JackbyDev

I've been curious to try Gentoo out on a VM to see what it's like. Funtoo sounds like a slightly easier version.

Over the years it's become tougher and tougher to find good sources of information for popular games with gaming journalism websites having a lot of SEO. The Fextralife wiki is garbage and was garbage for other games I've played before too.

My knowledge of 5e is definitely useful for some things but it also feels like a hindrance at times. I chose to make a character into the Battle Master subclass of Fighter. I misread quite a few of the maneuvers.

• Commander's Strike uses one of your attacks and a superiority die to allow an ally to immediately make an attack as an action. This is useful for getting extra attacks out of especially heavy hitters like rogues. In BG3 it lets them make an extra attack on their turn. And I think they don't get any extra damage from the superiority die.
• Maneuvering Attack uses a superiority die to allow an ally to use their reaction to move up to half their speed and not trigger opportunity attacks from the target of the attack. In BG3 it lets effectively lets them get a free disengage on their turn (so not just against your target). So it's a little better and a little worse.

These were two of my favorite abilities as a fighter and it helped encourage me to keep other players focused when it wasn't their turn. Also, we had a big group, so getting to do something small when it wasn't your turn helped with the boredom.

I'm not complaining, some of the changes are good and some are bad. All in all you can't really compare the two because one is a videogame and one is a tabletop game. A lot of the abilities have great QoL changes for videogames. Guidance lasting for a while is great. Many abilities that last a long time now just last until a rest. True Strike got a buff -- it's not necessarily great or anything but not pointless anymore. (True Strike did have some very small very niche uses but all in all it was mostly bad since it's better to just attack twice 99% of the time.)

It feels like some of the spells have descriptions slightly wrong but maybe I'm just confused. I'm enjoying the game. It's rough around the edges but I do like it.

A few weeks ago (I think over a month) I posted this pumpkin here. A Lemming (idk what we're calling ourselves) told me that "it should be a lot bigger before it gets it's first flower." I was already nervous that it and all my other plants weren't growing well. After some discussion some fish fertilizer was recommended. I suppose any would've worked but regardless, it's getting really big now.

The results were pretty dramatic. Nearly overnight it felt like. Every day I've seen visible growth. I'm even seeing the female flower buds so we're getting close to the pumpkin growing stage! The pictured ones are male. The seed pack says scientists hypothesize that the male flowers show up first to get the bees in the area by the time the female ones arrive.

I've been sending pictures of it nearly everyday to my gardening friend who dreams of becoming a squash farmer when she retires.

I've been very impressed with this plant. You may even see a small snap in the vine. When it reached the edge of the bed it broke after a big storm. I propped it up a bit with a card board box and it's been fine. No wilting. It was at a 90 degree angle, too.

(This song has nothing to do with the Oppenheimer movie.)

US, Georgia if it matters.

I just got laid off. Oof. Am I missing anything? I've never been laid off or fired before so it's all new to me. Just sanity checking myself.

1. Tomorrow I'm going to write down all my job responsibilities before I forget them. For updating my resume.
2. Figure out how to file for unemployment.
3. Figure out what I need for COBRA benefits.
4. Print and sign my separation agreement.
5. Ensure I have access to my paystubs.

The obvious thing being to start applying for new jobs lol.

Note that I mean the open version VSCodium and not VSCode. Even after manually installing the Python and Pylance vsix files into Codium I wasn't getting the Pylance hints in the editor. I find them super useful for ersatz static typing and just general problems.

First, I strongly encourage you go to go through the demo. It is about ten minutes long. Beware that it does auto play sounds. "Spoilers" are below.

My wife and I are like a broken record player. Whenever we are in some setting to give people advice (generally a wedding where you write notes for the newlyweds) we give the same advice. "Communicate early and often. It sounds cliche but is very important. Better to risk a small fight now than a big fight later. Don't let frustration fester into resentment." This advice was not directly inspired by this demo but having just replayed through it now I see a lot of the similarities.

I remember when I first did this demo. I was on the train going to work. At the time I naively suspected that the Always Cooperate strategy would win. Once I was able to look at it more critically and less emotionally I thought something like the Detective might be better to figure out who you can exploit. It was interesting that something as simple as the Copycat wins out.

And once they introduced miscommunications and your little dude trips on the way to the machine!? I was devastated! Watching those two little dudes cheat each other back and forth forever over something so petty. It gets me emotional. I know it's that sad guitar doing a lot of the heavy lifting in that regard though lol. But seriously, so many times in life it feels like people just get stuck in these cycles of revenge over utterly petty bullshit. Escalation over escalation over escalation.

So yeah, that's pretty much all I have to say. It's just interesting looking back on this thing that had this big effect on me at the time and seeing how it indirectly influenced very specific advice I give folks today.

What are your thoughts? This creator has many other cool demos like this but this is the one that I remember the most.