brin_bellway: forget-me-not flowers (Default)
Comments on my own posts:

The first part of the Runescape liveblogging [three comments]

The one about Ed Sheeran

The one about accumulating software prerequisites

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Comments on other people's posts:

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by [tumblr.com profile] tilthat; in response to [tumblr.com profile] sophus-b) The Pope Rap continues to be great.

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by [tumblr.com profile] inu-fiction; in response to [tumblr.com profile] maryellencarter) Consider Wordpress for image hosting. (Though since my new DW images are sharing storage space with my Tumblr backup, I *am* worried I'm going to run out of media-storage space on my account, after 7+ years of Tumbling. I've mentioned in Tumblr tags a couple times that I'm a lot more reluctant to reblog posts with images now, proportionately to how many images and how many frames they have: I have to think about whether it's worth the space.)

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by [tumblr.com profile] rustingbridges) Did you know they make shaker bottles of finely ground salt, the better to stick to popcorn kernels?

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by [tumblr.com profile] gasmaskaesthetic) Have you ever set yourself on fire for fun? (No.)

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by [personal profile] sophus) I inspired somebody else to start making sure the Internet Archive had copies of all their links! (And Sophus uses the laugh rule, too, so that's *two* blogging practices they got from me! I love being a positive influence.)

(For those of you who don't know, I invented the laugh rule. (Quite possibly other people in other places have invented it independently, but from the timeline of events† I strongly suspect that every laugh-rule-using rationalist can trace it back to me.) It's been very gratifying to see other people picking it up, to see the positive impact I've had on the community, to know I've inspired people to make the world a bit more joyful.)

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by [personal profile] ilzolende; in response to [personal profile] contrarianarchon) Approaches to browser tab management. [three comments]

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by [tumblr.com profile] nuclearspaceheater; in response to [tumblr.com profile] rustingbridges) Left vs right shift keys, long-ago typos, and different approaches social-media websites can take. [three comments, two of which are new]

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by [tumblr.com profile] redbeardace; in response to [tumblr.com profile] rustingbridges) The first-degree-ask bug remains unfixed and poorly documented; also, reblogs without commentary don't use up the bugginess. [two comments, one of which is new]

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by [tumblr.com profile] feotakahari; in response to [tumblr.com profile] archonofquandaries) There is a time and a place for reading hot political takes, and it is *not* while looking for porn. [two comments, one of which is new]

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by [personal profile] contrarianarchon) Dreamwidth and angle brackets, it turns out, do not mix.

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by [personal profile] contrarianarchon) Bloxp is glitchy, but sometimes useful (at least in theory). [two comments]

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by [tumblr.com profile] moral-autism; in response to [tumblr.com profile] serinemolecule and [tumblr.com profile] theopjones) The relative usefulness of laptops and smartphones in different situations. [five comments, four of which are new]

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by [tumblr.com profile] voxette-vk) How to operate a doorknob with no hands.

[Tumblr; Wayback] (in response to [tumblr.com profile] agapi42) Lying about your age for fun and profit. (If by profit, you mean chocolate.)

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by [personal profile] contrarianarchon) Wife-husband team Ursula Vernon and Kevin Sonney make some very nice podcasts.

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Links:

[Uncanny Magazine; Wayback] (by Vina Jie-Min Prasad; h/t [profile] flakesesomlys) A mostly-fluffy short story about a sapient robot getting into fandom.

[Atlantic; Wayback] (by Ed Yong) Appetite suppressants originally intended for humans might also work on Aedes aegypti?

Highlighted comment:
[personal profile] sophus uses music jargon to explain why Ed Sheeran sounds so different in different songs.

Laugh rule:
[personal profile] youzicha shares a Reddit thread about people who may or may not be Eliezer Yudkowsky.

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†Back when I was the only person I knew of who did it, multiple rationalists cited it as a thing they particularly liked about my blog.

Part 5

Feb. 20th, 2019 05:38 pm
brin_bellway: forget-me-not flowers (Default)
Word on the Runescape technical-support subforum is that the version of the Linux client I eventually ended up with works on and off, usually on the scale of a few weeks. The client maintainers say that the problem seems to be on the server's end and there's nothing they can do about it.

Sure enough, yesterday it started working. Presumably at some point it will go back to [immediately crashing on startup] for a while, but I'll enjoy it while it lasts.

---

On one operating system or another, I've been having fun playing again. I think I might do a quest tonight.

Part 4

Feb. 18th, 2019 12:30 pm
brin_bellway: forget-me-not flowers (Default)
After four hours of troubleshooting with no functional client to show for it, I ran out of ideas for solutions to try next, went "fuck it", and booted up Windows.

Sorting out which operating system to hang out on when is a work in progress. Am on Linux right now, and will stay here at least until schooltime is over (currently on lunch break).
brin_bellway: forget-me-not flowers (Default)
Not wanting to risk going through all the effort of coaxing Ubuntu and Runescape into cooperation only to find my hardware insufficient, I tried Runescape on my Windows partition first.

Turns out, the minimum available graphics settings for Runescape are very minimal indeed. There should be no question (at least hardware-wise) of whether I can play-the-game-at-all, only how pretty it will look while I do it.

---

There's still the software issues to deal with, of course. I mean, I guess I could play on Windows? But I know from experience that rebooting twice (there and back) every time I want to play a game is annoying, and camping out on the Windows partition for the entire duration of being-in-the-mood-for-that-game is even more annoying. My Windows partition is *not* set up for long-term habitation, and I don't even really want it to be.

---

(Writing these posts out, especially the first, *does* seem to be helping me sort out my thoughts on the matter.)

Postscript

Feb. 16th, 2019 11:54 am
brin_bellway: forget-me-not flowers (Default)
Me: ...actually, hang on. We didn't choose this computer with Runescape-playing ability in mind: while we *did* choose it to be somewhat better than the one we were playing on before, their requirements may have outpaced us. We'd better check first that this computer is even capable of Runescape: if not, the whole thing is moot.

*a few minutes later*

Me: ...oh dear, apparently they haven't properly updated their Linux client in years and it has outdated-dependency issues. I *might* be able to sort through it given time, but this is clearly not going to be a quick test I can perform before school.
brin_bellway: forget-me-not flowers (Default)
Me: Huh, I'm having Runescape cravings. I haven't had those in *ages*, and haven't played in even longer.

(Me: How long was it, anyway? *checks document labelled "Runescape Notes"* Wow, this to-do list is dated mid-October 2016. Yeah, I guess that timing *does* check out, come to think of it.)

Me': Maybe we should play? We did leave ourself some spare premium-membership credits†, in case we ever wanted to come back.

Me: I don't know. I mean, we have enough trouble with feeling overwhelmed by our to-do list as it is, and Runescape is so large and complicated that one's Runescape-related to-do list can easily be overwhelming all by itself. That was why we stopped, after all: they'd added so much content that it was just too much, we couldn't deal with it all anymore.

Me': We could just focus on one aspect of the game at a time and ignore everything else?

Me: I don't think our brain's set up to make that easy, and certainly the game isn't. We *like* to play a game optimally, and Runescape is so complicated that optimal play for almost any given task has a whole bunch of prerequisites, many of which have prerequisites of their own. And many tasks have real-time restrictions on how much you can do them, which means that *overall* optimal play requires switching between them all.

Me': What about Crawl? We don't play *Crawl* optimally; we don't even try. We *like* to approach Crawl with a certain amount of recklessness, not caring too much about whether a given move was technically the right one.

Me: That's because Crawl has no long-term meta-game unless you count stuff like greaterplayer. Crawl is almost entirely about the journey and very little about the destination: no individual Crawl game really matters in the grand scheme of things.

Me': I mean, *nothing* really matters in the *grand* scheme of things.

Me: That's a cached idea from people who are less egoist than we are. If playing Runescape would make us worse off in the moment *and* not set our future self up for a better life later, it is among the *worst* things that could happen.

Me': Counterpoint: resisting our brain's whims regarding which video game to play has, historically, almost never been a good idea. It makes us feel miserable and incomplete, and it should only be done under dire circumstances like a chatroom we run (and frequently re-read) whose archive is about to be lost. (and as I recall, it was in fact specifically Runescape that we were resisting in order to complete that project, and it *did* in fact make us feel miserable and incomplete; it's just that *that* miserable incompleteness was temporary, while the miserable incompleteness of not having a DS9 Rewatch archive would have been permanent, and so it was the lesser evil)

Me': Lowering our threshold for whether a circumstance is sufficiently dire, making us feel like playtime--and specifically playing *whichever game we feel like playing*, not whichever game we intellectually think we are in the best position to play--was a bonus for when everything else was done rather than a load-bearing psychological nutrient that needs to be given a certain amount of priority, is perhaps the single worst thing the financial nadir in 2017 did to us, and we should try to heal it.

Me: ...okay, you've got me there, that *is* an excellent point.

Me: Our current practice is to take civic holidays off, and there's a civic holiday on Monday. Since our exam is on Tuesday (I hope), we've already agreed to switch the Sunday and Monday workloads, taking tomorrow off and doing school on Monday.

Me: I propose the following: tomorrow, we take a look at the Runescape wikia, which last we checked was excellent. I'm sure they have a guide listing the time-limited tasks currently in existence. We will sort these tasks in priority order--completely ignoring any task whose sole reward is experience in a skill we already have max level in, even if we don't have max experience; we are *not* going to aim for max experience unless we somehow manage to reach a point where we've done everything else--trace back their prerequisites, and underneath the list of tasks themselves add a similarly sorted list of prerequisites. We may, optionally, pick a *single* additional aspect, and add that aspect and its prerequisites beneath that list.

(Me: I know this isn't how we normally go back to a game after a break, but we probably should *not* read through all of the news posts since October 2016: that's likely to be overwhelming.)

Me: We will aim to ruthlessly prioritise, and to not be too hard on ourself if we don't do as much on a given day as we'd wanted to. After all, if we weren't playing, we wouldn't have gotten to do *any* of it.

Me': *nods* [in the tone of one reciting a proverb] Some is better than none.

Me: Indeed. We'll see how it goes, and I reserve the right to leave again if we find we can't handle it. But there *are* a lot of good things about Runescape, and it would be nice to experience them again.

---

†Context note: Runescape dealt with its gold-farmer problem by legalising gold-farming as long as you traded with the gold-buyers in Runescape store credit rather than dollars. I was high enough level when they did this (and therefore had enough access to high-level money-making techniques) that I haven't had to pay dollars for premium membership since.
brin_bellway: forget-me-not flowers (Default)
We begin our story in 2012, when a game known as Find the Airport swept Tumblr.

There was (technically, still is) a website called MapCrunch. If you went to MapCrunch, it would display a random spot on Google Street View. You could interact with it in the normal Street View ways: move around, zoom in and out. You could, optionally, have MapCrunch not tell you where the spot was.

In Find the Airport, you set MapCrunch to anonymised-map mode, got your random spot, and attempted to navigate to an airport. (The idea being that you had awoken in an unknown location and had to make your way home.)

While Find the Airport had its good aspects and *was* possible to win (I won once, finding an airport in southern France), the mid-late game was often a long, frustrating slog. While there was always the possibility of finding a neat thing to take a screenshot of and post on your blog (and many did), the fun parts were almost all at the beginning, in which you attempted to figure out from contextual clues where MapCrunch had put you.

---

Enter the successor† to Find the Airport: GeoGuessr. In GeoGuessr, you're plunked down in an anonymised bit of Google Street View, and the explicit, site-supported goal is to figure out where you are from contextual clues. When you are ready to guess, you can place a pin on a zoomable world map. The site will then give you a point score based on your pin's crow-flight distance from the actual location.

It's still up to you how much assistance you're willing to allow yourself. Personally, I find it most fun to play by a rule of "I can use everything except other Google Maps tabs". Each round is a hunt for clues, often in seemingly-innocuous things, that I can stick into a search engine or look up on Wikipedia. Don't get me wrong, there's definitely a certain gratification in finding that you already know everything you need to know to deduce your location, but playing with assistance is part of how you learn those things you need to know.

There are a bunch of modes, competing against other players or on certain restricted maps, but I haven't tried them myself: I just stick to the classic one-player all-maps mode.

It's a fun puzzle, and a nice way to learn some neat bits of geography and explore places you might never have thought to look at otherwise. And if, like me, you enjoy the puzzle aspect of stalking people but refrain for ethical reasons, you might find this fills a similar mental niche. Bits of Google Map, after all, don't mind if you doxx them. :)

---

This post brought to you by playing a game of GeoGuessr and getting within a few kilometres on all five rounds. Take that, rural Australia!

(it also helps that I'm American enough to recognise an outline of Ohio on a state-highway road sign)

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†Although I'm not sure if it was *intended* as a successor, or if it was a convergent-evolution thing.
brin_bellway: forget-me-not flowers (Default)
Comments on my own posts:

Okay, folks, let's get this show on the road.

The one in which I get IP-banned from Tumblr [comment 1]

The one in which I get IP-banned from Tumblr [comment 2]

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Comments on other people's posts:

[Tumblr; Wayback] No, Dreamwidth is not just as prone to linkrot as Pillowfort.

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by [tumblr.com profile] nightpool) Another post on ArchiveTeam's Tumblr-scraping project.

(Re: the ArchiveTeam thing, I gather that some people are [viscerally horrified by the idea of] or [otherwise don't want] their Tumblr ending up on the Internet Archive. While I do not remotely grok this feel--surely the viscerally horrifying idea is that of your Tumblr *not* being archived?--I will note that the Internet Archive accepts takedown requests at info@archive.org.

Also, the Tumblr project is ongoing: while it's too late to save the NSFW *images* of the remaining sex blogs, they can still save the other posts (and let's face it, almost nobody trusts Tumblr not to eventually purge the rest too, either through censorship or through just pulling another Geocities). And even after the Tumblr project either completes or is forced to stop for good, ArchiveTeam has several other projects running, and I for one intend to continue helping out now that I know that's a thing.)

[Tumblr; Wayback] (in response to [tumblr.com profile] dreamwidth-help) The backstory behind my "How to Backup Your Dreamwidth" post.

[cw: apocalypse] [Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by [personal profile] femmenietzsche) The Sentinelese guard us against God.

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by [personal profile] oligopsony) Competitive RTS (Real-Time Strategy) players give a new-to-me perspective on the genre.

---

Links:

[Tor; Wayback] (by Michael Livingston) A sporking† of Braveheart.

[Y Combinator; Wayback] (OP by user patio11, but read the whole thread) Starfleet as an in-universe LARP. (Note: the canonical 47th Rule of Acquisition is "Don't trust a man wearing a better suit than your own", which is...actually not entirely unlike "never, ever, ever bet against the humans", particularly given that the thread is emphasising how vast the resources and power of the Federation are.)

[cw: nsfw text] [Tumblr; Wayback] (I know who wrote this, and it's not a *secret* per se, but I'm not sure if he wants his identity to be *obvious* either) A review of virtual-reality porn, written by an asexual.

---

†We're on a Livejournal fork, everything old is new again, I can call it a sporking if I want.

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Brin

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