I've been plowing through Three Body Problem series by Cixin Liu recently and it's been really great. I'm on the home stretch of the last book and so excited to finish it.

All about space exploration, first contact, invasion, advancement and philosophy. A really great thinking book and leaves me with lots of uncomfortable feelings to ponder over. The pacing of the book took a little bit to get used to but it does well to help grapple with the time and space scale it is working with.

That is what this particular type of furnace is called in glassblowing. A glory hole is a specific furnace for reheating glass that has been gathered to keep it at the right temperature.

I have at least 4 companies on my banned list, but the ones that come up most often are...

• Starbucks - I like good coffee. They just can't seem to deliver and just focus on mass appeal to overly sweet milk drinks. No thanks. Good coffee doesn't deserve that.
• Blizzard/Activision - They need to clean house. Horrible treatment of people inside. The games they produce aren't good even that good. I refuse to play their stuff as popular as it might be.
• Disney - I don't think they produce anything really valuable. Their marketing is amazing but I don't like what they have given us. I honestly want nothing to do with Marvel or Star Wars and dislike the direction they have gone with those franchises.
• Wizards of the Coast - all their game products are clearly cash grabs. Building in expiration so customers have to buy more is awful. I do not play Magic the Gathering and never will. I have also grown to dislike Dungeons and Dragons. It's not even that great and there are so many better, more interesting games to play.

That's just a few of my old man rants.

You made no bad faith argument here. Your response for further discussion was a great prompt and right in line with this thread but clearly they don't want to engage.

I really dislike this trend of responding to comments with the red badge of "bad faith argument". It is awfully dismissive, particularly without saying why, like in this case here. Best case, they may expect that you know exactly why you are being accused of that and want to shut down bad faith arguing, but if you have no idea why, it's really just meant to insult or harm. Ironically, accusing someone of a bad faith argument without explaining why may be considered bad faith arguing.

Sorry you got a response like that. I thought your response was good, thoughtful and good attempt at more discussion. I agree and don't have much to add, unfortunately, but just wanted to support your post.

insecure people who struggle with social skills

Hi, also me. Nice to meet you.

This is why I run "rules-light" systems and why you won't find me running (or playing, anymore) games like DND. The complexity of rules is just too much for me to remember and memorize. I don't have it in me to argue and debate about applying a rule and would prefer not to interact with someone who is rules lawyering. I find that having those rules there is more intimidating to me than anything else. I feel like I have to work with rules first and then find ways to be an agent of my character within that.

Because of my own insecurities, I tend to lean on systems that require more collaboration, discussion and openness. I can't really be wrong if we have collectively decided on a choice about our story. And even in that, calling it, our story carries so much power and lifts a huge weight off of my shoulders in terms of pressure for both playing and running a game. This is how I can skirt around my own insecurities and work with the kind of social skills that I have and prefer to use. I want collaborators rather than adversaries since that is socially much safer. Consequently, this also leads to very rich storytelling.

As an alternative view, I homebrew and while the cost to get in can be a bit steep, the long term costs are actually pretty good. I looked at the cost to get equipment as a loss and just wrote it off. Electronic kettle and automation was pricey, but luckily I was able to have some costs offset with work benefits. Realistically though, in actual ingredients, between $30-50 USD for 5 gallons of beer and about 8 hours total of time for cleaning, brewing, fermenting and packaging, it's not too bad.

I tend to be very meticulous though with my brew process, so I haven't lost a batch, at least not due to contamination. I've had some beers that weren't great, but when you put it in perspective, a 12 ounce serving probably cost me about $0.50 - 1.00. Comparatively, while not great, it was still drinkable and as good as anything I could get for that price.

Being able to make decent sized quantities of good beer to take to parties, give as gifts, and just have on hand really diminishes the hit of the cost of equipment. I feel like it's been worth it.

A lot of great advice in this thread.

Adding a note here about socks. Don't bother with Bombas. They are fine, but no better than other generic socks you will find out there. I was all in to the hype of them too but after using them for a few years i found they don't hold up any better than other socks. I wouldn't consider them an "investment".

Now, if you want to invest in a sock, consider getting Darn Tough. They are more expensive, however their wool and synthetic socks are pretty solid. I find they hold up way better than my Bombas ever did, are much more comfortable, moisture wicking of wool is very good and, best part, if they fall apart, wear down and get holes, Darn Tough will replace them. They will have you send them back and give you a credit to get a new pair. Full credit. It's fantastic. Highly recommend.

Right? That's exactly what I wanted and didn't get. But I did get bombarded with a half dozen ads in my search through the article including one that wanted me to pay them for this stellar reporting.

No, they don't seem to last long at all. Those two there have already fallen off but there are three more farther down.

It brings me a lot of joy that it was happy enough to flower for me. I spent many years thinking I was terrible at talking care of plants, but now, knowing and better understanding what they need, it has taught me a lot.

Thanks for your comment!

Do you think this will change over time where one community on a specific instance will gain the market share and all others will evaporate away? And if it does, doesn’t that just place us back in the reddit situation?

To the second question of putting us back in the Reddit situation: Yes.

If you want one platform, that's what Reddit did for you. How did that work out?

This discomfort that we feel from many communities paving their own ways I think is temporary. We will learn to adapt to this. I think this is not a fundamental problem with Lemmy, but a UI/UX issue that new UI features will help us handle as the needs are outlined and the "pain points" are made more clear.

One platform or source is not the answer. Freedom in choosing from many sources of information is where the real benefit lies.

This is very important aspect of games from this era and as a huge fanatic of Zelda games it is why Link to the Past is one of my faves.

On a related note, the game Tunic utilizes this game manual mechanic. It is a similar type game and part of the game is finding pages to the manual around the world that reveal game secrets, maps and mechanics. It's an absolute delight!

Disasterpeace is an AMAZING composer and has done some stellar work in both video games and film as well. Here's a couple of my favorites from video games:

• Fez
• Hyper Light Drifter

Please check out some of his other work here: http://disasterpeace.com/music