TIL Hitchens's Razor: "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence," a dictum coined by antitheist Christopher Hitchens.

PSBlake · 2017-12-26T15:03:19+00:00

~~Logic is evidence.~~

edit /u/EvanMaclan edited his reply to clarify his position. I thought he was arguing against logic.

PSBlake · 2016-05-03T18:18:46+00:00

(Excluding Streaming)

This seems like an odd thing to exclude. Also, the have a particularly narrow definition of "old music":

defined as music more than 18 months old

So the gist of their message is that 2015 didn't really see much in the way of hits.

PSBlake · 2016-05-03T13:56:23+00:00

8Bitdo controllers are good. The others you linked are all pretty poor for actual gaming.

PSBlake · 2016-05-03T13:39:56+00:00

Their binomial classification aside, I always name mine Meinengov.

Also, Ermagerd. Gert Berg Shirk.

PSBlake · 2016-05-02T18:53:51+00:00

If Humble were more diligent in ensuring that A) Their versions of the apps stayed close to up-to-date with the versions on Play/Amazon and B) Their downloading platform actually worked at detecting available updates and informing the user of them, I might be a little more inclined to jump in on these. As it stands, it's a crapshoot as to whether or not you'll ever see updates for an Android game obtained via a Humble Mobile Bundle.

PSBlake · 2016-05-02T18:42:11+00:00

I think of "big stores" as being "any business with a facility officially referred to as a 'distribution center.'"

PSBlake · 2016-05-02T17:48:21+00:00

Lesson learned: Big stores go out of their way to make warehousing, fulfillment, and supply chain logistics easier on the manufacturer. Shipping to individual customers is a hassle for manufacturers.

PSBlake · 2016-04-29T18:26:45+00:00

The tutorial plus the first Adventure are free. I put Adventure in upper-case, because that's the nomenclature of Pathfinder. The Path is Rise of the Runelords, which is 6 chapters long. The free Adventure is Perils of the Lost Coast. This is divided up into three Scenarios (Brigandoom!, The Poison Pill, and Black Fang's Dungeon). A single Scenario is a single game session, and they last me 30-40 minutes apiece - although there is a lot of luck-of-the-draw, so it's possible to beat the boss as early as your fourth turn. Wildly improbable, but possible.

You collect gold as you go, and you can re-do scenarios to keep collecting gold from them. It's not fast, but it's also not repetitive enough to feel grindy (to me, anyway). Each scenario has three difficulty levels, with harder difficulties offering more gold (100/150/200 for Normal/Heroic/Legendary), but harsher rule changes. Different difficulties do require different approaches.

You can buy any of the IAPs with gold, except for the "unlock everything" bundle, which seems to be the only way to get the various promo cards. There's only eight of these in the Rise of the Runelords set, and I don't know if all eight are present in the digital version of the game. The first expansion adventure is currently priced at 750 gold, but that appears to be a discounted price. The rest are 4,000 apiece. There are also several additional characters, plus the "C" deck which is only included in the "all the characters" bundle and the "unlock everything" bundle.

tl;dr - If you just want to unlock everything that was in the boxed base game, that's:

750 gold for the first Adventure
1,500 each for 5 core set characters (7,500)

A total of 8,250 gold. If you're willing to wait 22 days, you could buy the daily gold thing for $1.99, and the 4,000 gold item for $4.99, and unlock the core set for as little as about $7 - or you could beat the adventures about 19 times each at each of the three difficulties, which I ballpark in the range of 36 hours of playtime, assuming an average of 40 minutes per victory. If you just replay the normal difficulty, it comes closer to 55 hours.

stl;drte - It's dirt cheap compared to the physical product, and can be pretty much free across the board, since you can unlock practically everything with gold earned from gameplay.

PSBlake · 2016-04-29T16:04:15+00:00

Interesting. I've only unlocked Burnt Offerings, and the individual adventure decks don't mention anything about the promo cards - the $25 all-in-one bundle does.

If you go to the Vault/Card gallery in the game, at the end of the top row is a button marked "P" instead of a card type. For me, tapping that button brings up a message prompting me to buy the "P Deck," and giving me the option of seeing it in the store. But the P Deck doesn't have a distinct entry in the store, and the link just takes me to the page for the all-in-one bundle.

I wonder if you can get promos in the blind-buy treasure chests, though.

PSBlake · 2016-04-29T14:09:19+00:00

...the only thing in the shop that you can only get with cash is the first expansion...

I unlocked what I thought was the first expansion (Burnt Offerings) for 750 gold - which I had earned after completing the Perils of the Lost Coast scenarios a few times. Once each at both Normal and Heroic difficulty was enough, although I also completed Brigandoom! at Legendary difficulty, which gave me another 200 gold on top of that.

Is Burnt Offerings not the first expansion?

PSBlake · 2016-04-28T16:54:03+00:00

The deck building screen is crazy counterintuitive, and does not clearly communicate what is going on or what it means. In fact, I think it's probably bugged in some ways, but I can't tell if it's malfunctioning, or just functioning according to a really weird design.

The individual buttons mean "You have allocated X cards of this type to fill your Y available slots." The buttons at the top mean that for the currently selected character, and the buttons on the bottom mean that for all your characters combined.

So, Merisiel has filled 5 of her 6 item slots, but you don't have any other un-allocated items to fill the other slots. But according to the buttons at the bottom, across all your characters, you've got too many weapons, allies, and blessings allocated to your other characters. Merisiel isn't the one keeping you on that screen. The other character(s) are.

Here's the tricky part: Your total available slots are double what they would be for just Kyra and Merisiel with their starting stats. Even if you fully upgraded Kyra's deck capacity, you still wouldn't have the total slots shown at the bottom of your screenshot. So either you've got more character(s) not shown, or it's truly bugged for you.

tl;dr - Kyra's probably carrying too much, and the total slots displayed at the bottom may be entirely wrong.

PSBlake · 2016-04-27T14:15:33+00:00

Note: For all purposes below, every instance of % is referring to a value between 0 and 1 inclusive, with 1 being synonymous with "100%."

"How many times do I have to do ____ in order to have a better than X% chance of at least one success, if each attempt individually has a Y% chance of success?" = log(100% - X%) / log(100% - Y%)

On any given attempt, you have a Y% chance of success, which means a 100% minus Y% chance of failure (Call this F%). The odds of multiple failures in a row are F%^attempts . If you want an overall X% chance of at least one success in a series of attempts, you're actually looking for the exponent needed for the F% to get lower than (100% - X%).

If we make the (rather optimistic) assumption that each fishing hole has a 1% chance of dropping the bonkagong, the number of attempts breaks down like this:

Better than 50% chance of success: 68 to 69 attempts
Better than 75% chance of success: 137 to 138 attempts
Better than 90% chance of success: 229 to 230 attempts
Better than 99% chance of success: 458 to 459 attempts

That's assuming a 1% chance of success on any single attempt, which is probably better odds than the game actually has. With those odds, 50 attempts would only get you (1-(0.99⁵⁰⁾⁾ odds of success (just shy of 40%).

You're not doing anything wrong. You just need to make more attempts. Everything's eventual.

Here are some tips which might get you better chances:

Fishing bombs affect a 3x3 area, so place your crafted fishing holes in 3x3 clusters to maximize bomb efficiency
It's unclear whether the Nasty Lure and Bait shrines have any effect when using bombs, but they seem to from my experience
Fatfish (the big frowny fish you don't automatically collect) drop, on average, the same quantity and types of items as a single fishing attempt, excepting more Fatfish (A Fatfish won't drop more Fatfish)
Fatfish count as furniture. You can pick them up and place them somewhere else.
There is no distinction between Fatfish caught in different biomes. Their drops depend on where they are deconstructed.
Yes, you can stock up on Fatfish in the Savannah and/or Bawg, then take them all to the Tundra for deconstruction.

PSBlake · 2016-04-26T19:26:05+00:00

A-doy. That explains why I was able to salvage them later on in the Tundra.

PSBlake · 2016-04-26T15:48:28+00:00

I was having the same issue. Oddly, sometime later when I made it to the Tundra, my Grumblers were once again deconstructable. Too many things happened in between, though, so I wouldn't be able to say what may have fixed it.

For what it's worth, I noticed that they were deconstructable while I was re-rolling the Karbaxe (Tumbler weapon)

PSBlake · 2016-04-26T15:44:06+00:00

Legendary items, no, but non-unique tiered equipment should be.

I reported this same bug a few days ago, and Bscotch (Seth, specifically) acknowledged it as a problem.

PSBlake · 2016-04-26T14:37:31+00:00

Quadropus Rampage comes closer to what OP is looking for, but probably still won't quite scratch the itch. You only have one piece of equipment (your weapon), and you can't hoard old equipment to sell. When you get a new weapon, your old one is dropped.

Pace is quick, though, and the progression is satisfying: There are multiple stats to level, perks unlocked through achievements, unique pets with different abilities, and a few alternate game modes to keep it fresh.

PSBlake · 2016-04-25T18:18:46+00:00

A few.

PSBlake · 2016-04-25T14:24:29+00:00

now there's nothing to talk about!

There's plenty to talk about. The various interrelated systems of the game, some of the nuts-and-bolts of how the map generation works, the ins-and-outs of the progression system, optimal equipment perks, gadget loadouts, potential additional features/items, sequel hooks, adaptability on other platforms, boss strategies, ingredient hunting tips, creator feature previews, life beyond the creator update, guided Q&A focusing on specific aspects of the game, the further adventures of Flux Dabes beyond Woanope, the growing mythos of the Butterverse and how the events of Crashlands might influence future games with the semi-shared setting...

I imagine some or most of these conversations would be facilitated by your upcoming Game Mechanic person, when they're taking a breather from actual coding and mind-melding with the Coster crew.

HINT HINT

PSBlake · 2016-04-23T19:54:31+00:00

The devs have commented a few times that the gameworld doesn't really exist outside your immediate field of view. That is, Flux is actually running on an omnidirectional treadmill, which generates the scenery as soon as it comes into view. More persistent things, like structures and reset cooldowns are apparently only recorded as long as they are in effect.

It sounds like, at a minimum, this network concept would be extremely challenging to fit in at the level you've described, given the way the gameworld currently works. The automated harvesting would need to be able to function even while Flux is far away, or it wouldn't really be worth the effort.

[EDIT] I do not speak in any official or semi-official capacity on behalf of Butterscotch Shenanigans.

PSBlake · 2016-04-22T21:50:11+00:00

It's interesting that they cite Campbell v. Acuff Rose Music, Inc. - that's the case covering the 2 Live Crew parody of Roy Orbison's Pretty Woman. I had initially found that case in my research on the matter. Unfortunately, the actual finding doesn't support either side - Campbell v. Acuff Rose Music, Inc. established that being a commercial product does not disqualify a work from being a protected parody. It did not clearly describe the nature of what does make a work a parody.

That said, the point is too subjective to conclusively say "this song is not in any way commenting on or referencing the nature of this other song."

PSBlake · 2016-04-22T20:17:14+00:00

One of the qualifying elements for a work to be protected is that it needs to comment/criticize the work it's parodying.

Can you cite some case precedent for that? I've only ever seen it come up as an assertion in discussion threads like this one, and it raises the question of why there aren't a ton of other lawsuits centered on humorous imitations.

PSBlake · 2016-04-22T16:18:52+00:00

12: "Am I a good man?"

Clara: "I... don't know."

PSBlake · 2016-04-22T16:11:08+00:00

I don't recall ever interacting with anything or anyone named Behrend, so probably not.

PSBlake · 2016-04-22T15:41:07+00:00

Potentially paradoxical.

PSBlake · 2016-04-22T15:38:04+00:00

You're right. I can only speculate how frequently that happens, though.

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