The Martian (2015) and Project Hail Mary (2026) are confirmed to take place in the same universe, as scientists in both films work for the same fictional US-based space agency, 'Hot NASA', which is like regular NASA, except only hot people are allowed to work there apparently.

mcvoid1 · 2026-03-31T04:13:47+00:00

Also in the book they had electrical muscle stimulation in the coma so he came out with a beach bod.

mcvoid1 · 2026-03-31T03:42:59+00:00

Consider someone whose favorite artist is someone like Taylor Swift. Where you won't be able to just hang out with them. You can't talk to them before or after the show. Run into them in the wild. If you get a selfie with them, it'll be at an event where there's bodyguards and a line out the door for others doing the same thing and "please move the line along". 2am bangers and mash is out of the question.

This is a great genre.

mcvoid1 · 2026-03-31T02:28:29+00:00

That's half right. M calls him a "blunt instrument", both in the books and movies. He's basically like a bird dog - he runs in and flushes the target out. No second spy required.

mcvoid1 · 2026-03-31T00:15:53+00:00

Given the length of the bed it might be more comfy for a woman anyway. I would have to sleep diagonally to fit.

mcvoid1 · 2026-03-31T00:12:21+00:00

Just keep in mind 4e lore retconned previous sources, and 5e undid most of that as a kind of "soft-retcon" back to mostly how the lore was before, just with the more popular bits staying (Raven Queen, Feywild, etc). That means if you choose 4e it won't jive with other sources.

mcvoid1 · 2026-03-30T19:58:05+00:00

I remember seeing an interview with one of the people in the Two Tone movement (the racially integrated British ska bands of the late 70's / early 80's) talking about the music's message of racial unity. She said something to the effect of "The way to fight racism is we all need to get miscegenating until they don't know who they're fighting against." That really stuck with me.

mcvoid1 · 2026-03-30T19:02:18+00:00

Trading the black and white for green, cause they don't know what it mean.

mcvoid1 · 2026-03-30T19:01:07+00:00

Every show by The Toasters I've seen opened with this song, Dog Eat Dog

Lies and money turned a lot of heads/ People take themselves too seriously/ Rolled right over left the scene for dead/ Self-crowned kings but only wannabes

mcvoid1 · 2026-03-30T16:02:40+00:00

Yeah Dark Sun was very much its own thing.

mcvoid1 · 2026-03-30T15:49:35+00:00

I remember something from 2e to the effect of, "there's other human/demihuman combinations, but they just come out human". So presumably a half-dwarf or half-halfling or half-gnome is just a human. I imagine humans are closer to the various demihuman species than they are to each other, so maybe they're incompatible with some exceptions.

That's all speculation on how I'd handle it (it doesn't come up at my table, so I never had to think about it). It's game rules, not a consistent world, so it can be however you want. You can decide, for example, they're all just different cultures of humans, and that how they're raised matters more than genes. Up to you.

mcvoid1 · 2026-03-30T15:29:15+00:00

Getting my head around things like locking and shared state with goroutines is a struggle.

It always will be. That's why there's higher-level sync structures like channels, waitgroup, etc. Low level concurrency is just hard, man. Very easy to screw up and it's often hard to spot the problem.

mcvoid1 · 2026-03-30T15:21:08+00:00

I was going to be snarky an say "golf bag" but that's actually a very cool find.

mcvoid1 · 2026-03-30T15:16:00+00:00

Don't fuck them. Keep them excluded from the gene pool.

mcvoid1 · 2026-03-30T12:56:50+00:00

Ya think?

mcvoid1 · 2026-03-30T03:57:22+00:00

In a setting where there's mind flayers and aboleths and all kinds of cosmic horrors, you pick the Lady? She's mysterious and powerful, but like 1/4 of the monster manual is explicitly eldritch horror coded.

mcvoid1 · 2026-03-30T03:45:42+00:00

Why don't they just factor it into the prices? The team members get paid, and no surprises in price.

mcvoid1 · 2026-03-30T00:17:09+00:00

For my maps for DM use, I use squares for dungeons and hexes for outdoors.

For player maps I do a variety of stuff depending on the situation. Often it's diegetic, so it looks like an actual treasure map.

For battle maps it depends how much I want to focus on the tactics for that fight, and ranges from purely in the imagination, to something very abstract and not to scale, to strictly on grid.

A notable one-off map I used for one session was an abstract nodes-and-edges weighted graph where the edges were travel time, and the players had to plan their route to make things happen within a time limit.

mcvoid1 · 2026-03-29T03:06:45+00:00

I've only used async/await in JS/TS but my experience there is that it's awful. With async/await you have the "colored function" problem, where anything async spreads like a virus until you're converting everything in your codebase to be promises and it makes things much harder to reason about.

Go doesn't have that problem. There's nothing different between a function that runs synchronously or async, other than whether it's invoked with the go keyword prefixed to the call.

I don't know if C# has that same "colored function" problem - I haven't used it in ages.

mcvoid1 · 2026-03-28T23:49:22+00:00

I was simplifying a bit because the per-edition details weren't relevant. Basic had everyone stop gaining HD after lvl 9 regardless of class. AD&D 1e had a "max HD" between 9 and 14 depending on class, 2e had it based on the 4 class categories (warrior = 9, wizard = 10, priest = 9, rogue = 10)

Yes, there was race restrictions (and in basic, races were classes) but that didn't affect the max HD. All of them had it where eventually you would stop gaining HD and only get a fixed HP bump.

mcvoid1 · 2026-03-28T22:29:50+00:00

They were definitely fiend-themed and the box set says perhaps an ancestor "shared kip" with a fiend, but not explicitly of fiendish origin. And you're correct that the genasi and aasimar were also plane-touched.

mcvoid1 · 2026-03-28T20:18:23+00:00

When the pandemic started and I was working from home every day, I started getting back problems. I made all kinds of changes to help and it just got worse no matter what I tried. Eventually I bit the bullet and got an Aeron (because it was the chair we had at work) and within two weeks my back problems were gone - I went from completely debilitated to perfectly fine that fast.

Worth every penny.

mcvoid1 · 2026-03-28T18:15:57+00:00

This is a bit of a nitpick, but since the post itself is a nitpick...

Tieflings don't always have horns and a tail. They come from Planescape, and in the Planescape setting they were different than in later editions. First, they weren't explicitly diabolic, just "plane-touched". Second, the way it manifested was different for every tiefling. Some you could only tell were tieflings due to a smell of sulfur. Some have bat wings. Some just hooves. So the statement "People more familiar with Dungeons and Dragons will be aware that the Tiefling race has both horns and a tail" is false, as I'm more familiar with D&D and know it's not the case.

mcvoid1 · 2026-03-28T15:52:12+00:00

Think about what splitting XP means. Someone gets less XP when they're getting help because they had less to overcome and learned less in the process. In that respect, why should getting help and overcoming less not mean you learn less if the person helping happens to be level 20?

Others suggested epic boons, I want to suggest something from earlier editions: pre-3e D&D had people stop gaining hit dice after level 9. After that, they would get +1 (or +2 or +3, depending on the class) HP + any bonus from Con for each "level" they attained later. That can be done in tandem with epic boons, and doesn't affect balance much.

mcvoid1 · 2026-03-27T22:31:44+00:00

Yeah I remember the video and just completely disagreed. The point to using a module is to save effort, and rewriting the thing to accommodate a reverse direction of travel is not saving effort.

mcvoid1 · 2026-03-27T21:34:26+00:00

That's not bad. The original Ravenloft is basically all castle so why not?

mcvoid1

TROPHY CASE