@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)

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!

Does anybody else remember when I turned Jeffalo into a rabbit?

I got the idea to make an environment for text-based roleplaying, inspired by Colubrine Sector and the concepts of its threads, among other things. I haven’t formulated a map for it, but here are the room concepts I have so far:

• A mostly empty room, with a water fountain in the center that sprays an orange fluid, with steps leading up to it

• A storage room with dense hallways of shelving, housing an abundance of crystals that are all shaped the same, but appear to reflect light differently

• A room filled with water heaters, backup generators, and a few metal canisters meant to blend in with the surroundings, but upon closer inspection aren’t actually attached to any machinery

• An observation platform that gives a view of a massive glowing coil against the backdrop of a green-tinted void

• A workshop room housing a monolith from No Man’s Sky, embellished with ornamental aqueducts and inscribed with the message PROJECT KOLAKU: EXPERIMENTAL DIVERGENT MONOLITH + 36897 - 28381 × 138977000 ÷ 7.6653358 % 2833

• An open-air garden with a humid atmosphere, containing two rows of tall brambles that bear crystalline cyan fruit

• An abandoned snack bar littered with rotting fish, alongside a single brightly colored red coconut, covered with dozens of post-it notes with variations of “Traveling with Flashkit to his ‘Scratcharia’ place; will be back soon“ written on them

Would anyone be interested in trying this if I were to make it?

Smoke Alarm: *beep-beep beep-beep beep-beep beep*

Icelandic Waters: “YOU NEED A BREATH MINT!!“

I hope that I’ll be finished with this by the time Scratch’s asset services come back online. I’ve made several failed attempts at charting a level for OI-2 or OI-3N, so hopefully I can stick with this song.

Ludo neudint izeli olkh inkangbial loyt. Olkh akov suma udyono lamy boksitog eurazl. Yalsko vob itelis lak netey nil ibol fitsii gep tinan uynakoskjar yesotska. Ibol fitsii ryunguryu ukh ady olkh limyzya. Yuz yalsko vomestu gepyems netey.

. . . that was fun.

Icelandic Water Dragon: “Should I be concerned that this washing machine plugs into a conventional low-power outlet?“

Icelandic Waters: “What’s worse than a power strip overloaded by space heaters? Get a bunch of those things and plug ‘em all into a power strip. That would make a great xkcd comic.“