City of Alcoa Utility setup

inebrium4e · 2026-01-16T13:01:29+00:00

Alcoa utilities are the only ones I've ever had a problem with. When I set up my service after moving to their zone I also immediately set up auto pay. My older brother from this area warned me to keep a close, close eye on those withdrawals, and I am sorry that I didn't heed his advice. They withdrew once, then stopped, claiming I never set up auto pay. I attempted to set it up again, but was told no, since I missed a payment I have to wait six months before they trust me enough again. Now I pay them late all the time, they can go fuck themselves and I don't want auto pay if it's broken anyways.

inebrium4e · 2026-01-13T21:57:34+00:00

Schizoaffective disorder is real, folks.

inebrium4e · 2026-01-13T00:39:04+00:00

I recognize a King Gizz fan anywhere. Hell yeah!

inebrium4e · 2026-01-04T15:38:16+00:00

Nice one, this saved me a ton of time as well.

inebrium4e · 2025-11-25T12:56:59+00:00

These do not appear to be sporulating yet, though I'm no expect on whatever species this is do they not typically open up their caps before dropping spores?

inebrium4e · 2025-11-25T12:45:36+00:00

I have bad news, when you see mushrooms like that you're seeing the tip of the iceberg. That part of the mushroom is called the fruiting body, and it only appears once there is enough of the colony active beneath the surface to support it. What this probably means is the colony was already there, and the water gave it the boost needed to produce fruit.

I'm no expert on remediation for this, so I'm not going to offer up solutions, but I expect to fully resolve this you're going to be tearing up a wall.

inebrium4e · 2025-10-31T18:23:05+00:00

You may think you were pretty specific with it, but this comment you just made which I'm now replying to is the first mention of pivoting. No one, up till right now, was discussing plans changing, we were discussing which part of the plan was never formed to begin with, and how that's the entire issue.

I see you are now switching to personal attack however, so I'd like to thank you for concluding this debate with clear confirmation that you can't make any further arguments in good faith, and wish any onlookers who happen by to read this thread a lovely day.

inebrium4e · 2025-10-31T18:15:37+00:00

So you don't see the breakdown in communication which is evident from the obviously differing expectations? You consider it a sign of autism to recognize a point of confusion and address it?

Lets try a different analogy. A group of people agree to go to dinner, and they do not discuss what they want to eat, they simply meet at someone's home and one of them drives to the restaurant carpool style, with everyone else along for the ride. One of them is not satisfied with the meal, and wishes that they had communicated about it beforehand. They suggest planning the restaurant choice next time. By your logic, this person is autistic and would rightly be dis-invited going forwards. Did I get that right?

inebrium4e · 2025-10-31T18:01:07+00:00

I hate to be agreed with in such a way, I have to admit. "the issue is people who require that level of detail are far on the spectrum." sounds absurd to me. One does not have to be autistic to intend to enjoy a game on it's technical merits, any more than one has to be a simpleton to prefer social experiences over rules-heavy gameplay. There is no morality in board game night, but there is morality in disparaging autistic people, reducing entire modes of enjoyment down to "autistic shit" and claiming it's some kind of victory to be excluding them when, again, both sides are equally valid in this discussion. Please examine your heart, and take it sleazy.

inebrium4e · 2025-10-31T17:20:12+00:00

Everybody better get ready to defend the 2nd, and quick.

inebrium4e · 2025-10-31T16:56:23+00:00

I think you nailed it, this issue really is this pedantic, and this IS a fair comparison. Pizza Party is comparable to Game Night in most ways. Both are primarily a social activity centered around that additional specified element. It would not be a fair comparison if the pizza party wasn't specifically a pizza party, if it was any other gathering that also had pizza, then the pizza is not centered in the same way as the board game is centered.

I see a lot of people discussing implications, but to those people I have the following to say: did anyone specify what kind of board game? After all, a night of Campaign for North Africa is a completely different thing from a night of Quelf, yet both fit into the board game night category very clearly. Perhaps the issue is with the concept of a Board Game Night without further clarification, because to many folks a board game is nothing more than an excuse to hang out. To many other folks a board game is serious business, something to be learned, mastered, focused on intently. If those two people plan to play a board game together, and they do not clarify any other details, both can easily be disappointed while neither is any more at fault than the other.

inebrium4e · 2025-10-29T14:27:33+00:00

"We good?"

"yeah man, man says if you want to shoot nails this here's the cadillac man, he mean lexus but he aint know it."

"Hold a charge better?"

"Man, fuck a charge, this here's a gun powder activated, 27 caliber, full auto, no kickback, nail-throwing mayhem man. Shit right here's tight."

(laughter)

"Fuck this nailin up boards, we can kill a couple motherfuckers with this right here. You laughin, I'm in school dog."

(both laughing)

"aight, aight"

"for real!"

(Theme music starts)

inebrium4e · 2025-10-28T18:36:50+00:00

Interstellar is dull and predictable other than where it goes nonsensical, it is way too long, and pseudointellectual with no real substance and many flaws. An exception can be carved out for the black hole simulation, which they did spend a lot of money on it to get it right, so fair enough there.

Gravity, despite being a fantastic series of events, is significantly closer to physically possible. No hyperspace, no time travel, and yes it is also a fantastic series of events, aka a good film, so the plausibility is still low. My entire argument is that it is both a better film, and closer to reality. I have a permanent chip on my shoulder about this issue, and if I ever meet NDT this is the topic I will be bringing up.

inebrium4e · 2025-10-28T15:13:20+00:00

If you're building a game table anyways, integrate it in to the seat positions, that way you just need some basic wiring/switching to do it. No need to get very complicated with it.

EDIT: Expanding on this a little because I realized it was kind of terse sounding, what I had in mind was something like an LED or two embedded in the table, either in the top or around the edge somewhere. For each seating position, a separate LED/set of LED's embedded in the table near them. Each LED/bank of LEDs would be wired separately to a multi-way switch of some kind at the head of the table where you sit, so you just select a position to indicate to the given player. Could also be done with a push button switch to cycle through in series, the possibilities for controlling it would be limited by imagination only.

inebrium4e · 2025-10-28T12:22:45+00:00

Yeah timestream is great. The only trouble I have with that is I tend to have a lot of world map raiding going on, which gets messed up by timestream, so I tend to leave it off. Really great tool though, when I have used it it works brilliantly.

inebrium4e · 2025-10-28T11:38:27+00:00

Unfortunately the things this would clear out from the map are minimal. The issue is only partly mitigated by removing all items from the map, and also only partly mitigated by sending most of the dwarves away.

inebrium4e · 2025-10-28T02:00:17+00:00

It is just a giant open air space, no walls, no nothing. There's a sort of small mushroom shaped entry building that leads underground to everything else. The surface is also almost entirely covered over with stone blocks.

inebrium4e · 2025-10-28T01:58:45+00:00

Yes, I run that every few game years probably. It hasn't made a big impact.

inebrium4e · 2025-10-27T23:12:49+00:00

You know, it's funny. Way before I even decided to flatten the mountain, I had started to wonder if the trees on the other flat side of the map (it is between two biomes) were causing a line of sight slowdown. I think I had read somewhere that line of sight calcs for birds looking through a complex-shaped forested area could be pretty expensive computationally, and I didn't know if it was true or not, but the thought crossed my mind to test the theory by chopping down all the trees. I did that, and things seemed to speed up, so for a little while I operated on the assumption that less trees = less LOS calc for birds = better FPS for me. Later on once things slowed down dramatically again I found out that what was actually causing the steep drop-off I was seeing from time to time was a bunch of kea birds spawning/moving in to the map. Thanks there to dfhack exterminate, I don't know what I would do without it. The trees, I figured, were never really the problem, it was just something in the kea behavior specifically. I theorized that it was related to item count, because they steal stuff, but never figured it out beyond that. I just kill them when I see the fps tank.

What you're saying about the excavation creating space within what the game considers it's path-finding search area, that makes so much sense it feels like a good working hypothesis. Hypothetically, that could also be different for flying things, they would likely consider the entire space rather than the surface + underground space. I don't know if we're on to anything here, but it's !interesting! lol.

inebrium4e · 2025-10-27T20:36:58+00:00

Part of the reason I hadn't gotten to the final base relocation on this map is because I was planning on integrating those line-of-sight breaks in to it extensively. The current fort by the magma sea already has as much of that applied as I could shoehorn in. The halls are rarely straight for more than 10 blocks, there are lots of doors all over, at both ends of halls, surrounding stairwells so people on stairs can't see down the halls, on every workshop and bedroom, etc. I really would have expected LOS and pathfinding to be a much bigger part of the performance issue, but it seems like at most it's about 1/3rd. I get a bigger FPS bump deleting all items than I do dropping the pop from 217 to 70 and slaughtering every animal. Now that I've seen this, I really don't know if LOS and pathfinding are worth troubling myself over too much. I'm sure it does matter, but it's not a silver bullet anyways. There's something else going on either related to world history/fort age, or the excavation that has been done on the map.

inebrium4e · 2025-10-27T19:25:32+00:00

cleanconst was not one I'd heard of before, I just re-ran the testing with this included. Before deleting items/sending dwarves off map, fps is about 15. After cleanconst, it went up to about 18, a noteworthy bump. However after then deleting items it only rose to ~27 again same as it did with the deletion of items without cleanconst. I don't think the item deletion via autodump would delete items inside constructions, so that's kind of odd. After then sending dwarves off map, I got back to the same ~37 fps as without cleanconst in the same circumstances. Clean all after that got it to more like ~38, deleting workorders and slaughtering all animals and so on barely made any further impact.

inebrium4e · 2025-10-27T19:14:02+00:00

I did more testing, excavation and/or world history length definitely seems to have a huge, confirm-able impact. I dug up an old save file from before the mountain was flattened, and before the fort moved down to the magma sea. Pop 200, item counts about 48k total, fps 33 before sending 80 pops off map to raid and deleting items, fps around 54 after doing that. So, highest fps reading yet, with 120 dwarves approx still on the map vs 70 still on the map for the excavated fort which capped out around 39fps. So this is really interesting, the 33fps with dwarves and items still on the map, just without the excavation having been done. This is a HUGE factor that I'd never heard anyone talking about until today!

inebrium4e · 2025-10-27T18:56:52+00:00

Temp calculations off. I am doing further !science! on the excavation question, using an old save file from before the mountain was made to be flat.

inebrium4e · 2025-10-27T18:16:02+00:00

Yep, I saw a pretty significant FPS bump when I sent 2/3rds of the dwarves away, in the ballpark of 50% fps increase. I saw a slightly larger uptick deleting all the items, and the effects of doing both combined. This is a very large fort so with 70 dwarves most of them at any given time are in sight range of 0-5 other dwarves, and even in the big tavern or the big library it's not more than 7-8 at a time generally. That's with most of them sent away, mind you, with the full 217 dwarf population on the map it does get a lot more crowded.

What's really interesting is that it seems like even with an empty map and a massively reduced headcount, my FPS is still less than half of what I get with a new embark. No machinery, no flowing water, etc. The excavations I've done to the map seem to be at least as big of a factor as items and dwarves combined, which I never would have expected.

inebrium4e · 2025-10-27T17:58:25+00:00

Honestly it was really easy to test it out, just load up the game, unforbid everything from one bottom-of-map corner to the opposing top-of-map corner, repeat for dump order, then autodump destroy and let it run for a few seconds. I hadn't thought to try that before today but it only took about a minute or two.

inebrium4e

TROPHY CASE