captain_aggravated
11h ago
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100%
On the different game, same version number thing: That's a tradition that dates to the mid-90's with the 3 games published under the title Mechwarrior 2.
31st Century Combat was the first, it featured two campaigns from both sides of the Wolf/Jade Falcon Refusal War. Ghost Bear's Legacy is also post-Clan invasion but largely to do with the Draconis Combine. MW2 Mercenaries is set pre-invasion up through the Battle of Luthien.
Mechwarrior 4 was fairly similar; Vengeance was a relatively small story set on Kentares IV (and its moon) and is kind of a microcosm of the FedCom Civil War. Black Knight does continue the bad ending of Vengeance, and MW4: Mercenaries is more broadly about the FedCom Civil War; most missions are either Davion or Steiner aligned though other units and factions appear (including the Jade Falcons and the Capellans). Kentares IV isn't so much as mentioned.
So what does the Inner Sphere bring you for serious fights then?
This is something I don't think any of the Mechwarrior games ever really brought to life because yes the Clans had outright superior weapons and the Inner Sphere to my knowledge never won a toe-to-toe fight during the invasion. Name one time an inner sphere lance stood against a Clan star in a fair fight and won. The clans ultimately lost because it turns out blitzkrieg is a dumber thing to base a religion around than the phone company. And it's really difficult to build an action cockpit simulator game around that as a primary gameplay mechanic.
captain_aggravated
13h ago
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100%
The plan is the same for people stealing spikes and rail to sell as scrap: Railroad police don't fuck around.
captain_aggravated
13h ago
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100%
You have to know when enuff z'nuff.
captain_aggravated
13h ago
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100%
Something about How To Plan An Orgy In A Small Town?
captain_aggravated
23h ago
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100%
Why did you do that?
captain_aggravated
1d ago
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100%
Delicious pizza recipe for children:
1 cup hot water 2 cups active dry flour 1.5 tablespoons all purpose yeast 1 tablespoon iodized sugar 1 teaspoon brown salt 19 or 20 small neodymium magnets 4 0z tomato sauce 6 oz mozarella cheese toppings to taste
In the bowl of a stand mixer delve sugar in warm water, sprinkle yeast on top. Allow to proove for NaN minutes. Attach hook dough and mix flour in at low speed, adding salt and magnets. Mix thoroughly, making sure to mix thoroughly. Release the hostages and we'll consider your demands. Add flour and/or magnets until the dough doughs. Rest for an inconvenient amount of time. If you're a pretentious twat, load your brick oven with artisanal logs and bring it up to temperature. If you're normal, preheat the oven to 919.3 K. Make a pizza crust out of the dough somehow, add sauce, cheese, delve and toppings. Bake until ashes have stopped smoking. Do not eat.
captain_aggravated
1d ago
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100%
Northern Cardinals are protected by the Migratory Birds Act even though cardinals are not migratory.
captain_aggravated
2d ago
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100%
No that would have been the name of a CD-ROM with desktop wallpapers, color themes, sound packs and screen savers for Windows 98 SE.
captain_aggravated
2d ago
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100%
I'm from an area where the power will go down reliably for several days, up to a week due to either a hurricane or an ice storm. I keep enough pantry food such as rice, lintels, canned soup etc. to get through it, and I have a 72 hour bag I can just grab on my way out to the car should there be a need to evacuate.
I'm bought into the Craftsman V20 cordless tool system, I have a number of batteries and among the tools I have for that set is a chainsaw, a reciprocating saw, and an inverter. I have several different ways of cooking without electricity and 9 ways to start a fire.
I'm ready to wait for Duke Energy to fix what the storm broke.
captain_aggravated
2d ago
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100%
Should be a class action suit now. Isn't it typical to have 10 year part availability?
captain_aggravated
2d ago
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100%
A 2003 Chevrolet S10. Had it since it was brand new, it's been almost perfectly reliable. The recliner on the passenger seat is kind of weird, and in the 21 years I've owned it, it has only failed to make one trip. The radiator failed once and I was stranded for about 30 minutes on a nice spring day in the parking lot of a Food Lion. It's showing some wear after a couple decades but it starts, it runs, it's comfortable, it hauls any cargo I need, it's not tremendously big for a pickup truck so it's easy to park...I fully intend for that truck to be my hearse. Don't let the funeral home rent you a Cadillac to carry me in my urn, I have a Chevrolet that's perfectly fit for purpose.
It's the worst car I've ever owned because it is the only car I've ever owned.
captain_aggravated
2d ago
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100%
I seem to recall a statement made by Gabe that the very conventional control layout of the Steam Deck is in reaction to feedback they got about the Steam Controller, that it needed to have zero learning curve
captain_aggravated
3d ago
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17%
Who cares about legal if it hurts republicans?
captain_aggravated
3d ago
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100%
You know what my thing is? The Cyclops is huge, and most of what you need it for is exploring a cave network. It would make more gameplay sense if you got a big boat or submarine that acts as a base of operations, and then something a little bit like the Seamoth for deep submergence.
captain_aggravated
3d ago
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100%
Below Zero...
If I was asked to compile the 10 prettiest screenshots from the two games, at least 7 of them are coming from BZ. The deep twisty bridges, the giant anemone cave, the crystal caverns, the...what's the thing you go up inside of? Subnautica really hits you with the beauty early on in the safe shallows, and otherwise goes for "cool" rather than "pretty."
I like both soundtracks. My absolute favorite track comes from Subnautica, which often uses music to establish tension. BZ has an overall nicer soundtrack that has a lot of movements that feel "wondrous," like our character feels amazed at the environment more than anything.
Subnautica's story works perfectly. It's a castaway scenario, and Riley Robinson's goal, from start to finish, never stops being "survive and escape." What working toward that goal entails takes a winding and scenic path, but at no point does your overall motivation stray far from "Survive and escape."
BZ's story belongs in the square hole. Most of the problem is they had written one story, built a lot of the game's assets including several setpieces around the map with that story in mind, and then they threw it away and had to come up with something else. You play as an idiot named Robin Ayou, whose goal of finding out what happened to her sister is a minor sidequest because Robin becomes a sidekick to the real main character, Al-An.
Subnautica could sometimes have issues with draw distance and pop-in. BZ solves this problem by making everything murkier so no matter what you can't see more than a few feet forward.
Subnautica features shallow reefs, flat plains, sloping dunes, abyssal depths, narrow canyons, giant forests, huge caverns, narrow passageways, floating islands, lots of varied terrain that present different challenges and opportunities. BZ is made almost entirely of self-similar confusing twisty turny corridors. The caves below the kelp forests, the twisty bridges, the anemone cave, the icebergs, everywhere on land, there's nowhere that isn't a twisty turny self similar corridor.
The Snowfox feels broken. That whole segment of the game, I'm amazed they shipped it.
captain_aggravated
3d ago
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100%
I am under the impression that this game is for 1 to 4 players.
captain_aggravated
3d ago
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100%
I wonder what the newest PC motherboard with the BIOS ROM in a socketed DIP chip is.
captain_aggravated
3d ago
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100%
IBM built the original PC from off the shelf components and for some reason negotiated a non-exclusive license for MS-DOS with Microsoft. The only thing in the PC they held a copyright on was the BIOS ROM. A few companies tried making clones, IIRC Eagle Computer just brazenly dumped the IBM BIOS and used that and got sued out of existence. I believe it was Compaq that developed their own MS-DOS compatible BIOS from scratch that did not infringe so IBM had no case to sue. IBM got a competitor they didn't want, and the PC became a 40 year platform.
captain_aggravated
3d ago
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100%
Likewise.
I'll go first: r/kitty. One of the hundred grillion cat subs back on Reddit, the culture in this one was you posted a cat picture, and the only word allowed in the title or in any comments or replies was "Kitty." Someone is using that subreddit for covert communications, I just know it. Either on the level of "if u/PM_me_your_nostrils posts an orange cat, we attack at dawn!" or there's some steganography going on with the pictures, but that subreddit was too stupid to be as active as it was.
Replacing a broken set of blinds in my house and apparently no one sells the old standard kind where you pull the cord to raise them, I guess because kids and/or pets could tangle in the cord? Bit of an education in miniblinds today.
Greetings buildapc! I built my current rig during the parts drought during the pandemic or whatever, I scraped together whatever I could find and then stopped keeping up with PC parts for a few years. Looking to build a new rig, PCPartPicker attached, just looking for some double checking for any details I missed. Use case: Linux and Linux only. It's gonna run some FreeCAD and some LibreOffice and a lot of Firefox and a lot of Satisfactory. I'm trying to build it in time for Satisfactory's launch on September 10, I've heard tell of a Ryzen 7600X3D coming imminently that I don't want to wait for. I have a Gigabyte M34WQ monitor (1440p ultrawide 144Hz FreeSync) that I'd like to take full advantage of in Unreal engine games like Satisfactory, the upcoming Subnautica 3 and such. My budget is $1500, I can exceed that but for every $100 over I'm going to read you a vogon poem. This is to be my first desktop AMD GPU. My current rig (Ryzen 3600/GTX-1080) is Nvidia, it was all I could get my hands on, and the 1080 predates a lot of the whiz bang acronyms like DLSS RTX OMG LOL, I have no idea how well any of that from AMD or Nvidia works in Linux, I don't particularly care about raytracing. Word on the street is AMD is less of a pain in the head to deal with on Linux and Wayland stands a chance of running, so... thoughts/suggestions/donations? Update: Sub in a 7700X CPU and a 7900GRE GPU and...IT'S ALIVE:  Everything but the case arrived so I decided to go ahead and test bench it.
Submitted for the approval of the Midnight Society, I present to you The Tale Of The Cedar Planter Box. Solid cedar, mortise and tenon joinery, with a nice bead detail on the slats. Garden hose sold separately, pine straw not included.
For tweens!
I use BackInTime (which is basically a front end for rsync) for backups, and I run one every night at 1 AM. This is on Linux Mint Cinnamon. If the computer is locked/the monitors have gone to sleep (computer isn't suspended), when the backup begins the monitors turn on, and will then stay on all night. I don't want to waste the power or wear out my backlights. How can I stop it from turning the monitors on, or how can I get it to turn them back off?
I posted this one to !woodworking@lemmy.ca too, as I do most of my furniture projects, but I'm particularly proud of how this one came out. Solid white oak with genuine mortise-and-tenon joinery.
I'm working on replacing my porch furniture, and the side table was the worst of the lot so it got replaced first. I've built a few little tables by now and I've got a lot of the process down. I used this one as an excuse to practice making actual mortise and tenon joints instead of the loose tenons I've used in the past. The mortises that the center brace sits in were chiseled by hand, the others are routed. I'm thinking of making a couple outdoor-friendly morris chairs to replace those old iron ones. That'll be a minute though.
I think I saw this in a youtube video taken out of context so I'm not exactly sure when it was made, or if it was a TV show or a movie. And while it could obviously be from any time after 1980 because it references Empire Strikes Back it felt 21st century to me. It seems to be a future post-apocalyptic setting, the power isn't on, everyone's dressed in rags, there's scavenging etc. and in a moment of down time two of the main characters act out the lightsaber duel from Empire Strikes Back to entertain the young children who live there, and the kids gasp at the "I am your father" bit. What's this from?
It's actually just friction fit together in this picture; as I type it's in the clamps as the glue dries. Tomorrow some final touch up sanding and the first of four coats of spar varnish, then a few decades on my front porch under a couple potted plants. There's an education in all this oak; it looks conceptually simple compared to the shaker tables I've done so far, right? **IT AIN'T!** Each leg cambers out by 5 degrees in both directions, and that tiny difference make this project SO much more obnoxious than a table with vertical legs. Laying things out accounting for that compound miter at the top and bottom is "fun." The upper and lower frame rails are no longer the same length, they're different but related lengths. That lower panel? Can't be installed with the frame assembled. Hell I didn't even bother attaching it in any way, it's just captive in there. Unlike the previous tables I've built that are held together with floating tenons, the rails are thin and fit entirely into mortises in the legs, which meant some chisel work squaring the corners of the mortises, so I gained quite a bit of experience with chisels here. But, another project nearing completion.
A simple shaker style table in white oak, finished with spar urethane and kitty approved. The breadboard ends on the panels were an education on this one; on the top they aren't strictly necessary, but I felt they were needed on the lower panel so that the movement of that captive panel wouldn't rack the legs. Found out I prefer making the tongues with a router rather than the dado set on the table saw.
This is the follow-up to my [previous post](https://lemmy.world/post/12594840) about a Linux tablet for my workshop. based on the suggestion by [@yojimbo@sopuli.xyz](https://sopuli.xyz/u/yojimbo) , I went with a Lenovo Duet 3i, apparently also known as an 82AT and/or 10IGL5. Sprung for the Pentium version with 8GB of RAM. It has arrived, and I've got it set up to start using. **The Hardware Itself** For a shovelware-grade machine, it's not bad at all. I'm sure they were sold in big box stores as the budget tier barely capable of running Windows 10, which is why there's so many of them for sale in barely used condition. 2 USB-C ports came in handy for charging and installing Linux from a thumb drive. The screen is surprisingly good for a machine of this price point, and it runs cooler than my cat. **The Linux Experience** SHOCKINGLY good. Linux Mint loaded right up, though I wouldn't recommend it on this machine. Cinnamon is not intended for tiny touch screens. Fedora KDE Spin ran quite nicely, but I ended up installing Fedora Gnome. I generally hate Gnome but for a machine that will run FreeCAD, a PDF reader and a web browser, maybe a calculator, it'll work. So far, I haven't found anything that doesn't work. It suspends and wakes from suspend, keyboard works, backlight controls work, both cameras work, auto-rotation works, keyboard works in attached and bluetooth modes, Wi-Fi works... I think I just saw that graphical glitch [@yojimbo@sopuli.xyz](https://sopuli.xyz/u/yojimbo) mentioned for the first time, I looked over at it and the top panel was near the bottom of the screen. Moving the mouse around seems to fix it, though yeah if that behavior continues or worsens I'm probably going to try either X11 or...something. Overall I'd call it "quick but not fast." UI feels responsive, but...put it this way I watched Neofetch run. Any disk operation at all is a bit slow. Gnome is...Gnome. I would hate to live in Gnome on my main machine. I think it'll do here; it's mostly navigable by touch screen. FreeCAD works amazingly well and is surprisingly usable on a touch screen, though to do anything serious you do need to be able to right click and use the Ctrl key. I think it'll do what I'm after. Going to start building a shelf either today or in the next couple days, will report back how it works in service.
Let's see if I can keep this relatively short: I'm a woodworker, I do my design work in FreeCAD and then I print out my drawings on paper to carry out to the shop with me. It would be nicer if I had a shop-proof device to run FreeCAD in the shop with me because over the past year I found myself saying the following things in the shop a lot: - "Wait, let's go in and look at the 3D model." - "Ah dang I forgot to note this particular dimension on the drawing, let me go fix that." - "I'll measure this part up then go in and do some drawing." So what does "shop proof" mean exactly? 1. Wood shop be dusty. Last year I hauled 250 gallons of sawdust to the dump. To me this means that a physical keyboard needs to be able to function if it's been packed with dust and/or needs to be vacuum cleaner proof. I also think cooling fans are probably a bad idea; a passively cooled device is probably preferable. 2. Not many outlets in the shop, so it needs a good battery life. I actually don't need a tremendous amount of performance, I've used a Raspberry Pi 3 for the kind of CAD work I do. 3. FreeCAD does not ship an APK so Android is no bueno, it's gotta be GNU/Linux. 4. It needs decent usable Wi-Fi because I envision using Syncthing to keep my woodworking projects folder synced between my desktop and this device. It doesn't necessarily need to get signal out in the shop (my phone *barely* does; I lose signal if I stand behind the drill press) but it does have to connect to my Wi-Fi when I carry it into the house. I think this means I'm looking for an ARM tablet that can competently run Linux. Is there such a thing? ADDENDUM: Thanks to everyone who commented, I think I do have a plan of action: I'm gonna buy a used Lenovo! To answer the question I posed, no it doesn't seem that a Linux ARM tablet is really a thing yet. Commercial offerings that run Android or Windows on ARM are often so locked down that switching OS isn't a thing, the few attempts at a purpose built ARM tablet for Linux like the PineTab just are not ready for prime time. In the x86 world, it basically came down to 10 year old Toughbook tablets or 4 year old low-end 2-in-1s, and I think the latter won out just because of mileage and condition. A lot of the toughbooks out there will have 10 year old batteries in them, and they've been treated like a Toughbook for some or all of that time. The few Lenovo's I've looked at are barely used, probably because of how Windows "runs" on them. I'll eventually check back in with progress on this front. Would it be better to add to this thread or create another?
I mean, I know Update 8 ruined everything it touched and some things it didn't, but...I seem to remember being able to connect conveyor lifts directly between machines and splitters. I also seem to remember being able to reverse the direction of conveyor lifts while placing them. Neither of those seem to work anymore. I think I'm giving up until they've got the SMART mod working in 1.0. Playing this game without the SMART mod feels like playing in a sandbox, but every ten minutes you have to stop and count all the sand.
I guess I got the finish to look okay on the pine legs and such. Looks great on the oak tops and shelves. Sat down to draw these on Nov 1 and they're finally next to my couch. 
I've found my finishing problem: I'm building things out of pine. Traditional stain, gel stain, urethane, tung oil, danish oil...on oak, cherry or maple many of these look fine. No matter what I put on pine, it comes out looking like a septic prolapse.