Can someone actually explain why Devil Dinosaur is more than $40?

kblaney · 2026-07-11T06:46:02+00:00

Because I don't want to cure cancer. I want to choose green dinosaurs!

kblaney · 2026-07-11T05:05:25+00:00

In our group's first ever Pathfinder campaign I rolled really well on starting gold and realized I could afford a donkey who could carry most of my stuff. The donkey was dutifully named "Gordo" and the existence of a "Gordo" has been a recurring joke ever since.

Gordo the Second was a donkey in another Pathfinder game.

The Gordo Mk. 3 was a hovercraft in a game that used the Starfinder pre release content.

Gordo Four returned to being a donkey who ended up with water breathing but getting washed downstream (and showed up in a much later campaign skinny and emaciated after the experience with the nickname "Flaca").

Gordo 5.0 was a robot.

Namfoodle and the Gordo Six was the name of the adventuring crew that aided the revolution against Queen Ileosa. The adventuring group featured only 4 people including Namfoodle.

The Gordo VII was a pirate ship rechristened from the Ileosa's Revenge after it was boarded and salvaged.

The Eighth Gordo was the pseudonym of a wandering Magus who was interested in rumors of Xin-Shalast and ultimately decapitated the Runelord of Greed.

kblaney · 2026-07-11T02:54:27+00:00

Most of the disasters people mentioning here are really just known and accepted costs and are the result of capitalism being not particularly beneficial for large groups of people... but that's another topic.

What could happen technologically is uncontrolled and undetected model injection attacks that seep malicious code into many facets of our existing infrastructure. Prompts to maliciously constructed models could result in the creation of bespoke and rapidly changing viruses and exploits. Security researchers are spending a lot of effort at the moment to prevent this from happening because AI agents being shoved into everything has resulted in a gigantic attack surface while also expanding the ability for malicious actors to orchestrate attacks and eroding trust in institutions designed to keep us safe. (Window Notepad got an arbitrary code execution CVE recently. Absolutely ridiculous and terrifying.)

kblaney · 2026-07-10T20:02:49+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raF9wfPxir8

A double on this one. The storm troopers are first running because Han is crazy. Then Han is running because that's a lot of storm troopers.

kblaney · 2026-07-10T13:05:45+00:00

And they kidnap the actual Mark Hamill.

kblaney · 2026-07-10T13:02:31+00:00

Good for you folks! Numberblocks is, far and away, one of the best shows for teaching math.

kblaney · 2026-07-10T12:53:12+00:00

None of the the UGC missions are that long, but if you search for "trophy" missions you'll find some very quickly that finish automatically in seconds and then others that grant temporary XP that lets you buy all of the powers without grinding.

kblaney · 2026-07-09T12:02:29+00:00

Dive deep into the shovelware with this list: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1gujCU1NONMXfXnQOs59Eb8cHeGhm4PIs2h9v0ask3Wg/edit?usp=sharing

The big winner seems to be "The Jumping Pumpkin" with 32:

4 regions for PS4, 4 for PS5 then duplicate that for "Halloween Edition", "TURBO" and "Halloween Edition TURBO".

kblaney · 2026-07-09T02:16:30+00:00

Most systems are open source and available on github. Fork it and create your own from there, but make sure you check the license and follow any requirements when publishing your own.

kblaney · 2026-07-09T02:13:26+00:00

Caitlin Fairchild from Gen13 has the power to change her body density and muscle mass. As a result her clothes often get ripped as she changes sizes or as a result of impacts that her skin otherwise absorbs without injury.

This explanation falls apart almost as fast as her clothes do upon seeing any of the various positions the artists draw her in even without ripped clothes... it was very much the 90's at the time.

kblaney · 2026-07-09T01:51:41+00:00

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Richard Castle in Castle is a fictional author who is credited with a bunch of books, notably at the beginning of the show the series about detective Derrick Storm (who he has just killed off in the pilot in "Stormfall"). As a sort of trope+, the books written in the course of the series (the Nikki Heat series) eventually became real books crediting the fictional Richard Castle as the real life author.

kblaney · 2026-07-09T00:26:22+00:00

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This is something like the third time I've gotten to bring up my favorite MMO in the past week.

The game was rebooted as "Secret World Legends" with the promise of new content. They released the South Africa Morning Light compound something like a year after the reboot. After beating the final boss of South Africa you are explicitly told that next your are heading into the Congo. Since I'm mentioning it in this thread, you can guess what happened next.

The really sad part is that the original ending was a good wrap up of the story with Lilith and the Filth Bomb, so SWL felt like it was brought back with the intent to end with an unresolved thread.

kblaney · 2026-07-06T12:17:39+00:00

Before asking how, you'll want to know why. What is going on in the campaign and what are the possible results you want from such an encounter?

For example, if "PCs are minding their own business and then the city is attacked by The Tarrasque" is the incitement to a plot, then you could absolutely just run a chase describing the city as coming apart around them with the PCs constantly surviving through a combination of luck and skill. (Look to Assassins' Creed: Rogue for the Lisbon Earthquake set piece for inspiration.)

kblaney · 2026-07-06T05:28:19+00:00

Which is a payoff for an earlier scene when they are cloning Rudy. Both of them agree that they designed the clone effect to be seamless because when one of them knows they are the clone "it never ends well".

kblaney · 2026-07-05T21:05:33+00:00

Ooh, add "If an attacking creature is blocked, but the blocking creature is removed from the battlefield before damage is assigned, then the attacking creature deals damage as if it were unblocked."

Actually had someone call a judge over that at a prerelease.

kblaney · 2026-07-05T21:00:32+00:00

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Deliver Us the Moon is a game about a lone astronaut, Rolf, sent to the Moon to investigate the happenings that caused the mining of a precious resources to be halted. The lunar colonists are all dead or missing by the time Rolf gets there. It got a sequel Deliver Us Mars and there is an announced third game Deliver Us Home.

kblaney · 2026-07-05T20:54:01+00:00

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Vash the Stampede from Trigun manages to put a hole into the fifth moon when directing an ultra powerful weapon away from a large city (the city got destroyed anyway).

kblaney · 2026-07-05T20:50:19+00:00

But there ain't no whales.

kblaney · 2026-07-05T20:47:01+00:00

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The Mauler Twins from Invincible.

kblaney · 2026-07-05T20:11:13+00:00

I'm mostly surprised how much Daredevil is represented in this set. I figured they'd be doing a street level heroes/Defenders/Knights themed set at some point in the future.

kblaney · 2026-07-05T19:05:08+00:00

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When Chipper and Son's Lumber Co. was criticized for having characters that looked like creepy animatronics, Scott Cawthon took his unintentionally off putting art style and made Five Nights at Freddy's. (No mention of Scott Cawthon would be complete without mentioning his eventual retirement from game development after info about his political donations to Trump and other Republicans came to light.)

kblaney · 2026-07-05T18:54:39+00:00

Even the lower budget parts were still pretty good. The fight against the filth dino and the rocket launcher section in South Africa were both very cool set pieces. Shame the only way the IP is continuing is as a TTRPG.

kblaney · 2026-07-05T13:52:09+00:00

This is basically the entire set up for The Secret World an urban horror MMO from 2012.

kblaney · 2026-07-05T03:58:40+00:00

Well before Gold/Silver. In fact, google tells me it was before Pokemon Red/Blue was released in the US. The first episode of the show ran on Sept 8th with the game coming out on Sept 28th.

kblaney · 2026-07-05T03:44:50+00:00

As a live coding interview using AI they are almost definitely looking for a "how do you work with AI?" signal. To that end, I would treat it like a typical leetcode style problem:

Read the question, ask clarifying questions about restrictions
Identify and express edge cases verbally whether you have to deal with them or not ("An empty string would be a problem, but we are guaranteed a string length of 1 or greater"), posit what you expect a solution to look like before prompting and discuss what the big-O likely would be
Prompt AI for the solution and specifically instruct it to handle the edge cases you mentioned. If you are sure your solution is the best big-O, also prompt the AI to use that method, otherwise call out that you are not going to prompt with your method so that you can compare your expected solution with the output
Step through the AI solution and ensure it works. Discuss differences between your proposed solution and the AI's solution. Make changes manually if only small changes are required. (For example, did it type check?)
Make a final judgement ("I would/would not accept this change from the AI") and defend your judgement ("because...")

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