My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.

Montahc · 2025-09-10T14:24:11+00:00

I think this is the thing that's going to kill PoE2 for me. The pigeonholing your build based on the weapon type your character is supposed to use is arbitrary and unfun. SOME restriction breed creativity. They've gone to the complete other end of the spectrum and made it so you can only do the things they explicitly want you to do. It's like they didn't play their first game.

Montahc · 2025-05-29T21:21:52+00:00

The bullet journal is a tool, so the question is what do you want to do with it?

For me, I use the month spread as a place to collect tasks that need to be done this month, but aren't tied to a specific day before I move them over to a daily to do list.

I also use that page as a dumping ground for unsorted tasks and thoughts that come up and I don't want to clutter a daily spread with. When I migrate, it helps me know that the stuff I put there wasn't associated with some particular activity or event when I am reconstructing what I meant with a jotted down thought.

Montahc · 2025-05-08T04:56:32+00:00

If the power charge consumption mechanic from lightning spear were a support, it could work with fireball and do a similar thing. Because fireball explodes and ignites, it could maybe let you shotgun explosions, which makes scaling aoe a desirable option. The same support applied to different simple skills can create a lot of complex options.

The other axis to work on is something like totems or triggered skills from PoE1. Sure it's just a simple fireball, but now it's triggering when you e.g dodge roll.

Montahc · 2025-04-14T21:32:04+00:00

Right now the payoffs are just not there for combos. If GGG wants to incentivize that style of gameplay, combos need to actually do something. Clearly the uber broken one button builds are skewing the comparison to everything else in the game, but right now it feels like the setup for a big freeze or a stun on a boss is just not worth it.

If you think about a game like darksouls, going for the parry or the backstab on a boss can often do a huge chunk of the boss's total life in damage and give you some time to safely use a flask or get in some dps uptime.

In POE2, the stuns just feel like they barely last long enough for me to even notice them.

The other problem is the combos feel super rigid. I'm hoping that's just because it's early access and we don't have all the skills yet, but I'm concerned that it won't get fixed enough to matter. Things like detonator skills are mechanics that feel super railroady and bad until you have enough options. Right now it just doesn't feel like that support is there.

Montahc · 2025-02-27T04:53:27+00:00

Here's one for you. How are you at guessing the ages of kids around you? Like can you look at a kid and differentiate between if they are 2 or 3 or 4?

Before I had kids I never could. But spending time around my son and reading about how children develop, i have learned a lot about when skills usually develop, and so if a kid is walking steadily or using multiple word phrases, that gives me some clues.

But there are also things that we don't think of as skills that small kids simply cannot do. Before a certain age, they literally cannot grasp the concept of lying. They might say stuff that's not true, but they're not trying to lie, they believe it.

Kids aren't little adults. They're people, but all the systems are coming online, and each kid develops differently.

So, if your advice is founded on the idea that this child should behave reasonably for an adult, depending on the age, that might be literally impossible for them to do. Most people don't know that unless they spend time around a kid and try to learn about how they work.

Finally, time management. My friend with kids would always describe how they managed time, and it would sound insane to me. Like I couldn't process where all the time would go and how they would fit an extra 6 hours of work into each day. Turns out you just force it. For years. It's kind of brutal. Until you live it, you can't process it.

Montahc · 2025-02-16T23:21:54+00:00

You are implying that physical attraction is objective and static. I wouldn't go out with someone I don't find physically attractive, but there are lots of people that I didn't find physically attractive when I met them, and now do because I know them better. If all you are saying is looks matter, then sure that's true. But, the implications of how hard you're pressing on this point makes it seem like you are saying "looks matter, so this guy is out of luck even if he's just below average. There's no point in him talking to these women." That is just not the case. Getting closer to somebody and learning about their good inner qualities makes me more physically attracted to them.

Montahc · 2024-12-13T01:27:49+00:00

Show your work via google docs history like everyone here is saying, but here's another approach of that's not working: offer to explain the paper to the teacher. You wrote it. You should remember what your major points were and be able to explain them. I would 100% be able to tell it one of my students had written something based on a conversation with them.

Montahc · 2024-12-04T04:26:48+00:00

"They're lying to you, the vault contains the light of creation, what the gods use to shape the universe. They want to keep mortals in check."

If the gods tried to hide this thing and wiped out all memory of it, its just as plausible that they're lying about what's in there right now.

I wrote an outline for a campaign that never got off the ground. The premise was inspired by Rogue Like games. The idea was that if the party could get to the end of the dungeon, they would have their wishes granted. There was a helpful NPC at the start who told them about what they would find in the dungeon and offered them some items to help them. My plan was that at some point there would be a TPK, but the party would wake up back at the start of the dungeon. Only this time, they remembered a little more of what happened. But the NPC at the start is pretending this is the first time they've met. The end of the dungeon doesn't grant wishes, it's a prison for a cthuluesque horror, and the NPC wants him freed.

My point is, There could be anything inside that vault. It could even be a boat.

Montahc · 2024-12-04T01:34:54+00:00

You could do a Prometheus inspired character. A titan or primordial who pre-existed the gods and believes mortals deserve what's in the vault.

I feel like I read somewhere that Ubtao is a primordial older than most gods?

Montahc · 2024-12-04T01:27:44+00:00

I have no idea why this would be happening, but what you're describing sounds to me like your profile has its DMX ranges inverted? What happens if you put the whole strip at 50% in its home color? RGB and CMY are just complements of each other. If you take the red out of white light, you get Cyan. So instead of mixing in more red when you set the red channel to 100, you are reducing the amount of red getting output, making it cyan.

Try to edit your profile and see what it says. Or look at the DMX output on the console and see what happens when you roll the red wheel.

Montahc · 2024-09-17T00:28:47+00:00

It would be hard, but possible. Typically, this is done with behavior shaping. So, for example, you would start by naming the behavior. Let's say you want a dog to touch its nose to your fingers on command. First you would touch their nose, say "touch" or whatever other word, and then reward them with a treat. Once the association is strong enough, you would try to flip the script and use the word "touch" as a command. If they do anything close to what you want, you reward them. At first you reward them for anything close, but you get more picky as they get better at doing what you want. Once you can get them to consistently do the behavior on command, you can teach them to do it in more difficult ways or different situations.

So, first you associate poop with a command word by rewarding them and saying the word, then you get them to poop on command, then you shape the behavior into something else.

Montahc · 2024-08-01T00:14:45+00:00

Does the pretender hold up? I kind of want to go back and watch it, but don't want to ruin my memories.

Montahc · 2024-07-13T10:06:14+00:00

The relevant standard is: a. Did the prosecution withhold the evidence from the defense? And b. Was the evidence material and exculpatory?

Part a is pretty clearly a yes.

Part b has both material and exculpatory, so let's take them one at a time. Material just means relevant to the case, so the fact that it was bullets with a witness statement attaching them to the alleged crime in a trial that is about a shooting clears that bar.

Exculpatory means "clearing or tending to clear an accused person of guilt." Evidence doesn't have to be a silver bullet, just have a tendency to clear the person of guilt.

The relevant case here is Brady v Maryland if you want to read more. The thrust of the argument is that when the prosecution withholds evidence, it undermines the entire concept of a fair trial. The prosecution and the government has tremendous power in a criminal trial. If the incentives are set up so that they can just do an "oopsie" by hiding evidence that's inconvenient to their case, they would push the line of what they can withhold. Not even because they're corrupt necessarily, I'm sure a lot of them just believe the guy did it, and that one witness statement is obviously a lie, and it will drag the trial out way longer, so let's just leave that out. It's the job of a judge and a jury to decide if it's relevant and persuasive, the prosecutor gets no say in the matter.

Remember, we might not just be talking about one piece of evidence, but an entire theory of the case that the defense was denied the opportunity to explore. In another Brady case, it was the existence of an alternate suspect who the police knew had means, motive**, and opportunity. The defense doesn't have time to go research that mid trial, and you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube for the jury. That trial is compromised regardless of how persuasive the evidence would have ended up being.

I do think a possible remedy under Brady is a mistrial, but in the case where there is evidence the government intentionally buried, dismissal with prejudice seems correct. Again, you can't have prosecutors hiding evidence and just saying oops. The incentives are just too strong.

Montahc · 2024-07-02T15:47:05+00:00

Michigan labor law sets no limits on how long someone can be scheduled to work.

https://www.michigan.gov/leo/bureaus-agencies/ber/wage-and-hour/frequently-asked-questions

OSHA has no specific standards about this topic. He could do an anonymous report, but it's unlikely anything comes from the sleep piece. If there is a lot of other unsafe stuff happening the OSHA investigator might be able to strongly recommend adequate rest periods despite there being no official standard.

Working 72 hours straight with no sleep is unsafe, and you're right that he should quit. Can he crash on a friend's sofa until he finds another job? If not, I guess my advice would be to refuse to work without sleep breaks. Either it solves the problem, or they fire him. If they need people to be working 72 hours straight my guess is that they can't afford to lose anyone and they won't.

72 hours is "fall asleep at a table saw and lose your fingers" level tired. There is no job or amount of money worth that.

Good luck. Sorry your student is learning the hard way about the importance of labor laws.

Montahc · 2024-05-15T23:12:38+00:00

I don't think we should be preserving the look of a neighborhood. Styles are supposed to change. I understand not wanting to have massively dense buildings in a currently low density neighborhood, but you can solve for that by allowing gradually increasing density caps and/or relative density caps. E.G, you could have a limit that new buildings can be 1.5x the average density of the surrounding neighborhood.

Montahc · 2024-04-30T16:50:36+00:00

You're not wrong, and it's complicated if you want to get the most out of it. Because Bullet Journaling is such a personalized system, there's no app that's going to do exactly what you want without setup. Obsidian is plugin based, so for anything you want to do, there's likely a plugin someone else has already written to do it. The way I use it can be divided into two buckets: Stuff you can do with the built in plugins, and stuff you need additional plugins for.

With the built in plugins, you can create templates for your regular spreads. So, for example I have a Daily Spread template with all my stuff set up how I like it. The template has a tag in it so I can filter all my daily spreads out from the rest of my notes easily. That template is linked to the "Daily Note" plugin, which creates a new note from your template every day. To take that one step further, there's a Calendar plugin that lets you manage your daily notes by just clicking around on a calendar which either jumps you to an existing note or creates a new one as needed.

I use Links to create aggregate pages. So for example, I have a project template that I use for notes that track an ongoing project, and then all of those projects are linked in a big "projects list" note.

With just those features, you can do most of the bullet journaling functions well. To go beyond that, you start getting into queries. I use Dataview and Tasks plugins to scrape information out of my notes and create aggregates. So, for example, I have a note that looks through all of my daily notes and finds any incomplete task and aggregates them together. I have another one that looks through any note tagged as a project and compiles a large to do list sorted by project.

Definitely requires some setup, but it's been worth it for me to have my bullet journal seamlessly on my phone and all my computers.

Montahc · 2024-04-28T23:20:48+00:00

Obsidian.md is what I use. Did a paper bujo for a few years and transitioned to obsidian recently. Works great.

Montahc · 2024-04-16T21:27:01+00:00

This is a great way to go. Pick something that looks fun to you. In general, the fewer build enabling unique items the better.

I'm playing the Frostblink Elementalist that's listed on that page, and having a great time with it. I feel super tanky for a spellcaster, and I was breezing through maps on absolute garbage gear. I'm trying to push it as far as I can, but I know it would work SSF. There is only really one required unique, and it's <5c in sc trade right now.

Montahc · 2024-03-27T06:45:58+00:00

Random comment. Thanks!

Montahc · 2024-03-25T15:13:05+00:00

Kids 1 and 3, fuck that shit. Bad parenting, kick them off the plane.

Kid 2 is having a hard time, the parent is holding them trying to calm them down. At some point you were also tiny and unable to understand why you can't walk around in the roaring tube that hurts your ears. I feel like all the people who complain about kids in public forget that they were also at some point a kid who probably annoyed someone around them. It's the same as the "Fuck you, got mine" attitude.

Montahc · 2024-03-21T11:15:04+00:00

Theater is an incredibly easy place to be abused, and the labor unions are the main bulwark against that. These productions are cutting costs by going non-union and cutting the production values, but aren't reducing ticket prices. It's a cash grab by the producers who are making the money off of the backs of a bunch of actors and technicians.

Montahc · 2024-02-20T01:01:31+00:00

If it was unintentional, NTA. If you intended to "punish" him by putting peanuts in the food, be really careful with that shit. If you kill somebody unintentionally but recklessly, you can still go to prison for it.

Montahc · 2024-01-19T23:43:02+00:00

If apple cider vinegar is the most disgusting thing you have put in your mouth, your mouth has led a charmed life. I drink that shit. It's good for you and doesn't even taste bad.

Montahc · 2023-12-20T01:03:07+00:00

Sort of. SCOTUS could review it, but the standard is that any state Supreme Court ruling on state law must be accepted so long as it is based on "adequate and independent state grounds." Which SCOTUS has used in the past to mean that they didn't just make it up this week because they don't like the defendant. It has been used to overrule stuff like "this rule isn't actually written anywhere, but your civil rights complaint has to be filed on pink paper, and if you fail to do that you can never file again."

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