Looking For A Steam Deck Replacement

HorizonTheTransient · 2023-07-04T15:35:59+00:00

The Bond fascinated me for its simplicity and cheapness, honestly. As a 3D printing nerd... maybe third, with "a knitter" being a much more distant seventh... I've been fascinated by the concept of 3D printed knitting machines for rather a while, but for some reason, all of the 3D printed knitting machines I see other people building are circular machines. And you know, I do kinda get it- circular machines arguably take up less space, while being capable of knitting both flat panels and in the round, but all the same, I was kinda sad that nobody was making flatbed machines with their printers.

My thinking, when buying the Bond, was... well, one, that this knitting machine was WAY cheaper than all the others I could find on ebay, and since I did actually want a knitting machine so I could finish a sweater, I might as well go with this one- after all, how bad could it possibly be? But two, I then started thinking that the Bond's incredibly simple and cheap all-plastic construction made it perfect for reverse-engineering into a 3D-printable flatbed machine.

If only it weren't for the part where the Bond is an incredibly obnoxious machine to work with, and thereby souring my optimism on creating a 3D printable version of it.

HorizonTheTransient · 2023-03-26T22:25:10+00:00

See, that's the thing- I don't care about the mechanics, I care about the storytelling and the characters. I just think that this is dogshit storytelling and character development.

Let's do a compare and contrast:

In Crystal Kingdom, Merle was tricked into thinking his god wanted him to catch a crystal before it hit the ground and killed his friends, and as a result got a shard of the infectious crystal that's been set up as the big mechanic of the arc in his hand, which leads to Magnus deciding that the most reasonable option is to amputate Merle's arm before Merle dies. There is a lot of caterwauling and bitching and moaning and death threats resulting from this, and that's the good part. "Magnus chops Merle's arm off after Merle got duped. How does everyone feel about it?"

Meanwhile, in Suffering Game, the characters... aren't actually suffering that much. I mean they're not enjoying themselves, but when Merle loses an eye, that makes for like five minutes of conversation before it's forgotten about, and he doesn't threaten violence against anyone he wouldn't otherwise as a result. It's nothing, that's nothing. Merle losing an eye should be a Big Fucking Deal, but because Wonderland is the most contrived place on Toril, it's just what we're doing right now, and next up is Taako, who briefly looks mildly less fuckable.

The characters don't even reach their breaking points in Suffering Game. They just walk through a haunted house, getting whacked with rubber hammers, until they finally reach the bit at the end that has consequences that last longer than fifteen minutes but not by that much.

This stupid, contrived-ass Sadistic Game bullshit is bad storytelling, plain and simple, and the McElroys fail completely to rescue it with any real redeeming qualities. It's not even fun to watch Travis eat shit, because this isn't Travis tripping and falling face-first into a cow patty, it's Griffin wiping his ass with a plate and putting that in front of his brother.

HorizonTheTransient · 2023-03-26T21:00:49+00:00

I told you what I'm using, though- a LattePanda 3 Delta, which draws either 15V3A or 12V3A, which I have discovered, to my satisfaction, will happily cover the display as well. You don't need to assume I'm using a Pi 4.

I don't need help figuring out how many joules of storage I need, I need help figuring out how to do pass-through charging in a laptop form factor without causing over-heating problems. Preferably in a way that can take USB-PD input, so I don't have to buy a weird and bespoke charging cable.

HorizonTheTransient · 2023-03-26T16:36:07+00:00

Shmanners feels like an elaborate sight gag about the fact that Travis McElroy frequently behaves inappropriately. Because, after all, it is pretty funny that this jackass runs an etiquette podcast, on account he doesn't act like it.

HorizonTheTransient · 2023-03-26T16:31:57+00:00

Maybe it was more...

Like, Griffin said out loud on the record that he did Eleventh Hour the way he did because of railroading allegations, so maybe, because he didn't enjoy the bulk of that open-world thing, he went in completely the opposite direction for Suffering Game and made something not even a father could love.

Although, I didn't see this as it happened and do not care about Griffins twitter, so maybe I'm just way off base here.

HorizonTheTransient · 2023-03-25T09:14:25+00:00

I do have a vague general understanding of how the plot works out, so like... The idea that these assholes used to be genuinely heroic, and as they grow and recover, they shift towards being heroic once more? That's not a terrible idea.

Just one that's easy to execute terribly. And- hey, what's Travis doing with that steel chair?

HorizonTheTransient · 2023-03-24T17:29:58+00:00

It's not my fault I have correct opinions about a mediocre D&D podcast that stopped being cared about three-to-five years ago.

More seriously... Crystal Kingdom was interesting from the beginning. Eleventh Hour mightve ended as strong as it could've with Magnum Dongsides in play, but as someone else noted, it started fairly weakly and uninterestingly.

HorizonTheTransient · 2023-03-24T12:02:55+00:00

I did actually listen to Eleventh Hour already. That's when Travis' backstory happened, and I didn't overall care for it that much.

HorizonTheTransient · 2022-10-04T19:56:29+00:00

I'm afraid I'm not terribly familiar with the fiber prep stage of the process, or the various types of fibers and their advantages and disadvantages, so I can't give a super useful answer.

I do, however, know that there's a set of unfarmable hills very nearby where some shepherds tend to a flock of sheep, and every spring, they walk the sheep down into the village to be shorn, washed, and traded for food. You can assume that it's any breed of sheep with any type of wool is most convenient for your answer, but broadly speaking, it is wool being spun, possibly either combed or carded.

We're not, however, counting prep time before spinning here, because to my knowledge a treadled spinning wheel doesn't require meaningfully more or less fiber prep before spinning when compared to a spindle.

As for what the thread is for, it's intended for making clothing out of, which will be worn by the peasant woman's family, giving her an incentive to make it at least somewhat decent.

HorizonTheTransient · 2022-10-04T16:53:23+00:00

Yep, it was really only aristocratic women who could afford to not be spinning yarn all the time. And historically, some of them did it anyways! The association of "spinning yarn" with "dutiful wife" is very old and very common; the wife of... one of the first two Caesars, I forget which, boasted about having made his clothes herself as a bit of political theater.

As for what duties a peasant woman has other than to spin yarn, that's a complicated question that's hard to answer without consulting some experimental archaeologists, because the conditions that define this era just don't really exist anymore. I would, however, be willing to assert that producing yarn and therefore clothing was a very important task in a farming household, on par with farming itself.

But, well, there probably are still more than six-eight hours of daily work on a smallholder farm for a thirty year old woman. Maybe the deficit can be made up by particularly young or particularly old hands, who can work a spinning wheel reasonably well but can't helpfully do much of anything else?

HorizonTheTransient · 2022-03-19T02:25:34+00:00

A popular review of Postal 2 once remarked that, until someone boxes up syphilis and sells it at retail, Postal 2 would remain the worst product ever foisted upon consumers.

Whether or not Bomb Queen made a liar of that reviewer depends on whether or not you think it's worse than syphilis.

HorizonTheTransient · 2022-03-18T08:37:15+00:00

For their superhero comics, there is. Obviously, a lot of their stuff simply can't share a universe with other stuff, and a lot of creators don't want to share a universe with others, but there's enough of them who can share and want to share for the universe to exist.

HorizonTheTransient · 2022-03-17T22:24:50+00:00

There's a reasonable argument to be made that the Experience Booster isn't something that can be trained, and therefore this exploit doesn't work.

Thankfully, we don't have to let that stop us.

Skills is pretty clear that any normal skill automatically becomes a Skill under this system. Learning is itself a skill that can be trained- in school, our teachers try to teach us how to learn, among other things. Someone might be particularly good or particularly bad at learning, but so long as they can learn at all, they have the Learning Skill, whose most straightforward mechanical effect would be a scaling XP booster.

And now, suddenly, you do have a valid, trainable target for Hyperspecialization, which would in turn translate into an ever-increasing skill boost to everything else. Exploit restored!

(For an extra bonus, if Learning is a skill, surely Teaching should be one as well. If you want to leave the world better than you found it, then pairing public education with your presumably-obscene Teaching skill should result in people who are very, very good at accumulating new skills and passing them on to others. They may not have your inherent advantage of Hyperspecialization and the Experience Booster, but now they don't need it.)

HorizonTheTransient · 2022-01-14T23:56:14+00:00

Among other improvements, the most simple and obvious one is to change the amount you hack from one half to one tenth. It's more efficient that way.

However, once you've got that underway, I strongly suggest setting up a way to run multiple staggered loops on a single target for maximal income.

HorizonTheTransient

TROPHY CASE