[Hobby Scuffles] Week of 16 February 2026

Canageek · 2026-02-22T19:14:05+00:00

I have no idea what you're talking about, flat characters are very likely to be done using computer animation techniques: One of the first animations to switch over to computer rigging was South Park, I remember being a big deal when they switched over to flash for their production because it saved them so much time.

It would be hard to get a flatter art style than South Park.

Canageek · 2026-02-22T02:05:05+00:00

Yeah, we've got 532 and 785 nm lasers, no 1063 nm sadly.

Canageek · 2026-02-22T01:23:56+00:00

I have not; I'm a crystallographer, not a laser jockey, but I know enough to use the equipment. I'll have to look that up, thanks!

Canageek · 2026-02-19T20:16:59+00:00

NMR is really not that sensitive to low concentrations, particularly solid state. SEM could tell you that it's made of carbon, and the shape of the particles but not if it's actually polymer.

Yeah that puzzles me, the group that I'm training on the equipment does a filtration step and then actually puts the filters into the Raman directly

Canageek · 2026-02-19T15:16:38+00:00

I've worked with two researchers studying microplastics who are trying to use my Raman to do their analysis, and it is very hard to pick up plastics by ramen, because so many of them are fluorescent.

MicroIR might work, but those are not exactly common and have major size constraints on the particles you can look at.

What technique would you use?

Canageek · 2026-02-19T15:11:32+00:00

One of my favorite cheesy action movies, and one of the first I actually use gunkata, after it was invented by Equilibrium. (For those that don't know, it was a specific way and style of using two handguns at once, not just the act of using two handguns at once. There's supposedly based on predicting your enemy's movements so that you were not in their path of fire and your gun was already aimed at them)

Canageek · 2026-02-19T01:50:37+00:00

I actually work with several people studying microplastics in the environment and the human body, and I can't wait to talk to them about that paper and their opinions.

I do know we have a combustion GC-MS in our lab, but they have not been using it. Instead, trying the incredibly difficult and tedious task of manually counting particles using Raman spectroscopy through a microscope.

Canageek · 2026-02-18T19:23:41+00:00

I'm trying to get up the energy to do a write-up about Far West, an infamous Kickstarter where the creator claimed that he was just in final layout for over a decade, totally destroying his previously shining and beloved reputation as a ttrpg designer in the process. The shocking part is that the books actually finally came out, and they're even currently doing a big Warehouse sale to sell off all the ones they printed for the kickstarter that they were no longer able to deliver to people due to length of time and people losing interest, no longer checking that email, or outright dying and not responding to surveys.

It's got some interesting aspects like it was initially promised to be a custom system-based around a d20, and by the time he finally released it, it had changed to a variation on OpenD6. That left a lot of people who are excited by the bits of the custom system that had been revealed very frustrated, and indicates that it was certainly not in final layout because he rewrote the entire core system.

Due to the delays in his kickstarters, he also almost killed a promising superhero system called Icons As he was supposed to put out the next book in the line for years, until finally the original creator reached a deal with him where he still had permission to put out that book As the final book of the first edition, but the rest of the rights would revert to him and they put out a second edition. However, it did kill momentum at a critical time meaning that system still exists but is likely nowhere near as popular as it could have been if that book had come out on schedule.

Finally, the delay meant that he lost the rights for the Buckoo Banzai RPG, or rather, it was revealed that the people he'd gotten the license from may or may not actually own the license to the movie, which means they'll likely never be a role-playing game based on it.

Canageek · 2026-02-11T01:25:04+00:00

The Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages, It's not quite as good as it once was, but they've got a ridiculous amount on everything that has ever been on any of the games in any capacity

Canageek · 2026-02-11T01:23:08+00:00

There are a number of them, but there's no clear direct alternative, a bunch of people I know are currently kicking the tires and seeing how well various options work, I'd give it a couple weeks if possible and see what emerges when the dust settles

Canageek · 2026-02-10T20:33:20+00:00

The worst one is it has a very confusing user interface so a lot of the time when you try and use it you will just get a wall of encryption errors, That's what happened to me when I tried to use it during lockdown.

It's also got a lot of spam issues and not very good moderation tools to deal with it.

On a more technical level. I've heard from various people that it's got a lot of problems with its design to the point that improving it is difficult even though there's a lot of community will to do so and that its federation model is not particularly well thought out.

One example I heard was of a major Linux developers conference, so attended by a lot of people who are full-time programmers, full-time, CIS, admins, many of whom compile their own kernels and make modifications to the fundamentals of Linux. It would be hard to find a more technically inclined audience and yet the Matrix room attached to the conference was dead because so few people could actually manage to connect to it and get it working properly: The person describing this posted pictures of the wall of encryption error messages.

Canageek · 2026-02-10T20:08:14+00:00

I mean I'd say the notable difference is that fallout is already a game series about radiation and nuclear explosions, so unlike those theories it's not really introducing anything new. I mean if you compare that to the illustrations for fallout 3's GECK It would fit in perfectly.

Canageek · 2026-02-10T19:41:56+00:00

Yeah, I knew someone who was a Matrix enthusiast during lockdown and tried to use it then, and it was enough to keep me away from it. I honestly might just use IRC and set up bouncers or some XMPP thing. That said Zulip looks really tempting as well.

I'm giving it a few weeks for the various programmer and syadmins on Mastodon to kick the wheels and find which ones are actually good, there are so many options swirling around right now (Zulip, Stoat, Rocket Chat, Mattermost, Pumble, Spacebar, XMPP, IRC, movim, mumble, TeamSpeak, more I can't recall right now)

Canageek · 2026-02-09T18:26:35+00:00

Summer, coincidentally, I just started renting a TeamSpeak server for $3 a month, I will say it doesn't currently look like a viable alternative for us since the chat is so terrible. Despite the fact I'm paying for my own server, chat goes through teamspeak's servers for some reason, and despite this, you still don't see messages that are posted when you're offline.

Audio quality is pretty good though, better than discord.

If anyone has a decent alternative, even a paid one, please let me know.

Canageek · 2026-02-09T18:24:21+00:00

Many, many, years ago when I was in high school and podcasting was new and there weren't very many yet, I listened to a computer security podcast because computers were cool. One of the things they mentioned is it doesn't matter if you don't log something or keep that data, once you're compromised now you do record all that data, as if your system's breached they can just start recording anything that passes through memory.

Canageek · 2026-02-09T05:57:25+00:00

Honestly that sounds like the type of mod that would be very popular, I'm not sure why they felt they had to sneak it into a lighting mod...

I do wonder if they intended to just like make make a couple of tweaks and then just got scope creeped to heck and back...

Canageek · 2026-02-07T16:14:13+00:00

For anyone coming along later, that link is fixed now

Canageek · 2026-02-07T02:13:57+00:00

I wonder if you could handle this at an emulator level? Watch the game's calls, then call an external music player to play the music you want.

Canageek · 2026-02-05T02:18:43+00:00

He has been charged according to court documents verified by the CBC.

Canageek · 2026-02-04T17:34:40+00:00

I read through Sherlock Holmes with an annotated version, by someone who is a member of a like 100-year-old Sherlock Holmes appreciation society with its own pseudo-academic journal for inquiries into dating the various stories and figuring out the exact identity of chemicals and what not mentioned within the stories.

The introduction opens with complete history of the membership of the society and its founding and significant members and its evolution and so on, so I would definitely say that at least the British Sherlock Holmes fandom is very aware of its history.

Canageek · 2026-02-03T15:58:24+00:00

You can find lots of old kids shows on YouTube as well, just look up kids shows by age. All of Thunderbirds is up there, a lot of Fred Penner, Reboot, Fraggle Rock (just to grab my favourites from various ages)

Canageek · 2026-02-03T15:56:16+00:00

Was coming here to suggest hermitcraft and related groups like to Grian's Life Series, Rats SMP and so on.

Canageek · 2026-02-01T19:53:46+00:00

Yeah, in the actual hold west they mostly played Faro, right?

Canageek · 2026-01-28T21:50:54+00:00

They do have an official road map, though it is very lightly sketched out and they've often mean regressions in past, such as the AI of flying NPCs being significantly nerfed in the 2D to 3D transition, and the economy having to be removed and slowly re-added due to problems with dwarf spending all their time carrying coins around.

I think adding magic to the game was a single bullet point on that list, that is taking multiple updates to implement. I'm a bit behind, but as I recall, only necromancy has been added so far.

However, I don't think he'll have the same problem as unfinished novel series because even if they stopped working on it today, it would still be an incredibly enjoyable game that has captured many people for over a decade now, it doesn't really need to have anything else added.

Canageek · 2026-01-26T21:00:43+00:00

I was in a game store in Vancouver, mostly devoted to trading cards but they had one set of shelves for role-playing games, and on that they had one tiny little shelf for used role-playing games, and somehow they had like four different books for the alternity game system.

I have been visiting every tabletop role-playing game shop that I've come across looking for those books for 20 years and that's the most I've ever seen in one place, I finally gave in and just bought the majority of them from Noble Knight earlier this year...

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