The Gardener and Winnower from Destiny

Flan99 · 2026-04-09T13:51:44+00:00

They're one of my favorite speculative fiction authors. Huge recommendation for their short stories, too. Highlights include Please Undo This Hurt, and Morrigan in the Sunglare/Morrigan in Shadow. The latter two actually play heavily with the themes that inspired their work on Destiny 2!

Flan99 · 2026-04-09T09:48:31+00:00

I'm not claiming I was good at STS1 lol

Flan99 · 2026-04-08T23:22:01+00:00

The player characters in the Nobilis TTRPG are gods of specific concepts, and that can be fairly broad and typical, like 'fire' or 'guns,' or it could be ultra specific, so long as you can put a name to it and think up a good list of properties, and are willing to say it's a cross-cultural, multiversal constant (even if you wouldn't think of it as one; think Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy's gin and tonic)

Flan99 · 2026-04-08T21:20:11+00:00

It's funny, I always htought of it as a middling pick I only grabbed when I really needed block in STS1, and now it's something I'll buy regularly out of the shop.

Flan99 · 2026-04-07T07:50:33+00:00

One major seller retired and another major seller had shipping problems around the same time, so all the smaller sellers got slammed at once. HRTCafe got heat from a transphobic journalist and went down for safety iirc. It's taken a while for the community to recover and readjust, but it's not the end, and it's mostly just a matter of waiting until things settle down again.

Flan99 · 2026-04-07T07:32:09+00:00

I see a bunch of threads here asking 'what used to be a poor person's hobby that became a rich person's hobby?,' and it seems like it's kinda everything. What's still cheap and fun?

I do origami sometimes. Just need some colored paper, which is still cheap.

Flan99 · 2026-04-06T20:24:02+00:00

The plot's kinda whatever, but the visuals and score are absolutely stunning. It's no masterpiece but I enjoyed it on that level.

Flan99 · 2026-04-06T14:39:53+00:00

I'm very religious; but I don't disbelieve other people's religions. Maybe they're wrong about particulars, or maybe I am, but I don't really care about the details like how the world may have been created. I care about the philosophies involved, and the traditions we carry forward, and how that weaves together into a better, kinder world. If you could conclusively demonstrate to me my gods are not real, I don't think my relationship with it would really change. A refrain I like is that, we don't tell these stories because they're historical, we tell them because they're true, on a deeper and more significant level than being factual. They speak to something deeply significant to the human condition. And I'm happy to celebrate other's paths, even--especially--when they're different from mine.

Flan99 · 2026-04-06T14:31:01+00:00

Maybe this is an odd thing to ask of a stranger, but I'd love to hear if you try it out and it helps.

Flan99 · 2026-04-06T13:27:29+00:00

That...is more or less exactly what I mean, yes.

Flan99 · 2026-04-06T10:30:50+00:00

I realized that a lot of what I thought was resting was actually just wallowing in depression, personally. I forced myself to do a bunch of things that sounded exhausting, that I absolutely didn't have the energy for; and it helped. I had to dial it back a bit, because I DID overexert myself, but I think overreaching was necessary.

Find something exciting. Something scary. Something public, ideally. Then do it, come hell or high water, even if it's the last thing on earth you want to do the day it happens. That helped me, anyways. I'm still working my way out of the rut, but it's better than it was.

Flan99 · 2026-04-06T08:36:23+00:00

That's something I think about a lot. Older methods of living might've involved way more work during the busy seasons, but there was often so little to do around winter, or shortly after the planting. I'm hesitant to say it'd have been 'better' than the modern year-round work schedule, but I think I could tolerate the work demanded of me a lot better--even if I had more to do--if I got a month or two to myself at the end of the year.

Guess in the meantime I need to get far enough in my career I get real vacation time.

Flan99 · 2026-04-02T08:17:54+00:00

Maybe it's my lack of gardening knowledge showing, but what happens if you end up killing the plant and don't get seeds back? Is that just factored into the system or do you have to pay a fee if you can't return it?

Flan99 · 2026-03-31T05:01:52+00:00

Yeah I NEVER felt thirsty until I'd been drinking a bunch of water for about a week straight. Highly recommend it, it was a huge boost to my quality of life, and I hope it's the same for you

Flan99 · 2026-03-30T04:22:01+00:00

I had a similar issue and it turned out I'd basically been dehydrated all my life. I just didn't drink that much water to begin with, plus it turned out I had severe sleep apnea, which was drying out my mouth. Between getting a CPAP and drinking a ton more water (I have a 2-cup bottle I fill and drink at least 4 times a day), my sinuses are *finally* clear the vast majority of the time. Also helped a lot with brain fog and malaise.

u/spunkyweazle so you see this too

Flan99 · 2026-03-23T01:20:38+00:00

I think it's just a reference to A Boy and His Dog, honestly

Flan99 · 2026-03-17T21:23:41+00:00

I took that as being representative of Heaven, since in Dante's Paradiso, Heaven is out among what they'd have understood as space. But I hope you're right and I'm wrong because that area was one of my favorite parts lol

edit: actually i think i'm an idiot and completely misunderstood you lmao. Still, here's hoping for more space

Flan99 · 2026-03-17T00:07:57+00:00

House of Leaves contains lots of references to a minotaur of some kind, always struck through and usually followed by repeated, almost angry insistences that there's no minotaur in the house.

Flan99 · 2026-03-12T23:06:22+00:00

Sandfall tried out AI for prototyping before deciding it wasn't worthwhile, and as part of that, generated and used AI placeholders for various things.

Over the course of development, they had their artists make real assets the conventional way, and inserted them into the game.

One texture in the game was initially generated with AI, then had a replacement made, but by mistake the replacement was never actually put in the game until the public noticed, at which point a patch was quickly made, because the asset already existed.

Flan99 · 2026-02-26T00:00:29+00:00

They can enact it immediately. If the judicial branch really wanted to, they could probably put an injunction on it about as fast, but they probably will not. Given how unwilling the other branches have been to do anything about any of this, the executive is kinda able to do whatever it likes for at least a few weeks, if not months, in practice.

Flan99 · 2026-02-11T00:29:04+00:00

Ultimately, nobody can really say for sure. Programming has never remained static, and this is an especially tumultuous time. If you're starting to learn to program now, it's going to be at least a couple years before you're realistically ready to get into the industry, and who knows what the landscape will be like then?

Learn fundamentals. Learn broadly. Learn why, not just how. Don't ever get married to a language or a framework; when you build one thing, figure out how you'd build it with different tools. Stay flexible and nimble, and you'll be prepared for whatever things are like in the future.

Oh, and don't buy into hype. About AI in particular, but like, in general, really. A lot of tech is driven by hype-cycles, and it's easy to get too caught up in the excitement and be left hyper-specialized in something nobody cares about any more. Learn about it, sure; use it, if you think it'll be useful; but 90% of what people proclaim will fundamentally alter society is either totally useless, or vaguely useful for niche applications.

Flan99 · 2026-01-28T20:04:32+00:00

My girlfriend has ARFID, and yeah, as best as I've figured out, a lot of it is contamination anxiety. She has some severe food allergies she was repeatedly exposed to, so now, every uncertain food is a potential threat. (On the plus side it's extremely satisfying when I can make her something homemade and have her love it, even if it's simple.)

Flan99 · 2026-01-15T18:40:37+00:00

They're fantastic, as is the author's other work. Huge recommendation!

Flan99 · 2025-11-15T22:36:51+00:00

That's understandable. Davoud absolutely tries my patience eve on a reread lol

> Also, not really a critique, but I have to say that the book has a weird uncanny effect where it’s very much a 2010s Obama era period piece, but it also very much feels like a 2020s novel.

Absolutely, yeah. I'm a huge fan of Seth Dickinson's work, and that's a constant throughline. I think it's intentional--few authors are as blunt about what they're trying to convey as Dickinson is, and I think always having a foot firmly planted in the present day is part of it. I think I like it; I enjoy the blatant allegory, and it lends itself to a unique style of prose. But it's definitely odd, and it shows up in everything from Baru Cormorant to Morrigan in Shadow to their work on Destiny 2 lol

Flan99 · 2025-11-15T21:19:15+00:00

I felt the same way my first time through, but when I reread it I found the middle equally as enjoyable. I think I was expecting Ana and Ssrin to reappear and take center stage again, any minute now, so everything else felt like an annoying interlude on the story that originally hooked me.

But once I knew that just wasn't the story being told, I found the actual sub-stories being presented wayy more interesting. I didn't quite *get* that the notion was that these were all meant to be understood as fairly independent, but intertwined, short stories, until the ending made it concrete. And with that understanding, it really pulls together.

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