colkassad

Yes! Bombers Bar! That was it :) It was so much fun and quickly became the only thing I wanted to do.

Others have explained it pretty well in their replies. It's basically a slide-show. My big battle was the fight over the UALX-3 Keepstar that TEST was attempting to build as a FOB. My experience was sitting at my computer clicking my attack button when ordered and watching everything go by at a few frames per second. I had no idea if what I was doing was effective. The only fun part is knowing how momentous it was, with massive ramifications for each side depending on the outcome.

I know exactly how you felt. I had many moments like that exploring, which was a mechanic they might have added after you left. Searching for loot in ancient artifacts (or whatever it was) and never knowing if you are being hunted until it's too late was so nerve racking.

My coworker ended up defecting to a corporation that lived in wormhole space! The wormholes add so much to the game. A lot of times we'd find the mining ops by people scouting through wormholes. Another activity I liked was hacking those resource thingies (I forget what they were called, or even what they were). Doing that in wormhole space was so scary but the payoffs could be huge.

I bought the game when it first came out (2003? Boxed, from Target) and played with an online friend for a while. We mostly mined and we didn't really have a corporation, it was just the two of us. There wasn't much else to do at the time. At one point I fell asleep at my keyboard during a mining op. Gave up soon after.

In 2015 a coworker talked me into trying it again. We joined a small corporation, swore fealty to a larger corp (Brave? Band of Brothers?) and moved to low-security space. We got involved in massive 3000+ ship battles, some of which made the news. These are not as fun as you would think.

However, the most fun I had was joining 100+ ship bomber fleets that would warp in on unsuspecting mining operations and destroying billions of ISK (in game currency) worth of ships. We'd use Mumble for voice chat, which allows for a hierarchy of chat rooms, so that we could hear the fleet commander giving orders but he couldn't hear us. It was super organized and our fleet commander was really skilled.

In the end I couldn't keep up with the time commitments. For the fun stuff, you had to be online at a certain time and there was a lot of prep involved (buying the proper ships which changed all the time, getting your ships to the right station, etc). I still consider it some of the best multiplayer experiences I've ever had though. Nothing beats warping in and seeing those huge mining ships and then hearing the fleet commander start issuing targeting orders. It would raise the hair on my arms.

I was deep into the worlds of Quake 3 and UT99 back then. I made maps for Weapons Factory Arena, a popular spin on Team Fortress but much faster and frenetic (more like Overwatch). I also created all the weapons and some maps for the port of Weapons Factory to Unreal Tournament, which did well but was no where near as popular as the original. UT was by far the easier game to mod but there was something about the physics in Quake 3 that just lent itself better to that type of mod.

As for id drama, there was plenty after Quake 3. I remember a .plan update from John where he talked about people leaving and people getting fired...I think one of them was John Steed (rest in peace), one of the player modelers who was very active in the modeling community and well liked. Felt like a disaster at the time. I just think there was a lot of conflicting personalities at the company and it was doomed to fail (no pun intended).

Yeah, I went snowboarding once in my life (loved it but it was exhausting) and naturally rode goofy-footed. They only thing I really needed to learn was slowing myself down.

Interesting. Never really thought about one of my eyes being dominant. I do have a bad habit of covering my left eye when reading in bed.

When I stand on a skateboard, both feet on, I face to the left. My right foot is in front, which I steer with while pushing myself with my left foot.

I always faced left when riding a skateboard back in the day, otherwise known in skater parlance as being "goofy-footed". Facing right felt as difficult as writing with my left hand. I always wondered whether that was just the way I first rode a skateboard and it stuck, but if that was the case, I would expect the distribution of which skateboarders face which way to be about even. But goofy-footed riders are in the minority. I'm right-handed as well. I wonder what's up with that.

A radius of plank length is the only true answer

Thanks for listening. Feel free to reach out if you ever want to share. I create music strictly for my own enjoyment so I understand where you are coming from. Take care!

Yes, I have a soundcloud account: https://soundcloud.com/emmets-music

I like to mix electronic and orchestral sounds. Some examples:

https://soundcloud.com/emmets-music/the-seven-hills-of-rome

https://soundcloud.com/emmets-music/dark-matter

I also like piano a lot (I only know how to play guitar badly, I just draw in the notes and work velocity until it sounds good to me):

https://soundcloud.com/emmets-music/life-is-delicate-remixed

https://soundcloud.com/emmets-music/soledad

Do you put yours online? I enjoy listening to other musicians. People give soundcloud a lot of grief but I love the service and the musicians I have met there.

I love the world of music production. I started with Ableton Live six years or so ago and it's been a wonderful hobby. It has such a vibrant cottage industry of plugins (sampled instruments, synthesizers, effects, etc) thanks to the VST standard.

I've found LLMs to be extremely powerful in research projects. A lot of code related to research is very bespoke by its nature. Using Codex, I've been able to iterate on ideas that I would never had the time or courage to explore before. As for code quality/brevity, it doesn't really matter in this context as long as it works. And it's incredible to have this companion that understands broadly every aspect of tangential knowledge required to execute an idea. I do think it helps that I have over 25 years of experience in my domain (geospatial), which helps me guardrail my interactions and get good results in as few shots as possible.

I've had this internet handle since the last century. Most people in here are talking about Hyperion but Simmons was a fantastic cross-genre author. My favorites were his historical fiction that contained a fantastical bent:

Drood: Has Wilkie Collins as an unreliable narrator, depicting the last five or so years of Charles Dickens' life.

Crook Factory: An FBI agent is sent to Cuba to keep an eye on Ernest Hemingway, hijinks ensue.

The Fifth Heart: Henry James and Sherlock Holmes team up to solve a mystery.

The Terror: Tells the story of what happened to the HMS Terror that attempted to make the northwest passage. The Arctic is a character in itself in this amazing story. I thought the TV mini-series was fine.

Abominable and Black Hills: I haven't read these yet but look forward to doing so.

Honestly, I think Dan Simmons is my favorite author. I know his politics became unpalatable but I could never find it in myself to care. My heart sank when I saw this post.

It would make a perfect mini-series. Each episode or two could cover each pilgrim's story, with a finale two-parter to wrap up Fall of Hyperion. A lot from Fall could be trimmed down.

The first person perspective of the old lady at the beginning of the book was so creepy.

Thank you, I had forgotten about this website.

Thanks, got it and it's working wonders for my use case.

Been waiting days to get approval to download this from huggingface. What's up with that?

Doesn't surprise me. I managed to get in the first episode and it's amazing. Highly recommend going in blind.

Return of the Obra Dinn!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/653530/Return_of_the_Obra...

Hearthstone (while not web-based) is a deck building game that you play against others and you can only communicate with a small set of inoffensive phrases that cover broad sentiments. Makes multiplayer endurable, and you can turn them off if you like.

Meat-based LLMs trained for billions of years are underrated! Too bad they need healthcare (and sleep).

Heck yeah. My buddy had Ultima III (Exodus?) on his Atari 800 and I was so jealous.

Same generation, very insightful. Seeing the old covers makes me remember for a second what it was like to be 10 years old again. Scoring some of those at a school bookmobile was like Christmas. I remember learning about them on a PBS children's book show and being captivated by the idea and implications. I already loved books and the new dimension was fresh, along with D&D. Watching that stuff turn into the video games of today has been quite amazing.

In the FPS space, there used to be only three games worth modding for: Quake, Unreal Tournament, Half Life. You could make a mod back then and get tons of press and players if you could follow through. I was interviewed in popular gaming websites! The games themselves were quite simple graphically so anyone with a drip of talent, time, and motivation could contribute. That specific environment doesn't exist anymore. There are so many games now, it's an ocean, developers have exerted more control over their games, and the talent required to create content for FPS games is too high a bar now.

I loved Urban Terror and Rocket Arena! Rocket Arena was definitely old school, I think I started playing that in '96 or '97 (the Quake 2 version).

I loved the mods for the holy trifecta: Quake 3, Unreal Tournament, and Half Life. I consider it the golden age of online gaming. I also spent a lot of time on IRC servers chatting with developers (eventually joining a team myself which lead me to my current career as a developer). My favorite was for Weapons Factory, which was a popular Quake 2 mod at the time. The old dev team moved on with their lives so the community took over...and it was actually released and was even better than the first. High quality, with tons of cool maps, and for an active community of maybe 1000 people? Insane.