Thank you for everyone who came, and those who couldn't. Apologies, I know it was a short notice thing.

To next time!

The room is open, feel free to come in: https://meet.jit.si/TheHubskiHappyHour

_refugee_, c_hawkthorne, am_Unition, lil, steve, elizabeth, kantos, nowaypablo, kantos, NikolaiFyodorov, ButterflyEffect

I almost always give time estimates the Fahrenheit treatment: multiply by 2 and add 30. Friend says they're gonna be 5 minutes late? Expect them in 40. Recipe claims onions need 10 minutes? BAM, Fahrenheited at 50 minutes! It's annoyingly accurate.

After reading all of this, knowing y'all won't have a tenth of my trouble... I'm so pants-shatteringly fucking glad I don't have to worry about finding work for the next, dunno, 6-ish years. Still, c_hawk, veen, whoever else: you'll do fine.

14 out of 20 potatoes finally grew out of the ground. I was beginning to worry they're too deep or something. Definitely trying to be as hand-off about it as possible, since it's all too easy for me to obsess over shit.

A couple weeks ago I began having a pretty shitty realization at therapy, putting certain family events in different order suddenly made a lot more sense. In the "my parents started treating me like shit a long before I realised it and for other reasons" category. Dunno how to go about it, though, since I doubt extended family or their friends would tell even if they knew the details, and my brother was always treated differently (though not necessarily better) enough to have it skewed.

Unless that's all dust. But I don't think it is.

While it's not all 'dust', for all the reasons you mentioned, it may be a contributing factor. If you look at 1:24-1:32, there's a visible delineation on the ground close to that building, where it'd make sense for heavier particles to slow down/fall. There's also a rainbow, so unless it's a camera artefact (and I'll be the first to admit knowing relative fuckall about those), we have water there too.

I think we had a PM chain around this time.

That's cause tng can't copy links.

Added the other tag, figured it's deserved on the basis of my fun-having and not getting past the middle in 10 minutes.

The Chudnovskys, between them, have published a hundred and fifty-four papers and twelve books

I knew those two sounded familiar. Used the hell out of their papers on Pade approximants.

[...] and I don't think we played anywhere close to how it was intended. We tried, it was just so over the top that we opted for a dumbed down version.

The problem here lies in generality: it's not always easy, or possible, to simplify something and still have a viable game. Best case scenario, you can render one of those overengineered things into their simpler predecessor. For example: removing about a dozen of disconnected victory mechanisms from Game of Thrones boardgame results in something like Chaos in the Old World.

We didn't even finish. Just called it quits after a couply beers and a couply hours.

At least the night was eventful, and the boardgame facilitated some of that fun.

Good to see you back.

Doesn't really fit the vibe I got from the Sequence, but it's a nice ambient-ish track.

I love that 'bardcore' is a word now.

Yeah, I never got into the nitty-gritty of Battletech lore. Picked up one book and didn't finish it, because it spent 40 pages setting up a dozen people who then get wasted in the span of a paragraph or two. It'd be like the first hour of The Rock was filmed from the perspective of those soldiers who get killed off in the showers.

You won't find me objecting to blaming anything on MtG, but I have no knowledge of that in your part of the world. Here? I know D&D was just some import-exclusive game that costed an arm and a leg, required real English proficiency, and had no less than a dozen strong competitors all the way until the 3rd edition came in 2002-ish. It could be close to the top today, but it's still just one of the games to most folks. There was a phase when everyone and their mother wanted to play 5th edition in 2016-2018, but now it normalized again and it's no biggie to get 3-5 folks to play Neuroshima.

As to computers, maybe? I know that when I play on platforms like roll20 and the like, it's a godsend to have all those mechanical macros. It helps to move players' focus from rolling and cross-referencing to fun and roleplaying even during chunkier parts of the game. It may not work as well for Car Wars or Phoenix Command and similar, but I wouldn't know.

I'm from 98, so for sure the game is older. So are Call of Cthulhu, Warhammer, Cyberpunk 2020, Traveller, Paranoia, and a bitchload of other games I prefer over much of the recent dross. Between accessibility of legal reprints and easy ways to yar-har those games, they have sort of a renaissance nowadays.

To me, and I'd hazard most of my friends, a boardgame failed its role if it requires so much focus, socialization is impossible or heavily hindered. Carcassonne, Chaos in the Old World, Talisman, Battlestar Galactica, and the like are my jam. Beyond those, it's too involved to talk, while not being meaty enough to really engage my inner Ender. Lack of play testing could explain most of it, but I think it's also a fashion for those overengineered mechanics. All too many people equate depth (chess) with complexity (competitive cord untangling), and I think many designers genuinely don't (want to) understand the difference. Feedback or testing be damned.

To the best of my knowledge that was the last time that group of friends every played Battletech.

Ha! Had a similar victory story, but instead of mechs I channelled inner Zukov/Ludendorf, deployed a force consisting entirely of gunboat hovercrafts, and suicide charged his line of heavy assault mechs. Because it was on the tabletop simulator, for the life of me, I couldn't tell if the guy was laughing or apoplectic. Never got a rematch, though.

I fucking hate how many boardgames now ship with a rules summary handout as a must-have for players. A thing even advanced players need because of how many moving parts there are. If I wanted to faff about with counters, switches, tokens, miniatures, modifiers, table+-sized maps, and multiple A4-size game sheets, I'd drop the pretence and play that old version of Battletech that begins with an orbital assault phase. Or one of those wargame simulations for ultimate hard-chargers that take a week to set up.

I've been gifted with a first volume of Philokalia by one of the Ukrainian fellows, and it's an odd book. Really difficult to get into, state-of-mind-wise, but I'm definitely going to get back to it when I'll finish the heap that's currently open.

The garden is coming along nicely.

Well, yeah? Hell, many people in India are--by necessity--trilingual, and it's not like they're a nation of geniuses.

Personal bias aside, I'd say that polyglots are, on average, more curious about other cultures or places. Maybe more aware of the differences, too. Scoring higher on whatever subset/spinoff of Cattel/Raven/WAIS tests? Memory/number games? Fucking shape and colour dominoes? Tenuous idea of those being connected to language anything, most parents I know would dominate these metrics by virtue of doing that stuff with their kids on a near-daily basis.

I'm 'under investigation' because people in IT not only didn't remove my access to two other departments, they retained everything on my new ID. And for no fault of my own, I'm somehow a suspect because whoopin' 0.8 g of ephedrine went missing from a lab I didn't visit in sixteen months, from a safe box I never had access to. Not only the situation is stupid, the fact I'm anxious about the outcome is stupid.

And, gosh, presuming perfect conversion, you could make almost a full gram of free base amphetamine racemate. :V

Anyhow, just finished doing the literal groundwork for the vegetable garden, now I'll need to waterproof what's left of the dismantled gazebo to make a dog-proof fence around it. Potatoes will have to fend for themselves, though. Planted beans in pots and set them all around the house and balconies, will plant chickpea sprouts along the house fence this or next weekend. Depends on weather.

Still on the fence about hydroponic setup. I've done it a couple of times before, and it's about the same workload on 3 m2 as 20 m2, but fuckups get more severe as you scale up. If I went all-out, I may buy a fishtank and use it for nitrogen n'shit, but it'd be another complication.

Doomer prepperism? Hardly. I wanted to do that stuff for a long time, and I have a larger project in plans, where I'd like to replace most stuff that grows in the yard with edible greens. But before that, I need both practice and, really, a lot more patience than I currently have.