Microblogging Journal through 6/17/2024

Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Tuesday 06/11

• 11:11 # I know these Steam Next Demo Fests are supposed to be a good thing, but for me, all it does is reinforce the notion that there are a thousand million times the number of games that any normal human can actually play. Therefore, the only sensible reaction is to play fewer games and wait for the ones that are the very best of the very best, which are almost always the occasional ground-breaking AAA game that only comes out once every two or three years, which are selected by some gatekeeping process that is entirely unfair to the developers, but is way easier on the consumer than trying to wade through a thousand million game demos.

Wednesday 06/12

• 23:24 # Pathfinder 2e has some puzzling rules sometimes. Like if I’m a Harm Font cleric, why would I ever cast one of the four Harm spells I’m allowed that does 1d8, when I could cast an infinite amount of Divine Lance cantrips that do 2d4? 2d4 is going to be a better roll than 1d8 almost every day of the week. I can only think of one very specific instance to use a 1d8 Harm.. if I could do a 1-action touch Harm two or three times in one turn, that seems like the only situation where it could be statistically viable at level 1. Surely it’s missing the +8 damage bonus for the 2-action version of Harm, the same +8 that the Heal spell has? That has to be a typo? Or maybe Harm is only intended to become viable at higher levels. Anyway these are things I discover when I run various Pathfinder classes through some mock combat scenarios.

Friday 06/14

• 08:56 # I don’t know how this ended up in my recommendations, but I stumbled on a YouTube channel called The Operations Room, which just does fairly good quality top-down animations of famous battles in history, accompanied by a boring, droning monotonic brit historian’s voice describing what happens, and somehow this turns out to be a captivating bit of media art.

Saturday 06/15

• 08:40 # Humble has way better ttrpg stuff than game stuff. Practically the entire Delta Green library in PDFs, a ton of old Pathfinder PDFs, a huge set of Pathfinder 2e stuff for Fantasy Grounds, and now a bunch of map making stuff.

  • 08:53 # The only problem with Humble acquisitions is that you usually have to time travel back to the 1990s in order to actually download and install what you got. It can be a fairly extensive and tedious manual process.

  • 09:11 # In the case of Campaign Cartogrpher 3, it’s literally like time traveling back to the 90s because it still looks like Windows 95.

• 19:55 # There is a YouTube channel containing National Archives footage from World War I (and many other things). That is all.

• 20:56 # The word Hitler appears in my newest blog post, but only in an informational way. Netflix is the one who forced me into this precarious position.

Sunday 06/16

• 18:59 # Internet history will be written by the winners… meaning those who simply keep renewing their domain names https://www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/2024/05/17/when-online-content-disappears/

  • 19:02 # I sometimes wonder if future historians will look at this period in history and find too much information to sift through or a gaping hole of nothing.

  • 19:04 # Somebody might trip over a cord somewhere and accidentally crash all the hard drives of Wikipedia, for example.

• 22:17 # Out of context commentary: Did some writer think that “little and less” would have the same linguistic impact as “much and more”?

[That was in reference to the first episode of season 2 of House of Dragons. The only other comment I had was that the CGI of what’s-her-name landing and jumping off that dragon looked like the quality of a 1950s B sci-fi flick, where they just filmed toys hanging from wires. They really phone in the CGI work these days, don’t they? Or more likely they’re so overworked and underpaid that they just plain don’t care anymore.]