I only ever played the first one! My dad picked up the CD somewhere while working on a busted computer, I think? I replayed it like 12 times because I thought it was so interesting as a kid.

Yeah, StS really ruined me for other deckbuilders, and I'm still chasing that high. Some pretty good ones have been Power Chord and Banners of Ruin. They're both team-based games where cards are tied to certain characters, and I think that particular mechanic adds enough that it took me a while to crack the code on them.

I was actively taught in high school that "unions were nice, but not necessary any more, they get in the way of all our very cool free trade!"

Obviously, my thinking on that has changed a whole lot, but both my partner and I got fed that kind of rhetoric straight out of text books.

The wiki just says they're married. I know it's not "official", but it's official in my heart.

Yeah, that's kinda the vibe I get. It's definitely a receiving instead of initiating thing for me, too. I don't know that it's worse (because skin on fire sounds awful), but it's kinda different.

To the Moon was great. It's made with RPG Maker and it shows, but it hits hard.

I have an irrational fondness for it. The stat leveling mechanic is real double-edged sword, though.

Unless we're talking about 2/4 (with Cecil as the main character), in which case that one's just an absolute banger, no notes.

We think sand clocks have only been in use since the middle ages, and the reason they were invented is pretty interesting. (At least in Europe; I've looked into this before and couldn't find any other sources, but I may just not have looked hard enough).

For reasonably accurate time keeping, people had been using water clocks since at least the 16th century BCE. Basically the same idea as a sand clock, but water, which was slightly easier to feed into a reservoir. We don't think sand clocks really saw any use until the 13th or 14th century CE. Mostly, people needed to keep more accurate time on ships as oceanic voyages became more common, but the movement of the vessel messed up a water clock too badly to be useful, and pendulums had the same problem. So, enter a sand clock! Basically the same idea as a water clock, but way less prone to errors from the ship's movement.

(edit: some spelling)

FWIW, seconded. These look basically identical the grape hyacinth bulbs in my yard.

You can check by making a tea out of them. I don't recommend drinking it (it's mostly just "green" flavor), but it works as a pH indicator. If you add a bit of lemon juice, it should turn pink!

Inventory is through our POS/processor and production records are through Beer30 (though I have plans to write my own and open source it when I have time; we just opened and we're all still running pretty hard doing new-open stuff). We're also technically a nano-brewery, so anything we're doing is a little bespoke (i.e., I think it's a very situational setup) right now.

The biggest thing from a brewery-specific side that we're doing is controlling the brewhouse. We're running an all-electric system, and all the heating and cellar controls expose UIs over the LAN. In addition to being generally nifty, we're using Unifi to separate brewery-specific stuff onto its own network and the built-in VPN hosting (I opted for the OpenVPN option) to expose that network security. This allows our brewer to do stuff like check the temperature from home or set the boil kettle to start running before he leaves the house. (The useful thing about the UDM (primary server) running Alpine is that I have a task that essentially functions as dynamic DNS and updates an A record with our domain provider so he can always log in at a known hostname).

It also integrates with cameras, phone, and menu boards, which are all useful for the FoH side of things.

All-in-all, we're not doing that much with it yet, but it's pretty nice to use so far, and being a software engineer, I'm excited for the possibilities of useful stuff I can host on it.

I've been using Ubiquiti/Unifi for my brewery setup (cameras, several private networks, phone tree stuff). It comes with some pretty solid management software accessible through the local network, but under the hood, everything's just running Alpine. There's a bit of a learning curve if you keep the management software installed (firmware updates wipe out the crontab, for example), but you can customize it pretty aggressively if you know your way around a terminal.

More a comment than an answer, but an old coworker and I used to take walks and discuss how ML could be applied to managing an economy. We called ourselves the Open Source Socialists.