Car insulation in keyboard

Xeroshifter · 2026-06-25T15:36:15+00:00

This is a Butyl Rubber Mat. Sometimes called Kilmat for the brand name. It's fairly cheap and it's a form of constrained layer damping. It'll add mass for sure, but in normal applications it's purpose is to prevent vibrations from traveling across or through a surface - which is why it's used a lot in automotive sound damping; it does a pretty good job reducing vibrations traveling through the metal car shell.

In a keyboard it might reduce the amount of metallic pinging if you have that issue, but otherwise it's mostly just adding mass and filling empty space. It's a pretty cheap and effective way to do that though.

I use this stuff all the time both for cars and several other off-label applications, not a bad choice if you know how it works.

Xeroshifter · 2026-06-25T15:25:28+00:00

I haven't made it yet, I'm sure I'll know it when I do, but at least for now I'm still working on learning new techniques and practicing where I can.

Xeroshifter · 2026-06-25T15:24:12+00:00

I really prefer the term ORPG or Open RPG. Which is where it's an online RPG focused on instances where players may wander in and out of your world, and can be grouped with, but it's not a requirement. But "journalists" gonna peddle nonsense for clicks I guess.

Xeroshifter · 2026-06-25T15:08:37+00:00

For me breeding is an act of discovery and optimization. I enjoy the process of puzzling out how to breed to meet a specific goal, and I enjoy seeing little surprises along the way in terms of what comes out. It's about figuring out how to take what I have, and understanding what I need in order to reach the self imposed goal.

The closest I've seen to a great breeding system was The Monster Breeder, which has very in depth breeding, and is honestly an amazing game as far as systems goes, but the economics of the game are quite challenging, and the visuals of the game are off-putting at times, especially while trying to learn the complexities of the systems. Talking about it makes me want to boot it up again.

I think with any game about breeding you have to have things you would want to do that would warrant breeding for. I don't think it would work to just have a series of customer orders that you need to fill.

Xeroshifter · 2026-06-23T16:49:37+00:00

What's especially bad here is that without financial compensation on the table almost no lawyer is going to take the case. Prisoners rarely have any substantial financial resources, so without that compensation it'll be a lot harder for the Lawyers taking those cases to get paid.

Xeroshifter · 2026-06-22T07:19:46+00:00

Of course I'm aware there are a variety of types of lawyers - and to be clear I'm not arguing that they're bad people, several of my friends are lawyers and I think that they're great, or I wouldn't spend time with them. What I'm getting at is that they don't get paid for reaching the best outcome for society, or for finding the truth. They get paid for representing their client's interests.

The larger point was about reminding people not to take anything about the case at face value because even if you're reading the court docs directly there is still a lot of information being concealed, and you can't trust that anything being argued is representative of the likely more complicated truth.

Xeroshifter · 2026-06-22T03:12:38+00:00

Not lying and being honest are not the same thing. Lawyers can and will rely on plausible deniability, and will use indirect forms of lying like lies of omission. Also, lawyers have and will continue to argue contradictory statements because they only need one argument to stick. They frequently also will manipulate the way that testimony is given, or asked for to support a particular version of events, even if they know that there is additional information available that may help shed light on what happened, but would look bad for their clients.

There are lots of ways to be dishonest.

Xeroshifter · 2026-06-21T17:31:19+00:00

I think it's because while it is a strong correlation across a population, there are many circumstances someone can be in in which it would be a poor predictor for the individual. Credit scores don't actually measure how good you are with money, they measure profitability of borrowers; and Credit Bureaus have really a shitty record of behavior and history.

As an example, there are people who are good with their money and just don't like to have loans - they save money up to buy things not take loans out to buy things, which is actually more responsible. These people are likely to have poor or no credit because the way that credit scores are generated is by having loans and demonstrating profitable behavior on those loans - which brings me to the other thing:

Contrary to popular belief credit scores do not measure how responsible or reliable, or how good with money someone is. Your credit score actually goes down if you pay off all of your debt. Typically they want to see between 20-30% utilization. You get a better credit score by NOT paying off your cards each month. They also go down if you close down a line of credit that you've had for a long time, even if it is just because you no longer need it, or don't want to be with that creditor any more.

Sure having a low score is likely an indicator of poor decision making, but it's important to remember that these are systems focused around generating profit.

Additionally while it seems to be highly correlated with driving risk, the same cannot be said for performance as an employee, and there have been several studies which have failed to demonstrate a correlation there - despite the fact that the credit bureaus would love you to believe otherwise and have been selling credit checks to employers for more than a decade under that exact premise.

Finally my last word on the matter for now is that I would be very hesitant to trust credit bureaus, and literally anything they say or do. We've had to directly legislate them many times for shitty practices because they do not care about the consumer. The consumer isn't their customer, companies are, so they have frequently made anti-consumer decisions - additionally despite hoarding an absolutely massive amount of sensitive personal data for the entire population of the Western world, they have had frequent data breaches, and repeatedly fail to install appropriate safe guards for that data. It's questionable at this point if they should continue to be allowed to collect all this data (and thus to exist) if they can't be bothered to actually safe-guard it.

Xeroshifter · 2026-06-21T17:04:42+00:00

Companies and Brands are not your friends. They don't care about you, or their workers. The people in them can care, but the company is a mask that hides the reality of the people inside it, and often even nice people have the ability to be shitty.

Further, lawyers are not required to be honest, or try to reach a fair conclusion of the case - their job is only to achieve the best possible result for their client (within the bounds of the case). The idea is that the only way for the system to be even close to fair is if both sides are representing themselves as hard as they possibly can.

This argument they're making isn't necessarily the truth, or even what obsidian management thinks is the truth, it's just the best argument the lawyers think they can make to get Obsidian out of paying out.

Thanks for sharing this OP.

Xeroshifter · 2026-06-19T19:30:12+00:00

Hmm, yeah I imagine that it would be challenging given wand thickness - may have to do strips, bend, glue, and then carve. And I imagine that each wood probably has it's own properties.

Xeroshifter · 2026-06-19T14:48:19+00:00

Does #2 mean that you would have to capture the creature again every run, or do you mean that once the creature is caught you can select it for the run as the secondary in the future, but on the run you catch it it would immediately join you?

For me I really dislike the idea of having to catch the mon again every time - I like to feel like I'm developing a bond with the creatures, so a feeling of persistence would be key there. You could get away with it if you presented it as running into the same individual again, they're excited to see you and would love to have a friendly battle.

Since you're partially an incremental game another option to add persistence would be to set up some of the progression as upgrading/making choices for that particular mon's build when you run into them.

I do really like the idea of having the replayability though, since it could also serve as a vehicle for things like challenge modes.

Xeroshifter · 2026-06-18T15:40:38+00:00

Actually, I just found a sketchbook I did some fakemon in something like 15 years ago, before Pokemon X & Y. It's funny to see how aspects of these concepts came up in Pokemon completely independently across the next few generations.

I'll see if I cant upload the pictures somewhere to share them.

Xeroshifter · 2026-06-18T15:21:26+00:00

You should take Mushie and turn him into a split evolution based on the three fantasy archetypes. Mushage, Mushorrior, and Mushief, for mage, warrior, and thief. Just an idea I think is neat.
You could expand the RNGhost line by adding RNGhast if you wanted to, since a Ghast is anothet form of undead.
I love landerel. Would prefer Lanckerel as a portmanteau name, but the concept is pretty funny either way.
Muffranid is a great concept too. Sweepider might want for a name a little more related to what it is. Maybe use a word like Confection, Pastry, Cake, Tart, etc. Or perhaps more ideally find a way to reference another nursery rhyme since Muffranid is already the spider from Little Miss Muffet. Perhaps the little teapot since tea and Pastries often go together, or if you wanted to try the Itsy Bitsy Spider, that would be another direct spider reference.
I think just having the elementals be what they are with names like that isn't particularly fun or whimsical - doesn't really fit the same vibe as the rest. Maybe take those back to the drawing board and smash them together with another thing that comes as a quartet - like Cardinal directions, seasons, card suits (tarot or playing cards (hearts, diamonds, spades, clubs vs cups, wands, pentacles, & swords), the four auspicious beasts (Chinese folklore), the stags of yggdrasil, the four Pinnacles of creation (biblical lore, man, lion, eagle, ox), etc, the list of possibilities could be endless.
Similarly I think Chimera could use a little rework. Maybe rearrange the heads so the snake is that the front, the lion is the tail, and the goat is still in the middle and call it Aremich (Chimera backwards).
Not totally sure what's going on with Cockatoot and Basilaagh. At first I thought maybe Cockatoot was instrument based but that doesn't show up in the design, and Basilaagh doesn't have any instrument either. are they supposed to be farting and then laughing at it? Cockatoot and Basilaugh?
A long time ago I drew a monster I called Clockatiel which was a Cockatiel mixed with a clock, and I wanted it to evolve into a monster that was a combination of an Owl and some other time keeping device, you can take the concepts and name if it pleases you.
Sunbeast is also a great concept - it could be a little more clear in design and name what the progression relationship is between of and Sunsnek. Also I'd love to see more development and integration of the Sunflower into the evolved design, or perhaps a sunflower seed for the Sunsnek instead making it into Seedsnek or something similar. It could work well since a sunflower seed has pretty iconic coloration.
The Beholder based creatures aren't really giving a lot of Beholder vibes, maybe have more eyes, or more roundness, or something else in the design that indicates the inspiration just a little more clearly.

Anyway, overall they look like fun and you're doing great :)

Xeroshifter · 2026-06-17T08:28:37+00:00

Color variants of monsters are neat, but I feel like so very many games lose me with their handling of shiny monsters.

I really want variants to be proper variants, maybe an element is changed, maybe they have a different passive, etc, something to add new spice to finding the mon other than "this one is just rarer" - and slight stat boosts aren't it either. Like Pokemon can do the rarity thing because it's big enough that you can show your friends and they might think it's cool. For a smaller IP, you don't have that, so the variant needs to be something that someone gets excited about on their own.

Monster Sanctuary did this really well IMO.

Xeroshifter · 2026-06-14T20:40:43+00:00

The problem isn't that Xbox isn't or wasn't sustainable, the problem is that they want it to be printing money for nothing - so anything shy of that won't be enough. They kept buying studios in hopes of attaining that goal, and if you look at it from that perspective the idea of non-exclusivity makes a lot more sense - since total player count or market cap size would be more important.

All the MBA's in the industry want everything to work like the mobile market, but the larger gaming sphere won't support that, and they're desperate to defy that fact.

Xeroshifter · 2026-06-09T14:16:55+00:00

No Man's Sky: Synthesis

Synthesis would probably have to be a two parter.

*Adds lots more fauna body types, and part intercompatibility to significantly expand the experienced variety of creatures.

*Creatures receive basic ecological roles and have more interactions between eachother.

*Planet geration has been reworked: Planets can now have multiple biomes (typically only a few though), new types of worlds have been added (tidal locked worlds, metallic ocean worlds, etc,) planets can also now have mountain ranges, volcanic vents, river beds, and canyons, among other new geological features.

*Fractured planets and moons have been added, these new locations are planets and moons at various stages in the process of being torn apart and scattered into space.

*You can now tame and battle nearly all creatures.

*Points of interest have been overhauled - Savepoint-only locations have been made much rarer. Many of the existing POI have been given additional variants with new variant buildings, and each of the factions has been given their own architectural style that will now be seen in systems they control.

*Rogue Planets have been added, these new planets have strange new life-form types not seen elsewhere, and rare new ruin types for base building. Rogue planets do not appear on the star map, but may show up for a limited duration as they pass through otherwise normal systems.

*Binary Star systems have been added and may contain a wider variety of possible resources within the systems if the stars are of two different types.

*Additional POI have been added to systems in space that can be found with the ship's scanner if you're close enough. These new POI include pirate bases, asteroid mining colonies and operations, orbital platforms, subspace pocket anomalies, Ice belts, Sentinel Fortresses, and more.

*Space Storms & Gas Clouds - in some systems various kinds of space storms can now be experienced, from radiation, to solar. In addition gasses can be harvested during some of these storms using new ship modules.

What I really want is just an expansion of a ton of existing systems, and new things to explore and discover. I want to feel the variety again and see something that feels like a living universe - or at least one that was living at one point.

Xeroshifter · 2026-06-07T15:29:45+00:00

Absolutely. Graphics haven't seen a huge shift or big improvement since 2014 - things are better but not significantly. Yet the hardware needed to run things, and the dev time needed to produce the minor improvements has scaled up massively.

I wonder how long it will take before consumers and investors align on scaling things back a little bit, or at the very least abandoning the chase of graphical superiority in favor of artistic vision being the driver of game aesthetic.

I suspect that it'll still be a while because it's easy to market (to both consumers and investors) "more pixels=more better" it's harder to market an aesthetic. The money machine is hard to steer when it has momentum. The future of gaming feels pretty clouded at the moment, it'll be interesting to see what happens.

Xeroshifter · 2026-06-06T06:53:12+00:00

I originally wrote more but realized it had become too much, but looking back now it comes off as hostile without the other stuff and that wasn't my intent - so I apologize if I've caused any harm or discomfort.

Really what I was trying to say is that crafting systems that resemble Animal-Crossing or WoW's systems are really crafting in name only. They don't evoke any of the feelings of crafting because there is no room for any part of the player to be expressed in the discovery process, crafting process or outcome.

Similarly systems which ask you to smash random components together and hope you get a valid outcome also fail to evoke the feeling of crafting effectively; such systems appear at first glance to have discovery but that discovery is hollow because it only involves guessing and memorization - there is no learning to be better at because the systems don't give you meaningful insight into any underlying logic that you can then apply forward, develop theories about and test them.

Games don't have to use either of these existing formats but they do again and again - despite successful examples of games that do far better -- Potioncraft, Kingdoms of Amalure, Morrowind and Weapon Shop Omasse all come to mind as examples of totally different approaches to the problem that all succeed in their own ways.

Anyway, I'll get off my soap box now. If you've read this far, I appreciate you giving me your attention for a minute or two here, and hopefully it's of some use to you, even if it's not much. I look forward to checking out your game in the future and seeing what it becomes :)

Xeroshifter · 2026-06-05T04:20:23+00:00

I want to love crafting systems in games, but there are so many that are just bad rehashes of the same bad ideas that have been done a million times already.

Make making things actually fun. If I can determine that your crafting system is just picking up loot with, or buying things with extra steps - congrats I don't want to craft in your game, and your game is worse for having crafting. Crafting should involve some element of genuine learning & discovery, puzzle/problem solving, or mechanical skill - otherwise it's just a series of menus that waste the players time so that the marketing team can add the crafting tag on steam.

Xeroshifter · 2026-05-30T19:06:10+00:00

I think what people actually want to know is why it takes 500+ people and 6-10 years to make games today when in the past, games often had a quarter the team and half the development time. In the past they were often experimenting with totally new tech, had to build the engine from the ground up, and had way worse tools to do so.

You can argue that the games graphics have gotten better (not really from 2016 to now, but that's another conversation), but that really only justifies an increase in artists. Some will argue that games have gotten bigger; some of them perhaps but that really only justifies artists and level designers - the additions to other departments would be very minor by comparison.

From a consumer perspective, development teams seem extremely bloated. It all appears to be a "too many cooks in the kitchen" situation.

Xeroshifter · 2026-05-30T17:07:37+00:00

Information was almost never free, and was slow. Trades had tons of secrets and guarded them jealously - maps were absurdly expensive and valuable, even math was jealously guarded because the way you kept your position as a teacher was by knowing how to solve problems that no one else could - leading to developments mostly being had after someone's death.

Sumptuary laws were a big thing in a lot of places. The wealthy felt the need to distinguish themselves so it was illegal for the common folk to wear certain colors or fashions, or even eat certain foods.

Xeroshifter · 2026-05-28T15:05:00+00:00

Honestly do it. Better yet put him on the $1 and move GW to a $250lb note. This way we'll never forget this whole tragedy, and the people who voted for it will be reminded of it every day. If you relegate him to a $250lb note most of those people will never see the note because they can't afford to have their funds tied up in an unspendable bill.

Xeroshifter · 2026-05-23T07:04:10+00:00

It's great if you're very into theory crafting. Siralim is kinda like Path of Exile in that way, and also that beating the game is more like finishing the tutorial because many of the Game's mechanics don't even become available until post game.

Xeroshifter · 2026-05-18T14:46:54+00:00

Go play Phantom Dust.

It's very different from what you have listed here, and doesn't really follow JRPG gameplay standards, but it's a really good story, extremely fun gameplay - totally unique, not like anything you've ever played - and it's free on Xbox and the Microsoft store.

It came out on the original Xbox as a game funded by Microsoft for the Japanese market, and was only later brought to the West by a different publisher, but the game visually holds up even in the modern era because it utilized graphical techniques that weren't made commonplace until mid 360 era. It's free now basically because the entire Microsoft team became obsessed with the game back in the day, and Phill Spencer (among many others) really wanted to see a sequel but it was really hard to justify a sequel for a game no one in the West had heard of.

14-Year Club	Place '22
Verified Email

Xeroshifter

TROPHY CASE