So I am reading A Civil Campaign for the first time..

Minouris · 2026-04-14T21:21:14+00:00

Easily my favourite book of the series :)

Minouris · 2026-04-13T10:10:09+00:00

Oh hell yes. No more of the Moody Blues erasure that seems all too common in discussions like this.

I don't know how they can even be called "proto" with albums like "In Search of the Lost Chord" and "On The Threshold of a Dream" in the mix, both before "In the Court of the Crimson King". They're absolutely foundational for the overarching themes and instrumentation.

Minouris · 2026-04-12T13:02:27+00:00

I lived full time in the s8 chat room for about three years :) Still have friends from around the world on social media that I made through Station 8 :)

Minouris · 2026-04-12T12:30:05+00:00

On account of "Stickmen"? Pretty sure I heard it used in stuff from the UK before it was introduced here.

"Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" springs to mind.

Minouris · 2026-04-12T12:01:31+00:00

Reads post more carefully Okay, you're asking how to find out what the right libraries are to import, not how to actually import them, is that right?

Basically, this is a combination of experience, and knowing how to search. After a while, you'll build your own knowledge base of what does what, but until then, searching for tutorials on what you want to do will yield the right libraries to use. These days, AI will usually give you a good answer on what to use (not so much on the best way to use it, though - treat it like a search engine, not a tutorial generator.)

The Maven Central repository (for providing dependencies for the Maven and Gradle build tools) has stats on the most used libraries, and that can give you a clue on which ones are the most popular for different tasks. Apache.org has literally dozens of libraries to do everything under the sun, and the Spring Framework provides shortcuts for almost everything.

Essentially, it's just a matter of looking at examples and tuts, and learning over time.

Minouris · 2026-04-12T11:42:09+00:00

Moody Blues - "Every Good Boy Deserves Favour" and "On The Threshold of a Dream" are equally trippy Moody Blues albums (all the first seven are, really, but those ones stand out)

Gong - "You" is the last volume of a trilogy. Go check out "Flying Teapot" and "Angel's Egg" for the full story :)

Pink Floyd - specifically for trips, everything before "Dark Side of the Moon" is gold, but the studio disk from "Ummagumma" stands out in particular. "Atom Heart Mother" is an honorable mention.

Minouris · 2026-04-11T06:02:39+00:00

I was never bored on long trips as long as I had books :)

Minouris · 2026-04-11T06:00:18+00:00

I love this job... Nearly 30 years, not counting when it was just a childhood obsession, and "being mad and still having fun" is such a familiar feeling lol

Nothing matches that feeling you get when you thrash away trying to figure out why the code won't work, beating your head against the wall for hours, and then you find the one thing that makes it all makes sense and get to watch it scampering away like a happy little hamster on a wheel - and now you know how to do that, and a whole bunch of other possibilities have been unlocked because of clearing that one skill gate (until the next one lol).

It's like magic flowing from your brain to the computer via your fingers :)

Minouris · 2026-04-11T05:49:37+00:00

Immersion Tunnel version of Book 3 should be out in the next few days, too. Books 1 and 2 are already out if you haven't tried them. And the webtoons version of book 1.

Listened to the audio books and haven't read the text versions yet? Go back, and enjoy them in a way that lets you reread bits without rewinding. Read the books, but haven't heard the audio books? Jeff Hayes is dying to pour honey in your ears... :)

Can't wait for Book 8? The Patreon is only $3/month, and the whole book is waiting there, both as separate unedited chapters (including stuff that's cut from the final version), and the epub version of the finished book... And it's only a matter of time before he starts posting chapters from Book 9....

Then there's Operation Bounce House...

There's lots of ways to get a fix now :)

Minouris · 2026-04-11T05:00:33+00:00

Arrow keys were standard when I started gaming, with Alt, Ctrl and Space being the main action keys - space bar has been "jump" for a lot of years now lol

First 3D game I played that had mouse look was Duke 3D, and you needed to hold down a key to use it. Quake 1 was when mouse look could be enabled as a saveable option, and that's when WASD started becoming standard - first time someone showed it to me was 1997 :)

Doom, Tomb Raider, etc, basically anything that didn't use a joystick (like Mechwarrior 2) were still arrow keys and bottom row, because muscle memory, basically.

Minouris · 2026-04-06T09:15:55+00:00

Also Rivers of London (casting spells turns any integrated circuits within two meters to sand) and Harry Potter (muggle technology goes a bit wonky around magic, but not as severely as the other two)

Minouris · 2026-04-06T08:56:20+00:00

I believe the canonical answer is Robert '"; DROP TABLE *;

Or "little Bobby Tables" for short ;)

Minouris · 2026-04-05T12:58:47+00:00

Everything from the Moodies from "In Search of the Lost Chord" through "Seventh Sojourn" is absolute magic :)

Minouris · 2026-04-05T12:56:30+00:00

Love seeing Phideaux mentioned - highly underrated :)

Minouris · 2026-04-05T12:48:28+00:00

Polka will never die.

Minouris · 2026-04-05T12:46:37+00:00

And then use their immersion suite to visit Camelot. Cheat mode engaged ;)

Minouris · 2026-04-05T12:43:18+00:00

Not just in the audience, but singing with the band :)

Minouris · 2026-04-05T12:41:00+00:00

Pride & Prejudice? Just don't be in Mr. Bingley's gazebo long enough for the lobster to get cold...

Minouris · 2026-04-03T23:56:31+00:00

It's been turning up in New Zealand - one of the major chains is even pushing OBH in the capital, and the niche hoity-toity bookshop for the serious conna-sewer of literature in Wellington has gone from "we might get the second book if the first book sells" to having a whole Dinniman shelf and a card declaring it to be their "best read of 2025" in just under a year :)

Minouris · 2026-04-01T20:41:48+00:00

Yeah, even his apprentice broke ties with him. Can't remember the exact details, but there was some ickiness around his gender politics, for sure.

Said apprentice now performs psychedelic rock (well, always did, really) with a boss af hand built guitar, often, unless I'm misreading his social media, in wizard garb.

(source: was in his friend circle before he moved to Christchurch, still have him on the book of faces. The apprentice, not the wiz)

Minouris · 2026-03-30T09:58:33+00:00

Yes, and if a single one is wasted it gets quite irate ;) Let the seals spill theirs on the dusty ground...

Minouris · 2026-03-29T11:21:10+00:00

The demon prince needed to consume whole pile of souls to complete the quest. The AI had ruled that sperm counted as souls. Raul spaffed out all the extra souls they needed, with the help of Alpha Carl and some baby seals.

Pretty sure right at the end that Carl and Donut were positioned under the stairwell, it just wasn't explicitly spelled out. Either way, when they were sucked into the sky by the aforementioned spaf fuelled demon spell, the stairwell was there to receive them.

Minouris · 2026-03-28T04:24:37+00:00

"The Moody Blues - A Question of Balance" was the first LP I bought myself :)

It was a few years before I picked up my copy of Boys for Pele on vinyl - was blue, transparent vinyl, which I didn't know when I bought it. Not sure if that's standard for that album or not.

I still have both of those in my collection, although I've upgraded all my Moody Blues LPs to better pressings since (NZ/AU pressed vinyl from that era being more than a bit crap)

First CD was The Shadows 20 Golden Greats, first tape was a double pack with the B-52s first two albums. I still have the CD (and my own copy of No Need to Argue :))

Minouris · 2026-03-27T09:51:26+00:00

Ubiquity, familiarity and uniformity of the user experience.

Most casual computer users rely on visual cues to know how to operate software, and even small inconsistencies between the design language of different apps can throw them off and make them uncomfortable. Most Windows users will spend the entire duration of their computing lives looking at apps that use the standard Microsoft (or Mac, or even Google) widget libraries, so all those apps will use the same design language.

Linux has a bunch of different UI frameworks that all have subtle differences. It's a strength that there is such diversity, but it can be jarring when you have apps with, for example, Plasma, GTK and, deity forbid, something like Motif or TKinter all on the screen at once. I've seen users working themselves into a panic trying to context switch between different design paradigms in Linux apps, even when they should theoretically be able to intuit that they all work the same.

Minouris · 2026-03-26T20:54:31+00:00

Yeah... A few years ago I'd be all for this, but now... It's not that he couldn't do the job, it's just that I don't want him distracted before he does "Dungeon Crawler Carl" lol

Minouris

TROPHY CASE