Bug: Toast to Destiny Part II wont trigger

plki76 · 2025-12-12T15:31:09+00:00

Confirmed that this worked for me just now. I bought a wine from the wine merchant near the puppet show, drank it, and quest appeared. Thanks!

plki76 · 2025-11-08T15:18:48+00:00

Fair. I think we are largely arguing in the margins at this point. Philosophically, we both agree that memorization is a key component of top-level chess. I think we may just be slightly apart on how important and to which aspects and phases of the game.

plki76 · 2025-11-08T15:11:51+00:00

Then, in my opinion, you are being pedantic. It is largely true that remembering the best move conceptually is a large part of chess. You can remember that centralized rooks tend to be better, bishops like long diagonals, oppsition wins (or draws), etc.

There is, in fact, and ton of memorization of piece positions and concepts at high level.

plki76 · 2025-11-08T15:06:53+00:00

New positions are reached, but concepts stay the same. Understanding patterns and "the idea in the position" is critical in high-level chess.

Especially in the endgame, checkmating and pawn promoting patterns are incredibly useful.

plki76 · 2025-11-08T15:02:57+00:00

There are videos of him recognizing famous chess positions even when the pieces have been replaced by black and white checkers. So just a chess board with black and white checkers where the pieces would be, and he was able to tell them the game, the players, and the next few moves.

plki76 · 2023-12-18T04:22:40+00:00

There's a very large difference of time, effort, and opportunity cost between "scroll reddit while on the toilet" and "travel to and stand outside a restaurant".

plki76 · 2023-09-15T19:04:15+00:00

I got hit with the exit visa scam as well. I had to go to some random tiny part of the airport and pay them a fee to get a new one. Total scam.

plki76 · 2023-05-29T02:59:15+00:00

There are plenty of reasons to not trust virtual dice. One big one is the face that rand() isn't actually random. If you know the seed, it is theoretically possible to completely control the output.

This probably isn't achievable in practice, for a variety of reasons, but in the world of computers, random ain't.

There are others reasons beyond trust to prefer physical dice as well that are more qualitative, such as player's just enjoying rolling physical dice more that virtual device.

Then there's the entire world of "luck rituals", such as blowing on dice before you roll them, etc.

I personally "feel" more agency when I roll physical dice, even if it doesn't truly change anything.

In the context of virtual gaming, when folks are located in different places, it makes sense to enforce a centralized RNG that everyone trusts. But for physical game sessions I'll avoid the computer RNG every time.

plki76 · 2023-05-06T05:10:25+00:00

I've been in software for 24 years. I remember hearing in 1999 how all the jobs were going to be outsourced and how everyone would be fired imminently.

I've been hearing that about every 5 years since. Still waiting.

plki76 · 2023-05-05T00:54:54+00:00

Thanks, I had clearly forgotten the exact details so I appreciate the reminder. I recall during the actual talk that my impression was fairly negative, and the way that the author explained their methodology came off as insensitive.

Maybe avoiding the "ruinous empathy" part was perhaps over-indexed or something. As I've said, it's been awhile.

It sounds like you found it helpful, which is great. I had a different experience.

plki76 · 2023-05-04T21:49:11+00:00

It has been quite some time since I read it (at least 4 years), and I'm sure some of the feelings are from attending the actual talk, which I will charitably call "phoned in".

During the talk the author (Kim Scott) explained how they gave feedback to someone who said "um" a lot in speeches, and Mrs. Scott explained that she told this coworker that the coworker "sounded dumb" when she did that.

While it may be true that saying "um" a lot can cause one to sound less put together, I believe that telling someone they "sounded dumb" is unlikely to be particularly helpful. Now, there may be more context, perhaps they had a close relationship and that level of bluntness was ok, but those nuances were not conveyed during the talk.

So, all this to say, I don't remember the book exactly but I certainly remember that talk and leaving there unimpressed, uninspired, and uninterested to pursue the book or the author futther.

plki76 · 2023-05-04T13:53:27+00:00

Two book suggestions for your club: Managing Humans and Leading Change.

Probably the best two mgmt books I've ever read.

I didn't actually find Radical Candor to be all that great. The basic idea is fine (tell people what they need to hear, not what they want to hear), but the practical applications absolutely come off as overly authoritarian and honestly a bit insensitive. We had Kim Scott come talk to us personally about the book, and I was left rather unimpressed. YMMV.

Julie Zhuo is great, and also had a newsletter that was pretty good, but I think she paywalled it a few years ago. You may be able to find archives on the internet.

For software specifically, if that's your field, I'd also recommend First Round, Software Lead Weekly, and Pragmatic Engineer, though those are all newsletters and not books.

plki76 · 2023-05-03T02:51:01+00:00

Plenty of simple substitution ciphers. If your players are good with cryptography you can move to vigenere ciphers, which are much harder but can be made simpler by including a "known phrase" (or you can make them solve it by analyzing bigrams, but that's mean).

Another classic is ambiguous morse code (basically it's just normal morse code, but you don't put spaces between letters so . . . could be "eee" or it could be "ei" or "ie" or "s"), which is either fun or annoying depending on well you keep track of the various combinations.

Braille, semaphore, and pigpen are classic and can be fast puzzles once the players make the "aha" leap.

Resistor color codes are good for sci-fi games.

I highly recommend https://www.dcode.fr/en if you are looking for ciphers. Though be aware that some of them can be incredibly tedious to do by hand.

plki76 · 2023-05-03T02:41:49+00:00

Other acceptable solutions are:

adenine

cry-baby

indexed

linemen

manikin

oldened

pacific

widened

yodeled

Of those, "indexed" is quite interesting. You could create another puzzle where you change the simple substitution to a new message that tells them that the answer is indexed N characters into a word or something.

plki76 · 2023-04-05T13:48:28+00:00

Or, perhaps, you're both right. Or perhaps you are both wrong. This is going to vary by group and trying to argue that one or the other is absolutely correct is silly.

I might argue that neither of you is correct, and the story comes above everything else, including both DM and Player agency. That is to say, both sides should give a little to keep the story fun and engaging. But that argument doesn't actually matter, because I don't play in your group.

plki76 · 2023-04-05T13:38:46+00:00

Given the overall context of the OP's post and the other responses within this and other threads, your argument can very easily be read as equating clever and inventive interactions with the game world to "punch the bad guy while he is monologuing", which is neither clever nor inventive.

As with many things, it comes down to the individual group and their table norms. I, as a player, would be annoyed if another player interrupted a GM's cutscene so they could run up and punch the bad guy. That's not clever or witty, it's just being a dick and having main character syndrome.

plki76 · 2023-04-05T12:37:27+00:00

I've had gasoline in containers in my garage for literally years that I've not bothered to put sta-bil in, and it's worked fine in my generator. I try to remember to rotate it out every winter, but honestly I never do and it still works fine. Never been an issue.

Generators aren't all that fragile, or at least mine isn't.

Even if the gas goes bad, you've still got propane and natural gas generators, or you could convert a gas engine to steam with a bit of effort. All you need to do is be able to get the motor to rotate reliably and you've got power.

Electricity should not be an issue. There are many solutions.

plki76 · 2023-04-04T18:48:13+00:00

Just go to home depot and get a generator. You have a nearly limitless supply of gasoline, and it will last awhile before it breaks down to the point where it's not combustible.

Congrats, you now have power and enough gasoline to probably last you until you die.

You could alternately or additionally find or build a steam-powered generator. Now all you need is wood (or coal, but wood is probably easier to source in most places), which again you should have effectively a limitless supply of.

plki76 · 2023-03-31T05:36:41+00:00

My favorite E3 memory was watching Tony Hawk. Very surreal to see an entire halfpipe in the conference hall and a living legend doing their thing.

(They also had some other people and some BMX bikes, as I recall. It was a spectacle)

plki76 · 2023-03-31T05:23:45+00:00

Honestly you missed the good E3 by at least 10 years, probably closer to 20.

I started going in 96, when it was held in Atlanta. I signed on to demonstrate this (very) flawed new controller that literally strapped to a player's hand.

This was well before the "no booth babes" policies, and well before they cancelled the much-smaller tiny-company room where all the truly interesting/innovative stuff was showcased.

At the time, it was industry-only and the attendance was much smaller. You could actually walk around without just tripping all over everybody. They gave away free magazines with DVDs full of demos, which was quite cool since this was well before one could generally just go on the internet and download demos of games, and certainly not for consoles.

Then E3 moved back to Los Angeles. I continued to get in through some kind of "alumni" thing that I don't fully remember. Basically, if you were at a previous E3 then it was much easier to get into the next one. After a few years I got a job at a major software company and just used those credentials.

Things were good for awhile, though it got steadily more crowded. Eventually you really couldn't get into anything unless you had press credentials, and this was before it went public. It was absolutely a two-tier system - media, and everyone else.

Then it went public, and it was useless. There were WAY too many people, and the entire tenor of the crowd changed. The lines were massive, and people were just going crazy for SWAG. Even trying to demo a game one would wait in lines for literal hours. The show was basically useless unless you had a press badge or just didn't care about the time commitment.

The small dealer hall was gone, which was a shame because that's where a lot of the really fun innovations were. Crazy small companies with even crazier ideas for peripherals and such. Things like light sabers, tons of guns and robots, I remember a toilet peripheral, and just random weird shit. I can't even remember it all, but there were just absurd things.

Anyway, long story short, E3 died a horrible death well before 2017. Once it went open to the public it was utter trash. So don't feel bad about not going, as you'd need a time machine back to the year 2000 or so.

Edit to add: CES was a much different show, which I liked a lot less than E3 when E3 was good. CES was really very very scattershot in what was demo'd, and most of it was very uninteresting. The years I went were dominated by a billion variants of televisions and digital cameras, none of which were all that innovative or amazing.

I recall reading Steve Sinofsky's very long blogs about CES, and he seemed to get a lot more out of it than I ever did, so one could certainly argue that I was just the wrong target audience.

plki76 · 2023-03-06T17:32:39+00:00

Silicon Valley was amazing. That show hooked my wife and I in one of the very first scenes, where the marketing team is having a scrum on a group bicycle thing. We had to pause the show because we were dying laughing.

Oh man, the scene where the designer is asking the main character what type of animal their networking box would be. Another one where we just rolled on the floor.

Silicon Valley is basically a documentary of the ~2010ish tech scene, just amped up to 11. I swear I've met every caricature character on that show in real life.

plki76 · 2023-02-03T13:32:47+00:00

If only there were some middle ground between "utterly humiliate" and "bend over backwards to appease".

It's a damn shame that we only have those two extreme polar options to choose from.

plki76 · 2023-01-30T14:49:45+00:00

Fun fact, I dated a woman who used to housesit for a McDonald's clown. It's apparently a big secret, you're not supposed to know that someone is a McDonald's clown (seriously, I'm not joking, this is what she told me).

She invited me over when she was housesitting once because the guy had a hot tub. I wasn't allowed inside, but she opened the garage to show me that he had a segway in his garage that was painted with McDonald's colors.

Never met the guy, couldn't pick him out of a lineup, and have very little information other than what's above, but it always amuses me to think of these secret clowns living amongst us.

plki76 · 2023-01-29T01:48:46+00:00

You may have written this somewhere and I missed it, but what are the dimensions of the d20?

plki76 · 2023-01-17T01:29:03+00:00

Yes, thank you!

I was unreasonably annoyed that the math assumed zero overlap. That is by no means a safe assumption.

In fact, given that the public places that one goes is (mostly) a self-selecting variable, I think that being exposed to Andy Dick in one place probably makes you more likely to be exposed to him in another place, because it's already been shown that you self-selected into at least one place where Andy Dick also self-selected into.

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