• 1 Post
  • 20 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: January 28th, 2022

help-circle

  • I’ve really enjoyed it, and it’s been a breath of fresh air for this friend group that was really struggling to find stuff to play together. We used to get deep into a lot of survival crafting type games, think Ark and Conan, but several of us had gotten pretty burned out on those, and most of the multiplayer stuff we were interested in either didn’t grab everybody or was limited to just a few players. Stuff like Helldivers being only 4 players meant that not all of us could play together, which felt bad. These multiworld games, though, mean that we can all get on a discord call and kick the runs off at the same time, and it feels like we’re playing together as we call out stuff we’re sending to each other or items we need, but then we can wrap the runs up over the course of the next week as we have time. Plus there are enough games that most folks have been able to find something that feels comfortable for them.


  • I’ve gotten sucked into the rabbit hole that is multiworld randomizers lately. I’ve done several smaller multiworlds with a group of friends (4-8 players) all playing different games, and a week or so ago got involved in a larger one (15 or so players) that was organized on a forum I frequent. All of these have been through Archipelago, and if you’re not familiar with multiworld randomizers their FAQ is a decent introduction. I’ve played a few different games in these - Minecraft, Wind Waker, and most recently Balatro, and all of them have been really interesting and fun ways to play games that I was already pretty familiar with. Also, my regular gaming group has had trouble finding multiplayer games that we all want to play recently, and these archipelago multiworlds make it so that we can play something together without all having to agree on what to play, plus you can play asynchronously so we can start together but then finish runs out as we have time. It’s been really cool and I’m jonesing for more.







  • So I’m not an expert in nuclear weaponry. However, more modern warheads don’t somehow magically vaporize everything within a certain radius and then not cause effects outside that radius - that’s not how things work. They may have a larger fireball, which is the area within which things (and people) are going to be vaporized, but they still have very large areas where people will receive burns decreasing in severity depending on distance, and (if the warhead is detonated at ground level) radiation doses that will kill within 5 days to 1 month. Check out Nukemap to see those areas in different scenarios. Here’s one that I did for a ground burst of a 800 kt Topol warhead. You can see that the areas for radiation are larger than the fireball itself, and the areas for 2nd and 3rd degree burns are quite large. Setting one of these off anywhere populated would cause an immense amount of human suffering even if the folks in the ~220m fireball never saw it coming.








  • I hope no one takes this to mean that I am trying to stigmatize mental illness or people with mental illnesses, but it seems to me that if there are people who want to be famous or notorious so badly that they kill large numbers of people, that doesn’t seem to be the result of a healthy or well ordered mind. Am I misunderstanding how the phrase “mental illness” is being used here? I recognize that the headline is referring specifically to disorders involving psychosis, but they even state that only 25% of mass shooters are associated with non-psychotic mental illnesses. Are emotional/behavioral disorders not being considered here? Or is the mass shooting database they are using one of those that includes any shooting with more than a certain number of people involved, even if that includes events that the typical person would not consider part of the phenomenon of the types of shootings that most people are thinking of when they talk about mass shootings?

    Seriously, I hope I am not stepping on anyone’s toes or saying something that will be taken as hurtful, because that’s genuinely not how I mean it. But I really feel like if someone is in a state that they decide the best course of action for them is to kill a bunch of people they don’t know, how could that be the result of a healthy mental and emotional state?


  • I’ve been playing Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria with a group of friends. It’s pretty janky at times, but the vibe is pretty fun and we’re all LotR nerds to some degree, so it’s been fun arguing about where the devs were lore friendly and where they colored outside the lines. It’s also nice to play a survival crafting game like this that has no PvP so the balancing can be entirely based on PvE play, which means the grind isn’t anywhere near the level of Ark or Conan. I’d say it’s a more janky little brother of Grounded with a LotR coat of paint and some pretty cool level design.