• 1 Post
  • 41 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 28th, 2023

help-circle
  • My brother-in-law just got a new computer and was excited that he again has a device functional enough to play Stardew, so we just started a new farm. This is the third farm I’ve played with him and we’ve never yet made it to Winter year 1 (together) as differing schedules always eventually get in the way. Going back to the beginning is grindy, but also a nice change of pace.





  • I was having a similar problem with another game, and I had a similar desire to learn general troubleshooting rather than have someone give me a specific fix. That said, I don’t know if I can help because for me it’s basically butt my head against a wall until I poke something enough that it works - usually I don’t know enough to understand why the thing works.

    I was installing my games onto a secondary drive. The problem turned out to be that that drive had been formatted by Windows back when my computer was set up to dual-boot. Some games still ran fine in Linux, but this particular game nothing would happen when I clicked Play. On a whim I tried installing it on the primary drive with the OS, and it worked first time. So there was something about that game that didn’t work with the drive formatting.

    (I’ve since reformatted the second hard drive so that everything should now play nice with Linux, now that I no longer have Windows. Game is fine now.)



  • I think there’s also entrenchment in the history we build up on a site. Yesterday Facebook reminded me that it’s been 12 years since we took in a stray cat our neighbours had been looking after. We have many fond memories of that cat, but it was nice to have something external bring up that initial memory of first bringing him into our house. Today’s “memories” include silly quotes from siblings. There are old discussions to look back on. I’ll miss that sort of thing as well as the people. Fully setting up on a new platform (and leaving Facebook) feels like starting over, and inertia is hard to overcome.



  • I wasn’t going to plant a veggie garden at home this year. We’re hoping to move soon, so it seemed like wasted effort - I rented a plot at the community garden instead. But finding a new place has been slow, so we’ve just put in some leafy greens in the home garden. We’ll be able to eat from them even if we do manage to move before end of summer. Hopefully the heat will slow down the grass that likes to take over this bed.

    The bed at the community garden came with a lot of leeks. They’re very crowded (I suspect mostly self-sown) and we really need to pull some out this week. I’ll keep the roots and re-plant them at home to grow new leeks.






  • If you can find an annual plan that fits your needs, and paying for a year at once is possible, that may work out cheaper per month.

    It’s been a while since I looked for a new plan, but it seems to me that the direction mobile plans are going is that the only differences are how much data and whether anything international is included. Most plans these days include unlimited calls and texts. As someone who doesn’t do much calling or texting and needs like 2GB/month tops, pretty much everything has more than I need. A few years ago I was service hopping to whoever would give me a $10/month plan, but many of those have increased to $15/month.

    The plan I’m currently on is no longer available to new customers, so unfortunately I can’t recommend it to you.




  • The more of the Cosmere you read, the more things will connect and the clearer the picture will be. Every time I re-read SA, I see new connections I’d missed before. Some of that is familiarity with the magics of other planets, because that changes your read from “character did a weird thing” to “hey! that’s magic from this other planet; why/how has it turned up here?”

    In the earlier books, the crossovers between worlds/magics and the underlying “how things work” are more subtle and you’ll miss things on first read. In more recent books, it’s more overt.

    Some of that is because of how much the protagonists themselves understand. For example, in the first Mistborn trilogy the characters really don’t understand what’s going on on their own planet, so of course you don’t get a good explanation. In Secret History, the POV character does run into people who know quite a lot about what is going on, so when Secret History revisits the events of the main trilogy you’re able to understand the forces driving those catastrophic events.

    The characters in SA started off thinking magic wasn’t real and knowing nothing about realms and worlds beyond their own. They are learning a lot through their spren and Hoid, but there is still a lot that they don’t know. And you as the reader are learning along with them.


  • The training rod is definitely not a new addition. I used it in my first game a couple of years ago because I found fishing too hard. There was a dialogue where Willy asked me how I was finding the fishing, and one of my options to reply was “it’s too hard”. Then he told me to buy the training rod. I don’t know if it was available before that; I never looked. But try talking to Willy when you see him and maybe it will come up?

    The lake outside the mine is a good place to start. You get carp there, and sometimes they never leave the position your bar starts in, so you don’t even have to do anything to catch them - free XP!




  • I just finished Dragonsteel Prime. I read Way of Kings Prime when it was released (so: not recently). Dragonsteel (canon) hasn’t been written yet, so I’m not sure what you want to compare DP to?

    Brandon has commented that Dragonsteel (Prime) never got published because the story didn’t really work. Some elements of it eventually turned up in Stormlight, of course.

    I enjoyed both Prime books as a look at early versions of characters, settings, and magics. Reading WoKP after several Stormlight books, it was a little jarring to have a character die in Prime who is very much alive (as of SA4). DP didn’t do that to me; and as much as Brandon says there’s an early version of Shallan in that book, it felt like a wholly different character. I quite enjoyed getting to know Frost a little bit, and seeing early Hoid.