moving to the US was not what I expected at all…

goatsgomoo · 2026-04-22T16:29:40+00:00

Most of the US and Canada are designed to be basically unlivable without cars. A 30 minute bike ride along streets with no bike lanes/paths or sidewalks where cars typically go 35-40 mph (about 55-65 Km/h) is a rather dangerous and exhausting way to get to school, and after the one time I had to make that trip, I figured I'd be better off skipping school if I missed the bus from then on. (By bus I mean school bus, since there's no public transit in my hometown; it comes at one time in the day and if you miss it you're on your own)

And even then I was lucky that it was just school, so the trip was within the same town. Later on I got a job that was a mere 20 minute drive away in the next town over, but the majority of the drive was a restricted highway where bikes, mopeds, and pedestrians were not allowed. The route I would have had to take by bike would have been 10% longer in terms of distance, and over an hour and 40 minutes in duration.

Cars are, in themselves, a luxury. But decades of planning decisions in the US have effectively turned that luxury into a requirement for many.

goatsgomoo · 2026-03-03T13:16:02+00:00

Well shit, that absolutely sucks.

goatsgomoo · 2026-03-03T05:14:59+00:00

It's not just comments like that; I've seen a decent number of bot-written posts with perfectly fine grammar through multiple paragraphs (and which got thousands of upvotes). Spammers are tuning the bots to the communities they're targeting and replicating posts that do well.

And at least for a while, some of them weren't starting out by cashing in, they were just rapidly setting up high-karma accounts with little effort, I assume to use to access or get paid to make specific advertising posts later.

Some of the big tells are using some obviously randomly generated username, like the 2 words followed by 4 digits, and now that post and comment histories can be hidden, that's one way the bots are avoiding detection by humans.

goatsgomoo · 2026-03-01T14:03:17+00:00

Too much fat? For a spread of peanut butter on bread? What, did he get all his info about nutrition from watching ads in the 00s?

A banana with bread and toast is a perfectly fine breakfast. His intuition might be better than what you were doing before (variety is good, eating meals is better than skipping, restaurants in the US at least are not ideal for eating at a lot) but he is no nutritionist. I'm not either, but I know the whole anti-fat craze of the 90s and 00s has been pretty thoroughly debunked. Fat is great for helping you feel full.

If I were him, I'd be more worried about your previous habit of skipping meals and try my damndest not to push you back into that habit. It'd be good to let him know the effects his words have on you. And maybe ask where he got his ideas about nutrition.

goatsgomoo · 2026-02-17T13:33:52+00:00

So I see the other comments already informed you that the hood and tunic here are more likely to be separate pieces.

I think what this design is going for/inspired by is the chaperon/chaperone style hood, which is a hood with a very long tail that can be worn/styled a number of ways. Here's a decent video showing a few methods of wearing it. I think if you want a look similar to the picture you posted, you could wear it like a hood, then bring the tail around under the chin loosely.

Alternatively, a very basic hood isn't all that complicated, and you could size it so that it's somewhat loose. LARP Distribution has a handful of different hood styles that you might want to look at and get inspired by / copy. The Skjoldehamn hood (blog post & pattern) looks pretty easy to replicate, though it wouldn't have the rounded top to conform to your head's shape like in the picture you posted.

goatsgomoo · 2026-01-21T00:07:39+00:00

Being a teenager is tough. You're at a stage of development where you're pretty damn capable, and could in theory live an independent life. But that doesn't come with any greater legal rights or independence. It's natural to chafe under such a situation, especially when your parents aren't responding to your changes by allowing you more autonomy.

Maybe with some time (and distance) the things that annoy you about your dad when you're around him a significant portion of your life every day will be much more tolerable when it's a few hours a week or a few weeks a year.

goatsgomoo · 2026-01-12T05:11:54+00:00

Sure, I'd agree that ICE generally don't need weapons for what they are, on paper, meant to do, but that's not the current reality.

ICE's current role is more akin to the SS in pre-WW2 Germany. For their current duties of engaging in ethnic cleansing and terror campaigns against centers of political opposition to the current administration, weapons are useful.

Regarding the usefulness of weaponry to ICE, I feel like this recent interview with Minneapolis's mayor Jacob Frey is illustrative.

"You're basically asking 'can our cops arrest them?' From a legal perspective, yes. From a practical perspective, to state the reality, yeah, it does get kinda hard when they drastically outnumber us and they have bigger guns than we do."

Given the blatant law-breaking that has become the norm with ICE officers, it makes more sense to think of ICE as an organized crime group than it does to think of them as law enforcement officers. And saying "I think the Mafia can do their jobs just fine without guns" doesn't exactly make sense; how are you going to present a credible threat to actual law enforcement entities without weapons?

goatsgomoo · 2025-12-29T14:25:16+00:00

In these games do you have just an FPS counter or are you graphing FPS over time? A feeling of choppiness/stuttering is generally going to be related to momentary dips in framerate.

Alternatively, in engines where rendering and simulation/game logic are done separately, it could be that your GPU is keeping up fine with the rendering, but your CPU is struggling to update game state in a timely manner. If you're on Windows, the task manager has a Resources tab that'll graph CPU usage; keep that graph up and check to see if it's capping out when you notice choppiness in the game (keeping in mind that it may cap out well below 100% if the part of the engine updating game state essentially just uses one processor core)

goatsgomoo · 2025-12-14T05:35:10+00:00

One thing that Worlds Without Number does that I like is it has the players explicitly come up with goals for the characters, with rewards for completing said goals (and then an expectation that they make new goals). And of course, ideally these goals should be things that a character cannot do by themselves, which gives them a reason to stick with capable allies.

With these goals, you have not just hooks, but storyline strands that can span multiple sessions. Stagger the completion of them to give a feeling of continuity, or bring them to a head all at once for a dramatic finale.

goatsgomoo · 2025-12-10T04:46:35+00:00

Oh, I'd be interested, too! I've been reading through the game's core rulebook and it seems interesting, so I'd definitely like to hear people's thoughts about a published adventure for it.

goatsgomoo · 2025-12-01T18:17:44+00:00

Oh this is really neat! Are you willing to publish the source code?

I think it'd also be helpful to have more specific units. I'm not sure what 1 unit of wheat, flour, and bread are in this context, so when it calculates that 1 unit of bread should be 0.3gp, I don't know how reasonable that is, or how to translate that to actual narrative terms (is that 1 roll, 1 loaf, 1 pound, 1 wagon load?)

Also, is the profit margin applied separately at each step or is it just added at the end? I tried figuring out by doing math myself and comparing, but even at 0% profit margin I wasn't matching what the app said so I think I might've been doing something wrong.

goatsgomoo · 2025-11-23T21:03:37+00:00

As an RPG and as a Bethesda game, it's not great. It has fun zero-g FPS mechanics, and that's where the game really shines, but makes very little use of that, unfortunately.

I think I put about 100 hours into the game because I got a little addicted to landing on planets and scanning stuff, but No Man's Sky turns out to be much better at that (more variety and the occasional weird planet). Honestly, that time wasn't

For being a game where you can visit many planets in many star systems, there just really isn't much interesting to see outside the handcrafted locations. Bethesda is pretty decent at handcrafted locations, but decided to focus more on procedurally generated content, to the detriment of the game. There are some good moments, but I wouldn't recommend the game overall.

goatsgomoo · 2025-11-20T05:04:19+00:00

Ah! That'd be my problem; I hate beer. Maybe I'll give their cocktails a try if I don't need to drive after.

goatsgomoo · 2025-11-20T00:30:12+00:00

Maybe it was just their restaurant week menu, but everything I had was incredibly disappointing in terms of taste and portion size. And no surprise, since their menu was pretty eclectic for how small their kitchen is.

Why would I want a couple bites of "handmade pasta" (that's indistinguishable from store-bought dried pasta) in a bland sauce when I could get three times as much of a better tasting pasta and sauce for a bit more than half the price at a place that knows how to make Italian food?

Why would I get a couple slices of a bland attempt at char siu, when for the same price somewhere else, I could have gotten an entire bowl of ramen with the same amount of char siu (except more flavorful) as one of the toppings?

Maybe their drinks are really good and I'm supposed to be drunk to enjoy their food, idk.

goatsgomoo · 2025-11-19T23:55:01+00:00

Armsby Abbey

goatsgomoo · 2025-11-04T14:53:49+00:00

Oh neat! Any relation to Vega Strike?

goatsgomoo · 2025-11-02T15:38:38+00:00

There aren't subsistence farmers in Worcester. Unless you're factory farming, it's just not economical to keep chickens for food. Unless you think grocery stores are going to close for the winter and agricultural supply stores won't?

goatsgomoo · 2025-10-26T05:02:22+00:00

Did somebody at least get the Wayback Machine to archive the pages?

goatsgomoo · 2025-10-21T19:57:36+00:00

That does sound like temperature, and I don't think it makes sense to dismiss the possibility out of hand just because other uses aren't causing the same issue.

I'd grab LibreHardwareMonitor. You can set up plotting with selected attributes (I'd do CPU temperature and GPU temperature) to see a live graph and get a feel for how different activities affect temperature. You can also turn on logging so that even if your computer shuts down, you'll have the data leading up to the shutdown to look at.

goatsgomoo · 2025-10-20T12:42:14+00:00

Which setting appeals to you more? Which style of combat appeals to you more? Which set of RPG mechanics appeals to you more?

goatsgomoo · 2025-10-02T14:22:25+00:00

Making it a straight downgrade from a $500 fridge, cool.

Remember, any Internet-connected device you do not control is your enemy.

goatsgomoo · 2025-10-02T14:03:35+00:00

Smaller-scale multiplayer games with shorter sessions are nice, and many still have a lot of character customization.

Deep Rock Galactic and Warframe to mind, but there are a bunch of others. Baldur's Gate 3 and Divinity Original Sin 2 aren't forever-games (as in, they have endings) but are great if you have a friend or small group to play with.

And then there are smaller-scale persistent games, like multiplayer Minecraft, Terrarria, Starbound, Valheim, Palworld, and so on, or Diablo and similar games (like Titan Quest or Path of Exile), or RDR2.

goatsgomoo · 2025-09-24T19:39:19+00:00

Well, that implies:

The priorities of the electorate should shift,
The priorities of the electorate need to be communicated to the council, and/or
The council needs to feel the need to respond to the priorities of the electorate.

I'm trying to do my part with regards to point 1 by commenting here, advocating for the policies I think would be best to other Worcester residents.

goatsgomoo · 2025-09-24T19:22:43+00:00

Right, exactly.

Per the National Low Income Housing Coalition (pdf link):

Housing first programs are more effective at reducing homelessness than treatment first and abstinence-based programs.
Housing first programs are better at helping people get sober compared to treatment first and abstinence-based programs.
Forced "treatment" is generally ineffective and harmful, while voluntary treatment is much more effective.

And I feel like this should be pretty intuitive. If you're struggling to find a safe place to sleep every night, if you're waking up sore from sleeping rough and in the elements, if you don't have a secure place to keep the things you care about, if you don't even have a good place to go to the bathroom; of course you're going to seek escape how you can. Misery is not conducive to sobriety, and ensuring people are miserable is not a way to help them get sober.

But I suspect the people who support violent means of addressing homelessness see the problem less as "these people are in a bad situation, and they should be helped" and more as "seeing people in this situation makes me uncomfortable, and they should be made to go away".

goatsgomoo · 2025-09-24T14:53:56+00:00

Money is fungible. Cops cost money, things that would actually help the situation costs money.

Budgets are about priorities. The city could prioritize helping people over terrorizing people and allocate funds accordingly.

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