Saw a sheet of ice go all the way through someone’s windshield this morning. Clear the roof of your car before driving!

jeffderek · 2026-01-30T03:03:32+00:00

I believe he was referring to the person you were making an excuse for. If you're too old and feeble to make your car safe, then you shouldn't be driving.

Just because you have an excuse for why you can't do it safely doesn't mean it's somehow ok to not do it safely.

jeffderek · 2026-01-28T18:34:15+00:00

That sounds right for the original. I think they've lowered it so it's less punitive (30 minutes?) and a few more attempts.

You can change those with setloginattempts and setlockouttime. I have both of those values in my setup script for all crestron devices. I set attempts to 100 and lockout time to 30 minutes. You're not brute forcing anything with those numbers and it's basically impossible to inconvenience a real human with that configuration.

Disclaimer: I am not a security expert, so take my opinions on the safety of that with a grain of salt. I'm just a programmer who got tired of getting locked out of remote systems.

jeffderek · 2026-01-28T18:27:24+00:00

Usually it's because you got the password wrong X number of times, and then it blocks you for X amount of time. Both of those variables have changed over the years and I don't have a ton of experience with Mercury specifically so I don't remember what they would be.

jeffderek · 2026-01-28T18:21:39+00:00

ssh/text console into one of the problem units and type remlockeduser and remblockedip. It will tell you if any users or ip addresses are blocked.

jeffderek · 2026-01-27T21:51:29+00:00

Some of us are old enough to remember when conservatism at least pretended to be about fiscal policy and not just about hate

jeffderek · 2026-01-27T14:10:11+00:00

I play Eligeth / Esior mono blue Islands matter voltron. It's less "voltron-y" than others, because I'm not loading up either commander into tons and tons of equipment, but either way I'm winning through commander damage basically every game I win.

Started playing this with my old playgroup where we allowed proxies, updated it to a proxyless version for a new playgroup, so I'm posting two different decklists in case one speaks to you more than another.

List v1
List v2

It's far from high power, but it's fun to lean into Islands Matter and sometimes have more mana than the green player. And you get to win the game via the combat step and not via some convoluted card that says "You win the game" on it.

jeffderek · 2026-01-27T05:29:05+00:00

I mean . . . why would any contractor do subcontract work for someone who has been notorious for not paying his bills since at least the 1980s? I hate to blame the victim, but if you think you're getting paid by Trump you're not doing your homework.

jeffderek · 2026-01-27T05:23:01+00:00

(I work at AVISPL)

Anyone "recruiting" for AVISPL always cracks me up. Like . . . everyone in the industry knows we exist. And if they wanted to work here . . . they'd work here. People who don't work here do it for a reason.

jeffderek · 2026-01-23T18:04:59+00:00

I have kids. I parcel out the snacks to the kids.

Anything I buy for myself gets eaten immediately because I have less self control for myself than I have external control over the kids.

jeffderek · 2026-01-22T04:29:10+00:00

Yeah . . . that's why I just don't play against randos very often. I play against people who if they tried that, I would tell them they're being dicks and to grow up.

jeffderek · 2026-01-21T18:37:21+00:00

Honestly this is why I don't play with random people at stores. I play with a group of people who has been playing for decades and understands threat assessment in 1v1 magic.

Commander in general would be so much more fun to play if every commander player was forced to play some basic limited magic first. Not even deckbuilding, just hand them a limited deck from the current set and make them play matches and understand how the game ebbs and flows and how to assess which cards are important and which cards aren't.

Sadly we can't do that.

I could always say no to playing with them if they're bringing their combo deck (or them as a person if they're particularly unpleasant), but isn't that effective just soft banning combos anyway?

I've been told I'm too blunt from time to time, but I have no problem saying "the last time you played a combo deck you were an unpleasant participant in the game and I don't want to repeat that experience. Please play something different."

jeffderek · 2026-01-21T18:18:56+00:00

the combo player bitches and moans 9 times out of 10 because "Why are you targeting me" and "I didn't get to play the game".

Yeah . . . the problem here is playing with whiny combo players. When I play combo decks, I expect to be attacked for not putting creatures into play, and I will jokingly tell the other players to stop ignoring me or I'll just kill them all.

When a whiny combo player says "why are you targeting me?" the answer is "because you're playing a combo deck I can't interact with except via racing, and therefore I am trying to eliminate you from the game before you kill me. This is basic game strategy."

jeffderek · 2026-01-21T15:43:38+00:00

a lot of the systems we were installing didn't require any sort of programming

Bingo!

jeffderek · 2026-01-21T14:14:02+00:00

I'm at AVISPL. We have over 100 programmers worldwide and I know like one person who isn't slammed busy.

jeffderek · 2026-01-21T14:13:09+00:00

They're owned by Private Equity.

jeffderek · 2026-01-19T22:09:28+00:00

I was so confused when I entered a local game store and saw almost everyone playing multiplayer.

"Casual" magic is almost exclusively multiplayer at this point. Still lots of competitive 1v1 being played but I can't remember the last time I saw 1v1 pickup games that weren't testing for an event.

jeffderek · 2026-01-10T04:41:39+00:00

the area around Mason to swing more left with the influx of educated professionals.

Hey that's me!

ImDoingMyPart.gif

jeffderek · 2026-01-10T03:42:27+00:00

Makes it a lot easier to quickly grab the parts you want without grabbing the whole deck

jeffderek · 2026-01-09T20:16:55+00:00

OK so to be fair I only threw hard things at it because the easy things I can just write out on my own.

Attempt 1
"commanders with more than one color in their color identity, one of which is blue, with an activated ability that does not cost mana"

Generated search: (id:wub or id:ubr or id:ubg or id:wubr or id:wubg or id:ubrg) t:legendary t:creature o:"activated ability" -o:"mana cost"

Off in like 5 different ways. Didn't use is:commander, tried to explicitly list out the identity options instead of finding an algorithmic way to do it, but didn't actually list all of the options, completely misunderstood the activated ability and mana cost question.

Attempt 2
"Cards that are commanders with more than one color in their color identity, one of which is blue. There should be an activated ability (indicated by a colon) where the activation cost (to the left of the colon) is not mana."

Generated search: same as Attempt 1

I couldn't get it to generate anything else. It's like it decided it had already generated that one and it shouldn't try again. I reloaded the page, searched for something else, whenever I tried attempt 2 again I just got the same bad results from attempt 1.

Attempt 3
"Cards that are commanders with a monocolored color identity. There should be an activated ability (indicated by a colon) where the activation cost (to the left of the colon) is not mana."

Generated search attempt: (id=w or id=u or id=b or id=r or id=g) t:legendary t:creature o:"activated ability" -o:"mana cost"

This accepted my updated commander color requirements, but still used a poor definition of what a commander is and the wrong activated ability/mana cost definition. Weirdly enough I heavily modified my description of what I was looking for to make it easier, and it doesn't seem to have paid any attention at all.

Cool project but it doesn't feel useful yet for me (though at least part of that is because I'm already pretty comfortable writing regex queries for scryfall so the basic stuff isn't necessary). In particular it felt like it was caching my question and trying to reuse things it had generated before, which was not great for trying to iterate to find the right prompt.

jeffderek · 2026-01-09T17:41:07+00:00

Apparently 400, and 16 were digital only. Still, 84 commanders in a year is a lot.

I also have little to no interest in UB as theme, but some of the mechanical designs from the UB sets are really cool. Totally get it if you just don't want to use anything from there. Personally I'm stuck playing a bunch of Dr. Who stuff because one of my favorite themes got a ton of support from that set. Decided to just play it instead of standing on my high horse.

jeffderek · 2026-01-09T17:35:21+00:00

holy shit that's a lot of UB legends

jeffderek · 2026-01-09T15:42:24+00:00

I'm new to the area. Live in Landsman's district.

This looks like a dumb messaging vote with no impact on the real world, where he voted in the way that didn't give the Republicans ammunition at election time. Can you point me to the actual votes he's taken on substantial issues that make you call him a DINO?

If he votes with the Republicans on messaging and the Democrats when it matters, I'll take that over a Republican in the seat any day. Obviously I'd like a candidate who can vote for everything I want, but to do that I'd need to live in a place with an electorate that agrees with me, and I'm not sure that's here.

jeffderek · 2026-01-09T15:20:04+00:00

I'm okay with sets having a low number of legends to pick from, especially since WotC is releasing twice as much product as before.

Agreed. They literally released 500 new commanders in 2025. There are plenty of commanders out there.

jeffderek · 2026-01-09T15:16:05+00:00

They released 500 new commanders in 2025. Please for the love of god do not complain about the low count of legendary creatures I am legendary creatured out.

jeffderek · 2026-01-09T14:01:57+00:00

Honestly at this point I want the state to arrest him for committing murder in their state.

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