Random thought of the day
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@anotherusername Ah. Then to answer your question: it's not a joke. I see the post, except I see it as "This post is deleted!".
So you could say I technically see the post, thought not the post's content.
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This should have more jpeg artifacts:
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Ugh, reading that is painful. I googled the first sentence and found this:
When the original d20 Star Wars RPG was being released, Wizards of the Coast had a launch party for it at a local Planet Hollywood. Jake Lloyd and Peter Mayhew were there, as were some other Star Wars people of import, and I and several other designers ran intro games for them and anyone else who came along and was interested.
I ran the intro scenario several times, and most of those sessions are a blur. We used Star Wars action figures rather than miniatures, and most groups barely got through one encounter. It was fun, but most people did more laughing and movie quotes than gaming.
But one elderly couple with brilliant British accents came along and said they were on vacation and had just wanted to eat at a Planet Hollywood, but had been told there was a game launch. There knew they were welcome, and had grabbed some food from the buffet, but if there was a game they were interested in trying it. But they had no idea what “Star Wars” was.
So I showed them the good guy figures, and told them these were members of the Rebel Alliance, who fought for freedom and fairness against the tyrannical bad guys.
“Ah,” said the elderly gentlemen. His face was a lean angular shape covered in tiny wrinkles, he walked with a cane, his hair was sheet white, but his eyes seemed bright and alert. “So they’re the French Resistance, are they?”
Well I admitted, yeah basically.
Then he picked up an Imperial officer figure, and looked it over.
“And this is a Space Nazi?”
Ah… yes. Their troops are even called Stormtroopers.
“Oh!” said his wife. “It’s like The War.”
“Right,” said he sitting. “How do we play?”
I had those two wonderful people, with decades of experience and clearly a strong idea of what military work is actually like, and three teen fanboys. The elderly gentleman took charge, got the mission objective out of me, and…
And ran the PC team like real commandos. Scouts. Ambushes. Covering fire. Raiding enemy gear. Firing from cover. Sticking to the objective. I was making stuff up to cover some of the things he wanted to do, because I didn’t know the rules that well. And I was up front about it, and made it clear that was part of the fun. You can try anything in an RPG. The GM just works out what dice to roll.
The teens just started calling his character “The Lieutenant,” and hung on his every word. And unlike every other group I ran that night, they got through the whole short introductory adventure. And won. Without Jedi.
Everyone smiled and clapped when they were done. And the couple decided they’d pick up a copy back home, and introduce the game to their friends. I’m pretty sure they were both in their mid 80s back when this happened, in 2000. But I like to think they are still playing some RPG, with their group of friends in England, merrily making commando raids to this day.
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@zecc @boomzilla I would love to play at a table like that.
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Are there any video games where a character other than the player character has the ability to retry from a checkpoint?
...actually, come to think of it, that describes every recurring boss that's been in any game I've played.
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@ben_lubar Undertale.
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@coderpatsy said in Random thought of the day:
@ben_lubar Undertale.
You mean the photoshop fight? I guess that counts, but what I meant was something like how GW2 story mission checkpoints work.
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Everyone knows it's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop at the end.
But actually, it's not the sudden stop at the end that kills you, it's the massive organ damage caused by that sudden stop.
But actually, it's not the massive organ damage that kills you, it's the blood loss caused by that damage.
But actually, it's not the blood loss that kills you, it's the lack of oxygen and nutrients to the brain caused by that blood loss.
But actually, it's not the lack of oxygen and nutrients to the brain that kills you, it's the stopping of all signal transmissions in your neurons caused by that.
That's what kills you....unless you want to get more philosophical and say that you're not truly dead until the brain has decayed enough that you can no longer be theoretically revived.
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@anonymous234 said in Random thought of the day:
you want to get more philosophical
You don't really die until you're forgotten by everyone.
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@anonymous234 said in Random thought of the day:
That's what kills you.
I'm currently uploading a nine hour video about that!
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@ben_lubar said in Random thought of the day:
I'm currently uploading a nine hour video about that!
A 9 hours video, through a Milwaukee PC connection ?
And you think it will be done before the end of 2019 ?
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@timebandit said in Random thought of the day:
@ben_lubar said in Random thought of the day:
I'm currently uploading a nine hour video about that!
A 9 hours video, through a Milwaukee PC connection ?
And you think it will be done before the end of 2019 ?
Since it's a Dwarf Fortress video, it will take about as long as it takes me to upload the 30 minute XCOM 2 videos.
Dwarf Fortress is the best game in existence for this reason.
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@tsaukpaetra said in Random thought of the day:
@anonymous234 said in Random thought of the day:
you want to get more philosophical
You don't really die until you're forgotten by everyone.
Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That's when I will be truly dead - when I exist in no one's memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies,too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?
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Is it a problem if my knee-jerk response to "Don't you care about
$thing
" is "absolutely not" for all values of$thing
?
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@benjamin-hall said in Random thought of the day:
Is it a problem if my knee-jerk response to "Don't you care about
$thing
" is "absolutely not" for all values of$thing
?You're only human. Things need to each your care.
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I wonder if companies ever design stuff for >20 years into the future... like, Nintendo probably came up with the Switch decades ago, they just had to wait until mobile processors were good enough.
Well, Microsoft certainly comes up with ideas before their time, they just aren't good at the waiting part.
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@anonymous234 said in Random thought of the day:
I wonder if companies ever design stuff for >20 years into the future... like, Nintendo probably came up with the Switch decades ago, they just had to wait until mobile processors were good enough.
Well, Microsoft certainly comes up with ideas before their time, they just aren't good at the waiting part.
From my experience...kinda sorta. We have one product due to launch this year that has been a reasonably well fleshed out idea since before the millennium, sufficient processing power just wasn't available cheaply enough until pretty much the last year. (Edit: LCD screens too, but they've been cheap enough for a good few years now).
As a sort of related interesting point we usually design stuff to be manufacturable for at least 5 years, as that's generally the timescales the component manufacturers work to. I'm personally designing something at the moment which should be manufacturable for, at the very least, a decade. It's a royal pain in the bum, for one thing I can't use any component that's single-source as individual manufacturers have a nasty habit of showing components as 'recommended for new designs' and then 6 months later it's 'lifetime buy'...cough...Maxim Semiconductor...cough.
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The economics of lawyers and doctors are probably pretty similar... they're both highly paid experts that most people don't want to see until things go wrong, in which case they absolutely need one.
So if countries have successful single-payer healthcare systems, could single-payer "lawyering systems" also work?
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@anonymous234 said in Random thought of the day:
single-payer healthcare system
"You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford one, one will be appointed to you by the court. A cheap one though. You wouldn't want everyone including you to have higher taxes, would you?"
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@timebandit said in Random thought of the day:
@ben_lubar said in Random thought of the day:
I'm currently uploading a nine hour video about that!
A 9 hours video, through a Milwaukee PC connection ?
And you think it will be done before the end of 2019 ?
It's not the video upload that kills you, it's old age.
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@anonymous234 That's a great way to make lawyers who support single-payer healthcare squirm. Ask them if they'd like it if the government was the only one paying legal bills (and deciding how much you charge, who you take as a client, what cases you can argue, etc.)
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@ben_lubar said in Random thought of the day:
Are there any video games where a character other than the player character has the ability to retry from a checkpoint?
That's kind of how some racing games cheat if you get too far ahead of the computer racers. Except they are retrying by starting from checkpoints that are further along than they are, not retrying from checkpoints that they passed already.
Also you've reminded me of the movie "Funny Games"...
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With the money they make, Daft Punk could probably turn their helmet props into high tech, custom-made augmented reality devices.
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@anonymous234 said in Random thought of the day:
With the money they make, Daft Punk could probably turn their helmet props into high tech, custom-made augmented reality devices.
And they'd probably be just as hot as they are right now!
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@anonymous234 said in Random thought of the day:
With the money they make, Daft Punk could probably turn their helmet props into high tech, custom-made augmented reality devices.
Who says they haven't? :P
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The problem with having a random thought of the day that's good enough to post here is that, by the time I find the random thought of the day thread, I've forgotten what the thought I had was. >.<
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@anotherusername My random thought of the day : bookmark the last post you read in this thread
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@anotherusername
Step 1: Write idea down
Step 2: Come into thread
Step 3: Lose post-it note with idea
Step 4: %#%&#
Step 5:
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Every high school student should spend one month of their math classes learning about machine learning. I'm sick and tired of people telling me that Google perfecting function approximation for the purpose of finding cats in videos, is a sign that the end is nigh.
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@gąska said in Random thought of the day:
learning about machine learning
But who's going to teach the teachers about machine teaching?
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@tsaukpaetra machine teachers!
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RTODT: Even if you're completely bored and alone, you can always play with yourself...
Context
Watching puppy chase her tail after I took away all the not-toys from her.
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@gąska said in Random thought of the day:
Every high school student should spend one month of their math classes learning about machine learning.
Only if they've completed the rest of their stats class first. In particular, they should have done simple least-squares straight line fitting for a bunch of data; the vast majority of machine learning is really not much more than a more sophisticated version of that.
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Hmmmm
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@boomzilla That explains a lot.
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I wonder if software sucks more with each update because it's based on telemetry data coming only from people who are too stupid to disable telemetry.
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@gąska said in Random thought of the day:
I wonder if software sucks more with each update
That's what our users say...
because it's based on telemetry data coming only from people who are too stupid to disable telemetry.
We don't allow you to disable telemetry, so .
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You know cloud services? Google Drive, OneDrive, Backblaze, Crashplan, etc. They let you store things. They let you delete those things.
When you delete things, they actually just go to the trash for some time, just in case, but you can also go to the trash and delete them again, then they're immediately lost forever.
Makes sense right? NO! If I have very important data on a service, I want a flag that lets me tell it "always wait 7 days before truly deleting". And obviously that flag would take 7 days to clear as well.
Come on, you see the same option in many other services, to do things like change the password or disable 2FA. It's a basic safety measure that greatly reduces the impact of account hijackings. The clearest case being hypothetical ransomware computer that's smart enough to delete my cloud backup. And I can't think of any realistic downsides.
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@anonymous234 and then how do you tell it 'yes delete this' if you need to, y'know, delete something?
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@pie_flavor you just click "delete". For all intensive porpoises, it's deleted right then - it's just you can recover it. And after 7 days it's gone forever.
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@pie_flavor said in Random thought of the day:
if you need to, y'know, delete something?
The thing is that this almost never happens. The only case I can realistically imagine is that you're a company and you're legally required to delete some information.
And in that case, don't enable that feature. Or send them a certified letter with your signature on it requesting an emergency deletion.
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@anonymous234 As a company, if your cloud account with sensitive documents in it gets hijacked, you are in a world of pain regardless of whether they deleted any of it or not.
Not sure if this is a point for or against your proposal :)
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You'd think snails would be faster without their shells, but actually they're more sluggish.
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@doctorjones well, they're usually also dead, so there's that too...
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@anotherusername facts
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Idea for a new kids show: MLP:40K.
Pony Space Marines! Grimdark for all!
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Premise:
- cats are really arrogant.
- dragons (at least the metallic types) are shapeshifters
Therefore, either
a) cats are really dragons in disguise, watching humanity like the mice from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
b) cats believe that they are dragons in disguise.If I don't post again, the cat-dragon mafia has decreed my death.
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@benjamin-hall dragonkin furries. No wonder Tumblr loves cats.
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@benjamin-hall That's actually the premise of a game a friend is running on My Other Forum. We're all playing as dragons, living in disguise as cats.
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@carrievs Odd. I got it from a thread on an RPG forum talking about what dragons should shapechange into. Someone said "cute and furry, so cats" and it fit so well...