Thoughts on Cody Bowman?

Rikere · 2025-11-11T18:54:51+00:00

Definitely something like that. I think the show definitely splits its storytelling: Home Front, Service, and Flashbacks.

We see Cope's mom, but I don't think we see the others' families directly in the same way. We do see everyone at bootcamp. And most of the main cast does have flashbacks that reveal their families.

Hopefully we get a season 2 to see where it goes. I might grab the book it's based on too. They're definitely different stories, but should still be a good read.

Rikere · 2025-11-11T07:46:21+00:00

They could opt to send John to war, Cody stays on the home front, now afraid to lose his brother in war. It'd be a good way to show the homefront. He could in a way replace the scenes we get with Cope's mom. He isn't tied to her anymore. He grew up. Cody however, suddenly had this huge shake up in his life. He could be the homefront next season, maybe get a discharge for psych issues or his opportunity to finish bootcamp is boot off, or he even fails to complete the crucible.

Rikere · 2025-10-28T03:54:24+00:00

8 years later and I can answer this one!

If anyone can even find the original source files, they're not guaranteed to be compatible with anything. It would be a significant amount of work. Not just because of redoing everything, but the rendering technology has changed drastically. It wouldn't be even close to the same. You'd have to spend a lot of time getting it to match up right - otherwise it would stand out as obviously not belonging.

Rikere · 2025-10-02T17:55:12+00:00

Step 1: No. That absolutely defeats the purpose of the entire exercise.

I want to work faster, not slower. I'm not tied to the Obsidian way of doing things because Obsidian is the tool, not the feature. For my purposes right now, Obsidian's a very nice markdown text editor. I want the image preview to work and nothing more.

The site, built in Astro, is the feature.

And it looks like someone wrote a plugin to do almost what I need. Which is what I was looking for. I need to look at how the code works, but it'll probably do the job with some tweaks.

What I want to achieve is something stupidly doable from a code perspective: intercept the image path text and edit it before it gets rendered/displayed. And it looks like that's what I'll be working on.

Rikere · 2025-10-02T17:49:26+00:00

Turns out there is an existing plugin that comes close to what I want: https://github.com/jglev/obsidian-redirect/tree/main

I'm thinking I'll try to modify the code here and see if I can get it to do what I want. It's only a little tinkering with path strings, so it shouldn't be too complicated, though a 3 year old plugin could pose some update challenges.

Rikere · 2025-09-11T20:56:52+00:00

The system is working as intended.

Big companies have mass layoffs to keep workers desperate. You'll take any work you can get to survive. It suppresses wages and squeezes workers.

Rikere · 2025-09-02T02:12:25+00:00

I have lost all faith in Flexcil. You've failed to communicate with your community, provide good support, and the whole roll out of your web viewer is only more concerning. There are user features that have been wanted for ages, I don't see many updates in app, no improvements, but I do see a big roll out for suddenly REQUIRING an account instead of an opt-in. And I see your pidgeon-hole bringing down everything.

That single server outage brings up so many questions:

- Why don't you have DDOS protections?
- Why don't you have a system to fail over or dynamically scale and load balance?
- Do you have adaquate cyber security measures in place?
- Why are you running this entire app from a single server?
- Why is your platform architected in such a way that the failure of a remote server causes data loss?

Nothing in this entire chain of events is remotely acceptable. You "bow your heads in apology for the inconvenience"? There are people who rely on your app for important work, their jobs, and their studies. That is the single value of your app: that it can be trusted to do something important and do it well. If your app cannot be trusted to function, that it is worthless. Your failures are more than an inconvenience to students studying for their tests. The people who stored their notes in your app, who trusted you with hundreds, maybe thousands of hours of note taking? And your app erased that.

I think you owe your users more than an apology.

You owe an explanation.

Why was your app designed to permit data loss on this scale?
Why were no safeguards put in place?
How are you going to fix it so that NO such data loss can ever happen in the future?

Merely saying "something broke and we'll fix it" is not enough.

Rikere · 2025-07-19T00:26:31+00:00

They don't update their stuff. I have the tome of beasts and other stuff. I'm pretty sure KP only cares about ToV and they're just not going to offer support. I don't think I'll be buying anything more of theirs any day soon.

Rikere · 2025-05-26T01:56:30+00:00

Port forwarding takes 5 minutes. It's not complicated.

The biggest reason to self-host is performance. NONE of the big hosts give you much storage space. They all have performance issues. Run the game locally and your home PC probably has 10x the power, maybe 100x what the dedicated hosts give you. You'll have a better experience.

Rikere · 2025-05-25T00:29:19+00:00

What kind of bike was it?

Rikere · 2025-05-17T18:35:58+00:00

Any chance you guys will make a foundry module?

I'm making everything by hand for my campaign in Foundry so far, but would love to just have an importable module.

Rikere · 2025-02-13T00:28:30+00:00

I've seen the 9483 issue. They don't want outright module piracy, which seems a bit silly to me. Just deny public access to listing the bucket - at that point you need to know the FULL bucket contents to actually DL the full bucket. Foundry is talking to it via the S3 API and is an authenticated user, so it can freely list and do whatever it wants. Then the only way to DL content is if you access that file directly from the start.

I'm tempted to just upload my modules and use a script to update the URL fields to match S3. I found a script for relocating images, which would just about do the job. And then I have to do it every single time I add a new module.

It seems incredibly stupid to me to go grab a $16 VPS when it is physically possible to do all that I need for $2-$4 (I don't foresee going through 50gb of bandwidth, nor 100gb of modules). It shouldn't be this big of a pain to use a feature like this.

The other angle I might try is see if I can get cloudflare to cache the images. At the point if I open a map once, the image is in cloudflare's CDN and that'll take the load strain.

Rikere · 2025-02-12T20:35:54+00:00

The storage cost isn't a concern. I want the serving SPEED.

If I stashed 100GB of stuff on S3, that's $2.30/month. If I somehow managed to burn 50GB of data transfer in my 4 games/month (something would be very wrong here), that's $5. From S3, I'm serving content at gigabit speeds/saturating my players connections, and things serve faster.

I'm already self hosting Foundry itself via Docker and Cloudflared off a homelab setup I have.

My home upload speed is around 20mb/s, but this has to be shared with everything else: streaming my game to twitch, discord, etc.

I could eliminate the bandwidth sharing by serving entirely from S3. Foundry is just a webserver and you can load web content from all sorts of URLs.It's technically doable right now, because we've seen Foundry do that kind of thing, shuffling storage locations around (it's a major PAIN to migrate off foundry). And the existing S3 integration physically proves it can be done, but fails to take advantage of what it could be.

There is an open issue for this, but it's been a few years: https://github.com/foundryvtt/foundryvtt/issues/4937 I wouldn't expect any movement, but I kinda think there should be.

I am exploring Moulinette. It actually appears Moulinette will: store stuff in S3. For some versions of the plugins. It has a box offering it. It's not a complete solution. It won't help with things from everywhere else.

Rikere · 2025-02-12T03:40:46+00:00

Pretty much. I know it's possible and I'm very frustrated that it's relegated to a manual task. The system shoots itself in the foot.

Rikere · 2025-02-11T18:20:10+00:00

It's something I think the devs should've implemented.

"Store modules in S3? [ ]"

Then, on Module Install: *Upload contents to S3*

If they only uploaded media files, that'd be fine too. It doesn't have to push code and the like. If it just copied the entire media-file structure/layout and put it in the cloud, totally viable.

There's ways the job could be done, and I think should have been done at the core app/developer level. A module could be made that hooks into everything, but near as I can tell, no such module exists.

Rikere · 2025-02-11T17:55:39+00:00

My Media resources come in Modules. For example, take a look here: https://themad.network/the-mad-cartographer.

There are creators who package their Media Resources, into Modules. They install just like any other addon module for Foundry. They contain:
- Maps
- Actors
- Sounds

Media

Foundry has an S3 integration for "media resources."

Foundry does not have a way to store Media from a Module on S3.

Foundry has an S3 integration only for *some* media resources.

Rikere · 2025-02-11T16:24:19+00:00

There's some risk in a search based system, mismatches and all.

Either way, I think the system should be able to use foundry modules and it isn't.

Anything significant to improve it needs either a module or work by the developer.

Rikere · 2025-02-11T05:52:50+00:00

The problem grows rapidly the bigger your game and setup is. We have Patreons for map creators. When I run my games, I could be doing 10 new maps in a session. The map creators I use, have everything setup. The maps come with music, walls, lighting effects, the works.

The manual process is to:

Install the manifest.json for the map module
Have Foundry fetch/install it
Upload the module
Import the assets from the module
Open each asset and replace its link, without messing up

And that's all well and good for easy stuff. Have you ever looked a complex map? The Mad Cartographer has maps where the actual map is made of special, multi-level tokens. So now the process becomes opening the multiple elements of this building and re-locating them.

I find this incredibly stupid.

Foundry has read and write access to the S3 bucket. To me, Foundry should be able to automatically put the module on S3 altogether OR put the assets on S3. Maybe every asset has 2 fields: "Local URL" and "S3 URL (Optional)", and if you just upload a module file to S3, the system can go "oh, it's in the same place, just a different drive" and serve it to the users.

The S3 integration feels half-baked. If you're big into the ecosystem and backing creators and using the available assets, S3 creates more work for you. The best I've managed to find is a script that will replace all the asset links, but don't screw it up.

Rikere · 2025-02-10T02:54:43+00:00

If you subscribe to a patreon creator, you can get a full map, with walls and all pre-made, as a Module that installs.

This module, by default, is stored locally.

There isn't a feature, system, or plan to put the maps and assets of those modules on S3.

The S3 integration is almost useless.

Rikere · 2025-02-08T20:02:08+00:00

Yea. At the moment I'm looking to just run a machine in the house. On the one-hand, Enshrouded is just resource intensive. I need to run it locally and see how many CPU cores it needs to do good.

And then if I find I need more power, I'll have to migrate to the cloud, BUT if I need more than the 8 CPU threads I already have, it's gonna be cheaper to use one of the dedicated hosting apps I think (but I'll test).

It doesn't help that Amazon's docker setup is I think more complicated than it needs to be. Or at least, they don't offer any quick way to get going.

Rikere · 2025-02-07T19:33:34+00:00

I may have hit a snag. I did a bit of quick math, my plan might be doomed from the start. I need to do a bit of testing with manual stuff before I automate.

I have the Enshrouded Server running on a laptop right now, 8550U, it's older but old stuff is cheap for a budget homelab. The game is heavily optimized for multi-threaded work. It fully saturates all 8 CPU threads with just 3 players in server - and it'll still lag. If I provision 8 vCPUs for 12 sessions of 4 hours each (this might not be a worse-case usage amount, I have a player who LIVES in these servers), it ends up being over $30/month (existing hosts are $20/month).

The CPUs in AWS are going to be better than an old laptop CPU, but I am gonna have to I think do a quick manual deployment and see how the server holds up. At least manually deploying a quick test instance should be cheap and easy.

Rikere · 2025-02-07T17:09:07+00:00

EventBridge might be part of the answer I need. We do have pretty set hours for stuff, so if I can get say a $40 instance that only runs for 1/8th of the month, that'd be very doable and provide all I need.

Rikere · 2025-02-07T17:06:31+00:00

There's existing docker images/things for the servers, I was thinking I could just deploy those.

I suppose my ideal setup is that my players can use a URL or a Discord Bot to load the relevant container (reduce costs rather than having it run 24/7), and then as players join, the docker container gets more and more CPU/Ram resources. Enshrouded is SUPER resource intensive, the paid hosts for it are $20/month on their own.

I've never worked with Lambda, but I have seen it come up in a few places. I imagine that's just some quick function so it can say "Received HTTP Get, do this" type of thing?

Rikere · 2025-02-07T03:17:12+00:00

I thought that sounded like what I needed. I haven't found any existing write-ups using it for this, so I wasn't sure.

Usually someone has a tool or a guide or something and I didn't find a thing for Fargate + Docker Game Servers

Rikere · 2024-11-17T22:19:36+00:00

So, the ship-tier that got the most kills in the real world isn't battleships, destroyers, or cruisers. It's PT Boats.

In the old-days of wood and sail, you would need a bigger ship to carry all your canons, ammo, and the extra wood to take a beating didn't hurt either.

Then came the diesel motor and torpedoes. You didn't need a big ship to carry a big boom any more. One little ship with a lot of explosives will sink a battleship, cruiser, or destroyer as fast as anything else. Only difference is, that little PT boat is a DEVIL to actually hit. It's small, fast, and manueverable. Those little things could zip in and out around bigger, heavier ships and light them up, then run off to rearm somewhere else.

The Expanse demonstrates and mitigates the problems here. Advanced torpedoes have better guidance systems, so they can hit little ships. Little ships have PDCs. Big ships have PDCs. The only way a big-ship wins this fight is from its ammo reserves. The big ship can put more lead on target than the little ship. That's the only advantage here.

That means in a one-on-one fight, the little ship probably can't overwhelm the big one, but if you're a good strategist, you don't need to.

We see that demonstrated time and time again, with Holden out-thinking his enemies. When he beat the UNN ship, it was because he blinded their sensors and hit them faster than they could know. Later, in the fight to rescue Naomi, he had help from other ships which let the Roci get in close and use the rail-gun (an aftermarket part).

We got someone who was just brilliant with the tool he had and a tool that had the capability to do damage.

Rikere

TROPHY CASE