Really? How'd you all get into playing Ur?

It's a combination of having a relatively small group of people and a common gaming/rec area with donated board games. Sooner or later you'd see people playing, ask what's that, get a crash-course and start playing yourself. It has the advantage over most games in that all you need is 4 coins, 7 tokens per player, and a sheet of paper to draw the board on.

Dunno how it got started, but that could have been anything from an article to some youtube video.

Who introduced it to you?

One of the people I know from hackathons.

What's the appeal?

It's a combination of strategy and luck. You might be winning 6 to 4 only to have your opponent get a hot streak and even the odds. As long as the game is going, you can only guesstimate winner, and I like that kind of flow a lot.

Though, honestly, it's a great game to watch other people play. I'd be amazed if it turned out that ancient Babylonians or whoever weren't placing bets on ongoing games, cause that something I saw some students doing.

Try it yourself: https://www.yourturnmyturn.com/java/ur/index.php

Do you still play it?

Not as often, but won't say no to a challenge. :P

Ur can turn into a surprisingly tense, nail-biting game regardless of players' relative level. It replaced bridge as one of the pastimes at maths division for most of my senior year, and thank god for that. We used whatever as tokens and you'd be hard-pressed to find someone there who was unable to draw the board on a random piece of paper.

What can't be found in that magic Lil Woodchucks Binder of knowledge? Kudos, I hope to be remembered as an as good teacher as you are.

Use Dwarf Fortress wiki for tips on everything from interface to construction and more.

Here is a DF crash course:

And because there's been a new major release, I'd personally recommend trying previous one (0.34 or 0.44 from above video) first. At least until most game-crashing bugs and exceptions get ironed out.

If this is a free indie game, why is it closed-source?

There's no obligation to make it open-source, especially considering how the donation model rarely works for those and DF is their only source of income. Also, it's developed in, IIRC, C without version control (ToadyOne said so during reddit AMA) for over a decade. Even if it was released, it's probably a mangled idiosyncratic mess that would take years to refactor or get anyone up to speed well enough to contribute anything.

I don't think building it underground gets you anywhere. Maybe if you hollowed out a cavity somewhere under 1 km of granite?

I thought it's done for thermal buffer and isolation, not just structural support of all the steel/whatever would make the chamber, no?

too defeated for unicode today

I only unicode this easily because 3rd+ level keys are a thing. I chose right ctrl for my 3rd level, so making symbols like ² or ³ is RCtrl + 2 or 3, respectively. Plus it's much better than switching language layouts fifty times a day and comes with a buttload of nifty symbols (≤≥÷≠ßπµ).

I can't imagine so many problems stemming just from stress

When my brother landed in hospital and we didn't even know if he's going to make it, let alone come out without being mentally impaired, it took a massive toll on me. Already lost a brother when I was seven, and the fact I now could process more information made it worse. I was oscillating between extreme emotions, under and overeating, no sleep or crashing from exhaustion etc. It didn't end even when he came out of tumour extraction and continued for a few more months.

It didn't impair my ability to think or remember (I'd even argue stress triggers better recall in me, although that might be biased bullshit), but there's a picture of us where most people would mistakenly pick me as the one on chemo.

I'm happy you went to a neurologist and that your nerves are, if not calmed, then at least put mildly at ease. Be responsible and keep on being awesome, man!

Two, probably silly, questions:

1. Why are there no conjunctions (and/or) in the list of primes? In logic, it can be proven that all possible binary operators (there are 16 of them) can be defined only in terms of either NAND (not and) or NOR (not or), so I figured you'd need at least one in a list of semantic primes. Is it done purely through syntax?

2. Similarly, is there a deeper reason why some of the primes aren't removed on account of being defined as a negative of another prime (e.g. want - don't want, few - not many)?