@rick@ricko.social
@rick@ricko.social avatar

rick

@rick@ricko.social

I write code, fiction, and educational material. Enhanced with autism superpowers.

Photos I post are mine, and copyright by me. They may be reused under the CC-BY-NC-SA license, but not in any kind of machine learning.

My avatar is a 4-color animation-style rendering of me making a goofy hand gesture, in front of a pride flag for demisexuality. My background header is a photo of an electric truck parked off the road, overlooking a cloudy sky above a rocky coastline obscured by mist.

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

twipped, to random
@twipped@twipped.social avatar

Make a new Predator movie where a predator colony ship is hovering over the San Francisco Bay, but the only people who can see it are Apple Vision Pro users, due to a quirk in the headset’s image processing.

Call it AVP

rick,
@rick@ricko.social avatar

@twipped I feel like there's a "They Live" opportunity here. "They Still Live" with John Cena, maybe?

rick, to random
@rick@ricko.social avatar

@Haste Apparently, the Dimension 20 series I was misremembering was Misfits and Magic:

https://youtu.be/PfYKdLEVjg8

https://www.dropout.tv/videos/the-chosen-ones

rick, to random
@rick@ricko.social avatar

Arrived safe in Creswell, OR. (Just a bit south of Eugene.)

Stats for nerds, Day 1:

Vehicle: Rivian R1T
Distance: ~500mi / 800km
Wall clock time: 11hr
Charging stops: 3
Charging time: ~2h20m (~20% of total time, but I was not rushing)
Charge: ~250 kWh
Charge cost: ~$80 USD
Cost/kWh: ~$0.32/kWh USD
Cost/distance: ~$0.16/mi USD, or $0.10/km USD

Gas prices along that route are ~$5.60/gal. That $80 would've bought ~14gal, giving the truck an effective 35mpg. Not too bad for a truck, I feel.

rick,
@rick@ricko.social avatar

Audiobooks for the day:

  1. "The No-Girlfriend Rule" by Christen Randall and read by Natalie Naudus. 5⭐️/5.

This was super sweet, and would definitely recommend to just about anyone. Got a little misty in parts.

  1. "The Road to You" by Harper Bliss and read by Gabra Zackman and Emily Beresford. 4¾⭐️/5.

One of Bliss' better stories, IMO.

  1. "Dawn of Change" by Gerri Hill and read by Abby Craden. In progress, ~30%.

Good so far, but not the lightest subject matter. (Infidelity, SA, abuse.)

twipped, to react
@twipped@twipped.social avatar

For nearly a decade I was a strong fan of using jQuery and Backbone to enhance server generated html.

What led me to abandon that and embrace was not reactive development, it wasn’t the performance of dom diffing, it wasn’t any of the things that were inherent to React… it was JSX and pluggable, composable components.

Now, after two years working in a large scale react SPA with federated microfrontends… I’m finding that I miss the simplicity of Backbone and jQuery.

Funny, that.

rick,
@rick@ricko.social avatar

@twipped My previous two weeks were spent upgrading our build system to support multiple React apps. About half way through I had that exact same Five Minutes Of Doubt where I seriously considered whether things had actually improved since the days of PHP and jQuery.

twipped, to random
@twipped@twipped.social avatar

@rick first impression from my first two hours in HFW: Oh my god why is there so much bruised male ego on display?! Every single one of her guy friends is like “you hurt me so badly by leaving before I could woo you.”

The sun king begging her to come be his consort, and she’s like 😬😬

rick,
@rick@ricko.social avatar

@twipped I'd played this on PS5 when it first came out, but I just started a (SteamDeck) replay. And holy frak you're not kidding. Avad is smarmy AF.

It's interesting to watch people trying to attach to Aloy in the first few hours:

Varl sees Aloy as a ticket to a wider world. (And as a dead-sister proxy.)

Avad sees Aloy as a crown jewel.

Vanasha sees Aloy as a conspirator.

Erend sees Aloy as a dead-sister proxy, and ticket to chaos.

Petra sees Aloy as a distraction from Oseram misogyny.

rick,
@rick@ricko.social avatar

@grissallia @twipped I just finished another HZD playthrough, since I hadn't 100%ed it on Steam yet. Still fantastic, and barring Avad and a little more sibling trauma than I'd prefer, it holds up pretty well, IMO.

rick, to Steamdeck
@rick@ricko.social avatar

Let's goooooo!

rick,
@rick@ricko.social avatar

For the folks who were asking, does indeed run on the . Mine is an OLED version, and running H2FW makes it spin up like a jet engine. By default, it runs in 1200x800.

While the game's not buttery smooth, it's certainly playable. I'd recommend going in and disabling Bloom, blur, vignette, shake, etc., for best performance.

The default settings are fine, though. It works well enough.

Screenshot from "Horizon: Forbidden West" running on a SteamDeck. This is a wide shot from the intro, with a fog-covered mountain range in the distance, and a Thunderjaw on a hill in the foreground. The landscape doesn't look too bad, but the Thunderjaw is very low poly, and the camera blur is pretty gnarly.
Screenshot from "Horizon: Forbidden West" running on a SteamDeck. Aloy stands with her back to us, next to a downed Scrapper, as Varl looks on from behind. They are in a small basin surrounded by lush vegetation, with a "shoot me" ladder in the distance. This shot shows off the settings I landed on by disabling most of the filters. This makes it a little pixelated, but I prefer it to a blurry, muddy mess.
Screenshot from "Horizon: Forbidden West" running on a SteamDeck. This shot shows the title card running with the default graphics settings. It's a beach scene, with water, white sand, curving palms, and creeping sea grapes. In the foreground, a number of bright red ferns and be seen choking out the green plants beneath them. In the distance, some kind of artificial buildings can be seen through mist.

rick,
@rick@ricko.social avatar

@natejung IIRC, yes. The first-time-setup gives the option to enable it (off by default). I couldn't see a difference, so I turned it on.

rick,
@rick@ricko.social avatar

Oh, and napkin math for battery life.

I have both HZD and H2FW on Steam. I also have both an OLED and non-OLED SteamDeck.

HZD on non-OLED gets ~1hr play time on a full battery.

HZD on OLED gets ~2hr play time on a full battery.

Balatro on OLED gets 6-8hr play time on a full battery. (It's ridiculous.)

I only played ~20 minutes of H2FW on OLED, and it chewed through about ~25% battery. So, H2FW has maybe 1.5hr play time on OLED? Ish?

rick,
@rick@ricko.social avatar

@natejung Okay, I captured a shot of the sun both with HDR off and on.

It's not easy to tell from screenshots, but:

  • HDR off yields a generally brighter screen, but as you would expect it reduces the overall clarity.

  • HDR on is generally dimmer, but is also noticeably less muddy.

rick, to random
@rick@ricko.social avatar

That feeling when you get a question on a code review like "how did you work around XYZ" and for the life of you you're unable to see how that's relevant to the situation so you figure the reviewer is just confused but you also have the clammy-palmed dread of the very real possibility that you've completely missed something critical and fundamental.

rick, to random
@rick@ricko.social avatar

I wonder if you could declare that all text on your website, your mastodon account, etc, use "ROT-26 encryption", and then have legal standing for suits against any bots which circumvent it.

rick, to boardgames
@rick@ricko.social avatar

Another thing on my list to figure out before June: how to give away a few hundred . We're going to keep some, but we don't need nearly this many.

If anyone knows of a or similar who could use an injection of board games, and is on the West Coast, connect us.

If we can arrange it before I leave for my road trip in a few weeks, I may even be able to just drop them off pretty much anywhere in CA, OR, or WA.

A wooden shelving unit, 2m by 1.5m with 5 shelves, covered in boxes of board games. There seems to be a theme of railroad, 4X, Cthulhu, and Horizon Zero Dawn.

rick,
@rick@ricko.social avatar

@iain We're currently in the middle of nowhere in NorCal wine country, so clubs are few and far between. I've got some friends asking a few of the local wineries if they'd like to add board games to their tasting offerings, but no bites yet.

rick,
@rick@ricko.social avatar

I put together a GSheet with all the games:

https://ricko.is/board-games-2024

willaful, to random
@willaful@romancelandia.club avatar

? I seem to be in a slump. Started The Last List of Mabel Beaumont but it quickly turned into one of my worst personal nightmares. In Scrap Metal by Harper Fox but it's a bit too dark. Read The Dress of the Season (free on Amazon) but it was just okay. Tried the graphic novel of Every Day and it was so dull. Bleh.

rick,
@rick@ricko.social avatar

@willaful I feel that slump. I have noped out of 3 books in 3 days not because they were bad, just because I wasn't in that particular mood.

For the weekend, I have a re-read queued up for "Read Between the Lines" by Rachel Lacey. It's a traveling book, and I have in general liked other works by Lacey, so it should be a nice reset.

shippychaos, to random
@shippychaos@homo.promo avatar

finding books to read is hard when your preference is

“a story that will tear open your soul”

rick,
@rick@ricko.social avatar

@shippychaos If you're interested in a rec, "Sofi and the Bone Song" by Adrienne Tooley was absolutely heartbreaking, in the best way.

https://audiobookstore.com/audiobooks/sofi-and-the-bone-song.aspx

CW for off-page self-termination of a side character; pervasive scenes of emotional abuse by a parent.

rick, to random
@rick@ricko.social avatar

Just finished "Cassandra In Reverse" by Holly Smale. 5⭐️/5 for making me feel all the feels, and the very thorough and relatable :infinity_autistic: :autistic_heart: rep. So much so that parts were quite difficult to read, in the best way.

Summary: A woman who has trouble relating to the overwhelming world around her finds she can rewind time, using it to try to make more sense of things.

Unlike most of my recs, this isn't a romance in the generally-accepted sense. Though I disagree. YMMV.

rick,
@rick@ricko.social avatar

Links:

https://audiobookstore.com/audiobooks/cassandra-in-reverse.aspx

https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/2796e468-d0ff-4f42-8697-8cedc3a62049

rick,
@rick@ricko.social avatar

Also (and last one, I promise), while the time shenanigans in the story are omnipresent, they aren't used for sci-fi or fantasy purposes here. Even if you don't like those genres, you'll do just fine with this.

"Rewinding time" in this story is more a metaphor for how we can catastrophize, daydream, or make assumptions about the lives of people we haven't really taken the time to know. And about all the tiny choices we make, even when we don't realize it and think the world doesn't hear us.

rick, to random
@rick@ricko.social avatar

Hey, you.

Got anyone who you follow who you think is pretty cool?

You should tell them. Just DM them and say it.

Maybe you think it'll be awkward. Maybe you're worried that they'll think you want something. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

Anxious voices shouldn't drown out the good things we can share with each other.

Keep it simple: just tell them you appreciate their presence.

Use this social media mess for something positive.

salad_bar_breath, to random
@salad_bar_breath@todon.nl avatar

It is weird that a lot of sapphic romance media (books, movies, and shows) centers around bi, pan, etc femmes and rarely centers the lesbian, and even rarely has lesbian4lesbian relationships.

This isn't really reflective to the lesbian experience and community.

But in mlm media, this isn't the dynamic at all. Most mlm media though contains gay men, and centers gay men.

rick,
@rick@ricko.social avatar

@salad_bar_breath So ... I wrote up ~2000 characters worth of response to this, but I trashed it because don't want to be the um-actually guy.

tl;dr: Her opinions speak to a misunderstanding about the last ~30 years of WLW romance. That is, she's kindof right only if you look at WLW for the past 5 years, and completely ignore anything older. Which, okay, fine, it's ... a position to take.

Ugh. At some point, I need to just sit down and write up a PhD thesis on this stuff.

willaful, to romancelandia
@willaful@romancelandia.club avatar

? I just finished The Oak and the Ash by Annick Trent. I thought the first in the series was good but had plotting issues; no complaints about this one! Realistic portrayal of the lives of 1800s queer working people, with a sweet, slow burn romance. (Hard to have anything else for them!) For a comp I'd give Erin Satie, because of the focus on period technologies and intellectual interests.

@romancelandia
@romancebooks

rick,
@rick@ricko.social avatar

@willaful

Just about to start "Cassandra In Reverse" by Holly Smale, based on a rec from a friend. I know nothing about it other than it's got timey-wimey shenanigans, which I am generally here for.

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