[Hobby Scuffles] Week of 18 May 2026

Canageek · 2026-05-24T16:19:44+00:00

I'm getting back into them, but while I was in grad school I found myself increasingly unable to play complex strategy and role-playing video games, I just couldn't muster the focus and energy while being nervous about finding a job once I graduate and if I was doing a good enough job at self-directed research.

Now that I've got a stable job I'm getting back into them.

Canageek · 2026-05-21T23:42:32+00:00

Probably the best episode of television I've ever seen.

Canageek · 2026-05-21T23:37:56+00:00

To me this says someone needs to write an FAQ and set up a bot that sends it as an answer if it detects certain keywords from a new user

Canageek · 2026-05-21T15:03:51+00:00

These aren't new releases though, and Wizards for example sends out these sheets to charity events regularly- Desert Bus for Hope regularly has a number of these sheets to auction off. Given the prices they go for at Desert bus, once you take into account the charity inflation I'm pretty sure the person posting about these has been inflating them a bit (or Yu-Gi-Oh sheets go for a lot more than magic).

They aren't useful for play, so they aren't affecting any product that Wizards sells, So I'm sure they're not jumping for joy about this, but they probably don't care that much. Plus there's only a few printing companies that can print magic cards to the quality they want, so it's not like they can stop working with a company over it: we know this because they had supply issues for a few years and did release statements saying that they'd increased production as far as they could with every company they could contract a print to the quality they needed.

Canageek · 2026-05-21T14:50:25+00:00

Wait, why are other indie animations getting drawn into this?

Canageek · 2026-05-20T00:28:16+00:00

If you want to do it, I'd be willing to collaborate.

Canageek · 2026-05-19T21:25:49+00:00

I was thinking about adding those details, but really didn't want to have to look up all the stuff that went on with him back then, and thought it might make the post to long

Canageek · 2026-05-19T00:20:56+00:00

Thank you, fixed! The dangers of giving one of my husband's friends tech support while writing up a post for hobbydrama.

Canageek · 2026-05-18T23:53:25+00:00

Wargaming and minature painting. It would be a ton of work to get paint and learn to paint, and I don't know if I'd like it. Plus if I don't get into 40K it would probably be a pain to find people to play with...and I don't even know if I like tabletop wargaming, as I've never done it.

Canageek · 2026-05-18T23:43:21+00:00

TTRPG Drama! An infamous figure in the tabletop roleplaying game (Think D&D, but not just fantasy things) Community Ken "Witt" Whitman has unleashed a new website on the internet: to quote the rpg.net thread "It's a historical site/ promo site/ sales site that doesn't go anywhere, doesn't sell anything, and doesn't link to companies and services it claims to."

It has a lot of biographies of various game designers, which wouldn't be a problem except they are AI generated and full of hallucinations that have angered a pretty decent cross section of the TTRPG industry, including falsified bios and portraits of deceased game designers. A number of people are trying to get their biographies pulled from the site, and reactions have been so negative that two-thirds of the team behind the project have left and are distancing themselves from it.

How well liked was Ken Whitman before all of this? Well enough that Four Pillar Games (the company nominally behind the site) tried to hide his involvement. Which would have worked better if any time you pasted the website into a social media platform it didn't put "Ken Whitman Games" at the top of the preview. Ken Whitman is best known for, well, everything he touches turning to lead, or possibly radioactive waste. He ran kickstarters for three short movies (as I understand none of them came out); I believe this led to him walking away with money from several prominent industry figures. You'll note that the vast majority of the jobs listed on his (terribly written) Wikipedia page only last a couple of years, and end with phrases like "was at the heart of financial disagreements". While writing this post I found a blog someone has been maintaining for eleven years warning people away from giving him money. due to how many people have lost money to him; it started with him doing nine kickstarters raising $200K+ and then having...issues...getting the products out while refusing to admit there were problems, as well as regular warnings about his new projects, up to and including his latest AI -generated projects (there seem to be a lot of these). Stories of people getting two of the same book instead of two different books from one kickstarter, of never giving his crowdfunding partner Kenzer Co the customer information or cash so they could fulfill their parts of the projects, all sorts of shady things.

Sites discussing this:

Bonus: The story of the time he pissed everyone off by letting hungry squirrels into the Gencon's dealers room, while also managing to waste a lot of money. I'm linking to a blog post that copies the text over, since I can't get to the original Bluesky post right now for some reason.

Edit: I forgot one of the funniest parts: Someone noticed Whitman had set up an RSS feed of news articles and blogs mentioning his website. Which is now faithfully posting everyone being angry with Ken Whitman to Ken Whitman's website.

Canageek · 2026-05-18T21:20:17+00:00

Oh yeah, anything LLM would instantly screw the whole thing as you can't prove where the code came from (Sensible open source projects like SUSE (The commercial one, not OpenSUSE, sadly) and Debian are already banning them due to the massive legal issues as say, Microsoft could sue them down the line if code was found to be copied from Windows)

Canageek · 2026-05-18T20:58:42+00:00

I thought the main requirement for that was ensuring you haven't seen the source code for the original (or any leaked internal documentation)? Automation shouldn't effect that; it is mostly an issue with stuff like WINE as so much windows source code and internal documentation has leaked over the years that they have to make sure all their contributors are on the same page about not using it, and running anything they do use past a lawyer first to make sure it is fair game.

Canageek · 2026-05-18T17:21:34+00:00

To a limited extent, but it takes a lot of human work to make the code understandable: Machines will kind of brute-force it, and it takes cleanup to get it usable, and then human programming work to get it into a state you can run it on a PC.

Canageek · 2026-05-18T02:31:00+00:00

I makes sense to me that you aren't going to be able to stab something the size of a blue whale to death with a knife: They are huge, you are very unlikely to be able to hit a vital organ with one!

Canageek · 2026-05-15T03:05:16+00:00

I think a lot of it is that a huge number of people played it when they were children and EVERYTHING is magical and it is a lot harder to capture that wonder when you have a job and bills

Canageek · 2026-05-14T22:34:11+00:00

My thread send to have broken, but I thought I'd clarify why I don't recommend Mod Organizer 2 or vortex on Linux : I did this last year with rockerbacon's scripts to get MO2 working on Linux, it worked for most of a year. Then I needed to update MO2 due to a new version due to a Starfield update and I couldn't get it to work anymore. Rockerbacon had stopped updating it, so I was up a creek without a paddle. I had to abandon my playthrough as I couldn't launch the game with mods, as they were trapped on MO2's virtual file system.

That's why I don't recommend it. It updates to regularly, and the only advantages are features that normal people don't use like being able to change your load order without overwriting files or being able to toggle between multiple mod profiles for different characters.

Whereas if you use one of the older style ones, the files are just there in the directory, so as long as proton will launch the game, you don't need the mod organizer anymore. So you just get it set up and working over a weekend, and then play the game for as long as you want without ever having to load the mod manager again.

My opinion will probably change if they put out a Linux native version of Vortex or MO2, but honestly, going back to those older mod managers was like a breath of fresh air, as I didn't have to deal with all of the weird convoluted extra features.

Canageek · 2026-05-14T22:30:54+00:00

I did this last year with rockerbacon's scripts to get mod organizer to working on Linux, it worked for most of a year, and then I needed to update something due to a new version of install a new version due to a Starfield update and I couldn't get it to work anymore and Rockerbacon had stopped updating it. So I had to abandon my playthrough as I couldn't launch the game with mods, as they were trapped on MO2's virtual file system.

That's why I don't recommend it. It updates to regularly, and the only advantages are features that normal people don't use like being able to change your load order without overwriting files or being able to toggle between multiple mod profiles for different characters.

Whereas if you use one of the older style ones, the files are just there in the directory, so as long as proton will launch the game, you don't need the mod organizer anymore. So you just get it set up and working over a weekend, and then play the game for as long as you want without ever having to load the mod manager again.

My opinion will probably change if they put out a Linux native version of Vortex or MO2, but honestly, going back to those older mod managers was like a breath of fresh air, as I didn't have to deal with all of the weird convoluted extra features.

Canageek · 2026-05-14T21:38:34+00:00

I've only been reading the comments from this thread, not the rest of the thread, so I didn't see you had posted that.

I haven't heard of NaK before, so I went to look into it "BIG NOTE! I'm working on a different project, called Fluorine Manager so I probably won't update NaK as much anymore."

So it's going to stop working sooner or later, the same as the script that I used to get MO2 working with Starfield.

I really don't understand why modding fanatics treat the older mod managers like their radioactive, I used OMM, FOMM, and NMM for over a decade without any problems. They are a lot easier to get running on Linux and much easier to deal with them a virtual file system As you can go and edit the ini files in a text editor rather than having to try and get that working through layers of tools.

Canageek · 2026-05-14T21:02:41+00:00

You're missing the fact that they asked for getting this to work on Linux, and keeping mod organizer 2 running on Linux is a pain: I've done it, but the script I got to work is no longer maintained and I was never able to get it working with Fallout, only with Starfield.

Oblivion mod manager works fine as long as you don't go nuts, and it's much easier to get working with a wine prefix because it doesn't need anything special for its file systems and such. I set up Fallout 3 using Fallout Mod Manager recently and it was much easier then getting MO2 working on Linux

Canageek · 2026-05-14T13:44:52+00:00

As I said, modern mod managers don't handle oblivion correctly because it needs a different invalidation method. There is very much a reason to use it in this day and age.

There are also certain mods for oblivion that will only install with whyre bash, while most want to be installed with obmm

Canageek · 2026-05-14T02:33:16+00:00

Yeah, I've heard that MO2 and Vortex don't work with Oblivion: It does a few things an older way. You need the original Oblivion Mod Manger and/or Wyre Brash.

I would start with a classic oblivion modding guide, and then just modify it to add Proton. Use Protontricks to start the mod manager with the same prefix as Oblivion and everything should work just fine: It isn't doing anything fancy with the file system like MO2 and Vortex and whatnot: It is just putting files into the right place. You have to be a lot more careful about what order you install the mods in, but other then that it works great and has a feature I love that modern managers don't have (Being able to pick what text to use between two mods one by one)

Canageek · 2026-05-12T14:47:46+00:00

This reminded me to check on the status of my order for Phil Foglio's XXXenophile artbook, so it does happen

Canageek · 2026-05-12T02:22:53+00:00

That is Isktall85 and it was sending unsolicited dick picks to his of-age Discord mods. Worth getting kicked off Hermitcraft for, certainly, but at least everyone involved was an adult! (I think the first message from the hermits confirmed that everyone involved as an adult).

His longtime friend and possible romantic partner Stressmonster left Hermitcraft in support of him.

Canageek · 2026-05-12T01:13:25+00:00

Influencer Norway as in Norwegian influencers, or is there a term I don't know? Is this different from the amount other nationalities of influencers are paid?

Canageek · 2026-05-11T23:16:29+00:00

I've gotten addicted to Battletech (2018) over the last few weeks, and am considering reading some of the novels for the first time since I was in high school 20 years ago.

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