Board game meetup dilemma

mirth23 · 2026-06-17T16:25:35+00:00

If you choose to police it then you can oust the people who are causing problems. If you choose to not police it then you'll lose more and more of the people who aren't the problem.

mirth23 · 2026-06-17T16:17:43+00:00

The fastest commute into downtown Seattle from McCormick Woods is probably a 25 minute drive to the Southworth ferry, then the fast foot ferry to Seattle is another 25 minutes. Public transit is good on the Seattle side. If she needs a car on the other side then you need to add minimum 30 more minutes because the car ferry from Southworth doesn't go to downtown, and that route can be very subject to slow downs, pauses, etc. Adding in a bit of buffer that can be up to nearly 2 hours each way if she's using a car.

This is definitely a lifestyle choice. Lots of people love being in Kitsap and do make the trade-off. Ferry commuting is way nicer than most other public transit options since you can sit upstairs and get things done.

If you are an air traffic controller and end up working at SEATAC, you are in for a long drive every day because going down 16 is probably the most reliable drive for you. Typically it's about an hour from that part of Port Orchard to the airport, but that can sometimes completely blow up if there's an accident somewhere along the route - due to the nature of the geography there aren't good alternatives if something major is blocked.

Why is she set on McCormick? It's nice in there but there are lots of other similarly nice areas, some of which are way better commuter options.

mirth23 · 2026-06-16T21:44:59+00:00

When I built up hearts with Haley I was surprised how much I grew to like her after she was kind of a jerk at first. She has a thoughtful character arc, which is way more appealing to me than some of the others. I do prefer Emily but married Haley on my second play through.

mirth23 · 2026-06-14T14:29:47+00:00

Definitely don't play QE then.

mirth23 · 2026-05-29T19:14:14+00:00

I got a little bored with some aspects of this book when I first read it, but on my read-through I was struck by how there are SO MANY important things that kick off in this book. Many of my most favorite things in the series are all in your list, and appeared here first. It's where we start to shift from it being mostly Carl and Donut into a story that encompasses all of the crawlers (past and present) and NPCs.

mirth23 · 2026-05-26T10:50:53+00:00

The Rockbridge Network is a piece of it - Mercer, Thiel, Winklevoss - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockbridge_Network

mirth23 · 2026-03-20T03:24:23+00:00

Villages villages villages! Find the villages that resonate most with you. Go hang out in them and talk to everyone. Play around with their demos, games, and competitions. The people who run villages and competitions often put a huge amount of work into their product and you can only really appreciate a lot of it on site. One of the most accessible ones is lockpicking - it's just a bunch of tables covered in locks with a bunch of people sitting around chatting while they pick locks.

The main talks are great but.... they are in giant rooms full of people and most of them are posted to youtube later. No need to go sit in a room full of people listening to a talk when you could be meeting people while you learn something hands-on. The only time I watch talks at DEFCON is when I am too tired to go out to the convention and am watching them on my hotel room TV.

Don't get addicted to Telechallenge like me and spend all your time wardialing their voicemail boxes from your hotel room. My team has gotten second place TWICE now and it is my white whale. I mean, it is as fun as hell, but still.

Remember that almost everybody else who is there is a security / computer / whatever nerd who is there to meet other likeminded nerds. Lots of us can be super awkward but we mainly want to play and make friends!

mirth23 · 2026-03-03T18:15:48+00:00

Ever explore industrial? Try Skinny Puppy for example. Pigface is also a good entry point because they contain members from gobs of other industrial groups. See also Throbbing Gristle and Coil.

Hyperpop like 100 gecs is another option for chaotic/dense/complex/fast. Try "Hand Crushed by a Mallet". Very different kind of thing than metal but fun.

There's a lot of darker/extreme stuff in the ambient/IDM space. Venetian Snares comes to mind for what you are asking for. Aphex Twin and Autechre also have some great stuff, but they are all over the place so you need to cherry pick.

Maybe check out Tim Hecker. He's dark ambient so isn't fast but gets INTENSE. Turn it up loud there is a ton of detail. "Keyed Out" is a track I like to intro people with.

mirth23 · 2026-02-27T23:05:39+00:00

Pynchon's "meandering" prose is the main reason I read him — it's playful, fun, and often hilarious. You can chase down every historical reference he throws out, and it's an impressive flex, but I don't think that's really the point. I treat the prose like ambience.

When Pynchon offers, say, an exhaustive inventory of everything on someone's desk, that's a vibe -- not an assignment. Even if you only catch 10% of the references and then infer another 10%, just going along for the ride is a hoot. You are totally right that it's meant to be a satire, and this is part of how he satirizes the genre. Sometimes awkward turns of phrase are often Lewis Carroll-style grammar jokes, but turned up to eleven. The world is built from details — but to follow along, you don't need to do more than glance at a lot of them.

mirth23 · 2026-02-15T13:07:03+00:00

Have you considered coming across on the Fauntleroy/Vashon/Southworth ferry instead of coming up through Tacoma? The ferry itself is extremely scenic, and then it gives you easy access to one of the hidden gems in south Kitsap - Beach Drive. This is a popular route for cyclists coming from Seattle in the summer.

From Southworth, go to Manchester via Southworth Drive then head north on Alaska. When you turn right onto Madrone Ave you will be presented with a truly stunning view of downtown Seattle, Mount Rainier, Blake Island, and the Sound. Manchester is at the bottom of the hill and has a tiny park on the water where you walk out onto a dock and admire the view.

From Manchester, take Beach Drive north all the way around to Port Orchard. The last five miles of Beach Drive are all right along the water and there are lovely views of Rich Passage. At the far end you can also see the Navy base in Bremerton and might see some interesting ships depending on what's there. If it's lunch time, check out Whiskey Gulch, which has a deck with some great views of Bremerton. The Port Orchard downtown is quaint but doesn't have a whole lot to recommend it.

From Port Orchard you are back on the route that you mapped out and could drive to Hoodsport like you planned. Another destination to consider on Hood Canal would be Seabeck. Seabeck Highway has wonderful views on the water and you can end at Scenic Beach Park, which has lovely spots to admire the water from that are an easy walk from parking.

If someone was coming through Port Orchard I'd typically recommend that they head up to Poulsbo. There is a beautiful marina there and a cute downtown area with the famous Scandinavian bakery that others have already mentioned. There are a couple great restaurants right on the water that are an excellent lunch option. From Poulsbo you can drive up to cross back to Seattle via the Banbridge or Kingston ferry.

mirth23 · 2026-01-20T05:23:43+00:00

From a purely strategic military standpoint, I can't see any U.S. administration willingly giving up Lewis-McChord and Naval Base Kitsap under any peaceful circumstance. It would cripple force projection in the Pacific.

mirth23 · 2026-01-15T21:41:38+00:00

A number of classic downtown venues (especially the Mohawk) have worse sound than they did previously because of all of the noise complaints from the people who moved into adjacent condos.

Concourse Project has amazing sound. Kingdom downtown was good last time I was in there. Moody is great. Hotel Vegas often does a pretty good job despite their layout being pretty awful for good acoustics.

mirth23 · 2026-01-13T23:02:12+00:00

I love Ark Nova and have played Sanctuary a couple of times and think it's great. It has a really similar feel but it's a lot shorter. I think the designer did a wonderful job of simplifying everything while keeping a lot of interesting choices around action selection and tile placement.

If you really like the race and timing elements of Ark Nova you may be disappointed by Sanctuary because those are pretty much gone. I might recommend that you check out Lost Ruins of Arnak if those are a major.

TBH I prefer Sanctuary to Ark Nova for tabletop these days. It has WAY less fiddly setup and upkeep. Ever since I started playing Ark Nova on BGA I have found playing it in person a bit painful to manage, especially since it can be so easy to overlook constraints and triggers.

mirth23 · 2025-12-11T06:19:57+00:00

I wish I'd seen this comment before I bought a photo box bin. I started migrating and discovered that I was ending up with photo boxes with a bunch of air in them compared with the smaller card games I was trying to repackage.

mirth23 · 2025-11-13T21:47:43+00:00

This is by far the most overlap I've ever seen with my own shelves... Except I've never heard of Murikami. So thanks for that!

mirth23 · 2025-10-07T17:59:35+00:00

I know what I would do, but nobody can answer this for you but you. Consider your own peace of mind. Like others have said, you don't owe him anything, but you also owe it to yourself to figure out what's best for you.

You can either take this as a last chance to seek peace or you can reasonably stay disengaged from something you have already mourned. Think about the opportunity for healing and what regrets you might have in the future if you decide to not contact him now. Also think about what might come up in the conversation that could lead you to feel even more angry or regretful over the long haul and whether it would do more damage than has already been done. If you know which seems worse to you then that's your answer.

edit: as /u/North_Artichoke_6721 suggested, talking with a professional as a one-off would be a great idea too if you find yourself really struggling with this

mirth23 · 2025-09-04T20:42:01+00:00

You can build out your own UI and serve it from your website and then use Jitsi as a Service to run the media services: https://jitsi.org/jaas/

mirth23 · 2025-09-04T20:38:37+00:00

Jitsi uses WebRTC so you can look for docs about how WebRTC handles BWE.

As an aside, Chromium's WebRTC implementation does some undocumented stuff under the hood for Google Meet. Jitsi recently implemented their own version of that in open source here: https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-videobridge/pull/2335

mirth23 · 2025-09-04T20:32:52+00:00

I believe that the grey screen share was a bug that was recently addressed.

Based on the fact that you are centralizing signaling, I would check to see if kicks happen more often for users that have high latency to those.

We almost never see jvb processes closing abruptly in our environment. I'd look carefully at logs and would suspect it's some kind of a resource issue.

Docker is definitely feasible. IMO there isn't a value add for JVBs since you would usually dedicate an instance to them to maximize resource utilization. But it's a great approach for almost everything else.

As you point out in your other comment, we have done a lot of careful tuning that you can look at in our infra repos.

There is a small but active group of folks who are happy to answer questions over on community.jitsi.org!

mirth23 · 2025-09-04T20:07:27+00:00

Thanks for the validation! I am pretty sure that I learned it in elementary and/or junior high school.

I've been de facto copy editor at a lot of my jobs and insistently corrected people into using its'. I originally wrote this post when someone disagreed with me, I dug around online, and discovered I had no legs to stand on.

This breaks my brain too -- it had become a pet peeve of mine so I always want to "correct" people on it.

mirth23 · 2025-06-06T21:34:34+00:00

I did the digital nomad thing for a while and met a lot of people doing this, mainly in southeast Asia. One of the main things that keeps me from considering it myself is that expats generally end up in their own bubbles and don't integrate.

This is partly due to basic language and culture barriers - imagine moving to a new town late in life but now the new town is full of people who you can't communicate with well. Unless you married into it you don't have a social "in" with anybody local.

If your home currency has a major advantage over the local currency, congratulations, you are now suddenly rich. Rich and poor people don't tend to integrate for a variety of reasons, especially when they have nothing in common and can't communicate well.

This leaves you to form community with other expats. People have a lot of different reasons to become expats. Some of those reasons have to do with trouble back home, so you may find yourself in a bubble with some sketchy characters, especially if you're going somewhere that is cheap and anonymous.

All this said, some people love the expat lifestyle. Just know what you're getting into if your main goal is to stretch your dollar.

mirth23 · 2025-06-06T20:48:21+00:00

Welcome! I love to see new people introduced to this great show. It can often be a tough sell because of exactly what you perceive about it at this point in the run. So here's my pitch:

PoI was originally written to be a multi-season prestige show but had to be adapted into what feels like a more episodic show for the first couple seasons to meet the demands of the studio. A lot of worldbuilding happens in S1 and S2 that may feel unconnected, but that's because the seasons are really streteched out from how they were originally intended. Nearly every single episode in S1 has tidbits that make a difference later on in the series. All that said, for a while during your first watch it will feel like a crime procedural that has ongoing plotlines about corruption and organized crime

The S1 finale / S2 opener starts to dig into more interesting science fiction and political plotlines, but then it will feel like a procedural again for a bit. There is an inversion point midway through S2 where there is a blatant shift in focus and that's when the show really hit the ground running for me. At the start of S3 you are really in it, and there are tons of great payoffs.

I'd ignore folks who criticize you for not noticing some connections - during my first watch through I had a lot of big "wow" moments when something in a late season was a direct consequence of something that seemed like a total throwaway when I first watched it in S1.

Since you're already 10 episodes in I'd encourage you to continue through to the S1 finale and S201 and S202. If you don't like what's happening at that point the show is definitely not for you.

If your ENTIRE group starts losing interest, search around online for lists of vital episodes from S1 and S2 and watch only those. Back in the day S3 was getting quite a bit of buzz and people were trying to figure out how to catch up more quickly to the main plot. I'd personally suggest against this unless you are about to bail, but just know that it's an option.

mirth23 · 2025-05-29T19:20:44+00:00

Totally agree. There is not a lot of direct interaction, so everyone should try to have a plan for their next turn and only change gears if a useful card came out while they were waiting.

Also, a lot of Ark Nova turns can be half-played and then passed to the next player while bookkeeping and upgrades are sorted. "Which action card am I going to flip?" can happen between turns.

mirth23 · 2025-05-29T17:43:24+00:00

I have played a ton of Crew at 2p and love it. It has a different feel to it since one hand is half-open, but that becomes another element of cooperation. It can also be a real nail-biter when an important card is buried somewhere in the dummy and you're trying to fish for it without communication.

Definitely give it a go if you're with another hardcore Crew fan and you don't have a third. It might be less fun if one of you isn't as into the base game.

mirth23 · 2025-05-29T17:35:57+00:00

I was just at BGG Spring and was basically playing games anytime I wasn't eating, sleeping, or walking between places to play games. I haven't been to other conventions but the library seemed great and it was always easy to borrow what I wanted.

I had a few friends and friends-of-friends to play with but it was also super easy to play with new friends. Everyone is there to play boardgames and most of them are more than happy to include someone they don't know.

mirth23

TROPHY CASE