, Falcon's Wing rocks suddenly. CAIN chimes, 'The ship has been hit by a powerful electrical discharge.' It runs a control check and soon tells you that the hatch through which the flyer leaves Falcon's Wing will no longer open, due to a fused circuit. Will you:

Attempt to repair the circuit and risk a further damaging burst of lightning?

Ignore this and return to the Eiger Vault immediately?

jyrgenn, to random
@jyrgenn@mas.to avatar

US politics is getting on my nerves, strongly, and I get much of the news in this place. Content warnings won't help. Instead of leaving here to reduce that influx, I am thinking of unfollowing those through whom this comes into my feed. I won't do that lightly, and I know I will lose a lot of interesting things as well. It is not a comment on your political positions, which I mostly share. I appreciate the discussion, in principle, but I no longer want to follow it. >>

RogerBW,
@RogerBW@emacs.ch avatar

@jyrgenn I'm in much the same position.

BigJackBrass, to random
@BigJackBrass@vivaldi.net avatar

The procedures I have to follow at work are entirely exceptions based. It's like the worst set of RPG rules imaginable.

RogerBW,
@RogerBW@emacs.ch avatar

@satsuma @BigJackBrass Like DC Heroes, low initiatives declare their actions first, then high initiatives can come along and make them pointless.

RogerBW,
@RogerBW@emacs.ch avatar

@satsuma @BigJackBrass So I'll just roll the dice to choose between them then…

RogerBW,
@RogerBW@emacs.ch avatar

@satsuma @BigJackBrass Seriously, a friend of mine regarded this as one of the major factors working against the Nazi war machine - Hitler saw a project and said "ooh, shiny", and it got absolute top priority, just like all the other shiny projects with absolute top priority. Whereas in England your brilliant idea had to convince civil servants who'd seen six brilliant ideas before breakfast.

mhoye, to random
@mhoye@mastodon.social avatar

The UK government wants programmers to do performative, unpaid labor, so they can leverage tools built entirely on a nonconsensual strip-mining of the public sphere, to find a way to automate the process of treating desperate people as something less deserving than human with tools that will let them launder their racism, classism and hatred.

Don't do this.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/apr/29/government-hackathon-to-search-for-ways-to-use-ai-to-cut-asylum-backlog

RogerBW,
@RogerBW@emacs.ch avatar

@mhoye Why don't they just deny them all and then let the poor bastards sue if they can stay alive and pay to do so? It's much more keeping with current policy.

RogerBW, to random
@RogerBW@emacs.ch avatar

@lordof1 you need to see this.
https://dmv.community/@jcrabapple/110302032792318605

RogerBW,
@RogerBW@emacs.ch avatar

@lordof1 Ah, curse those biohazard rules.

RogerBW, to random
@RogerBW@emacs.ch avatar

Bunting alert! Rather less than was up for the funeral or the jubilee in this Home Counties cul-de-sac.

RogerBW,
@RogerBW@emacs.ch avatar

@BigJackBrass I have my tiny chainsaw…

shimminbeg, to random
@shimminbeg@masto.ai avatar

@BigJackBrass
RT from catwheezie on TW (three masto profiles but I can't tell if any of them are genuine)

RogerBW,
@RogerBW@emacs.ch avatar

@shimminbeg @BigJackBrass There must be a conversion for Bunnies & Burrows.

satsuma, to random
@satsuma@dice.camp avatar

The horseman is charging at you very quickly. You will only be able to fight for one round of combat before the momentum of his attack carries him past you.

Vassagonian Horseman: COMBAT SKILL 20 ENDURANCE 28

1: Roll 8 E 16/LW 0

RogerBW,
@RogerBW@emacs.ch avatar

@satsuma We can't kill all the bandits single-handed, fun as it may be to try.

HadasWeiss, to random
@HadasWeiss@mastodon.social avatar

should i be lying about my age in my 30s? (46yo)

RogerBW,
@RogerBW@emacs.ch avatar

@HadasWeiss Tell people you're 65 and look really good for your age?

ianfogg, to random

Question — is micro-post style social media a winner takes all space? Or, can twitter, t2, post, mastodon, bluesky, etc. etc. co-exist?

RogerBW,
@RogerBW@emacs.ch avatar

@ianfogg The ones that want to be big will fight hard to make you believe you have to back a "winner". IMO using twitter or similar to get official published news is just daft - that's what web sites and RSS feeds are for. Social media is for humans.

ulysses, to random
@ulysses@tabletop.vip avatar

Today we played Flamme Rouge for the first time. Certainly some similarities with Formula D that we played last week. I like modular track. And using cards instead of dice gives at least the appearance of greater control. But I also like the dice and gears of formula D. Do I really need both games? Probably not. But that’s never stopped me before.

image/jpeg
image/jpeg

RogerBW,
@RogerBW@emacs.ch avatar

@ulysses To me Flamme Rouge often feels like a hand management game with a complicated scoreboard more than like a racing game. (I love it all the same!)

nayele18maybe, to random
@nayele18maybe@mstdn.social avatar

There’s no problem a breath of fresh air or arson won’t solve.

RogerBW,
@RogerBW@emacs.ch avatar

@nayele18maybe Fresh air helps the arson, too. I mean really it's a public service.

recluse, to random

Does anyone still play ? I played a lot when I was in college, ages ago, but haven't really thought much about it since. I still have a few sourcebooks because SJG produced some pretty amazing references.

RogerBW,
@RogerBW@emacs.ch avatar

@recluse Play it, occasionally write for it… I'll admit it's not perfect, but of everything I've tried it still comes closest to letting me run the sort of game and my players enjoy.

RogerBW, to random
@RogerBW@emacs.ch avatar

OK, did not expect to see a debate about salvation by faith vs salvation by works in this children's animated film. (Watching for a future .)

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