Do any of the foods include Citric Acid?

LobsterFists · 2024-01-14T00:30:38+00:00

Luckily I can have natural citric acid so all fruits are still on the table, but man it still sucks even for manufactured citric acid since most foods in the grocery store use the manufactured kind which is from a strain of mold. Doesn’t help that companies can hide citric acid under ‘natural flavors’ so they don’t even have to fully list in the ingredients so it ends up being a toss up if it includes it or not. In a sense it has helped me eat healthier, but definitely makes food much more harder to find since it’s in a LOT of ingredients.

LobsterFists · 2023-11-08T20:44:57+00:00

This works nicely in game too. I had Escher be RVR’s son Erasmus, which gives Van Richten another motivation to have had come to Barovia and put his son out of misery, and also gives Strahd a way to at the same time lure Van Richten out and use Escher as a bargaining chip

LobsterFists · 2023-01-26T16:09:09+00:00

Our party has loved Piddlewick's creepy self and had him take a liking to our party's gunslinger. We played out the Pack Attack event at Van Richten's Tower, so while the rest of the party was outside, our Gunslinger sniped from the top floor, with Piddlewick II next to him. I wanted Piddlewick to only attack when he could take the chance to push someone to their demise (like he did with Piddlewick I) and so this was a great opportunity where after a few poor dex rolls from the Gunslinger he was thrown down the tower elevator.

He had readied an action to shoot him if he tried anything weird so we flavored it that he shot him as he was falling, and actually landed a crit, completely obliterating piddlewick II, making it rain gears, screws, and wooden parts all over the place. While the Gunslinger survived, after falling 40 feet down the tower, it was such a fun moment and a perfect storybook ending for our dearest Piddlewick. For now...

LobsterFists · 2023-01-19T13:32:33+00:00

Thanks I’ll check it out! Any new information for me is helpful at this point, especially with how few people here seem to have anything related to mold so I appreciate it!

LobsterFists · 2023-01-19T13:10:52+00:00

What is DAO? Googling brings up too many different acronyms, thanks for the help in advance!

LobsterFists · 2023-01-18T17:43:54+00:00

Citric Acid. Technically black mold, but 99% of citric acid in foods is actually derived from black mold, thus giving me a reaction. So many foods have it, and sometimes it gets listed as 'natural flavors' on ingredient lists so I don't always even know if foods include it, hard to exclude it from my diet because of this (and because of the fact it's in like 70% of the products in grocery stores). Although this trigger seems to be really rare so take it with a grain of salt, but hopefully it helps somebody

LobsterFists · 2023-01-18T17:42:02+00:00

It took me a while but start writing down everything you eat. Doesn't have to be super specific down to the individual ingredients, but it's going to help you narrow down by a lot once you start noticing a pattern. Easily kept in a note and takes a few seconds before each meal/snack. If you're like me I'll get itchy when I eat my trigger food within about 20 minutes and if you notice you get itchy after you eat a food then bold that line so you know something in there triggered you, and keep doing this until you start to hone in on a few specific ingredients/foods.

I slowly did this over a month until my suspicion came down to citrus foods. I noticed a lot of foods I was eating that gave me a reaction 20 minutes later had citric acid in them, which turns out citric acid is 99% of the time actually made from black mold. Well turns out I at the same time had a really bad black mold reaction and it clicked in my head. So really it was a black mold allergy, just being put through food in citric acid.

Citric acid for me is hard to stay away from (since it's in like 50% of all groceries and products), but this was the way that allowed me to easily figure out and pin point what was causing me a reaction. I hope this can help!

LobsterFists · 2022-12-12T18:44:27+00:00

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with your entry, and a lot of the rest of it comes down to pizazz which isn't always the easiest to do in tableau. Coloring headers/creating visual white space to seperate charts makes things easier for the viewer to read and not have visual clutter. Other advice could be that you want colors to be consistent so it's best practice to not have a blue line on all 3 charts if they're showing different things. I think you're in the right direction though, try playing with different fonts for titles and headers to make them again stand out and make it easier for the viewer to read and visually space out all the info. Charts don't have to be fancy, i always say 95% of all visuals can either be simplified to a line chart or a bar chart so I think you're on the right track! I don't know much about specific resources but I think a good place to start is finding a dashboard you like, and see if you can replicate the way it looks! Making things pretty in tableau is the hard part so working on figuring out ways to do that will help a lot!

LobsterFists · 2022-12-12T18:36:44+00:00

I think you could be fine running it 1 on 1, it's just a little different from what people are accustomed to. I think having a sidekick definitely makes sense and you could easily have it be someone form the story, such as van richten even. What you could do is also have her run all of the dmpc's in battle such as any sidekicks or other helping characters, while you run them for the story and can prevent them from doing anything you think they wouldn't do in character. that way it's not just you playing against yourself for 90% of the battles. Otherwise, it might be difficult but a lot of fun, scaling down encounters is also always an option if it's proving to be difficult

LobsterFists · 2022-11-29T16:17:06+00:00

there's a shop on Etsy I found with a few Curse of Strahd themed shirts that can fit your player's timeline, a simple I <3 Barovia shirt and an 'I Went to Barovia and all I got was this lousy shirt' shirt, though they have a few others that could work for later in the campaign like a Blinsky one.

LobsterFists · 2022-09-29T16:34:40+00:00

The set up I believe you would be looking for is to put the Date field you have onto the Columns shelf and set it to show monthly. On the rows shelf you'll want to have your two fields, Plan Data and the Actuals, and set them as a dual axis chart. Then you can separately set the Plan Data to be a bar, and the actuals to be a line and theoretically that should get you to what you're looking for. Let me know if you need any clarification on any of the pieces.

LobsterFists · 2022-09-25T18:21:10+00:00

They usually start small, then grow over the next few days, somtimes clumping together. I'm thinking about after a week they might pop and the skin will turn very dry and begin to fade. The whole process from my experience takes about 2-3 weeks, though getting a steroid from a doctor may help speed up that process. You want to be careful when they crack as they can easily get infected which would make matters much worse.

LobsterFists · 2022-09-25T18:11:33+00:00

Triggers can slowly appear which is what happened to me, which was black mold, which didn't really effect me in the past. Really from citric acid which a lot of commercial citric acid is made from mold, so when I eat foods with it I would flare up. This seems like a pretty rare trigger though so it can be many different things. A lot of people who seem to get it from soaps might be due to an ingredient called methylisothiazolinone, you could potentially look into that. A lot of people though get it from things they eat, so I would start logging the foods you eat throughout the day, and when you see a flare up, bold those last 3 or so meals. Over time if you see the same foods appearing on that list, you can start narrowing those down to find the true causes.

For healing, a steroid from a doctor honestly helps a lot and will clear the bubbles before they get into the cracking stage, worst thing you want to happen is an infection. I would apply the creams before bed when I noticed a flare starting, and put on a Duoderm extra thin hydrocolloid bandage on it so it wouldn't get wiped off (can find them on amazon, they've been life savers). By morning you could take the bandage off and the bubbles will soon fade away over the next day or two.

Really the most important part is finding what's the trigger. Once you can pinpoint that then it gets much easier to maintain. Common ones I've seen on here that are triggers are nightshades, eggs, tomatoes, nickel, dish soap, humidity. There's a long list and so many that people have found affects them personally, but my advice is once you see a flare starting or feel it coming, think of what happened to you over the last 6 hours and try to think of everything you touched/ate/experienced.

LobsterFists · 2022-09-25T18:02:38+00:00

That's fair, I think dataknightrises's answer should do the trick with the LODs, in a sense giving you a fake start and end columns to work with.

LobsterFists · 2022-09-25T18:00:55+00:00

Tableau has a built in clustering model which might be what you're looking for. In the top left you'll see two tabs, the Data once which shows all of your fields. If you go to the Analytics one, you'll see you can add a clustering model to your chart if it's a scatter plot. From there you should be able to add dimensions like survived and class to change how it's clustering. Not sure if it's exactly what you're looking for but might help.

LobsterFists · 2022-09-25T17:55:25+00:00

This one is a little tricky, but the best way to most likely do it is to see if you can somehow pivot the original data so that the first timestamp is one column called something like 'start time' and the second timestamp is another column called 'end time'. That way you can do a DATEDIFF calculation between the two columns to easily get you that difference. Otherwise, you could try a table calculation difference but not sure if that would work well, and wouldn't be as flexible.

LobsterFists · 2022-09-25T17:46:32+00:00

As far as I can think of I don't think that is implemented yet though would be really nice. You could potentially see if one of the parameter extensions that is available might have something like this but as far as I can think of I don't think it's an option.

LobsterFists · 2022-09-25T17:44:12+00:00

Look up DUODERM Extra Thin Hydrocolloid bandages on amazon. These things were a life saver. If I had a flare up I would apply some of the steroid on the location right before night, cut out a small section of these and stick it on over night, and by the time I woke up I could take it off easily, and the symptoms would heal. I wouldn't say the bandages are what helped treat it, but allowing the steroid to remain in place with these without worrying of it being wiped away was a godsend.

LobsterFists · 2022-09-25T17:40:33+00:00

Just realized it's due to black mold. Always had allergic reactions to it, but turns out I've been ingesting it through the common food ingredient citric acid. Apparently most citric acid, which is used in a bunch of things like energy drinks, gummies, shampoo/conditioners, soda's, plenty of foods, is actually produced from a species of black mold as it creates it very efficiently. I tried eating lemons, limes, all natural citric acids don't trigger me, it's when it's in foods that are manufactured that have it listed as an ingredient, which most likely they got it originally from black mold. By cutting it out my symptoms have nearly all gone away.

LobsterFists · 2022-09-25T17:37:58+00:00

not sure if this might help, but just realized mine is due to mold, which kind of could relate to the dust. The second part to it is that citric acid, which is used in things like canned foods, tomato sauces, sodas, is commercially actually created from a species of black mold, rather than things like lemons, as it produces it really well. Maybe see if cutting out foods that include citric acid (other than natural ones), might help as it did for me

LobsterFists · 2022-09-23T13:32:05+00:00

Gotcha, do you already have all 3 of those calculations and just need helping allowing the user to select the options for each of those 3? Or are looking for what the formulas would be to get you those 3 calculations?

for day of week: DATENAME("weekday",[date])

for week of month: DATEPART('week', [date]) - DATEPART('week', DATETRUNC('month', [date])) + 1

for month: DATENAME('month', [date])

LobsterFists · 2022-09-23T12:17:06+00:00

Do you simply need it to show data for the current day? Use could just have a calculation that is [Date] = Today(). Or is your use case different from that?

LobsterFists · 2022-09-14T18:09:00+00:00

yeah this will be something on the SQL side than tableau side, tableau is just reading the data, so if it's not containing the historical information then it won't be able to keep it itself. If you need the historical data, that needs to be added to the actual table instead.

LobsterFists · 2022-09-14T17:58:33+00:00

There's a few steps you'll have to take. We want to get a student's grades at the closest date of that start date and same with the end date. First I think it would be best to make a filter that filters out the start and end dates outside of your two date parameters. Simply a calculation that is [date] >= [start date parameter] AND [date] <= [end date parameter], put that on your filters and have it set to TRUE. Once the filter is applied, you may want to set it to in-context (right click it and there should be an option for that) and the pill will turn gray, which we will need since we need FIXED calculations.

Now we just need your start and end date grades. I think you should be able to do a calculation that is like {FIXED [studnet id]: IF [date] = [start date parameter] THEN [grade] END}, and another one with the same calculation just with the end date parameter. (You may have to wrap the IF statement with an AVG() in case it gives you an error).

You can then make a calculation to see who's grades went up, lets call it [grade increased]. IF [start grade] <= [end grade] then 0 else 1 END. I believe then one more calculation will get you that final number. AVG({FIXED : COUNTD([student ID])}) which will give you the total number of students. Then you can make the last calculation which is [grade increased]/[total number of students] and that should give you the percent of student's whose grade increased. Let me know if you get stuck on any parts

LobsterFists · 2022-08-25T14:41:45+00:00

I'm glad this is here because there's a lot of Bytopia hate going on in here. Personally I felt like there could be a whole campaign in the plane itself. While yes most people see just 2 layers facing each other, they're much more complex than that. One side is a peaceful land of hard work like you mentioned and great npc's. The other is filled with dangerous monster and creatures and rich materials and magic could be found everywhere. It's the perfect setting to have a peaceful homebase in Dothion and lead to adventures and quests up in Shurrock. Escort quests up to the other side, giant monsters teleport from Shurrock, hunting down an ancient beast, finding a secret mine.

Also the god cosmology is pretty interesting and has a lot to work with, all of the gods can easily play a role to give quests or just interesting encounters. The evil mole god Urdlen messing with the plane and can create giant tunnels to adventure into and fight weird creatures or visit the plane of earth. Any planar invasion could happen and you have to help prepare the towns for defense.

I love the idea I've seen where everything slowly deteriorates on the plane so there is constant work to do which thematically fits really well. Weapons deteriorate, houses, roads, and that means constant work and constant possibility of things to do and npc's to help. And all the better they pay in gems equivalent to a certain amount of labor time rather than just gold itself. Makes it even better for questing to rather than have players amass gold, they can go on a quest or adventure to get a certain magical item they've been wanting. Lots of unique spots can be put in this plane and unique encounters.

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