captain yesterday's page

Orthos wrote:

I've been in favor of an "amicable divorce" as a solution to the increasingly-hostile disagreements between states in the US for some time.

Give a few years (and maybe some financial aid) for families to relocate to the states that jive with their personal positions, then go our separate ways.

But that's admittedly unrealistic for a whole host of reasons and especially ignores the fact that it's a certain particular set of states that provide all the funds and a certain other particular set of states that receive all of it.

One of my fun thought/discussion topics is, "What would the world be like now if Lincoln had allowed the Confederacy to secede peacefully?"

There's a whole realm of historical fiction that could be written there. I see quite a few thought articles on it, but no books. Maybe an untapped inspiration for someone?

I recommend Cyberpunk Red, if only for the setting (which is also the setting for Cyberpunk 2077).

I am slowly running out of things to discover in Elden Ring and getting too close to the end... :/

Of course not counting all the things I have missed.

I've been playing Elden Ring for over 1200 hours over the last 3 years and I'm STILL finding places I didn't know about.

Drejk wrote:

captain yesterday wrote:

So, Drejk, how far are you in Elden Ring?

I am standing at the Drainage Channel, fuming at the very thought of going through those !@#$%^&*()+ knights, getting close to have my ass handed to me by Malenia.

And...

It was anticlimatic...

Yes, she killed me on the first fight because of a cheap trick - her introductory animation moves the PC to the center arena, within the range of her first combo, so she killed me because I wasn't holding shield block (or dodged in a right direction) immediately when the animation ended.

The second attempt was... Maybe not a complete cake-walk, she put me near death a few times (and if I haven't been investing in Vigor for the last few levels, she would definitely got me), basically depleting all four of healing potions I had prepared, but otherwise, Tiche, with some help from my slung rocks massacred her.

It would be completely different if I was melee, as I would fail to block/parry/dodge her attacks in direct melee slashfest...

I was fortunate my first time I defeated her I happened to summon Let Me Solo Her and we were able to get her in a corner and wailed on her.

captain yesterday wrote:

Rookie landscape designer: I have this idea for a water feature, but it's kind of intricate

Veteran landscape designer (raises an eyebrow and looks at me): I mean, that's kind of our thing, lay it on us!

What are the odds that their "intricate water feature" is a small pond with a tiny fountain in it? What's that? The tiny fountain is slightly off-center for aesthetic reasons? Ooo, fancy.

So close! It was actually a small fountain that flows off 3 sides into tiny ponds. All perfectly centered.

Which, to be honest, wasn't THAT intricate (I was doing that the first show I helped set up in Seattle).

Rookie landscape designer: I have this idea for a water feature, but it's kind of intricate

Veteran landscape designer (raises an eyebrow and looks at me): I mean, that's kind of our thing, lay it on us!

I've had my apartment for almost a year and a half and just this morning I realized I can lounge on my loveseat.

This must be what the kids call "relaxing".

50 GB? I somehow expected more...

Yeah it's amazing how much they can fit in those 50 GBs too!

I learned today it is 2 days until Christmas.

Yup!

First snow run of the season!

First house, I try to start my blower and immediately the cord snaps, then a second blower refuses to blow snow for some reason so I broke it further as an example to the others.

We did not have any further issues.

I've cut my last paver of the season.

Which means winter has officially unofficially started!

Now, it's boulder carving season!

I grew up on a dairy farm, and became a baker and then a landscaper.

Waking up at 4 AM is all I've ever known.

So... just how punctual am I?

I forgot about our 6:00 am team meeting this morning so I was 2 minutes late. My team became concerned that I might have had a medical emergency.

For being 2 minutes late. Two. Minutes.

I was on time once and they called me when I wasn't there 10 minutes early.

I shift from dressing like a lumberjack in the summer to dressing like a mountaineer in the winter.

In lighter news, it's always astonishing to me just how much of a difference long underwear makes.

It's switched to Winder here (we get no Fall), so highs are in the mid-50s and lows are in the low 40s and I keep the house set at 58°F.

I was getting really cold, even with a wool hat on, so I broke out my polypropylene leggings. All of a sudden I'm snug and toasty. Because somehow keeping my legs warmer affects my entire system. As only makes sense.

Yay for undies!

I definitely could have told you that.

Scintillae wrote:

Qunnessaa wrote:

So, I'm desperately putting off making some travel plans partly because I'm feeling under the weather after getting my seasonal illness shots, but on the off-chance that the good folks of FAWTtL-dom can inspire me, does anyone know about anything absolutely thrilling that should encourage me to visit Philadelphia?

A conference for work is going to be held there, but it's at least half hybrid and I can get away with Zooming in, and it's happening just at the start of the new year, the first weekend of January.

I would be more excited about it if I wasn't a bit out of it and at the end of a very busy couple of weeks. It doesn't help that I'm enough of a goody-two-shoes that I'm not likely to blow off early to explore before the evenings, if I attend my conference in person.

Idk, visiting the Liberty Bell? Otherwise all I've heard about the place is that evidently their football fans climb utility poles or something.

I think according to CY you kill the fans with the utility poles then disrupt the network by destroying their utilities with Polish fans.

Yes, the Philadelphia sports scene is truly a magical sight to see! One of the few cities where you can go to a game and watch the fans of a team beat the s#$& out of other fans of the same team.

In Philadelphia you ain't family unless you're throwing hands at each other.

I found a vampire pond so I stabbed it with the zombie spike and then found a zombie tree stump and chopped it out with the vampire axe.

Dyslexia is a son of a b%$~&!

How do you know you have a good manager?

NobodysHome: I just noticed our winter break doesn't start until Wednesday December 25th. Is it OK if I take the 23rd and 24th off?
Manager: Oh, I'm taking those two days plus January 2nd and 3rd so I get two full weeks off. I'd do that if I were you...

When your manager actively encourages you to take extra down time during the holidays...

It's a trap!

Well, I learned something last night: Driving with a commuter mug full of hot coffee is far, far more effective at keeping me awake and alert while driving in the wee hours than any energy drink. I think the warmth had something to do with it. But 3.5 hours of driving from 10:15 pm - 1:45 am was surprisingly easy until the final 10 minutes, when I think my brain was just thinking, "I'm almost home! Time to crash!"

No, no it's not.

Stupid brain.

I could have told you that.

Waterhammer wrote:

Curse you. Now I want pizza…

…And a mustache.

Pizza & Mustache? Wasn’t that an 80s mismatched buddy cop duo TV series? Starring two guys who, by the standards of any other decade would be ugly as hell but somehow were pitched as sexy heartthrobs?

That’s how I’m choosing to remember it now.

It was also known as Simon & Simon.

NobodysHome wrote:

Drejk wrote:

Issue with having pizza is having pizza:

No, seriously, I ate 2/3rds by now (41 cm diameter) and I would like to eat more of it. I know I definitely shouldn't, but I'd like to...

Get older.

More than 2 pieces of pizza at a sitting and I get such bad heartburn that I hate my existence. It's a self-regulating pizza digestion system.

That's exactly why I am leaving the rest for later - I am close to early heartburn threshold. I may still get heartburn later from what I already ate.

Ironically, I got heartburn when I was young but I haven't had it in years.

2 pieces is my minimum.

But then again I lift over 4,000 pounds on average every day, so..

Quark Blast wrote:

Villaneuve's strength in adapting Dune is the same Peter Jackson had with the LotR trilogy. Namely, in each case the director stayed true to the author's vision as laid out in the books.

I will always resent Peter Jackson for what he did to the LotR trilogy. I idolized Aragorn in the books. Turning him into a whiny, emo, "But I don't want to be king," was his greatest failing, but so many unnecessary rewrites of fundamental character traits like that.

And yet he did such a d**ned good job otherwise that it's unlikely anyone will try again for at least another 20 years, and they'll try to emulate Jackson's vision rather than Tolkein's.

The thing is though, that's how people that read the books saw Aragorn, or at least my brother that basically made every ranger in D&D Aragorn 2.0 for 20 f*+!ing years before the movies came out.

Responding to spoilers is annoyingly hard, but here we go:

** spoiler omitted **...

Yup, the issues here were pronouns and people feeling like the democrats wanted to give out money for student loans and the whole everyone gets 25k for a home loan so taxes were going to constantly go up. Or something. I'm not educated and it's just anecdotal from people I've personally talked to.

It's cool, we got to talk it out.

I told NH a couple weeks back that I was gone, and for good. But I came back for a visit to see how y'all were doing, considering recent events. And I promise this will be the last time y'all read me here.

** spoiler omitted **...

So, point one, Trump never actually talked about any of that, you projected it onto him.

But, that's his thing, Trump isn't an actual person, he's just a projector, for everyone to project what they want or need on him.

He never actually says anything he just babbles on for 3 hours and lets everyone interpret what they want to hear out of it.

I'm not trying to be an a*@**#* but I've seen plenty of his speeches over the years and I never heard him say anything that nuanced.

Impus Minor is in Fargo, North Dakota. His girlfriend convinced him to buy a fleece-lined denim jacket. I have never seen anything so upper Midwestern.

Speaking from experience, he should avoid smoking pot and then talking to anyone, the Fargo accent is next level as far as inciting the giggles.

Yeah, I'm still starting Animal Farm with the sophomores next week. They can draw whatever parallels they want.

Hope this helps.

Hope this helps get through to the younger generation. My favorite hip hop telling of Animal Farm.

I was rained out pretty early so I took Crookshanks to vote then I came home and voted myself and took a nap, it was raining again so I've been playing Elden Ring ever since.

It's my coping game.

Here I thought I woke up a bit later then I usually do and it turns out it was earlier.

Well, having moved into an apartment since the divorce I no longer have a lawn, thus unlocking eternal youth.

I have a deck, but that's where I keep my rock and molten metals collections, so good luck scaling that!

On a lighter note, I learned a valuable lesson about vetoing character ideas.

I'll be running a game for Crookshanks and her friends and one of them wanted to make a stuffed poppet named Pooh Bear, and I said "no,I don't want Disney Adult Thugs busting down my door".

So,instead they made Poe Bear, an oracle of the cosmos that quotes Edgar Alan Poe.

Yup, lesson learned.

Death sucks, went through the same thing with our dog.

It's tough, but at least you're handling it.

Random data points because obsessive-compulsive: The lows are dropping into the 40s this week, so it's about time to turn on the heat. I've tracked the date I turned it on every year since 2014. And in spite of the Bay Area's infamously variable climate, the data's remarkable in its consistency: (U.S. date format for your furriners, but it actually seems like the better format for once.)

.

11/13/14
11/04/15
10/12/16
10/29/17
10/23/18
11/07/19
11/06/20
12/06/21
10/21/22
11/09/23
10/26/24

The consistency is pretty impressive; other than the 2016 and 2021 outliers, you can pretty much expect I'm going to turn on the heat within a week or two of Halloween.

Well, I find it interesting...

Yeah we usually get our first snowfall and cold spell within a week of Halloween and our first measurable snow within a week of Thanksgiving.

It's Halloween! Can I burn my IT department at the stake?

For the last few weeks, my internet connection has been flaky. I thought it was just something about AT&T messing with us, as they always do. (TL;DR version: Our ISP is Sonic, but they have to lease their lines through AT&T, so somehow whenever an AT&T salesperson comes through the neighborhood our internet gets flaky and the salesperson asks whether we've been having trouble and says, "Oh, yes. I hear a lot of people have trouble with Sonic that way.")

But the last couple of days have been awful so I went in to check my internet settings.

Yep. Another update. Another, "We re-enabled WiFi for you. Aren't you happy with us?"

Grr...

And special torment for the Microsoft devs who wrote code to preferentially use WiFi even if there's a hardwired connection. That's just... peachy...

Ironically if you have your Xbox hooked up to a LAN it'll ask you at least twice if you're sure if you accidentally try switching it to Wifi.

captain yesterday wrote:

NobodysHome wrote:

lisamarlene wrote:

Val's school is 90% Hispanic (predominantly Mexican-American), so his Big Project for the quarter in his World Cultures class is to choose a dead loved one and make a shoebox diorama of an ofrenda for that person.

So we spent the evening sketching out our design and talking about making miniature flowers and pastries and choosing photographs.
The person he chose (his godfather, who died earlier this year) loved his backyard garden, so we're cutting windows into the back wall of the diorama and printing out a garden backdrop to paste behind it.
Val doesn't usually put this much effort into school projects, but he's really going all out. Which is good. He's had trouble talking about his grief. I think this is helping him.

That's WAAAAY better than the kids' annual assignment of, "Choose something unique to your culture or your family that you celebrate every year."

We are so White it's terrifying. GothBard's family came over on the Mayflower (and has the docs to prove it). My family fled to California from the South during the Civil War. We do Halloween, and Thanksgiving, and Christmas, and that's about it. The closest things we had to "traditions" were Disneyland every Fourth of July or the Fake Russian's every new year. So they'd try to write about one of those things and their teachers would say, "Not good enough."

Please don't insist that my kids have a "unique" culture, then grade them down because you don't think anything they do is "unique" enough.

We're direct descendants of Vlad The Impaler so all my kids had to do was put a bunch of Barbie heads on toothpicks on a field of green felt with a castle wall in back and call it a day.

Family history would be easy -- we had all kinds of interesting ancestors. But year after year it had to be an annual "tradition" -- some rite that we performed every year that was unique to our family. Somehow I think that your kids claiming an...

Every year we added on to the tower we were building in the garden.

We hadn't decided if it was going to be a wizard tower or a castle tower before the divorce.

lisamarlene wrote:

Val's school is 90% Hispanic (predominantly Mexican-American), so his Big Project for the quarter in his World Cultures class is to choose a dead loved one and make a shoebox diorama of an ofrenda for that person.

So we spent the evening sketching out our design and talking about making miniature flowers and pastries and choosing photographs.
The person he chose (his godfather, who died earlier this year) loved his backyard garden, so we're cutting windows into the back wall of the diorama and printing out a garden backdrop to paste behind it.
Val doesn't usually put this much effort into school projects, but he's really going all out. Which is good. He's had trouble talking about his grief. I think this is helping him.

That's WAAAAY better than the kids' annual assignment of, "Choose something unique to your culture or your family that you celebrate every year."

We are so White it's terrifying. GothBard's family came over on the Mayflower (and has the docs to prove it). My family fled to California from the South during the Civil War. We do Halloween, and Thanksgiving, and Christmas, and that's about it. The closest things we had to "traditions" were Disneyland every Fourth of July or the Fake Russian's every new year. So they'd try to write about one of those things and their teachers would say, "Not good enough."

Please don't insist that my kids have a "unique" culture, then grade them down because you don't think anything they do is "unique" enough.

We're direct descendants of Vlad The Impaler so all my kids had to do was put a bunch of Barbie heads on toothpicks on a field of green felt with a castle wall in back and call it a day.

Ironically, as much as I love building things IRL, you put building subsystems in a video game and I'm out.

Relatively, I do like how Skyrim did it where you basically pick s#&* out.

The "fun" part of getting divorced is navigating everything the spouse handled.

Which is especially fun when said spouse also cut off contact with their daughter.

This week Crookshanks and I had to navigate the world of insurance billing and coverage.

The good news is I'll probably get a bit of my money back.

Still, incredibly confusing!

More Daylight Savings Hell: GothBard's entire division has been working on a milestone handoff for the last month or two and it's due next week, so of course all the emergency, "What can we do about this?" meetings are taking place. Since many of the team members are in Europe, the meetings are scheduled to start at 6:45 or 7:00 am PDT.

And if you check, thanks to Daylight Savings Time, we are currently experiencing the darkest mornings of the year. (Last year sunrise on October 31 was 7:33 am, whereas on December 21 it was earlier at 7:21 am).

And what enrages me is that the vast majority of people I talk to want to simply abolish DST entirely. "Let's just have normal time year-round." But because of the sportsball lobby, our choices are, "Stay with the current system, or go with permanent DST," neither of which anybody except sports parents want. Even sleep researchers say that permanent DST is less healthy than normal time.

If you don't like your kids playing sports in the dark, adjust your sports schedule, NOT the schedule of the world around you!

This is America, sir.

The fly still lives!

It's been landing on light bulbs and treasured belongings when it isn't mocking me.

I figure it'll slip up as soon as it reaches old age at some point this weekend.

Last night's session was such a good example of why I mislike "hardcore" gaming content: You need dedicated players willing to work together as a cohesive team, and it's really hard to find such players.

Tomb of Annihilation is an AP designed for 4-6 experienced, at least somewhat optimized characters. As I've mentioned, our group is a nightmare of failure to cooperate in a cooperative game.
** spoiler omitted **...

Tomb of Annihilation was designed as a meat grinder.

At least according to the original author (I played (and died) through it).

I was going to let the fly live, but then I googled how long a fly lives. Turns out it's 15-30 days.

Rolls up newspaper

Looks like I'm going to make some collateral damage because that's too long.

Freehold DM wrote:

NobodysHome wrote:

...her dog didn't react at all because she hadn't trained it to chase cats.

i don't think you train dogs to chase cats...other way around.

In my lifetime of cat ownership and relationships with dozens of dogs, I've never met a dog that instinctively aggressively chased cats without the owner's encouragement. "There it is! Get the kitty! Go get the kitty!"

In my experience, a "normal" dog will trot over curiously to try to sniff the unfamiliar creature. Only a human-trained dog will bark and take off at a full run trying to catch the cat. LM's been around a lot more dogs than I have; I'd be interested in her take.

EDIT: Admittedly, my experience is with labradors, retrievers, border collies, corgis, and a rottweiler. Not exactly a "murderer's row" in the dog breed world. Both cats I knew who were killed by aggressive dogs were killed by pit bulls whose owners had trained them to be so aggressive they had to be put down because they posed a danger to humans as well.

Every dog I've ever owned.

I've never trained or encouraged our dogs to chase cats it's just something they do.

We had golden retrievers and hound dogs, so both instinctively hunt small animals.

Drejk wrote:

Apparently I had unfulfilled quota of annoying morons for this year. Let's hope today caps it.

** spoiler omitted **

I've always worried about running into such morons when traveling to certain parts of the country, but I have yet to encounter one. You have my sympathy.

I'll be honest, the only one I don't understand are people that wear a mask when they're driving alone.

Not that I'd say anything to them, it's just weird.

Former Coworker quit because "I'm the wall guy! I should be building walls!"

Since then I've been building only walls, with little or no oversight or detailed plans.

Sucks to be him!

My coworker just showed me a trailer for a game called Ghost of Yotei. It's a sequel to Ghost of Tsushima. I haven't played that first game, though what I've seen of it impressed me.

If you like old school samurai movies you'll love Ghost of Tsushima.

It is considered a literal national treasure and one of the best stories and the most breathtakingly beautiful game I've ever played.

It's one of the few games I've finished.

Captain Yesterday's pro tip of the day!

If anyone points out a flaw in your project, blame it on the circumference of the earth playing tricks on the eye.

NobodysHome wrote:

Another friend hit by a drunk driver.

They're fine, but their car is totaled, and their infant daughter nearly became an orphan.

Can we please start confiscating vehicles already?

Oh no, I don't drink and drive. I am fortunate to have a great public transportation system here.

Same! Except I also live in a city with milkmaids.

I will forever treasure Martha Stewart for her cooking segments with Snoop Dogg.

captain yesterday wrote:

Pathfinder 2.5 fixed that.

Even a proctologist can't fix a**h***s.

They can only diagnose.

Just give it a few months I'm sure they'll have an archetype for proctologist.

Actually, it would not surprise me to see someone cosplaying McGruff as a pervy Furry flasher at a Con. I bet it's been done.

It wasn't supposed to be pervy, it was all a big misunderstanding.