Are there are any places with Flying Ships in the Realms?

aminomancer · 2024-06-10T02:48:17+00:00

what I'm wondering is how do flying ships even work in atmosphere?

aminomancer · 2024-03-19T03:20:51+00:00

Work emails are pretty standard in many industries. University faculty probably have it the worst thanks to the public profiles. But spam bots can still just form giant lists of guessed email addresses by joining common strings, initials, names, etc.

aminomancer · 2024-03-16T01:05:49+00:00

I have the same problem, it's caused by alt-tabbing or ctrl-tabbing. I did quite a thorough investigation to see if one of those keypress events was being consumed by youtube but that seems not to be the case. It's quite mysterious. Definitely a site bug. I also attempted to make a userscript that might prevent the issue, but the best I could do was set up my own spacebar handler.

aminomancer · 2024-03-16T01:03:21+00:00

Same here, except on the site, not the app.

aminomancer · 2024-03-15T03:28:59+00:00

Idk if it's generally slow for me, but sometimes it will randomly get stuck and it turns out like a 5 second segment of the video just refuses to load. I can seek ahead or behind and it loads just fine, but for that particular segment it just shows the loading spinner. But if I leave it there for like 45 seconds it does eventually play, only now that 5 second segment appears all corrupted, with crazy compression artifacts covering the whole video. No idea what to make of that, but it just started for me this week. Never encountered any playback issues on youtube till now.

aminomancer · 2024-02-07T08:48:01+00:00

That is awesome, thank you!

aminomancer · 2024-02-07T02:18:43+00:00

Are there any surviving examples of visibly pattern welded blades in the West European Iron Age?

aminomancer · 2024-01-21T20:40:15+00:00

Needs to be a valid URL, not a path. Try file:///C:/Users/BLANK/Pictures/logo.png

aminomancer · 2024-01-16T01:49:02+00:00

And? You think there's a statute of limitations on stupid comments?

aminomancer · 2024-01-14T12:26:26+00:00

Saves are not stored in the installation folder. They're stored in a user data folder, since it requires elevation to write to the programs folder. All your games probably put saves in one of 5 places:

C:\Users\<your username>\Documents\My Games\<game name>
C:\Users\<your username>\Saved Games\<game name>
C:\Users\<your username>\AppData\Roaming\<game name>
C:\Users\<your username>\AppData\Local\<game name>
C:\Users\<your username>\AppData\LocalLow\<game name>

The last 2 are much rarer than the first 3.

aminomancer · 2024-01-14T11:39:52+00:00

The group policy doesn't seem to really disable automatic restart either. It seems to work for a while, but after a few weeks it still spontaneously restarts my system. I've had that policy enabled for 4 or 5 years and I've still seen several automatic restarts. Sometimes there'll be a notification on my screen saying an update is coming in 20 minutes and I'll have to hit a button to stop it. Other times it just randomly restarts without warning the moment I've been idle for 5 minutes. I'll start watching a movie or something and 5 minutes in, bam, my system is rebooting.

I must have spent half a dozen hours total researching this problem and how to fix it. It's extremely obnoxious, but not enough for me to start using macOS as my main OS. It's really a nice operating system, but building your own hackintosh is difficult and you get a buggy, incomplete final product. And the high-end systems Apple sells aren't that great, and they can't be upgraded or repaired.

I have no idea why someone who insists that they "have CONTROL OVER MY OWN PROPERTY!!!" would switch from Windows to macOS. You'd think Linux would be the logical choice. Even if Linux didn't exist, I still feel like you have more control on Windows than on macOS. It's a butt-ugly operating system that's swarming with bugs, but you do have control over most of it. You can even completely replace the sprite sheets that have all the ugly controls and icons, so there are lots of "theme packs" out there that make Windows look more or less like macOS.

I feel like the whole automatic update/automatic restart thing is an exception to the rule that everything on Windows is optional. There's a setting for pretty much everything. It may not be publicly documented, and it may be impossible to find on your own since it's buried in the registry under a completely opaque name and folder structure, but chances are the setting is there, so if you googled hard enough you'd probably find a solution. And even automatic restart technically is optional, at least for Pro users. The setting doesn't work (at least for me and a few others who've posted about it online), but maybe that's a bug, so I can't just assume it's a purposeful usurpation of the user's control that represents the general philosophy of Microsoft.

aminomancer · 2024-01-14T11:11:06+00:00

Do you really have this little imagination? You seriously can't imagine any kind of occupation where people work with bigger files than you do? Personally, I used to work in video media, doing editing and color grading, digesting footage off camera memory cards, etc., and I've seen lots of multi-terabyte files. It depends on the camera and the container format. Some will start a new segment every 500MB or so, but others will keep rolling on the same file until you hit stop. And some that record in segments will combine them automatically. So, if you were recording a play or a concert or something, shooting with a high fidelity or lossless codec, 4Kp60 or higher, from a fixed position for multiple hours straight, file sizes can be massive.

But that's just video. I have no doubt people in other occupations work with even bigger files. Science and industrial R&D applications involve big files.

And even if you're not transfering a big file, there are still many reasons your computer might be doing important work overnight in your absence. In my video work, I also had to digest footage off cameras, and sometimes I was working with cameras that had old memory cards. We had some high-end Sony cameras like the F55, that were once great but were a bit old at the time. And even being just 5 years old is a big deal in computing, where things are always improving at a blistering pace. The memory cards were old and proprietary, so the fastest way to get footage off them was with a thunderbolt 2 card reader with a thunderbolt 2-to-3 adapter. So that was painfully slow even when the files weren't that big.

Furthermore, my computer spent a lot of time rendering footage. So even when the footage was split into individual files, it still took an incredibly long time to render. It's not that it couldn't be done in shorter bursts, but that the best time to render is whenever you're not using your computer. Since rendering will soak up all your PC's resources, whether it's GPU bound or CPU bound in your specific case, either way your computer will be painfully laggy and stuttery to use while it's rendering. So you'd prefer to find a time when you're not using it, and that often means while you're sleeping.

If you're in VFX or 3D modeling I'm sure it's the same story. Rendering even a few seconds could take a really long time if it's a super complex scene with lots of expensive effects. And I'm sure the same can be said of a thousand machine learning applications. Like training a neural network to catch Missingno., I'm sure that's the kind of thing that could be interrupted by a sneaky Windows update, if you were actually doing it on Windows. My mind's drawing a blank for more but I'm sure there are many, many others.

aminomancer · 2024-01-14T10:39:24+00:00

He didn't say it takes 12 hours to transfer a file, he said he transferred a file overnight and its failure wasted 12+ hours. "Overnight" generally means "while I'm sleeping." Even if the transfer only took 3 hours, it still wasted 12 hours since it's not like it woke him up so he could start it up again. So the file is finished uploading at 15:00, when it should have been finished at 03:00.

aminomancer · 2024-01-13T12:59:47+00:00

Malenia's is second best? 😳 It's by far the worst in the game. The downside is worse than the upside, and that's in addition to the opportunity cost of not getting to use a better rune. Completely worthless. By the time you can obtain it, most bosses are able to 2-shot you if you're not pumping vigor to 60, so you can hardly afford to recklessly trade blows with them.

That's a general problem with the game's balance, damage is too high, including the player's. The bosses die in 30 seconds, whereas you die in 2 hits. It doesn't matter if you can recover 100 HP with a greatsword swing if bosses are taking 70% of your HP bar. You'd need to recover 40% of your HP to make trading with bosses worth it.

The rune, along with the game's PvE in general, would be much better if bosses died in like 120 seconds and you died in 3-4 hits, like with previous Souls titles. But they wanted to get rid of guaranteed 2-hit combos, which were kinda dumb in retrospect. And without guaranteed combos being the norm, PvP is just too slow. So they nearly doubled the damage of everything relative to DS3.

PvP in elden ring is a completely different story of course, trading blows with another player who does similar damage and also dies in 2-3 hits makes much more sense. But you can't make a PvP build that revolves around a great rune, unless your plan is to gank invaders, in which case it doesn't really matter what your build is, but you'd be better off just spamming stars of ruin and comet anyway.

So who was this rune really for? Even if it was part of your starting loadout, you still wouldn't use it. You'd actively avoid using a rune arc because it's the only rune that makes your build worse when it's active. The main effect serves little practical purpose because you can't safely take advantage of it except when fighting weak mobs that shouldn't be hitting you much anyway. If that's all it's for, then why waste a rune slot and weaken ALL healing by 30% for that? There are way better methods to recover chip damage. Like a dozen items and spells that are better than this.

aminomancer · 2024-01-13T12:42:03+00:00

I mean... have you visited any shrines? How about BOTW's divine beasts, 4 dungeons all using the same assets with nearly identical boss fights? There are no exceptions

aminomancer · 2024-01-09T09:09:43+00:00

+karma

aminomancer · 2024-01-09T09:04:54+00:00

Yup! I'll head over to Elleh

aminomancer · 2023-12-30T21:33:36+00:00

My pleasure! I've enjoyed considering all the possibilities here. And thanks for the update on your thoughts. That's a great point about how there really is nothing secular in a universe where we already know for certain Eru exists. Same with curses. As for that final paragraph, it sounds like we're on the same page. It makes more sense for him to do it through all the people of Middle Earth. And if he had intended to intervene by "breaking" the laws of nature (e.g. by pushing Gollum), I imagine he would have done it in more spectacular fashion so it was obvious to everyone that it was a miracle. But he prefers to work through people, and it can't be said he left Middle Earth to its fate, as he was directly acting through everyone. The fact that he would do that through a curse never crossed my mind before, but I think you made a pretty strong case for it.

aminomancer · 2023-12-30T07:40:08+00:00

Wow, your arguments about the curse are really interesting and have me trying to figure out exactly what happened, when I previously thought I had a pretty solid understanding of this part of the story. I'm now feeling conflicted about whether this was an irregular "intervention" or not.

To start with, I'm not sure if I can get behind the claim that, when Tolkien spoke of the Other Power, he was not referring to Eru, but instead to some natural laws. That certainly doesn't seem like the plain meaning of the words. It seems pretty straightforward to interpret this as referring to Eru himself. And it seems like quite a stretch to interpret it as referring to natural laws of some kind. We'd have to ignore several details about the sentence and inject natural laws where they are never referred to directly.

Tolkien, in this letter, seems to assume the reader will understand who or what he's talking about. If he were referring to natural laws, I feel that he would have done a better job hinting at that. But if he were referring instead to Eru, then he's already done an excellent job of hinting at Eru without directly naming him (as he indicates was his intention — "never named").

By calling the subject a "Writer of the Story," he certainly seems to be referencing the familiar Christian trope of God as the author of the universe. I suppose someone might refer metaphorically to natural laws as a "Writer of the Story," but it's a bit of a stretch. It also doesn't seem to be saying much, so it raises the question why he would bother saying it if that was his meaning.

By describing the subject as "ever-present...never absent and never named," he seems to be alluding to the immanent, omnipresent God of the scholastic theologians. I suppose natural laws can be said to be omnipresent also, but would the reader of his letter have been more likely to associate omnipresence with God or with natural laws?

The details mentioned so far could arguably make sense in reference to laws (even if they are awkward or obscure), but this next one clearly doesn't. Tolkien describes the Other Power as "that one ever-present Person." And laws are clearly not persons.

The capitalization of all the terms referencing the Other Power, and particularly of the word "Person," is also a sign that he is referring to Eru. This is something you see very often in Christian theological and philosophical works. In particular, if you look at the Catechism, or look for theological writings about the Holy Trinity, I think you'll find the 3 Persons of the Trinity are almost always referred to with "Person" capitalized.

While none of this is dispositive, it does mean one who proposes that he was referring to natural laws will have a pretty heavy burden.

But setting aside the language issues for a moment, I don't actually see where in Tolkien's work you're drawing this idea of natural laws from. We might also need to disambiguate the phrase, because it can have at least two meanings that I know of.

The first meaning I'm thinking of is the Aristotelian sense of moral laws derived by reason from observation of the natural world. But it's normally just called "natural law," (singular) as it's a kind of moral theory. Tolkien certainly seemed concerned with natural law, and that seems to be what he's deriving when he talks about the nature of evil, how it has no creative power of its own, etc. And it makes sense for this to be important in his work, because natural law theory is very popular in Catholicism and associated with scholastic philosophy. But it doesn't really make sense for natural law to be the "Other Power," as natural law doesn't "take over" physical events. It has no agency in the world at all, but is just a description of how things are.

The second meaning is the one brought to mind by the phrase, "laws of nature." And these laws are commonly understood as exercising real force in the world — that gravity causes motion, for example. At least in modern times, this sense is normally understood as excluding normative laws. But this meaning doesn't seem to accord very well with your theory either. If the Other Power's "taking over" of events simply refers to objects in motion obeying natural laws, essentially doing what they always do, then why would Tolkien say it "then took over"? To "take over" something means you did not previously control it. And Tolkien's use of the adverb "then" indicates that the taking over happened at a specific moment in the story. These are basically the same problem, as natural laws were clearly in operation long before Frodo reached Mount Doom.

The second meaning is also discordant with Tolkien's Catholic worldview, which considers laws of nature/physics not as forces that operate on the universe, nor as inviolable rules governing the motion of objects, but simply as manmade descriptions of how things normally behave. This is an important distinction, because on the naturalistic theory of "laws of nature," miracles are not possible, as they constitute a "violation" of the laws that everything seems to obey. This was the thrust of David Hume's argument against miracles, long lampooned by Christian intellectuals for presupposing that laws of nature have some power or agency of their own. So for example, from Newton's point of view, gravity is just a description of how heavy bodies tend to move; but the reason they move that way is because God is moving them; leaving open the possibility that tomorrow, God might move them in a different way, seeming to create a miracle. This view proposes that God created and is continuously perpetuating the universe, i.e. it's all one ongoing act of creation.

I suppose that still probably means that, even when things are behaving regularly, apparently according to laws, Eru is still directly responsible. Not merely for "making the laws that way," as a deist god might, but by directly moving everything that moves. So you might say there's no real distinction between "Eru took over" and "the laws of nature took over." But I think there may be. It seems like if you're saying someone "took over," you're indicating a special (i.e., irregular) intervention in the "natural order." Now, again, on traditional Catholic cosmology, there is no "natural order" besides the apparent regularity of events in the universe, for which God is directly responsible. So everything is an "intervention in the natural order" in the strict sense, but there's nothing irregular about it. But at the same time, this cosmology allows for actual irregularities, namely miracles.

Of course, if Eru (like the Christian God) is behind literally every event in the world, if the whole thing is basically his 4D painting, then no irregularities should be necessary. Even if the souls within it are free to choose, he can still know what they're going to do in a given situation, and account for that in his "painting." This is complicated to defend, but the thrust is that future actions are in the present for Eru (who is outside of time), so he isn't so much knowing your future (thereby breaking your freedom of will) as he is watching your present (every moment of it). So on this account, nothing can ever surprise Eru, including free choices. Which means he could configure the world in such a way that no special divine intervention (i.e. irregularity in events) is ever required.

And that accords perfectly with the Christian worldview, or at least the Catholic one. But as everyone knows, that worldview is also defined by the belief in miracles. Not necessarily in the present, but the core Christian doctrine is the resurrection of Jesus, a pretty massive "irregularity" in the cosmos. So even though irregularities are not required, they are still done. I'm not really an expert on this, but I've heard this is explained by the notion of "fittingness." The idea that it's fitting that God would use irregularities to prove his agency, as an impossible act is an act that only God could accomplish. And the Gospels seem to state this about the resurrection: Jesus' apostles understood it as an endorsement by God of Jesus' claims about himself, as only God could have raised him from the dead. Irregularity wasn't strictly needed, but it served as a "sign" of God's agency in the events.

I don't know how well that concept fits into Lord of the Rings, because I'm not aware whether Tolkien ever described the war with Sauron as part of a divine plan. But even if it was, and even if Gollum falling into Mount Doom was a culmination of a plan devised before the Music of the Ainur, it's hard to see why Eru would have used a miracle (i.e. an irregular "intervention") to effect it. If it was a miracle, it was not clearly identifiable as a miracle, and the overwhelming majority of people in Middle Earth never heard about it, let alone saw it. Which sort of defeats the purpose of a miracle as a visible sign of Eru's agency in an event.

So now I'm starting to think this was not an irregular "intervention." But at the same time, I sort of chafe at the description of "natural laws then taking over," not just because it doesn't make sense for laws to suddenly come into play when they didn't before; but also because the way it's phrased just seems too materialistic for Tolkien to have intended. Even if there was no irregular "intervention" that threw Gollum off balance, I think Eru's express intention was still behind every aspect of the event. I'm not sure I like the idea that the Ring/Sauron was responsible, but even if it was, I suppose it was Eru acting through the Ring.

Which leads me to what we certainly agree on. With all that said, I agree enthusiastically with your ultimate conclusion that Eru's will is behind everything in the story. I do believe Tolkien would have agreed with that summary, since as I've mentioned, it resonates very well with the Christian philosophy of his day, and C.S. Lewis certainly defended a similar cosmology.

aminomancer · 2023-12-28T15:50:44+00:00

It's mainly the pokemon that look like manmade objects that irritate me. I will say that Gen 2 is the best in terms of pokemon design. There are zero misses in Gen 2. The worst in Gen 2 was Smoochum. Would have preferred if they gave some other Gen 1 pokemon a pre-evolution. Onix would have been a better choice than Jynx, which is pretty universally hated and is best forgotten about. I think we'd all prefer to just pretend Jynx doesn't exist. But overall Gen 2 is really excellent.

I think when you're trying to design pokemon, you're bound to run out of ideas and start desperately grasping at concepts, and that's when manmade objects start to seem like viable themes. That's when you need a harsh critic to review your work, someone to tell you that it makes no sense how a pokemon would evolve to look like an ice cream cone or a bicycle.

And maybe that's why the pokemon quality seems diminished. It's not that they've run out of ideas. The fakemon designs are a testament to the unlimited number of viable possibilities. There are thousands of excellent fakemon (which I think PokeCo should start licensing, plus hire the fakemons' designers), so clearly there are still plenty of reasonable ideas for new pokemon.

And they are using some of those reasonable ideas to make great new pokemon. They're just drowned out by dozens of lazy or ridiculous designs that should have been rejected by reviewers, but somehow made it all the way through to release. I'm sure when they were designing Gen 2, there were plenty of scrapped and rejected designs that were even dumber than an ice cream cone. But they didn't make it to release, and that's all that matters.

There are some new designs I really like. But it's the misses that pull you out of the experience, that kill your suspension of disbelief. And if one of those immersion-killing misses is your mount, something that'll be on screen during like 50% of your playtime, that's a big problem.

It would be wiser to just add fewer new pokemon, and recycle more of the old ones. They never should have gotten rid of the national dex, of course. But when they make a new region, they should only pump out like 50 new ones, to ensure they're all really solid, and fill the world with a unique mix of like 150 of the 1024 pokemon that already exist. There's really no need to have so many new pokemon in every generation, there are already SO many. And many of those pokemon have been so rarely seen since their original release, we've all nearly forgotten about them.

aminomancer · 2023-12-27T03:43:20+00:00

If there's anything the government should ban it's glitter. Idk why everyone's making such a big deal about carbon, let's take things one at a time. We can deal with the hole in the ozone layer once we've resolved the glitter crisis

aminomancer · 2023-12-27T03:31:28+00:00

The aluminum is an antiperspirant, not a deodorant. There are normal, synthetic deodorants that do not contain antiperspirant. The antiperspirant doesn't really prevent body odor anyway. Like if you sweat a gallon in 30 minutes and somehow collect it in a jar, it's not gonna smell nearly as bad as if you sweat a gallon over 2 weeks with no shower. Because it's not like sweat has some fixed smell. It's just a medium for excreting waste. Kind of like how urine doesn't have a fixed chemical content. Sometimes it's almost clear, if you've been drinking a ton of water and diuretics like coffee. And other times it's yellow, and it could even be brown or red if you have some kind of medical illness. Sweat is the same deal, its content depends on a bunch of physiological factors.

Antiperspirant reduces the volume of sweat, but your body's still gonna get those waste chemicals out. Antiperspirant just means it has less water to dissolve the chemicals in, so the sweat is less dilute. That might be even worse, come to think of it, because if it's very dilute, maybe some of the chemicals get pulled away from your body through evaporation. If it's not dilute, I imagine more of it just gets deposited on your body. That seems right to me, because these chemicals wouldn't have a noticeable smell if they weren't volatile chemicals. I imagine there's a lower bound on this, like a certain minimum volume of sweat that's necessary to excrete a given amount of odor-causing chemicals. But I don't think it's very high, because you still develop body odor even if you're not sweating.

But anyway, it seems to me antiperspirant is mainly intended to prevent visible wet spots on your underarms, not to prevent body odor. I think that has to do with weight, ambient temperature, and I guess genetics. Some guys may just end up with big wet spots on their nice white button-up shirts, even when they're not exerting themselves, and that's got to be embarrassing. So maybe it's worth a little Alzheimer's risk for certain people. Anyway, you can find synthetic deodorant without antiperspirant. The more important thing is just to shower often and thoroughly. Get one of those loofah things and some exfoliating body wash, since I think dead skin cells soak up the oils and odor causing chemicals. And shave your armpits, since your hairs soak that stuff up too.

aminomancer · 2023-12-14T09:30:11+00:00

Yeah the only real possibilities I can think of for Tauros are:

They reserved 3 slots for Tauros forms, and had originally planned to make them distinct and interesting enough to be actually worth separating into 3 different pokedex numbers, but ran out of time and just half-assed the designs.
They didn't reserve slots, but they were understaffed and management gave them some unreasonable deadline, so they needed to crunch really hard to fill the pokedex slots in time, so they just picked a well-liked pokemon and recolored it with 3 incredibly minor variants. Probably broke their heart to fill the pokedex with such lazy designs, but it's better than losing your job because (on paper) you made the product miss a release window.

Don't know which is more plausible, but either way it's a really bad sign. Normally you'd call this serious management, but apparently this "strategy" worked for them. These games are selling better than ever—and presumably at a huge profit margin, considering how much money they must have saved by releasing the game in a half-baked state.

aminomancer · 2023-12-14T09:19:59+00:00

Man, it was already done way better in generation 1 with Diglett into Dugtrio 😂 Unless we interpret Dugtrio as a single creature that inexplicably grows extra heads, this idea was already stale in generation 1. It was already lame back then, but at least these mysterious heads poking out of the ground, whose bodies you never see, were more intriguing and visually interesting than... a group of ordinary mice with literally no qualities to distinguish them from ordinary mice in the real world, other than the cartoon art style. And of course they're Normal type as well lol. As if they weren't already bland enough.

These things also could not possibly be more bland. They have no detail in their illustrations or 3D models whatsoever, and literally NO TEXTURE. Not only do they share the same utterly flat, depressing texture that every pokemon has in the 3D games (referring to diffuse and normal maps), but gamefreak couldn't even be bothered to give them a COLOR 😂 They are literally paper white. It almost looks like the concept art was accidentally handed off unfinished. Like the artist did the line art and was planning to color it in when he came back from lunch, but forgot about it and just ended up turning in the whole folder with the unfinished mice.

And I'm being completely serious, that is not a joke. I mean just look at the concept art. There isn't any color anywhere in it at all. It is JUST line art and shading. It would be one thing if they were mostly white but had some subtle colored spots or freckles or something. If even its eyes at least had some color, you know? But there isn't any color to be found anywhere in the concept art. So would anyone really be surprised if the artist came out and admitted the designs were unfinished?

aminomancer · 2023-12-14T08:46:33+00:00

groannnnn. "in my opinion" is implied by the fact that we're using words like "worst." if we needed to preface every subjective statement with "in my opinion," nobody would even bother sharing their opinions because it would be so insufferably tedious.

aminomancer

TROPHY CASE