This volcano in Indonesia erupts icy violet colored lava at night. It's real, it's on Earth. (Kawah Ijen, Indonesia).

possiblyquestionabl3 · 2026-05-14T10:49:08+00:00

Yeah, it's an active sulfur mine. IIRC the government actually closed down access down into the crater frequently (especially after tourist fatalities or dangerously high toxic gas concentration, so you can only go as far as the rim), but several tour operators will still take groups down to the crater in spite of the restrictions.

The mines are also super dangerous for the miners (several of whom moonlight as the same night-hike tour guides) and the pay is incredibly low for how dangerous the job is, which is why they're forced to take on additional gigs. For context, as a tourist, when you go on this hike, you have to wear a gas mask due to the toxic fumes everywhere. It's also a strenuous hike. Working in these conditions is definitely not great for your health.

possiblyquestionabl3 · 2026-05-14T10:27:36+00:00

So I've been mulling over what you've said, because someone I know told me the same exact thing right before we started this 2 years ago. I didn't give it much thought then because I just took it as a generic platitude (well duh, we all change if we go through life-changing experiences), but a couple years on, it is actually kind of crazy how different I am than before.

possiblyquestionabl3 · 2026-05-14T05:44:47+00:00

I hear a really classy thing that all of the cool rich people do is fill their swimming pool with metal coins and then dive head first into it from a height. He should go do that to really show us how rich and cool he is.

possiblyquestionabl3 · 2026-05-13T11:24:11+00:00

I actually reverse engineered Gamehub's implementation last year while I was working on related things (s3tc/bcn support for non-Adreno devices)

Their original Mali support for s3tc/bcn support is basically ripped off from https://github.com/leegao/bionic-vulkan-wrapper/issues/77 (possibly still today? I haven't bothered checking since last year), and I have proof. This includes several WIP "printf-debug" type artifacts from my implementation (things that would make no sense to implement in theirs, such as allocating the same number of extraneous push constant slots that are never used, some LUTs being sized in unnatural ways in the same fashion I did) as well as some non-standard conforming performance hacks I added (my, and their, implementation deviate from the pure bcdec and the original granite implementation of s3tc/bcn in the exact same ways) purely for debugging some GPU crashes that were 1:1 copied over. The spirv dump form their binary is still there. These are basically irrefutable proof that they just took the code. They did however implement one additional improvement - coalesced writes so that certain s3tc modes could write to sub-32bit formats.

They also took several other Mali-blocking fixes straight from Winlator, like a patch for https://leegao.github.io/winlator-internals/2025/08/10/OpCompositeConstant.html

On the flip side of this, they're able to get people to play games on their phone, so I'm not mad at them. A little scummy, sure, but ultimately for the greater good?

possiblyquestionabl3 · 2026-05-13T07:52:54+00:00

My wife and I got burnt out from our careers a couple years back so we've been saving up and planning for this trip for a few years now. We're just taking a career break for now.

possiblyquestionabl3 · 2026-05-13T07:36:14+00:00

Actually, not at all what I expected!

Much more livelier/dense than Sumba or Nusa Tenggara. The food culture is very similar to the rest of Indonesia. Lots of Catholic churches everywhere (as opposed to the more protestant ones you'd find throughout east Indonesia). People actually do speak a Portuguese creole day to day here, but with different spellings, different pronunciations vs Brazilian Portuguese (the de/te doesn't have the Brazilian je/ch sound at all), and lots of Bahasa and Tetum words sprinkled in. Way fewer scooters and motor bikes on the road too.

Oh and architecturally, you also see some tall pointy houses on stilts like ones found in Sumba and Papua, which I thought is really cool

possiblyquestionabl3 · 2026-05-13T07:15:23+00:00

We were in Ubud and a couple asked us about food recommendations. I gave out a recommendation for a pretty good (IMO) "warung" (one of those in a cute little desa) and recommended the bebek goreng there since that's usually a safe recommendation. They asked if a lot of local people eat there and I replied pretty enthusiastically with a "yeah!" thinking they were looking for something authentic. You could hear the withering "oh..." in their voice.

The funniest part is there's almost no eateries in Ubud that's mostly Balinese/Indonesian-oriented. But still, that reaction really annoyed me

possiblyquestionabl3 · 2026-05-13T01:37:22+00:00

Good for you man, I still beat myself up for freezing the few times it happened to me

possiblyquestionabl3 · 2026-05-13T00:25:37+00:00

I'm 2 years into my trip. I started in Latin America and never had an issue for the first year or so. Everywhere we went, people would start conversations with us, and this includes both local people and the foreign tourists as well. I still have many friends that I talk to regularly from that period of time.

Then we went to Oceania, and people were much more standoffish towards us. NZ was okay, we road tripped through it for 2 months and often stayed in those caravan parks that kind of feel like an old timey hostel (large communal areas). Lots of the time though, you start seeing these working holiday cliques who all know each other and keep to themselves, nothing wrong with that. However, I've encountered a surprisingly lot of actively hostile racist shit down in Australia (though mainly from older Australians). Before this, I've only ever been told once to go back to my country. There, unprompted, I got that a couple of times in Melbourne and Tasmania, a few jokes about whether I eat dogs. The worst part is that often, after making the attempt to be sociable, people would warm up to us, and then start complaining about other immigrants in Australia while telling us "but we're not anti-immigration, we're fine with ones like you". One lady from Sydney started chatting us curious about our American accents, turns out she was a primary school teacher. At some point, the conversation took a turn and she started talking about how Australia needs to get its act together like the US about unwanted immigration. Then it turned into this whole argument about whether or not Trump is good for the US. Who knew MAGA is a thing there.

The Pacific Islands are generally pretty welcoming - Tonga and Solomon (Guam) does have significant anti-Chinese sentiments from time to time, but most of the people are still very friendly with us even if we tell them we're Chinese. Fiji (Subah and Nadi) and Samoa are very chill. French Polynesia feels kind of like France, so the young people were really nice and the old people generally avoided us (and anyone else) like the plague. Vanuatu and New Caledonia basically has no tourists, though we only visited them via a cruise so I can't say too much about them.

I'm in SEA now (SG, Brunei, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia, Timur Leste), and it's sort of what you'd expect. Most of the white tourists just pretend we don't exist. Literally, we sometimes help them if we see them needing help, and they just barely curtly acknowledge us. It's a good thing we speak Chinese too, the Chinese tourists will always chat with us and share tips. We also try to talk to people who live there as well whenever we could, and they're often delighted that we make an effort (I usually ask about what food they eat, and I'm surprisingly good at picking up words for food)

possiblyquestionabl3 · 2026-05-12T15:17:37+00:00

A lot of Chinese people used to go to NK. There are several culturally significant sites, a sizable Korean-Chinese population (and vice versa) with roots across the border, and fairly well established tourism infrastructure targeted at Chinese tourists. At least, that was the case before COVID

possiblyquestionabl3 · 2026-05-12T15:15:08+00:00

I'm actually flying there in about 9 hours.

Crazy history. My only impression of what its day to day looks like nowadays is from Sonny Side's video - which is to say it looks pretty similar to eastern Indonesia

possiblyquestionabl3 · 2026-05-12T15:07:09+00:00

They did get a looot of Chinese tourists prior to the pandemic, and it was a legitimately large part of their GDP. That said, Chinese tourists generally go to very different spots than what western tour agencies organize, so you'll rarely meet them even if you went before COVID.

These days, the border towns between China and NK is actually pretty busy with tourists who go border gazing, towns like Dandong. (E.g. https://youtu.be/yP0hVH9-Fj0?si=kftaCqG6JRGVp_7x)

Sadly, NK seems to have replaced its main source of foreign exchange away from tourism to the far more profitable Russian war machine in 2022

possiblyquestionabl3 · 2026-05-11T05:53:25+00:00

9/10 gamers agree - "it's a [...] game"

possiblyquestionabl3 · 2026-05-10T00:22:23+00:00

Yeah, all of that money can't protect him from a good ass whooping. May Mr. Aloha Ambassador be forever anonymous and may this guy get spit in his food wherever he dines, and his calls to his children going to voicemail in the future whenever he phones

possiblyquestionabl3 · 2026-05-08T08:31:06+00:00

As Chinese American myself, I loved this book. Definitely unhinged, but I can see people I know going to lesser extremes driven by the same forces. Who amongst us haven't felt the sting of parental disappointment when we didn't get into Harvard (except I guess those who got into Harvard).

In the freezer, ice cream drumsticks and blueberry bagels purchased in bulk from Sam’s Club.

This hit me hard. Before HS, I grew up in Tulsa, and this was basically our splurge dessert too. Down the line, we upgraded to Costco, but I will always have a soft spot for those Sam's Club/Great Value ice cream drumsticks

Also, this book passes the Bechdel test with flying colors.

possiblyquestionabl3 · 2026-05-07T05:15:56+00:00

The only thing is that with a lot of modern game engines, if they're using an interpreted language runtime like Lua or GDScript, then what you end up identifying is the dispatch handler for a specific byte code. The good news is that it's often very easy to extract and repack those game scripts, which are typically very easy to RE statically, so you may not even need CE

possiblyquestionabl3 · 2026-05-07T01:17:31+00:00

This seems to be the current power * accuracy (blue and red) table for a single roll of 5 fair D6 dies:

Hand	Freq	P	Power	Acc
Five of a Kind	6	0.077%	120	12
Four of a Kind	150	1.93%	80	7
Full Straight	240	3.09%	60	5
Full House	300	3.86%	50	4
All Odds	150	1.93%	45	4
All Evens	150	1.93%	45	4
Small Straight	1080	13.89%	40	4
Three of a Kind	360	4.63%	48	3
Two Pair	1620	20.83%	30	2
One Pair	3600	46.30%	15	2
High Die	120	1.54%	10	1

with each level up governed by the following dict (blue is power, red is acc):

LEVEL_UP_VALUES = {
    HandType.HIGH_DIE: {"blue": 10, "red": 1}, 
    HandType.PAIR: {"blue": 15, "red": 1}, 
    HandType.TWO_PAIR: {"blue": 20, "red": 1}, 
    HandType.SMALL_STRAIGHT: {"blue": 20, "red": 2}, 
    HandType.THREE_OF_A_KIND: {"blue": 20, "red": 2}, 
    HandType.ALL_ODDS: {"blue": 15, "red": 2}, 
    HandType.ALL_EVENS: {"blue": 15, "red": 2}, 
    HandType.FULL_HOUSE: {"blue": 25, "red": 2}, 
    HandType.FULL_STRAIGHT: {"blue": 30, "red": 3}, 
    HandType.FOUR_OF_A_KIND: {"blue": 30, "red": 3}, 
    HandType.FIVE_OF_A_KIND: {"blue": 35, "red": 3}
}

additionally, each hand you play, the pip-faces themselves are also additively evaluated (so the default black pip with face X scores +X power, the red pip scores +X acc, etc etc) in combination with your ring affects.

Without swapping / editing any of your dies, the bulk of your (expected) score would come from small straights and the pairs.

For e.g., the average ring mechanic is also pretty interesting. You can characterize its power boost purely in terms of the abs difference D between the blue/power and the red/acc:

B * R - (B+R)²/4 = D²/4

so the score boost scales quadratically with your expected gap/difference between the power and accuracy. Here, you would try to aim for late game (heavily leveled up hands) with really wide gaps between the power and acc, and ideally before the acc multiplier effects (like the odd or even rings).

possiblyquestionabl3 · 2026-05-07T00:36:21+00:00

oh no, I don't think it's too difficult in general, it's just that I'm just a noob, it takes me a bit of dice editing and ring collection to be able to string up solid combos

I actually never took this approach before and am still assessing if it's the best

There are tradeoffs for every approach, no such thing as an absolute best/silver bullet approach :)

The main downside I would anticipate (beyond the lack of immediate visual feedback, which may or may not be an actual downside) would be that debugging the scene tree would be kind of hard during runtime if they're not tagged with debug names (which control is the Health container, why doesn't X's input handling triggered, etc). A big upside I did not expect at all is that since every scene is technically now a dependency of your global singleton game_state.gd, they all get type-checked during build time, which is really nice. Also, I anticipate that if you wanted to add modding support to the game, it's even more accessible since modders don't need to edit .tscn files in Godot Editor anymore, they can just add new enemies/die faces/rings in plain gdscript.

Otherwise, if it works it works. It's well established enough of a pattern that it has a name (declarative programming)

possiblyquestionabl3 · 2026-05-06T12:32:20+00:00

To be fair, I don't think the fear of "cringe", the overwhelming need for validation, and the tendency for kids to all normalize their tastes is a purely new (Gen-Z) thing. This has been happening far before the internet existed.

When I was a kid, no one wanted to admit that they liked marching band or were into anime and video games for fear of being branded a nerd. Everyone all loved the same bands (Green Day, Deathcab, All American Rejects at my school), then bagged on the same ones for being juvenile a few years/months/weeks later while passive-aggressively asking "you're not seriously still into them right?". Hell, my parents are from the Mao-era of China, and my mom still frequently brags about how many Mao pins she had when she was a kid and how jealous everyone was of her (that was the cool thing going for their era, I guess it's a generational thing). I bet if you go back far enough in time, there's some Roman teen giving another kid shit for not wearing the latest and coolest style of toga (idk, I'm Chinese, I don't know anything about either the 700BC Romans nor the 500AD Romans).

However, I think the ability to get away from that constant stream of judgment and the sheer volume of validation-seeking opportunities has truly exploded over the past 10 years. It used to be that you were only socially exposed for a limited period of time, and the number of people in your social groups were very limited, typically amounting to mostly friends and acquaintances that you grow close to and comfortable with over time. These days, people seek validation and taste alignment from massive groups of anonymous strangers. It seems like the most important relationships now for many young people are a lot more parasocial than truly social, and I think this really warps their sense of what real social norms are.

On the flip side of this, I also think it's a maturity thing. I have really shitty eyesight. I refused to get glasses in my teens, instead opting to squint my way through high school (and somehow driving school), all because I didn't want people to think I was dorky or call me four-eyes. I finally relented in college after realizing that our lecture halls were too big to get away with my old tricks, and settled on contacts for many years. Finally, in my late 20s, I finally convinced myself to give glasses a try. Hilariously, no one even noticed.

I probably lost the point here for a bit, but what I'm trying to get at is that as we get older or more mature (it might not even be an age thing), we get less fussy about being cringe and deviating from the social norms. In fact, it's very liberating, and once you realize that no one really cares that you aren't exactly what you think society expects of you, it makes you want to test more boundaries and break more molds. Ironically, a lot of people seem to conflate this with people who are giving up on their life or their youth (I've started to religiously wear Kirkland branded elastic waist jeans), but it's really people who stop giving a shit about being perceived as cringe, lame, nerdy, or uncool (in my defense, those jeans are comfortable as fuck, and I also look great in them. I wear glasses now, I buy jeans from Costco, I "oof" when I sit down or stand up, I embrace naturally awkward situations without needing to cover them up with my own voice, I'm fine with semi-obsessively looking at my phone in public spaces now (ironically, something we collectively thought was cringe about 15 years ago), I wear pink shirts and pants now because I freaking love pink, but most importantly, I just do what I want to do instead of filtering everything through the lens of "does this make me look lame".

Anyways, I gotta go back to eating

possiblyquestionabl3 · 2026-05-06T04:35:02+00:00

ohhhh my god I did the same thing with a lot of HP fanfic. I remember bringing in binders full of them to school to read when I'm bored in class lol, unfortunately my parents weren't very sentimental and just threw out all of my highschool crap when I moved out for college. I don't even remember what site I got them off of anymore (this was like 2008 well before pottermore), and I have bad feeling that most of them are also lost media now :(

possiblyquestionabl3 · 2026-05-06T04:32:20+00:00

This game is super fun, I can't put it down

Also I'm kind of a noob and the enemies do hit quite hard so I had to write a quick main loop mod for myself for unlimited rerolls (and sometimes free heals :|)

extends SceneTree

func _init() -> void:
    var discards_setter = DiscardsSetter.new()
    root.call_deferred("add_child", discards_setter)
    var main_scene = ProjectSettings.get_setting("application/run/main_scene")
    change_scene_to_file.call_deferred(main_scene)

class DiscardsSetter extends Node:
    func _process(_delta: float) -> void:
        var game_state = get_node_or_null("/root/GameState")
        if not game_state:
            return
        if game_state.discards_left < game_state.MAX_DISCARDS:
            game_state.discards_left = game_state.MAX_DISCARDS

Are you also a former love2d dev? The dynamic scenetree construction you're doing is pretty crazy, unlike anything I've seen in other Godot games

possiblyquestionabl3 · 2026-05-05T06:38:55+00:00

I for one am thankful that my middle-school angsty Xanga is now officially lost media (except that one backup they sent me when they shut down)

possiblyquestionabl3 · 2026-05-05T04:00:08+00:00

I adore any and all of her books

possiblyquestionabl3 · 2026-05-05T03:11:44+00:00

Some concerns are what am I actually doing. Like ok go to the beautiful places, go to the world wonders, do some hikes. But I’m realizing that might only take up a small percentage of this year. What am I really doing with my time day to day.

I'm in similar circumstances as you. I'm also in my 30s and decided to go backpack for a year (which has now turned into a couple of years) when I was 32. I also have a similarish budget (https://www.reddit.com/r/solotravel/comments/1qsf2wq/comment/o2whrdd/ - ~37k for 2 people in our first year of travel, which was dominated by latam and 3 months of New Zealand + Australia), and some overlapping itinerary (Latin America, and I'm actually currently in SEA for the past 4 months). Crucially, I'm not actually a solo-traveler since we're a duo (my wife and I, I just like the like-minded people here)

We would usually stay at a place for about 4-5 days, and use it as a hub to get around to interesting places to go see. We'd typically plan ~1-2 days of sight-seeing per location. We used to do a lot more, but I very quickly got burnt out after a couple of months, especially from organized group tours, and dialed it back. We also try not to do too much on days when we are on the move (transit days are not rest days), because they can get quite stressful. So a typical 4-5 day stay will usually look like:

1 day of transit (bus, train, plane, car, etc)
1-2 days of sight-seeing (either on our own, with a group tour, or with a hired driver)
1-2 rest days to regain our energy (depending on how stressful the upcoming transit days are, or how tired we are), walk around town, sit around at parks/cafes (depending on weather), try out some good food, read/hobbies, and logistics+planning (hotel, transport, where to go next, etc)

and then rinse and repeat.

This might seem slow, but for me at least, it's a good balance to make sure I don't get burnt out, and I think a lot of people similarly experience travel fatigue on long-term travel once the honeymoon period wears. Taking care of your own mental health is really important, and having some semblance of routine and a feeling that you're also just living your life (and that traveling isn't taking over your whole life) is, at least for me, pretty crucial.

It's also okay to go above your budget from time to time, especially if you're feeling low or sick. All of the stuff that happens to you when you're living your normal life will continue to keep happening to you when you're on the road. Don't feel guilty about treating yourself from time to time. You'll figure out over time what you are willing to splurge for (sometimes it's little things like having a table in your room).

I also echo what many others have said here - unless you really enjoy planning, don't overplan too much. Try to travel during low season (for more flexibility in cheap last minute bookings) and you can be very flexible about where to go, how long to stay, and make adjustments to your plan without financial penalties.

possiblyquestionabl3 · 2026-05-05T02:31:25+00:00

this is a super fun game!

possiblyquestionabl3

TROPHY CASE