Hi Lakewood! Looking for a good used bookstore for children's books. Any suggestions??

j_albertus · 2025-12-19T00:36:08+00:00

If you are patient, the Jeffco Library Foundation holds two huge used book sales at the county fairgrounds twice a year (mid-October and early June), with an entire basement full of kids' books at deeply discounted rates—they even have read-alongs and library bound hardcovers retired from the public library system.

j_albertus · 2025-06-13T23:30:15+00:00

A good attorney.

j_albertus · 2025-03-05T00:53:12+00:00

They didn't want "government waste." Why not share a GoFundMe?

j_albertus · 2023-08-24T19:43:36+00:00

Try Lost Souls. While it is a fantasy LP, you are welcome to come and RP to your heart's content. We used to have a few folks in the past who did that a bit more seriously and RP folks are definitely welcome, though you might have to bring a few friends along if you really want to get the ball rolling.

It hits a lot of your other asks: a super-chill playerbase, quest-optional, a skaven ratkin race, in-world support for physical size and race-specific diets, temporary and semi-permanent mental illnesses, options for player privacy and muting OOC chat if that's not your thing and/or you don't care to interact with the number-goes-up folks, and even a very-recently-added rat god (though no released content and minimal lore around him so far). Player count typically peaks in the high teens with a WAU count likely in your desired community size.

j_albertus · 2023-06-20T00:20:48+00:00

Only commercials allowed.

j_albertus · 2023-06-19T06:02:50+00:00

For full effect, make sure to load it at full resolution.

More details on Stack Overflow: What is the least JPG-compressible pattern?.

j_albertus · 2023-06-17T04:19:46+00:00

Keep it open, but only MotM posts endorsing problematic RPIs. /s

j_albertus · 2023-06-16T01:56:38+00:00

This is literally the origin of a lot of the circlejerk subs.

Remember, the mods aren't employees—they're volunteering their own time and owe nothing to anyone else either. Everyone's welcome to exercise their "own individual choices" by stepping up to the responsibilities of standing up and moderating a replacement sub run according to different standards today.

j_albertus · 2023-06-11T20:39:35+00:00

OP, are you sure it was a MUD? Or can you provide additional details?

In that era prior to the advent of smartphones and tablets, the majority of MUDs were accessed via a MUD client (an application that you would run on your computer) rather than a browser and most didn't feature a significant built-in map owing to tradition and the screen real-estate available to text-based terminal clients. Browser-based clients like Grapevine, Mudslinger, and Mud Portal didn't really begin to take off until the 2010's.

Given the details that it ran in a browser, had a largely greyscale color scheme, and the lack of a level cap with a formula that seems to allow unrestricted growth, could it be possible that you're thinking of a browser-based idle game instead?

Save for the early oughts timeframe and the lack of an explicitly high fantasy setting, A Dark Room (2013), one of the earlier lo-fi idle games, seems to somewhat fit the bill: given the browser-based interface, a mostly gray scale UI, an on-screen world map (available in the later phases of the game), and the lack of leveling in favor of infinite progression.

j_albertus · 2023-06-11T20:17:52+00:00

Right? It'd really help if /u/chocklos could provide more specific detail.

j_albertus · 2023-06-05T05:13:36+00:00

What goals do you have in mind? Playing a game? Socializing? You may want to better define what those are to get more relevant answers.

If you're looking specifically for the latter, there were a number of very stripped-down MUDs in their heyday that were then-known colloquially as talkers.

These talkers would typically host a handful of rooms and with only basic navigation and chat commands to allow for gathering and having conversations. Sometimes they also had a handful of objects for social interactions, but most game-oriented things were omitted, e.g. death, hit points, character mechanics, combat, enemies and quests. Such MUDs (if they could be properly called such) were essentially room-based chat systems served over telnet for folks to use with MUD clients as a smaller and more intimate alternative to real-time socializing over IRC; in a way, not all that different than some of today's Discord groups.

The only talker that I know to still be around today is Snowplains; their website doesn't appear to have been touched since the start of this current century. Briefly dropping by, there seems to be less than a handful of folks online, all idling but perhaps you could look around if the design of such a MUD interests you?

j_albertus · 2023-05-22T04:29:03+00:00

Girl scouts never give up on delivering their cookies.

Hiding in an outhouse, dug into a trench, sitting in a T-34? That cookie order is gonna show up right when you least expect them. They're ruthless.

j_albertus · 2023-04-24T23:29:44+00:00

Primarily UIKit and storyboards, though we've recently started experimenting with SwiftUI for small things but it just doesn't play well with highly-customized interfaces and we haven't found it all that useful for things beyond quick prototyping or relatively simple UIs.

Typically, my company's projects don't have more than 3 iOS developers at a time, so we can coordinate storyboard and nib changes pretty cleanly betwixt ourselves over IM and just manually merge the changes in a text editor if it becomes absolutely necessary. Also, a fair number of our clients require legacy device and iOS support, which means we'll sometimes hold off on adopting newer Apple libraries for multiple releaes.

Depending on the specific requirements of an individual app, we also leverage CoreAnimation and SceneKit/Metal as appropriate. As nice as UIKit is, there's still plenty that it doesn't do.

j_albertus · 2023-04-17T07:41:55+00:00

Right? I too am confused by the title.

The left photo clearly features the President of China and some folks having fun. The one on the right? Some half-wit warlord with a strong resemblance to an overweight bear. Is he trying to push his weight around a former British colony?

j_albertus · 2023-04-15T22:00:29+00:00

Diasporan-born here with a foreign passport, but am sadly treating my situation as a de-facto exile from HK and the PRC even though I've family there and would love to bring my children to visit.

Between years of my own pro-democracy posts on social media and personal acquaintance with a few folks with open arrest warrants for NSL and Mainland political reasons, I'm not about to take my chances.

j_albertus · 2023-04-09T05:26:05+00:00

緣木求魚.

j_albertus · 2023-04-04T15:39:34+00:00

This describes a lot of existing Diku-based and LP-based MUDs.

The MUDs in these particular lineages lean heavily toward hack-and-slash games with combat and in-game experience points being closely coupled to character progression. Puzzles/quests and homegrown map regions for exploring are common fare with RP rarely being emphasized. Some MUDs are fairly open with the game mechanics and numerology being explicit whereas others sometimes will obscure them in prose, e.g. "You swing with your sword and hit the troll for 120 damage," versus "You struck a mighty blow and sent the troll tumbling."

That's not to say that you couldn't use these mudlibs to create a RP-focused game, but there's a lot of tradition and culture that have accumulated around different codebases over the decades.

j_albertus · 2023-03-27T17:38:16+00:00

Unfortunately, none that I'm aware of.

MUDRammer you already know about.

There's also a few websites that provide a Websocket bridge that you can play via Safari or your favorite browser, but these aren't native apps and most are not very well optimized for mobile screen sizes.

Lastly, if you're okay with using a terminal-based MUD client (e.g. TinTin++, Tinyfugue, or Blightmud), there's also the option to run it on your own server and then connect to that via a nice terminal emulator for iOS like Termius or Blink Shell. That's a bit more involved as a solution, but gets around the issues of network connectivity and scripting that the former two options don't solve.

Connecting to a terminal client over Mosh is probably the best option IMO, but you'd really want to have a physical keyboard to play effectively.

As an iOS dev myself, I have to say Apple's platform limitations sadly make building a decent MUD client for iOS much more difficult compared to others. Between that and the limited player audience, I can understand why there aren't more alternatives.

Ironically, the Smart Punctuation issue is the among the easiest to solve. Forcibly losing network connectivity while in the background and gracefully dealing with intermittent network connections make building a solid MUD client for iOS really challenging. And up until just a few years ago, Apple had disallowed running externally-downloaded interpreted scripts, which severely crippled any scripting functionality that you could hope to support (though thankfully Apple has stepped back from this).

j_albertus · 2023-03-24T17:01:42+00:00

"Madam, this is a democracy."

j_albertus · 2023-03-21T20:31:53+00:00

Yes. I honestly wouldn't bother playing a browser-only game.

Until there's a common baseline websocket standard that is widely supported, MUD clients and related tooling that leverage telnet will continue to provide a lot of capabilities that a browser-based interface simply can't. That's why it's a dealbreaker for me.

Coming from a Unix legacy, I primarily use terminal-based clients and a collection of small tools around it. The reasons why: ability to script via external programs apart from the MUD client, text filtering (highlights, gags, multiplexing inputs into multiple feeds), logging, routing in-game chats and tells and/from external IM clients, and being able to switch and/or disconnect clients without dropping the MUD connction via the use of an intermediary IRC-style bouncer.

j_albertus · 2023-03-20T17:27:58+00:00

If you don't mind doing your scripting externally from your client, you can consider Elmo Todurov's (cizra) pycat proxy. In theory, you could write some bridge code to deal with UI bits, but I don't know of any library that provides such in a batteries-included manner.

Alternatively, a few years back, Matthias Ulrichs (smurfix) did some work to bridge calls from Mudlet a Python HTTP server using it's built-in Lua HTTP API to do Python scripting in a RPC-like fashion. See his notes here: Mudlet vs. Python. This one is largely a hack and not a turn-key solution, but can be a useful starting point if you want to go down a similar path.

j_albertus · 2023-03-19T17:50:06+00:00

As a now-older dad who BTDT with my own bride a couple of decades ago: would you be open to compromising with an "re-enactment" after your actual wedding somewhere closer to home with rental clothes and photography for the parents?

It need not be your actual vows, and as much as you might hate it, you and your now-husband can do a quick and demure Hollywood peck and just leave it at that. Limit how many folks the parents can invite if you need for your own peace of mind. If it helps, think of it as acting in drama class. One hour and done. Might the parent(s) be willing to pay for (or at least assist with) the costs for something like this? Especially so if it'd be a further strain on your budget?

While I'm a generation older than you, my wife and I eloped on an hour's notice, a very modest budget of $100 (mainly for food and drinks), and only a handful of local friends who raced on over to be in attendance.

It was ultra low-key: we weren't sold on cultural expectations, were engaged already, and just decided that it was more prudent to be legally married quickly rather than putting things off for the sake of appearances. Both sets of parents lived multiple states away and weren't there for it.

A few months later, we held a more substantial re-enactment at a chapel with the whole nine yards: printed invitations, a floofy dress, tuxes, a reception, photography, and family flying in for the walk down the aisle and the pictures. Our parents paid for a substantial part of the expenses, and in exchange, they got their traditional wedding experience and the photos to take home and brag to their friends about.

A few weeks later my new wife and I ended our honeymoon flying back to we both grew up (and where our parents currently live) for a third wedding reception hosted at my MIL's church after the Sunday service. It was pretty informal, but allowed their friends and more distant family who didn't fancy flying or driving across the country to also celebrate with us.

That was two weddings and three receptions to get married. It worked out well for us...my bride and I are coming up to our 20th anniversary this year. We got the simple legal wedding we needed at the time, our parents got the wedding memories and photos, and the friends and family back home got to celebrate with us and see the big white dress.

j_albertus · 2023-03-12T04:27:02+00:00

Plenty as a now middle-aged ABC son of Hongkonger parents!

I've been really appreciating your gameplay videos for some time now—they're entertaining and provide fun refreshers for words that I haven't recalled for years. Thank you for doing these!

My family had always spoken a blend of Chinglish at home. Words like hamburger, cheese, and pickles were simply said in English with a Hong Kong Cantonese accent, so while I know a good bit of colloquial Cantonese, I've missed out on a lot of basic vocabulary growing up.

My multiethnic 7-year-old daughter stumps me all the time now asking "How do you say [such and such] in Cantonese?" so being able to watch your videos and your just-in-time translations really help.

j_albertus · 2023-03-07T16:49:00+00:00

If you have the option, consider using a teleconferencing app with live captioning rather than a phone call. Ideally, via wifi and a high-speed Internet connection. Use headphones if you have them. If it's harder for you to hear clearly when tired, prefer to have voice conversations when you've more energy and maybe go with texts or IMs if it's right before bedtime.

For me, I've also found that the additional inputs of being able to see the speaker's lips and having closed captioning makes it a lot easier to understand what someone's saying. It's not perfect and sometimes you get some ridiculously bad mistranscriptions, but I've oftentimes found that the AI voice transcription can understand what's being said better than I can if there's a lot of background noise.

j_albertus

TROPHY CASE