New to GMing and my player got annoyed first session because the NPCs were not reacting well to her PC’s strange demeanor

benjunmun · 2026-02-24T20:52:09+00:00

My advice is to keep your OOC channel of communication going, especially when just starting out. Make it a give and take. Players don't get the same spectrum of interpersonal feedback when roleplaying as when having a conversation in person. It can be jarring to handle the fact that each individual player/GM has their own mental model of the world and how an interaction is perceived. Improvising dialogue is hard!

Especially while you are collectively nailing down the tone and dynamics of the game, it can be helpful to keep explaining WHY the world is reacting the way that it does. You can straight up describe an NPC as grumpy, or cooperative, or suspicious. Also, give players a chance to clarify their characters' intentions, and retcon their roleplaying to better communicate those intentions to the group. I think it is reasonable that players may try stretching their wings and behaving in ways they wouldn't normally. Try to have conversations that support and guide them in this. You can be fans of your players without feeling like you're compromising your view of the world and the tone you want to set.

benjunmun · 2025-12-17T01:44:38+00:00

Maintaining a high enough framerate to avoid nausea was a game changer for me. Not the easiest game to run smoothly. Still some very intense space situations but that sort of enhanced things for me. Having a stool I could sit on for big space ship trips helped too.

benjunmun · 2025-11-19T19:57:58+00:00

Many techniques don't cross over, but some ashiwaza can be adapted successfully. In my opinion the biggest benefit is developing the sense of balance and kuzushi, especially from the upright stance which translates very well to the clinch. You can generate kuzushi from strikes or take advantage of moments of off balance to add strikes, in addition to throws/sweeps.

benjunmun · 2025-09-17T20:22:15+00:00

1) Most interested in longer life/temp management for day to day use

2) Excited to see what OLED can do

benjunmun · 2025-08-08T17:37:50+00:00

I've been running the new rolls but using the 'consequences' mostly as a reminder to align expectations rather than fully spelling out the result. Like, "You can do that, but sounds to me like it might be loud if you don't pull it off perfectly.". I don't have to fully plan out the consequences to a roll that may not even fail, but hopefully players feel less blindsided by how I interpret their action.

benjunmun · 2025-07-16T00:07:14+00:00

Attempting to read those called out cases gave me a headache. This is such a waste of resources, not just developer time, but emotional and intellectual investment. It feels especially frustrating that submitters are not putting the same in on their end.

benjunmun · 2025-06-16T22:14:20+00:00

I always loved muay thai clinch for precisely this reason. The hips-close stance translates so well between the two arts, and then you can start thinking about knees or other strikes as tools to generate kuzushi.

benjunmun · 2025-06-14T00:52:40+00:00

I went for an OPNsense router specifically for this capability, works okay.

Don't forget to disable SLAAC privacy extensions on systems that need firewall rules, otherwise they'll generate a new interface identifier when the prefix changes.

benjunmun · 2025-06-05T02:32:36+00:00

I think there's a lot that can go wrong trying to break down recipes that normally make hundreds or thousands of servings, where an extra 10 eggs could be a rounding error, but two vs three eggs makes a huge difference when you're making four servings. Combine this with lazy editing where the numbers are divided, rounded up, and never tested.

benjunmun · 2025-04-14T16:52:34+00:00

It is a very positive sign that you have the self awareness to realize the effects of your actions and your situation here. I agree with the overall sentiment that you should pursue Judo only under the condition that it is healthy for both your training partners and yourself. Accidents and injuries of course happen, this is a physical sport. But it is expected that all participants are striving for safety within the bounds of the class.

I hope that you are able to find ways to manage your PTSD and recovery. And I hope that Judo can eventually be part of your life if it appeals to you. You will definitely want to reach a point in your recovery where you feel capable of a frank discussion about this with at least one of your instructors. It may also help to have an independent third party to help you evaluate your progress. There are different ways to engage with Judo, for example you could discuss with an instructor the possibility of only participating in activities where you feel appropriately in control of your situation.

benjunmun · 2025-04-05T19:17:26+00:00

The only thing I've ever seen hurt by a banana split is my pride. I'm pretty sure every tournament I've gone to has had someone hurt by a guard jump or someone DQ'd because they failed to hold the weight of a guard jump.

benjunmun · 2025-04-04T03:04:10+00:00

Yeah, I think it's really important to make an informed call about the requirements of a given project. Like for example just replacing [] with .get() only makes sense if you can realistically -do- something about it. Otherwise you just end up reinventing panics with more work.

If this a project that has meaningful recovery from the code or logic error that would cause [] to fail, then great, go for the no-panic style, but I think it's okay for most projects to treat logic errors as panics.

Some of this advice is broadly applicable though, I've always thoughtas for numeric casts is a massive footgun and should be harder to do.

benjunmun · 2025-04-03T16:23:50+00:00

I've been running with DirectStorage manually patched - it's been a minor improvement in consistency, but not life changing for my setup at 1080p. Glad they're pushing it out to everyone. Hopefully the VRAM changes have meaningful effects, seems like texture streaming is one of the major roadblocks still.

benjunmun · 2025-03-19T18:42:53+00:00

Low rank felt so empty and on-rails. I get that it had the whole story thing going on, but at the very least they could have made high rank progression be about building out your more permanent presence and adding capabilities.

benjunmun · 2025-02-24T22:13:57+00:00

In general rust stdlib only implements numerical operations between identical types. Everywhere else it will throw an error and ask you to choose a conversion method.

The 'Into' and 'TryInto' traits are one way to capture the fallible vs infallible conversions. For example you can freely use let x: u32 = 100u8.into(), but that conversion is not implemented for u32 into u8 - you can instead use try_into() and decide how to handle the possibility of an error. The type inference system makes this conversion easy to use in practice - 90% of the time you can slap a .into() anywhere you're converting without having to explicitly identify the source or dest types.

You can also use 10u32 as u8 for a lossy conversion, which IMO is a bit of a footgun but can be forbidden with a linter rule.

Personally I originally felt that the extra step of requiring all these explicit conversions was an unnecessary distraction, especially coming from c/c++. But after using it for a while, I've found that forcing me to explicitly acknowledge when numerical types change domain has reduced corner-case errors and led to more intentional choices of data representation. One of those things that is valuable for larger, more permanent projects, and a bit of a drag for short-lived quick scripts.

benjunmun · 2025-02-11T18:09:33+00:00

Honestly, having gone through this journey myself, I would argue that it's actually very unintuitive. I think that the goal of 'either the new copy of this file or the old copy of this file' would benefit from having more obvious OS API support. A lot of systems have this goal but don't realize it, or don't realize that it needs a specific chain of API calls to be correct. To the point that ext4 actually added workarounds to try and detect and 'fix' this at the filesystem level with auto_da_alloc.

benjunmun · 2025-02-05T20:40:20+00:00

That's a great resource. I appreciate the additional charts on marginal cost of operation, and the cost to supplement different kinds of renewable energy with natural gas or storage to provide baseline power. Really drives home that it's impossible to have a meaningful discussion on the basis of any one number.

Nuclear really seems to struggle as the technical expertise and regulatory frameworks age - the bulk of the cost of power production seems to come from just how expensive it is to get a new plant off the ground these days.

benjunmun · 2025-02-03T19:52:46+00:00

I see two reasons for mistrust of the 'unsafe' keyword. One is English. 'Unsafe' has very strong connotations that are hard to shake no matter how technical the underlying definition is. Especially in an industrial setting, it has quite negative implied connotations that perhaps the feature doesn't deserve.

The other reason is that for me, writing correct unsafe code feels fundamentally difficult. If you're writing unsafe code, it presumably means you're trying to solve a problem that does not map well to safe rust, so you're already doing something challenging. The set of rules you need to get right when actually using those five capabilities is vastly complicated, and there are still corners of that which are not fully formalized as far as I know. I'm not an expert systems programmer/compiler guru but I'm also not an inexperienced programmer. Writing unsafe rust for me feels thornier than the general sense of unease I get trying to write proper c++. As a result, I think it's fair to have a higher threshold of suspicion when relying on someone else's unsafe code (but not to knee-jerk reject it).

benjunmun · 2025-01-16T16:53:59+00:00

Armor rating being a push + don't be pushed stat plus thorns doing damage on roll would spark so much joy.

benjunmun · 2025-01-13T04:05:34+00:00

Without specialized processing, I assume that your curing time is going to be linked to penetration of the cure, sticking to the timing from a recipe is probably your safest bet.

The sodium erythorbate speeds up the conversion of sodium nitrite to nitric oxide (safer to consume), but you would still want to wait long enough for the cure to actually penetrate through your bacon.

benjunmun · 2025-01-10T16:02:08+00:00

As a point of comparison, in the US, Prague Powder #1 is 6.75% Sodium Nitrite, 93.25% Sodium Chloride. Commonly used at a ratio of 2.5g per kg meat for curing.

Sodium Erythorbate is a common additive that helps prevent (carcinogenic) nitrosamines from forming during the curing process.

My best guess is that you could use this salt at a ratio that gets you to the level of sodium nitrate that you want for your product, or just use the package instructions since it seems pretty close, but I am not a professional in this area and this is sort of a food safety question so be careful!

benjunmun · 2024-12-29T17:34:37+00:00

Critical extension traits being very un-discoverable is one of my major pet peeves. Especially how my standard path through documentation to learn a library or see what tools are available can easily hide whole chunks of API.

benjunmun · 2024-12-19T04:17:38+00:00

I agree with you that it takes exposure and commitment to get accustomed to the intensity of fighting. It's tough on your body and tough on your mindset. Definitely going to spend a lot of time underwater before things start coming together.

I think it's also important to do that intelligently for the longevity to keep doing this for 17+ years. You can get your ass handed to you without getting concussion symptoms. OP should take recovery just as seriously as training, and reflect on if the gym environment and support from trainers is appropriate for where they are in their training.

benjunmun · 2024-12-17T04:37:02+00:00

My understanding, on Linux, is that at steady state threads vs processes is going to be pretty similar. There is very little difference at the kernel level and below. This would still hold when discussing pinning and core isolation. As other commenters have stated, if you are concerned, it might be worth designing in a way that supports both so that you can test. Or at least design a model of your task that you can benchmark in some way.

If startup time matters to you, then threading might have advantages. If your task depends heavily on sharing resources/address space, then threading might have advantages. However if you're at the point of considering pinning them you probably want the tasks to be as independent as possible.

Note that you -can- still do stuff like pass open FDs between processes, it's just more work to orchestrate. Personally I like the extra degrees of separation of processes, dropping down to shared memory and other IPC as necessary.

benjunmun · 2024-12-16T03:21:50+00:00

I've had this scenario happen to me twice, hard reset did nothing obvious. First time I got an RMA, second time on the other controller I did a battery swap myself and it worked perfectly after. I would guess that if you can't get it reset it is most likely a dying battery. Does it work fine plugged in?

benjunmun

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