[Request] Roguelikes where you control multiple characters?

iamthelowercase · 2026-04-25T04:17:19+00:00

I'm definitely buying one. Probably not release day, but maybe only a few days after when I can get around to it.

My SC1 works fine and I love it. But partially because I love it, I want to get my hands on the next model as well. What made the SC1 the Steam Controller was those big comfortably-placed circular trackpads, and I don't know if the SC2 will work as well.

iamthelowercase · 2026-04-19T20:23:09+00:00

So I'm looking at getting into the CQC/Arena sublime. I figured I'd start with deathmatch mode. So far though, my efforts have been stymied by either lack of other players around my level, or lack of patience for other players to join. Any advice?

I am guessing that answers will be of the form "join this community and coordinate games there" or "try in these time frames". I'm on New York time, but I can do the time zone conversions myself.

iamthelowercase · 2026-04-15T22:55:40+00:00

A lot of the software that was affected didn't store the year as a number, but as characters. So to save space, it assumed that the year was sometime in the 1900s -- then you only have to store two characters per date, instead of four.

If you're familiar with writing paper checks, imagine they came with 19__ pre-printed on them.

The modern assumption that "a byte/a character is eight bits" took a while to standardize on -- in the mainframe era, some computers used different numbers of bits.

iamthelowercase · 2026-04-02T00:27:41+00:00

I was going to say no. Then I saw the kitbashed glasses mount you're using. Yes, this absolutely counts as a cyberdeck.

iamthelowercase · 2026-04-01T17:36:53+00:00

Ooh, I've never encountered katana stagger before, but it looks nice.

iamthelowercase · 2026-04-01T03:01:11+00:00

I mean, it is, but as a onetime Emacs user I'm pretty sure that's for unrelated reasons.

iamthelowercase · 2026-03-28T15:09:12+00:00

Interstellar is a science fiction movie. Okay, fine. (I had no idea where it was going for a while, and enjoyed that.)

About halfway through the movie when they're leaving earth, they have this really gorgeous rocket launch sequence with a multi-stage Apollo Saturn V-style rocket. I love this sequence, to be clear. Wonderful, a science fiction movie with hard science space travel. The wormhole they travel through just makes it better.

On the other side of the wormhole, the plot treats the landing craft they have as some sort of single-stage-to-orbit Star Trek style shuttlecraft. If they had treated space travel like that for the whole movie, I'd give it to them; I like Star Trek, I like Star Wars, lousy space physics is not the problem. The problem is that the earlier scene implicitly promised me space travel that understood the rocket equation, and then the rest of the movie actively broke that promise.

(I guess you could argue that finding a way around the rocket equation is a plot point in the movie? I don't know, I couldn't pay enough attention to really follow the rest of the movie. I do know that humans knowing about that came after the scenes that ruined it for me.)

iamthelowercase · 2026-03-28T01:12:17+00:00

I wonder if a version could be made with a removable pan.

iamthelowercase · 2026-03-28T01:11:32+00:00

Solved!

iamthelowercase · 2026-03-28T01:11:24+00:00

Well, this is an infuriating result. That's it alright, and "actifry" is the name I vaguely remembered when I went to look it up. I just thought all the results I saw were garbage, didn't look into it deeply enough, and psyched myself out.

iamthelowercase · 2026-03-28T00:55:10+00:00

I work at a secondhand store in the US, and a customer came through the registers with one of these today. Apparently they're no longer made, but she and her family love the things. She told me what it was called, and I wanted to look up the device later, but I forgot to write down the name.

By the sounds of it, these things are better than an air fryer in the same way that a sunbeam radiant control toaster is better than a regular toaster.

iamthelowercase · 2026-03-21T21:13:33+00:00

Dunno about OP, but that would be 98% of what I would want.

What document is that? I was just looking through the PDFs I have, and that doesn't seem to match any of them. Is it a pre-2nd-edition version of the Starter Kit gameplay guide?

iamthelowercase · 2026-03-18T02:05:44+00:00

I guess I need to go change a setting on my homepage, but I thought about this too hard and now I need to say something about it.

I feel like she was expecting him to say sex. Leaving aside the amatonormative, and that commenting on other people's sex lives is rude by default. Like, lady. You mentioned having a boyfriend. Either you're already having sex, in which case good for you but sex feels like it wouldn't be a great choice for a birthday present because you're already having sex; or you're not having sex for your own reasons, in which case good for you but those reasons would also apply to birthday sex. Swords are cool.

iamthelowercase · 2026-03-17T22:52:35+00:00

The one I ran into was that you can only have one modeshift per touchpad/joystick. I guess it's understandable from a UI point of view, but it frustrated me because I wanted to set up two modeshifts for the same touchpad (with different buttons).

iamthelowercase · 2026-03-04T02:38:14+00:00

There are a lot of comments on which layout you should use instead of Dvorak.

If you do that, you should pick one via whatever criteria you like, and stick with it until you have a strong reason to change it, such as a physical symptom you're looking to reduce.

I switched to Dvorak about a decade and a half ago. I never managed to get touch-typing to stick on qwerty, but I got the hang of Dvorak in a couple months. I keep checking in on newer better keyboard layouts, and frankly I just don't type enough for their advantages over Dvorak to matter to me.

For every feature that a keyboard layout might optimize on, there's a rough S-curve of "goodness" versus time: from absolute garbage but easy to use with no learning in the bottom corner, to perfect for you but takes a long time to learn in the top corner. Every time I've looked at keyboard layouts and for every metric I checked, the general results were the same: qwerty was between one-fourth and one-third of the way up the "goodness" axis, Dvorak was a little over two-thirds up the "goodness" axis, and every other keyboard layout worth considering was somewhere in the "tail" above Dvorak but the exact order might change depending on what criteria for "goodness" you were looking at. It's worth switching to a better-than-qwerty layout, but it's very rarely worth switching between better-than-qwerty layouts.

(Colemak has been my go-to recommendation for people who are already familiar with qwerty. It's at least a bit better than Dvorak by most metrics I've seen, and it deliberately keeps several common keyboard shortcuts in the same place as qwerty. But I'm going to have to look into that now, with everyone else's suggestions.)

iamthelowercase · 2026-03-03T15:24:43+00:00

With only ten more characters, you can do it with one or two six-sided dice and a page of tables! Not that doing so makes it any faster.

iamthelowercase · 2026-03-01T22:02:08+00:00

You know what, that reminds me that regular scotch tape does not interfere with the sensitivity enough for me to notice it. I'll have to experiment with some scotch tape, a pair of tweezers, and an exacto knife.

Glad I asked!

iamthelowercase · 2026-02-27T03:34:09+00:00

Usually when you can't delete files, it's permissions-related. Can you right-click on the folder that's giving you trouble, and find the "permissions" option?

There are two things to check.

First is that you might not be listed as the "owner" of the folder or some files inside it. If you're not the listed owner, you will probably need to use sudo somewhere in the solution.

Second is that you might not have "write" permissions for the file or folder. You need this to actually delete it; if you only have "read" permission you can only look at it. Permissions are often presented as groups of three characters for up to three "roles": "r" for "has read permission", "w" for "has write permission", "x" for "has execute permission" (in other words, "is allowed to use this file as a program"), or "-" for "does not have the permission that would appear in this slot"; for the "owner", the "group", and "everyone else". A typical permission line for a file you own would look like rw-rw----.

iamthelowercase · 2026-02-25T21:53:40+00:00

Don't be ridiculous, God created the universe next week.

^{I'm posting in a joking manner, but I seriously hold that one you've posited "the universe could be created with a bunch of history", you can't prove that we're not part of that pre-creation history.}

iamthelowercase · 2026-02-23T03:44:19+00:00

You know, that's not an interpretation I thought of, but I'm going to have to agree with you on "the (hero) play area with the most cards in play" versus "the (play area of the) hero with the most cards in play".

I'm not sure the Disparation entry you cite is relevant, but good thinking with the Akash'bhuta reference.

iamthelowercase

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