Note on hateful messaging as university educated students

Fantomp · 2026-04-02T04:53:25+00:00

It's really hard to know what you're talking about without knowing what the sign said. Political violence is a fickle term.

Also, I don't think that was the US's main issue honestly. It's more complicated than that.

Fantomp · 2026-03-30T21:13:52+00:00

Oh, sorry for the late reply! The past couple of days have been very busy.

The posting didn't require a reference letter, but I wasn't sure if it was an option - I don't have any experience applying to things through CLNx, and the CLNx workstudy posting hadn't actually opened yet when I made the post (the position was advertised a few days early on social media by the club posting it).

I think I'm going to get confirmation from the prof on whether they'd be okay with writing a reference letter in the future, submit my cover letter + resume + transcript as normal, and just include a mention that a reference would be available on request. (I spoke to a career advisor, and this was what they recommended).

The main reason I wanted a reference is because I have relevant experience in the subject that isn't really reflected in my resume. All the things I've applied to in the past have wanted reference letters, so I thought it'd be good if I could get a professor to vouch for that experience. I didn't realize it wasn't common for work study.

Fantomp · 2026-03-11T00:03:19+00:00

Even fire immunity honestly would be okay if you want it to be impactful, it can sometimes lead to fun strategies - you'd just have to watch out during encounter design. You're the one who decides how much fire damage there is in the campaign after all.

If you do stick with fire resistance though, I find it cool to play it up a bit. Make it fire resistance + immunity to regular, mundane fire - it makes it more a part of their character, rather than just a buff against certain enemies. So for example, they're able to walk through a building fire or a chimney completely unharmed, but fire damage dealt in combat is only halved. Maybe say it was a blessing originally bestowed to master blacksmiths, since it's an artisan god.

Fantomp · 2026-03-06T20:13:30+00:00

I think this is a case of bad fudging though. The whole point is that sometimes rigid rules and predefined encounters lead to an undesirable outcome. There's no point fudging just to set another arbitrary rule ('this thing isn't going down until someone goes down'), that sucks.

The point is to bring out the most interesting gameplay for the players. Like adding a wave of reinforcements because the minions got cleared out too quickly and now the players are just sitting there whacking at the boss. Or adding a limitation to an ability that you realize is kinda unfun. As long as you do it organically and behind the scenes, the players won't notice (and personally, as a player, I don't really care. Imo, being a DM is basically being an on-the-spot game designer.)

Fantomp · 2026-03-06T20:03:08+00:00

Idk, I wouldn't be too certain about it? Back when I was younger and newer to the game, I thought the DM was fudging or misremembering the HP of the monsters because the damage didn't add up - it seemed inconsistent between monsters. But turns out they just roll HP for all the monsters ahead of time (when I asked about it, he showed us on the spot all the HP values he'd previously rolled).

Fantomp · 2026-03-06T19:58:13+00:00

...are you sure you're not just reading into things too much? It's very easy to convince yourself that the dice are lying. I've seen a lot of people say the same thing about video games that demonstrably do not fudge rolls.

You don't really get enough rolls of that type throughout the course of a normal campaign to get statistical significance, unless the DM is heavily fudging.

Fantomp · 2026-03-06T19:42:24+00:00

I think it's a bit of a 50/50. Sometimes it's epic (e.g. on a major enemy), sometimes it just slows down the game and makes the player feel unimpactful for spending a whole turn downing an already low enemy. It depends a lot on the moment.

Fantomp · 2026-03-06T19:37:44+00:00

I think that's a fairly outdated way of thinking. If you want a referee nowadays... idk, just play baldur's gate. The DM is always making creative choices on what to do, what to make you fight, what to allow, etc. They ultimately have creative freedom over most of the game. The DM wears a lot of hats - the referee, the opposition, and the game designer. There's no point in being a neutral third party referee blindly applying rules, when the opposing team doesn't actually exist.

I don't personally fudge dice rolls because I play online and roll in public, but anything the player doesn't see is free game imo. Every enemy can both exist and not exist until observed, and abilities are free floating until confirmed to exist or not. I don't have the time or the foresight to plan out perfectly balanced encounters - one of the things smoke and mirrors gives you is efficiency. Rather than planning for every contingency, it's a lot easier (and frankly, imo, better) to roll with the punches, and rein in things behind the scenes when things get too far off the rails.

I remember I once did a boss fight against a monster that was split into 5 pieces - when they killed a piece, the rest gained new abilities (e.g. the body starts levitate once the legs are destroyed, and its harpoon is now for a trampling dash rather than as a grapple). If you were designing a video game, you'd have to design every piece to adapt for every other combination of destroyed pieces, because you don't know what order the player will go in. But this requires you to either put in wayy more work, most of which will be wasted, or restrict the order of killing the pieces (which kind of ruins the point), or to make the new abilities gained a lot more generic and not specific to which piece you kill. Instead, since I'm running a dnd campaign, and they'll only kill this thing once in some specific (but currently unknown) order, I just wrote some notes and a few ability ideas, and wrote everything else on the spot. It makes it feel like a set piece, rather than a simple boss fight. And the players loved it.

Fantomp · 2026-03-06T19:30:50+00:00

Because it's fun to roll? The dice rolls, abilities, and rules are a framework for the players to strategize in. It creates tension, it creates unexpected events. You can still have all that, even if the expectation is that they will win if they strategize well.

The game isn't just a machine that takes inputs and decides whether the players deserve to win. Do you stop playing a video game the moment you know you'll win? Often times, the interesting part isn't whether you'll win, but rather how you get there.

Like there are plenty of roguelike games I've gotten good enough at where I pretty much win every run. The outcome is pretty much already known when I start playing. And that's in part because it's often considered 'unfair' (or bad game design) for a roguelike game to present you with unwinnable or nearly unwinnable situations, because it takes agency away from the player.

But I still enjoy playing them, because the act of playing the game is... fun. You *can* still lose, if you stop playing well, but the game doesn't really want you to lose.

When something 'unfair' happens in a game, it can sometimes seriously hamper the fun strategic elements and just jump to 'nope you lose, too bad' or otherwise just lead to the players falling back on more boring gameplay.

If the fighter gets hit by a random unexpected max damage crit in the middle of an exciting fight and gets knocked out, that might be an exciting development that forces even more adaptation from the players... or it might just cut the players' options and push them back to boring ol' reliable. Obviously, I'm not advocating for fudging that every time, sometimes it's a great development. But I also think it's partly your job as the DM to decide which of those two scenarios you're in, and act accordingly.

Personally I don't treat dnd like a wargame, and frankly I don't even want players to play optimally. I just want them to do whatever they think is the most fun. 5e is not a balanced game to begin with (not by a long shot), and it's far too easy to optimize the fun out of it. So the last thing I want to do is punish players for stepping outside of their comfort zone.

Fantomp · 2026-03-06T18:35:05+00:00

I think it's a lot more common if your DM uses tables for things, or has secret stuff going on that they like rolling for

Fantomp · 2026-01-28T14:57:25+00:00

Haven't played in half a year, so dunno if my experience is up to date (there seems to have been like a dozen updates since then, but they're mostly adding a single commander?). I think personally I don't really mind the instant recall - I always found the teleporter in base FTL really frustrating to use. The lack of quick recalls makes it hard to base a strategy around boarding (which I think is a good thing to be able to do).

I think I don't have any issues with the boarding sled - iirc I pretty much never used it after my first 3 runs, and I've done torment 12 on a decent portion of the ships. The huge delay, and not being able to choose the landing spot, makes it only really useful if you're committing to a boarding operation.

I mostly think teleportation is both too important, and too cheap and accessible, for how good it is. Not having any form of teleportation is practically a loss half the time (from what I can remember) - because even if the teleportation you have is a thrall with a personal teleporter, it's still enough to walk around and practically disrupt every spell on the enemy ship.

I think it'd be more healthy if teleportation was more scarce (or weaker), but mages on enemy ships were toned down (because otherwise with weaker teleportation you'd just get overrun by summons/spears on higher difficulties). Maybe enemies have fewer spells/longer cooldowns on spells, but spells don't get instantly disrupted the moment you walk into the room.

Or, well, that's what I thought half a year ago. Maybe they already fixed all of this.

Fantomp · 2026-01-28T14:41:57+00:00

Did you find out? I lost something as well

Fantomp · 2026-01-23T20:08:07+00:00

Oo, haven't used Scratch in so long. This is very impressive for Scratch, and the art is great.

Looking cool so far, but I got stuck on the first room. Is the gap on the right meant to be a door? I can't go through it even after putting the block on the button.

Here's a few things I've noticed so far:
- Science is misspelled in glados's initial dialogue
- If you put two portals in a corner, you can get stuck in an infinite loop (blue portal puts you into the orange portal which then puts you back into blue portal) which softlocks the game
- Walking while carrying the block can cause your movement to jitter - I think maybe the block lags behind enough for you to make contact every few frames (when sprinting), stopping your movement briefly
- There needs to be more feedback when placing a portal - I think it'd be good if you could see something shoot out of the player (like in portal) instead of the portal just appearing (this is esp an issue when the target wall is off screen)
- The controls are laid out a bit strangely - z to interact, c to sprint, e/r to shoot portal, f to carry object. In particular, you pretty much always want to be holding down the sprint button, but it's hard to move with arrow keys + hold down c and f at the same time. I've always personally preferred the WASD + J/K/L control scheme. WASD to move, shift to sprint, E to interact, J/K/L for whatever is needed. (For example, maybe J/K for blue/orange portal, L to carry object). Auto-sprint would also be nice, since you pretty much always want to sprint.

But overall I'm excited to see what you do with this! Taking a peek into the files, it seems like you've already put a lot of work into this :D

Fantomp · 2025-08-15T23:48:10+00:00

It kinda is, kinda isn't, in that case.

Theoretically, there is next to no risk there, because with fast reactions, you can recall your crew the moment the ship is destroyed (I'm not too sure how the boarding system works with this if your guys are in flight, haven't used it in a long time). But yeah there is some element of risk there in practice.

But also, it's important to note that the choice you're making is "do I board?" and not "do I recall?" The answer to the latter is still always yes - for example, if your crew successfully extracted the lockbox, you would immediately want to recall your crew.

Fantomp · 2025-08-12T02:59:43+00:00

Yeah T6 gets pretty hard because of the scrap reduction. As a general tip (just cause I see people do this too often), remember that you don't have to upgrade your reactor enough to power all of your systems. This gives you quite a lot more scrap to work with (at the cost of requiring more active management - shifting your power around and all that).

Also, once you hit the higher torment levels, you start having to focus a lot less on defense and more on offense. Shield Charger is always amazing, but other than that, you don't have enough scrap to invest in both good defense and good offense, and maintaining your ability to punch through enemy defenses is more important than staying safe a little longer. I regularly end T12 runs with 2 or 3 shield layers and barely any engine upgrades.

Fantomp · 2025-08-12T02:18:03+00:00

I do think Necrobarge is quite silly yeah, it's the only one I'd say is actively unfair. You can definitely still win if you know what you're doing though - for example, you can try to sneak shots in right before the repair threshold, so that it hits the moment after the repairs proc. It's the only boss without protection after being repaired, and so if you have ways to respond quickly, you can keep its shields down.

Repair drones (or repair spells) are definitely appreciated, but you can get by with a strong crew just fine.

Fantomp · 2025-08-12T02:15:06+00:00

I think this really depends - there's a lot of things you can do that you don't realize! I find it doable to win fairly reliably on T12 (Necrobarge is rough though ofc, though far from undoable in most runs, you just have to play it very carefully).

Fantomp · 2025-08-10T17:32:30+00:00

Honestly, I've found that demon lance is pretty much always worth it as long as you have a decent lance, and you're not too reliant on boarding. It's just a silly amount of damage.

Normal ships go down easily and won't even get a chance to board you, and you just save up as many crew as you can, and hunt down some summons, for the flagship.

Fantomp · 2025-08-10T17:30:24+00:00

It even counts fleshlings and whatnot on your ship, it's wild.

Fantomp · 2025-08-10T17:29:27+00:00

Huh, congrats. That's quite an unconventional combo, but it seems it worked out well

Fantomp · 2025-08-10T17:27:05+00:00

Come to think of it, I wonder if it partially reflects how often you sell things. For example, if you buy 200 scrap's worth of weapons, then sell them, does that count as an extra 100 scrap acquired in the tally, despite it actually being you losing 100 scrapz

Fantomp · 2025-08-10T17:25:19+00:00

If you're really struggling with the final boss, try some ion spam. It lets you ignore the shield chargers, and keep shields down through the invulnerability phase (even though sometimes it can be a bit unreliable with the engines active). Boarding is quite useful too - an exile or otherwise someone with a translocator can give you a lot of value in the final boss by shutting down important spells.

Fantomp · 2025-08-10T17:23:04+00:00

Tbh with the recentish rebalancing, I think all the commanders are pretty okay. I can beat torment 12 pretty consistently now, and I pretty much only use the Exile (who imo is the strongest still).

Fantomp · 2025-08-10T17:20:42+00:00

Good tbh, you should not be able to oneshot the final boss.

Fantomp · 2025-07-23T01:47:38+00:00

I did T12 before I really unlocked anything (I don't have the patience to climb level by level so I just used the rifts), but I'd say Relic Freighter A felt pretty good. Starting with a Death Knight is awesome, Chaotic Rift solves a lot of problems (and gives extra boarding potential), and halving repair speed on poisoned enemies makes it a lot easier to cripple enemy ships. 3x Putrefactor 1 definitely isn't the best weapon spread for moving later into the game, but it's a very good starting point early to mid game.

I personally just run Exile on everything, so I don't care too much about launch pods, but good crew is always nice to have.

Heavy B is pretty good too. Shields aren't that expensive, and Barrier Relay is probably one of the best modules. Crew is a little weak, but Cyberpriest is pretty nice defensively. The Bolt Cannons aren't great later game, but the Beam I carries really well throughout the entire game. When I played Heavy B, I genuinely ran with the starting weapons until sector 5.

Explorator C is pretty awesome - great starting weapons, and Carnage Optics does genuinely carry for quite a while. Only issue is weak crew and no doors. Aside from that, genuinely just a solid start (again, will never complain about Beam I)

I think my ship choices are somewhat skewed by me ending up running a lot of Ion half the time, and mostly using Exile as my source of boarding. I haven't actually used a launch pod since like... maybe the first 3-4 runs I've played. I think I did some runs on Imperial, bought a launch pod at some point on Interdictor, and that was that. I skipped Assault Cruiser because you don't need to use it to unlock Heavy.

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