@landonhere

[disclaimer not in use]

Regular Online Times

• 6:30-9:00 in the morning

• 2:00-4:30 in the afternoon

• 6:30am-9:00pm, tentative

All times are in Eastern Time.

Find Me At . . .

• Scratch: LandonHarter

• Text Based Games Forums ( https://tbgforums.com/forums ): Orb Fish

• Libera IRC ( https://libera.chat ): LandonHere and IcelandicWater

Reach Me At . . .

• Scratch: My profile comments

• Text Based Games Forums: https://tbgforums.com/forums/index.php?topic=6648.0 (please @ mention me if you want to talk to me)

• Libera IRC: DMs over MemoServ are preferred, but you may also talk to me in #MineralFish during my stated regular online times (please state your wasteof.money username when you join)

Because Corkboard is currently occupied by an unread RW-570 broadcast, I’ll broadcast my latest creation here: https://vimeo.com/990572807

Am I using the phonetic alphabet right?

My husband and I are both huge nerds, obsessed with anything to do with science and video games. He's currently playing Skyrim, a fantasy game with beautifully rendered dragons. I happily note that the dragons actually look plausible. A pet peeve of mine is "unrealistic-looking" fantasy creatures.

This leads to a long discussion/argument about how to build a truly plausible dragon via evolution. I, a marine biologist, have referenced everything from iguana tails to egret necks to various species of bats' wings and even proto-birds like archaeopteryx, over the last hour to cobble this thing together, but my husband, the physicist, is still unsatisfied.

Husband: "That's all well and good, but you've only given me possibilities, and things that could maybe fly, given the right size-scale and circumstances."

Me: "Sweetheart, I would be happy to genetically engineer a functioning dragon in our kitchen for you, but I think l'd end up doing something illegal in the process."

Husband: "We'd probably get evicted."

- Sheldon Cooper Dating Amy Farrah-Fowler, Part 4 on Not Always Right

I was going to share these in an RW-570 broadcast, but Gilbert and Corkboard are absent from #MineralFish, so I’ll share these here.

Icelandic Waters: “It's an ominous reminder that Rain World: The Watcher exists . . . and an ominous hint at what the plot may entail . . .”

*goes to sleep*

Fun fact: my dad just so happened to have a business fight scheduled for today. I remember the time that I resisted a Windows update to the point that the operating system got damaged, but maybe doing that is a good thing . . .

The newest update to No Man's Sky, Worlds I, hasn’t come to the Switch yet, which is understandable. This has given me a chance to strategically prepare what to bring on the combat-oriented Liquidators community expedition that launched alongside it. The plans will be finalized when the patch comes, but here’s what I have so far:

Exosuit shield upgrade x3
Pulse Spitter upgrade x2
Scatter Blaster upgrade x2
Polyphonic Core package
-=-=-=-
Repair Kit x20 (ditto)
Ion Battery (charging hazard protection tech)
Starshield Battery (charging starship shields)
Condensed Carbon (charging mining laser and portable tech)
Sentinel Boundary Map (harvesting Sentinel tech)
Void Mote (Autophage currency)
Projectile Ammunition x9,999 (ditto)
Unstable Plasma (ammunition for explosive weaponry)
Chromatic Metal (crafting and refining)
Ionized Cobalt (crafting and refining)
Salvaged Data x60 (construction research)
Runaway Mold x19,988 (refines into 4000 nanites)
Stasis Device x10 (sells for about 160,000,000 units)
Atlantideum (charging the Polyphonic Core)
Sodium (crafting, refining and recharging)
Ferrite Dust (crafting and construction)

Coming soon to RW-570 . . .

I have enrolled in the iOS 18 public beta just so I could use the new journaling features. I can't really go back now; the entries that use the new formatting features would probably get corrupted if I did.

Like, a completely handmade app for general journaling, or an advanced reference system for the archival of generative materials? I had the idea to make the latter, however I would need to figure out how to work with Swift Data and state bindings first.

I needed a reliable place to type text without being presented with autocompleted entries or suggested searches . . . so I solved the problem myself.

I’m currently using a service with a feature that uses ChatGPT, and it seems to be acting up. So far, I’ve observed it misspelling “writing”, putting a random } at the end of a text string, and missing a space between two words.

Turyin, yuz lamy davli ond kuhrom sut inkangbial kehtubinsk gep olkh kihopyevetsi odorov nil olkh akov suma udyono. Odorov oul satkar amskyvium gep pogaetsiis zenam kevich suma uvorki lolashtar tuapsemu aishi. Akh nok kislobninog tuni oglegkorg; push yems ladogdanko gep uynakoskjar lovan arechnostarii zuberech meysk.

But olkh inkangbial loyt yems epano zenam olkh kislobninog nii olkh itelis nozavolochen!

After paying a little more attention to the advertisements for “play to win free money” games that I've been getting, I realized what's wrong with them. And I'd say that, for every figurative brain cell you have, they seem even worse.

The burning fault lies in the economics, the business model, of it all. An advertisement for one such game listed a daily earning cap of $300. While I can’t make estimates on how substantial $300 is compared to the company’s treasury, it seems big enough that, given enough players, it could bankrupt the company in no time. The problem is exacerbated by the advertising, which they also have to pay for. And since advertising (in theory) attracts customers, this would produce exponential strain on the company wallet.

The point that I’m getting at here is, where’s the counterbalance to all the cash that they’re prodigiously spooning out to their customers and advertisers? Given that they’re open to all the new players they can get, the money must be coming, indirectly, from the users. A rule of thumb that I’ve heard is that, if you aren’t directly paying for a product, you are the product . . .

POSTSCRIPT: And then my faith in humanity was further decreased by this footnote. This defeats the whole purpose of an advertisement! Why are you showing fake footage under the name of a real product?! You’re effectively admitting that your product is so lame that you can’t advertise the real thing!