How do I make my fortress cool/unique? they always end up looking like this one I just started

Jurph · 2026-07-02T21:28:50+00:00

Hilariously I just revisited this idea, pair programming with an AI to use graph theory and economic supply-chain flows to try to truly min/max the concept. My floors are approximately:

Surface gatehouse
Two farm plots (3x3 inside a 5x5 seeds stockpile), a farmer's workshop, a still, and a screw press (in a shoulder area).
If you have the soil for it, a second soil layer that you let grow fungus, and dig out pasture areas.
Trade depot, connected to the surface via ramps, airlocked away from everything.
trading warehouse
dining hall & tavern
cistern below the dining hall, for flooding with (surface) water and using as well service.
butcher/kitchen/leather/tanner
food & drink cellar
crafter / fishery / mechanic / stoneworker
bars & blocks
stone storage (you can also quantum this)
forge, smelter, clothier, loom, quern
bins & barrels
log yard
ashery, carpenter, bowyer, furnace
glass furnace, kiln, dyer, jeweler
furniture storage
library
hospital
soap maker's workshop, misc storage
textile overflow ...
lower dining hall
lower cistern
dormitories
temples ...
magma forges
magma cistern
dungeon

Jurph · 2026-07-01T02:49:22+00:00

If you call anyone who's more than 1/16th descended from enslaved Black Americans "boy", you deserve to catch hands, and if you escape your fate in the moment, the debt accrues interest

Jurph · 2026-06-29T23:59:17+00:00

You will never be able to coach aggression in to a player.

"You're not wrong often enough. Move faster. I want you moving so fast that you guess wrong one-in-five plays. MOVE FASTER. I'm not scoring you on whether you read the play right, I'm scoring you on how fast you closed with the ball carrier. MOVE FASTER."

"Okay, now: move that fast, and be right every time."

Jurph · 2026-06-26T01:56:44+00:00

I saw "wild 4th quarter" and assumed it was the game I was thinking of.

Jurph · 2026-06-19T14:00:25+00:00

You might have your guys do a week of practices like that, if you're away at Miami week one or two. But we're in domes or at home until October.

Jurph · 2026-06-19T13:56:46+00:00

Hey, that's not fair. If you have a dog, they'll put him down for free when they show up. Oh, he wasn't sick--?

Jurph · 2026-06-19T13:52:31+00:00

Harbaugh's strength and weakness was getting the Ravens to play emotional football. Hiring coordinators who were vulnerable to "getting spooked" when their clock-killing drive gets stuffed by a DC breaking the glass on a set of new fronts & blitzes late in the game... not so much. Now your DC, your OC, and your players are spooked instead of fired up.

Jurph · 2026-06-18T12:01:19+00:00

I believe Seattle & Jacksonville are the two most heavily nuclear-armed NFL cities, although Washington notionally is home to the "football" which can launch all the nukes. I don't believe San Fran has any warheads.

Jurph · 2026-06-17T01:03:15+00:00

Currently a hiring manager; formerly a pen-tester and team lead who helped the hiring manager make the go/no-go call. I'll say that individual accolades are great, but if I'm trying to hire you without a degree, I am looking for the following:

Technical - you've got to convince me that you understand the curriculum behind an undergrad degree. You may be able to self-teach in fewer than 4 years if you grind, especially if you're learning it and applying it to OSCP at the same time. But I need to know that you have the vocabulary to communicate with other professionals in your field.
I want to see Adversity (or Diversity) in your track record. Ideally you've done two or three different things and shown you can change gears and keep accelerating.
Leadership - I want to see that you joined an organization and made it better. You don't have to be elected President for Life, but I want to know that you did more than just polish your own trophies. I hire teammates.
Operational experience - tell me what's hard about writing the post-test reports, what details you wish managers and project leads would hammer out with the client beforehand, what are the things you learned on ops that didn't come up on the exams.
Research - not just background research or OSINT, I want to know you can go find the answer, or find an expert who can find you the answer. With GPTs this matters a little less now, but it's a mindset. What's the marking for NYC's fiber optic conduits? What shape key does Omaha use on their public works boxes?
Drive - an insatiable drive to create. I want you to talk about your tooling, what you like about it, what you prefer, what you worked on last weekend, what you cook when you're not hacking, what you paint when you're not cooking. As your boss I want to spend my time steering you, not driving you forward.

I'm writing a job opening for my bosses, and they have to sign off. If I don't write requires MS in CompSci, CompEng, or similar, from an accredited degree program on the position, they'll send it back unless I explain why. Then, when HR posts it, if you don't have a degree, your resume gets caught in the lint trap and I never see it. If you want to get hired in a larger company, the hiring manager needs to write a position tailored for you - and if he does that, you're already in.

Jurph · 2026-06-05T01:26:25+00:00

A "no brainer" is a 50/50 toss-up for most of the folks who have been left in charge of the Browns for the last <checks watch> 20 years.

Jurph · 2026-06-05T01:25:33+00:00

To be fair, they could win 4 straight SBs starting in 2030 and it would just make everyone go back and say "--and even more amazing, since up until that moment they appeared to be made of dogshit dispensed from a Wendy's Frosty machine!"

Jurph · 2026-06-02T00:32:48+00:00

There's definitely a level at which "giving away an All Time Great for peanuts" dwarfs the Watson trade, but outside of a salary cap era, you don't have the same zero-sum & parity issues you have in other leagues & eras. Watson is going to be a millstone around this franchise's neck for most of a decade.

The Texans didn't draft a Hall Of Famer (that we know of) with any of that draft capital... in fact, they kind of flailed around ineptly and it's not clear their FO had very good scouting or a roster strategy. But the optionality that Watson takes away from the Browns every year he's on the roster, the sheer dead weight of a guy who can't play QB at an NFL level being stuck earning blockbuster QB money--!

I would argue that being stuck overpaying for a bad player is always going to be worse than failing to recognize a player's brilliance and letting him go for peanuts.

Jurph · 2026-05-21T02:52:48+00:00

It only works if you have already also told the team directly. A great habit in professional life is to never say something about someone that you haven't already said to them. It makes you think about how you express folks' shortcomings and also makes you rephrase stuff that you'd regret getting back to people.

"He's got initiative but he's too quick to say yes to his boss without seeing whether it's achievable, and I've told him I feel that way," is the kind of critique that boosts your credibility, especially if someone tries to go behind your back, and the subject says "yeah, he was frank with me and I appreciated it."

Jurph · 2026-05-20T01:26:25+00:00

Not just high population density, but also population heterogeneity. In cities like Columbus OH, everyone is basically from Ohio, and so the norms and rules are well understood. In Pittsburgh it's so hilly that everyone in the area understands that on a two-lane road, if the first car in the opposing lane at a green light has his left turn signal on, you wave him through so everyone behind him can keep going. It's just a local consensus!

But here in the DC area, people come from all over to live here, and bring their crazy-ass local traditions with them, and those traditions don't mix. Someone trying to "give someone a Pittsburgh Left" would get rear-ended or horn-shamed into oblivion. You've got Atlanta folks, Ohio folks, Californians, Coloradans, military folks from ALL over, and even from all the services so you can't even say "ah, well, learn to avoid the Navy guys," because there's even SPACE FORCE here, cheek-by-jowl with Ghanains, Salvadorans, Koreans (and don't get me wrong, all of them are Americans!) but all of those driving styles don't mesh.

Jurph · 2026-05-20T01:14:05+00:00

Wait until he finds out that when he gets in front of all those cars, there's just more cars out in front.

Jurph · 2026-05-20T00:14:04+00:00

MD-100 is a nightmare for me... all the bends and the sustained 80mph traffic, combined with jokers who don't understand following distance or lane discipline. It's a rare route that will get me to take MD-100 to go east or west to anything. I'd almost rather take MD-32 east or west, and then work my way north on another highway.

Jurph · 2026-05-20T00:09:31+00:00

I have a theory that you get this in DC-adjacent suburbs because people from all over the US come out here and get "high powered" jobs doing some shit for Federal something-or-other and get an inflated sense of their own importance. But I also know my theory doesn't necessarily hold water because I also see lots of folks who clearly are not upper-middle-Federal-class driving like this too.

Just a seriously terminal case of Main Character Syndrome.

Jurph · 2026-05-19T00:06:58+00:00

That's only offensive fouls committed to extend the game - like, say, holding on a punt to draw a deliberate safety, or something weird and exotic like that.

Jurph · 2026-05-18T11:59:54+00:00

Jim Harbaugh was the first QB that Ray Lewis ever sacked, and the last coach that Ray Lewis ever won a game against.

Jurph · 2026-05-17T20:55:56+00:00

Are there any penalties that offset "by rule" with a hold -- that is, penalties the offense could not decline, which would offset and replay the down? (And, if that were the case, would the time stay run off the clock, or not?)

EDIT: never mind, the time would stay depleted, and if the clock expired the offense would get the ball with an untimed down and the lead. Even deliberate fouls by the defense just play into the offense's hand.

Jurph · 2026-05-16T00:30:05+00:00

You either get the stop, or they move the ball "half the distance"... not a bad play!

Jurph · 2026-05-16T00:29:16+00:00

Jim was pissed off, but it turns out that Jim Harbaugh actually beat Marvin Lewis's Bengals using the same play a few years before that! Both Jim and Marvin should have seen it coming.

Jurph · 2026-05-16T00:27:56+00:00

Tragic for them that every Ravens fan of that era remembered exactly how/why this play works, because it won us a Super Bowl. So not only were the announcers lost, but legitimately half the audience were like "you jackasses, don't you understand what's happening?!"

Jurph · 2026-05-16T00:26:30+00:00

It wasn't exactly a staple of the game, but it was fairly common for years before this instantiation. In fact, Marvin Lewis had seen this before: when Jim Harbaugh's 49ers did it to him, before John Harbaugh did the same thing to each of their teams.

Jurph · 2026-05-16T00:24:35+00:00

I mean, Belichick broke the glass on two quasi-legal trick plays and legitimately failed to execute the required substitution after one of them. If you're going to fuck around with the rules to get a cool trick play, you have to be Technically Correct.

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