@Sandra@idiomdrottning.org

Sandra

@Sandra@idiomdrottning.org

Idiomdrottning demonstrates a new and often cleaner way to solve most systems problems. The system as a whole is likely to feel tantalizingly familiar to culture users but at the same time quite foreign.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

Sandra, to random

Warner's decision to deliberately leave diacritics out off "It Came from Beyond Zen" is really weird and it's at the expense of readability. It just looks strange, especially since the previous book had "Dōgen" and not "Dogen" 🐶. It's fine being sloppy with diacritics in an email but this is the Treasury of the Dharma Eye. Don't half-ass it.

I know there's a rant from a few years ago about someone complaining that their name uses a ZWJ sequence in Unicode (which many names do) but this is going too far in the other direction. It's already romaji, no need to doggify things to the 7-bit extreme. Not into it.

Sandra,

My own least favorite edition is 3.x (and PF—which sucks because I like the company, the setting, the characters) but I'd rather play 0e, B/X, 1e, 2e, RC, or 5e over 4E. I was playing B/X (with some of the guys who would later go on to make Mörk Borg) during the tail end of 4E, before 5e came out (which is when I started my own group).

There's a lot of things that's neat and good with 4E. Clarity, balanced classes, interesting–albeit–long-winded fights, neat art and settings, retro vibes.

Some of the problems only apply to the early days of 4E and was addressed as the game evolved:

• A bad initial release and marketing campaign that was seen as disparaging older fans while simultaneously begging "the game will remain the same"
• A fight against other editions and a push that "this is the game now"
• A switch to digital that was plagued with problems due to a horrible tragedy
• Broken monster math
• All classes felt overly similar in their play patterns. Not 100% identical but too similar
• Abilities that felt as if they were spells, like a fighter ability that makes all enemies take a step towards her
• Weirdly flavored / templated abilites that felt like "hitting the play button on a canned action" as opposed to actually doing it

Other D&D (including late 4E): "I have this sword. I'm gonna chop 'em with it!"
Early 4E: "I am going to use this Reaping Strike ability."

To me, that can feel cold and distant. The fact that the powers came on cards that you'd flip as you used them was actually good overall, but it exacerbated this problem greatly. I get a lot of pushback on this from people who had gotten over it and could easily "translate" the abilities into game action, like "I strike them reapingly" or however that would sound, IDK, because I never learned to do it. I can write novels and poems and lyrics but I can't strike reapingly. 🤷🏻‍♀️

4E Essentials (the later edition) get a lot of hate from fans of the original release but it has classes that I actually want to play.

Another issue I get pushback on is that some 4E fans love the "mythicness" of the martial power source. Samson with the jawbone, Flex Mentallo... And that's fine, I'm happy for them. I personally prefer where spells are explicitly marked as spells, as 5E's "Hunter's Mark" ability is or the eldritch knight's "Shield" spell, and magic items are similarly special. Like, we all love Luke Skywalker but he didn't solely rely on the martial power source. He also had ki (or whatever the midichlorian heck is going on).

And some other problems persisted throughout the game's entire run:

• A skill challenge system that was poorly explained (some people were like "always say you're in a skill challenge", others were like "no, just roleplay out a scene and as they are doing checks in the scene, mark progress")
• A skill challenge system that has utterly broken math (throughout all three revisions, including the attempt in the Essentials Rules Compendium). The 5e version, "group checks", also has problems, but fewer.
• Unnatural language. 5e had a push towards using natural language, or language that looked like natural language, over the arcane shorthand. This is a double-edged sword since it also helped with the clarity of 4E. 5.24 is back-pedaling a bit here, with capitalizing rules terms and conditions. Not my preference, I liked the natlang approach. Helps with rules-hacking and glogging and mashing together stuff from various editions the way I like it.
• Overwhelming in play with too many conditions and modifiers to juggle
• Not suited for the type of sandbox play I like. There are 30 levels and huge steps between the levels. So most people built encounters just-in-time, just to fit the party's current level and capabilities (and when you do that, the DM has a lot of responsibility for the outcome of those fights). I prefer making a world with graduated difficulty and set the player characters free in that world; if it's too easy they won't get much XP so they'll see harder pastures, and if it's too hard they die, so they'll try to find a lagom horizon on their own. And, they can freely use resources like town militias, religious warriors, pit faction-v-faction etc (we just came off a long "PCs+lizardfolk vs human slavers" skirmish campaign in our game)
• Killing the OGL!

rml, to random
@rml@functional.cafe avatar

If I'm not dealing with a specialized topic or a legitimately hard problem, I rarely consult StackOverflow or other examples, as I recognize that I'm dealing with a personal blind spot, which makes spending a little extra time solving the problem rewarding in the long run. Add a note to my and soon enough I'll never have to look at it again.

I feel like tools like will be devastating for any new programmers and their problem solving capacities, just because it will prevent a good deal of them from acquiring the set of conceptual tools required to grow as programmers.

Sandra,

@rml

I don't use it for computer stuff but I use the RPG one all the time for D&D mostly as an extra voice-of-reason in rules disputes. They don't have final say, we as a group do, but sometimes the players can be so stubborn and obstinate unless I can cite chapter and verse. (Which makes me a li'l frustrated with some of the reasoning from the FKR crowd and other DM styles that presume DM authority.)

Probably most interesting example was (this particular one wasn't Stack Exchange) when I called up a music college and asked them help settle whether a magic cello that had been submerged in red wine for one hour was ruined or if it could still conjure a cottage of shelter. They said it still would work.

Sandra,

FR is great! I love it. We've spent hundreds of sessions there and some of the novels are really nice.

But since all the settings are good (Talislanta, Mystaria, Golarion, Eberron, Radiant Citadel, Athas, Aebrynis, Zendikar and so on), just pick one (or make one up) and go 🤷🏻‍♀️
They're all good.

Sandra,

Yeah, there are three versions for D&D.

There was a d20 version in the 3.x era that was unfortunately a pretty bad adaptation. There is a 5e port of "the Savage Land" which is a really good and well-made port, feels seemless, it's great, but it's the Savage Land prequel as opposed to regular Talislanta. I ran a three session campaign, pretty fun.

And there is going to be a 5e port of the upcoming new edition.

Sandra, to random

I saw a YouTube-commenter refer to the new D&D edition as "5.24". I like that nickname for it and hope it catches on.

Sandra,

I was in a situation in the early 00s when money was even tighter than it is now. And I had a good friend that collected games and would get a lot of games. And I would buy fewer games and more rarely, since I was so broke at the time. And I'd bring them and we'd play them and he'd like them and he'd immediately buy the same games. And I'd think "if he was gonna buy a copy anyway, why did I buy one? I could've saved that money."

💸

To answer your question: have as few games as possible and have a situation or group in mind for every game. "Here's one I can play with my boyfriend, here's one for work lunch, here's one that I think mom likes" and maybe that can be it. If you have friends with games they are probably aching to get those games to the table and if they're happy to play them with you, that's great.

Sandra, to dnd

One D&D issue that @reverse brought to my attention—it was nine years ago that we had this convo—is when a module's room description has something happening just as a party is about to enter a room.

Arden Vul has a mix of room types:

• there's a tiered roll-table system for who is there and what they're doing / what they want
• there is a schedule of hours (sometimes combined with probabilities)
• there is just a probability
• and a few that are just "the prisoner is dying and will die within three rounds of the party entering".

I think this is a fine mix but that last type can undermine the other types. It's instantly noticable by the players as feeling "fake", and it can make other things feel similarly fake. They've been sneaking around in a prison lately and at one location there was people being there just twice per day, and the party happened to leave there the exact same time as those NPCs were arriving (at our ten-minute-turn granularity). That sort of awesome timing accidents really happening for real is to me a lot more memorable and awesome than any "scripted" room has ever been.

@dnd

Sandra,

Wonderful game, me and a friend play all the time. Easy and fun.

Those stones are a li'l bit too small for that board. But we have the same problem. You get used to it. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Sandra,

Oh, I didn't even realize it was a miniature set! ⚫️⚪️⚫️⚪️

Sandra,

I started by porting over Ghosts of Saltmarsh from Greyhawk to the Crowded Sea region of the Forgotten Realms, we started near the Pearl Cities (so we’re using a ton of al-Qadim books). I’ve added a lot of other modules like Veins of the Earth and Fire on the Velvet Horizon and the last fifty sessions they’ve been in The Halls of Arden Vul, which I’ve set on Dabab Island. Archontean becomes al-Hadhar, Thorcin becomes al-Badia, and Wiskin becomes sahuagin. They’re fighting three cults: Set, the Blood Moth, and Istishia of the Cold Water.

We’re 258 sessions total into this campaign; we’ve had other, earlier campaigns set on the same continuity and planet (al-Toril). We reset the numbering since Tomb of Annihilation used the rule “Replacement characters are at the party’s level” and this campaign uses “Replacement characters start at level one”.

Sandra, to random

If you're lurking around on Lemmy over RSS or WWW, and you come across a comment or post you wanna reply to from your Mastodon account (or other fedi like Pixelfed or Akkoma), find the direct URL to that comment or post, and paste it into your instance's search bar. You might have to reload because sometimes it takes two tries.

That'll bring the post right into Fedi so you can reply or boost as normal.

You're looking for an URL to a comment or post of the form https://servername.tld/comment/12345 or https://servername.tld/post/12345 . If there are a bunch of other @ signs or levels in there, that's no good. Go back and look for a fedi icon (five colorful dots with lines connecting them), that's usually connected to the URL you need.

Sometimes it takes a while for your reply to show up and sometimes it just doesn't. 🤷🏻‍♀️

You don't need an account on Lemmy for this. Just your normal Mastodon (or other Fedi) account.

Your favorite board games?

What are your favorite board games? Me and my friends love playing board games, but I get the feeling their tired of playing the same things. What do you guys usually play? My favorite board game of all time is HeroQuest. I never get tired of playing it. Also love Catan, Arkham Horror, Betrayal House on the Hill, Spyfall (great...

Sandra,

That could have been:

• Xia, legends of a drift system
• Star Wars, outer rim
• Firefly
• Merchant of Venus

Those are probably the most well-known games along that line 💁🏻‍♀️

Sandra, to random

Perhaps between the poles of the two types of human relationship he has elaborated we could designate a third. It would include all those public relationships we so enjoy online but which we do not allow to develop into private ones. These contacts can be decidedly human even though they remain somewhat distant.

https://idiomdrottning.org/the-secular-internet

Sandra, to random

"If you play Rock 'em Sock 'em Robots twenty thousand times in one day, that's one play."

https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/144390/logging-plays

Sandra, to random

On the world's biggest pirate site, probably better known as YouTube, I often see "no copyright intended" and other weird disclaimers. Today I saw a real gem in that vein: "Came from a CD I bought so there shouldn't be any legal issues". Because that's how it works 😅

Sandra, to random

Someone might say “humans and animals” but we overly smart people will fall over ourselves saying “humans are animals!” at risk of missing the original point the speaker was trying to make.

“Fingers and thumbs” is another example.

Linguist Ruth Kempson did some work sorting this out in the seventies, and the phenomena has had a couple of different names throughout the years (like the confusing term “autohyponym” from 1984). The one I like is “vertical polysemy”.

https://idiomdrottning.org/fingers-and-thumbs

davidradcliffe, to random
@davidradcliffe@mathstodon.xyz avatar

I have stumbled upon a surprising conjecture: The sequence defined by a(n) = n^2 - (n^2 XOR n) is injective, where XOR is bitwise exclusive OR. Can anyone prove or disprove this?

Sandra,

@steike Nice find. Does that work even when the input to a is negative? It produces large positive numbers.

@davidradcliffe

Sandra,

@steike

If we were to stipulate that n had to be negative it's obviously injective since a(n) is strictly ascending as n is decreasing, and you proved that a(n) is injective for positive n, but maybe there is a negative input that produces a collision with a (probably much larger) positive input?

@davidradcliffe

Sandra, to random

The various USB C to 3.5mm headphone dongles I have all sound completely awful. Is making a good, clean DAC a lost art? The old USB A one I have on my desktop (first-run Griffin iMic) is heaven sent. It's like the clouds part and rays of pure sound shine through. And then I go on the iPad and my ears die.

It sounds like a sample rate issue 🤔

Sandra, to random

My review of Race for the Galaxy's iconography got selected for review of the week:

https://boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/147259/life-changing-magic-getting-rid-games-geek-weekly

I'm grateful that it got selected, grateful and a little embarrassed. I wasn't too happy with how the review turned out; I had more ambitious ideas about going into more detail but I ran out of spoons, and then I (as the emotional creature I am) couldn't gracefully handle the designer's reaction.

I'm also grateful that some people have written in saying I write well; I still see tons of mistakes in all my texts and I just wish I had the spoons and time to edit endlessly. I'm exhausted.

But I'm glad. As a kid it was always "she seems to like math but she can't write, so she must hate free writing" and I'm like no. Maybe I just hate pencils and QWERTY. I got frustrated by writing because the ideas fired faster than my pencil could keep up. Shorthand, mindmaps, Dvorak, text-editors all have helped.

And a willingness to say "heck it, this is never getting done, let's hit send"

Sandra, to random

"Extract Method" guy teaches the Dominion card game?! 😵‍💫
In hindsight that does make a lot of sense.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FArqWGIxhgY

Sandra,

Y'all know I'm the world's best programmer but I wouldn't've been if it weren't for reading that Refactoring book 🫡

Such a correct and true way of thinking about programming like God intended 💇🏻‍♀️

Sandra, to random

Since I'm such an anti-copyright activist, people get confused when I'm not into counterfeits. I just want people to know what they're buying and not get fooled or scammed.

Sandra,

@Aradayn

It is difficult to intellectually honestly argue for the time limit.

Either copyright is morally wrong in which case it's also wrong the first 14 years.
Or copyright is morally right in which case it's also right even after the first 14 years.

I think it's wrong so ergo even 14 years is too long.

The only situation where 14 years is good is if copyright happens to be morally exactly neutral (which, OK, all things are morally exactly neutral on the nihilist's canvas), and if a limit is "good for society" since it "promotes creation" during the limit period and "enables creativity" after the limit period and a perfect sweet spot limit time could somehow be calculated. I am not convinced of those premises. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Sandra,

@Aradayn @apophis

"I really bristle against a “solution” that is painting us deep into a corner, which is all-too-common." ← https://idiomdrottning.org/perfect

All the problems with copyright as economic scarcity, especially in the age of big models as means of production becomes even more centralized, are still going to be there for the first 28 years. The 14 year thing came from the age of the printing press and was an industry regulation, not the age of the floppy where it's a consumer regulation.

We are on the threshold of an era where people wouldn't have to work as hard, where robots could help us do tedious and dangerous stuff, but since it's in the hands of the owner class workers are going to be even more out of luck. Big money has no problem sidestepping copyright with loopholes like ML or just acquiring their way through it like how Disney bought Fox, Lucasfilm, Marvel, and Henson.

"Yes, I mean, pragmatically copyright works at some basic level to assure that artists are compensated for what they create."

I'm an artist and I'm not getting paid so obviously it does not assure that.

Ultimately there are three ways the world could work:

• to each according to need
• to each according to ability
• to each just crumbs as ownership gets concentrated

Copyright is one of the many perverse incentives in capitalism that steers us towards the latter of those three.

First they divorced sustenance from existance by renaming it "compensation". A li'l kick in the head as they shout "earn your keep here".

And with copyright they're divorcing compensation from creation and tying it to copying. It's expensive to make a big fancy movie. It's like three cents to male a copy. That's a problem for the quid-pro-quo model mercantilist model market capitalism was developed from and is ostensibly still based on.

They're so married to the idea that "growing a carrot is expensive so selling it should cost commensurately, and if a farm makes money selling carrots, a studio should make money selling movies". But a movie cannot be sold since it is intangible, an expression. Wrapping chains on that expression is desctruction of copies that could exist. https://idiomdrottning.org/mittens

Solution: maybe not tie compensation to copying and instead crowdfund the creation process? Crowdfunding was invented by the left → https://web.archive.org/web/20160517205031/https://firstmonday.org/article/view/673/583 but of course central capital hijacked the idea with corporations like Kickstarter and Patreon.

Even the capitalist system are realizing the futility of trying to "sell" digitally locked down singles of movies and songs and we're seeing the rise of streaming. Instead of paying for one copy of Gaga and one of Bach, you pay for an account and get both. Great for consumers but dangerous as it means that we as society place even more of our infrastructure in the hands of big capital (and they get to control our machines with libraries like Widevine that give corporations more power than uid 0). I grew up in an era where the road network, phone network, train network, water network, postal service, health and education, even television, where all that was owned by the people. That kind of centralization had huge problems and is very far from my ideal model but with capital's ownership concentration we get all the bad parts of that world but now we can't even vote about it. The phonebook was a public project while Facebook just eats the public.

Copyright is central to the owner class—and of modern colonialism (if you look at the world's exports & imports it's like we get goods from them while only selling nothingness back, only selling abstract ideas, "you give us sugar and diamonds and we'll let your kids look at Mickey for an hour—ah, ah! ☝🏻only look, no use!").

"Then, people who grew up with the work can riff on it and make new things! That's useful for creativity." So you know people thought it was awesome how the Iron Man story continued in Hulk and Captain America. Shows the appeal of shared universes. But those movies had to be made by the same studio since people didn't wanna wait 28 years for the sequel. Shared universe storytelling is becoming the purview and USP of big IP.

And that is gross.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • megavids
  • tacticalgear
  • magazineikmin
  • thenastyranch
  • Youngstown
  • mdbf
  • rosin
  • slotface
  • InstantRegret
  • khanakhh
  • Durango
  • kavyap
  • osvaldo12
  • DreamBathrooms
  • JUstTest
  • GTA5RPClips
  • ngwrru68w68
  • everett
  • tester
  • ethstaker
  • cisconetworking
  • cubers
  • modclub
  • provamag3
  • anitta
  • normalnudes
  • Leos
  • lostlight
  • All magazines
    •