@Sandra@idiomdrottning.org

Sandra

@Sandra@idiomdrottning.org

Idiomdrottning demonstrates a new and often cleaner way to solve most systems problems. The system as a whole is likely to feel tantalizingly familiar to culture users but at the same time quite foreign.

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Sandra, to random

I’ve got a lot of posts making fun of “dark matter” but that doesn’t make this new model any less terrifying:

our findings indicate that this expansion is due to the weakening forces of nature

God gets tired?!

https://www.earth.com/news/dark-matter-does-not-exist-universe-27-billion-years-old-study/

Sandra, to random

I disagree with many of these “things that don’t work” but number 12 is spot on:

Explaining board games. Here’s how people usually seem to teach board games:

  1. Someone spends 5-30 agonizing minutes explaining how the game works.
  2. No one understands anything.
  3. The game starts.
  4. As each game mechanic arises, people ask, “Hold on, how does it work?”
    You can skip to step 3.

https://dynomight.substack.com/p/things

(Also get off substack!)

Sandra,

@RogerBW

Ah I get so frustrated when trying to learn from something like that, and just wanna jump in. Step one requires me remembering a lot of things just from hearing and seeing them. It’s like “here memorize this half-an-hour TV episode or play”, I wouldn’t be able to do that.

One of my favorite games to explain is Star Wars Rebellion because I explain the goal, how the mission cards and leaders and troop movement works, and then I call the entire “refresh phase” as “just bookkeeping” and we’re off to playing this very complicated board game in just a few minutes 💁🏻‍♀️

I like to learn board games in two steps.

Step one please just start and walk us through step by step as we’re actually doing them. (Most people here say that they also need to hear an actual goal, wins and loss conditions, so for their sake that might be a good idea to add first.)

Then after that first game is over, that’s when I go scour the rulebooks and FAQs and all the nitty gritty crannies and “oh you explain this part wrong, actually the Harkonnens only get one bad when more than one spice meter go down” and stuff. That first teaching game is so essential for me to try to understand.

This isn’t meant to shut you down, please keep the convo going because I’m super curious about this topic, and your data on it from your job as a boardgame explainer. (I didn’t know that was your job, cool!) Just giving some more deets on my own experience with spacing out when people are trying to explain games 😭

@smorkin is the other way, he wants the explanation phase to be six times longer than normal because he’s also asking strategy questions, like “why would you ever wanna do that” whereas I’m much more “uh… it’s legal. I want it to be emergent whether or not it’s good to do it, I almost don’t even wanna know that before hand, I just said you’re allowed to do that.”

Sandra,

@RogerBW @smorkin

Yes, Star Wars Rebellion has that Learn To Play / Reference split (although I should download & print a fan-made reference that has Rise of the Empire baked in), I love that.
But it needs a good index. "Retreating, see Combat step such-and-such".
Don't they do that anymore?

Sandra,

@RogerBW @smorkin

About this part:

The problem with step by step for me is that you may need to make a decision up front which will significantly affect your play for the rest of the game, but you don’t yet know enough to make that decision.

The amount of “risk” each such rule has, risk of “missing hearing the rule messes up the game” is not binary, it’s gradual, right? And the more rules we hear, the higher the chance that a rule gets missed or forgotten in the flood.

https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/14536/you-never-told-me-rule-rules-you-most-certainly-to

Sandra,

@RogerBW

I've played a couple of games of Ashes RotPb (non-reborn edition) and I don't even know what the rule you have in mind is 💁🏻‍♀️

Conversely, I've ranted and raved that Telegraphic Attack and Feinting Attack needs to be in GURPS Lite since the math breaks without them for even basic things, even GURPS Ultra-Lite's combat system could benefit from them. It should be baked into the core rules even for all contested rules: you can lower your opponents skill by one for each two you lower yours, or raise by two for each one you raise yours 🤷🏻‍♀️ (Or they should've used a linear die result distribution instead of bell curve.)

tinyrabbit, to random
@tinyrabbit@floss.social avatar

I don’t know why Meta haven’t been public about this, but you can now hide any of your posts from Threads users by just adding the word ”pixelfed” anywhere in it. Nice to give the option to opt out so easily, but a somewhat strange way to do it and a very random choice of keyword imho.

Sandra,

@tinyrabbit

(Explaining the joke to peeps who're out of the loop:

Meta is censoring their competition, Pixelfed, an instagram-like fediverse site.

Not sure if it's really happening:

Various people have tried to recreate the same situation with their Threads accounts, and their comments are still publicly available

https://wedistribute.org/2024/03/is-threads-hiding-pixelfed/ )

Sandra, to random

@PaulCzege I must interview you!

Here are the four questions:

  1. Who was the best actor to play Moriarty?
  2. Who was the best actor to play John Watson?
  3. Who was the best actor to play Dracula?
  4. Who was the best actor to play a robot or computer?

OK questions over please answer truthfully

Sandra, to random

Grognards: “D&D lost its wild creative spirit once it started being inspired by fantasy inspired by it, like a snake eating its own tail. It was better when it was inspired by the pulps and not just Tolkienesque EDO.”
The D&D millenials & zoomers: “OK, here’s some wild fauns & furries & blue tieflings & dragonborn monks & water-spirit frog people.”
Grognards: “No not like that.”

Sandra, to random

Growth sounds great. It’s what plants crave.

“Growth” that’s based on pretending that existing limits don’t exist isn’t “life”. It’s reckless and deadly.

In grade school, a lot of the econ lessons were about not getting stuck in borrowing loops and to be careful with credit cards and “buy-now-pay-later” schemes and to only use loans for carefully considered investments. Don’t waste what you don’t have, is the takeaway there.

The under-accounted–for costs of fossil fuel leads to destructive behavior. We think it costs $4 per gallon but when the piper comes it’s gonna be our skies, our waters and our selves.

https://idiomdrottning.org/degrowth-isnt-death

Sandra, to random

JavaScript mangles semantics in a way that CSS does not.

Dynamic content (such as animated elements) and even some amount of user interaction is well handled by CSS to the extent that it more affords designers making pages such that that stuff can be turned off, ignored, overridden. That’s much more difficult with JavaScript and the virtual DOM.

https://idiomdrottning.org/re-i-used-to-think-css-was-good

Sandra,

@tinyrabbit

I literally can only read your web page by turning CSS off 💁🏻‍♀️ by using reader mode or the Gemini version. But that's why Gemini is so good.

Sandra,

@simon_brooke

Yes, I said as much in the last section of the post, that most sites don't do styling well, that is and that I pretty much don't read any commercial web pages because of that.

What is the problem with that page, specifically?

I'm literally using your own browser's default font and text size (so if you've got a problem, the problem is not with the site—CSS is effectively already "off" for those things), and I have a darkmode and a lightmode option.

Are you on the darkmode or lightmode? I turned the glow off on the darkmode version a few months ago. I use the lightmode version myself, which @tinyrabbit doesn't have, which for my astigmatic li'l eyes is a problem. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Sandra,

@simon_brooke

Thank you.
Is this clearer?

https://ellen.idiomdrottning.org/re-css-no-blockquote.html

One line removed from the CSS.
Seems less clear to me 🤷🏻‍♀️

Sandra, to random

Rich gets richer:

https://mixmag.net/read/spotify-reportedly-will-start-paying-less-royalties-to-less-popular-artists-news

#VimesBoots

Sandra, to random

From find’s manual page:

-mmin n
    File's data was  last modified less than,  more than or
    exactly n minutes ago.

Uh…

Sandra, to random

In 3e, 4E and 5e D&D, you roll a d20, then add a number to that die roll, and then compare to a target number. In its worst iteration, that target number is even kept secret by the Dungeon Master, but even when rolled against an open target number, this has a couple of problems.

https://idiomdrottning.org/dice-math

Sandra,

@RogerBW

I did not mean to come across as underplaying just how much more difficult subtraction is. I should make that even clearer in the post. Addition is to me 100 times easier. So in the end I'm not looking for a system with subtraction. I'm looking for a system with all the math is

  1. Done before the dice hit the table, and
  2. Done once per enemy type, not once per enemy.

And then ideally doesn't use subtraction. The tens-conplement system and the roll-extremes system both are free from subtraction and from post-roll addition.

Sandra, to random

So here’s a script that temporarily actually does make the home directory into that git repository, waits for you to be done with Magit, and then restores things.

https://idiomdrottning.org/cfgmagit

Sandra,

Wow, this script saved my neck today. Magit's ability to revert just parts of a hunk through an active region is great.

Sandra,

@loke

Jag tror att kanske runt 78, 79% av allt jag gör är saker jag inte har en aning om hur man gör utan Emacs 💁🏻‍♀️

Sandra,

@Mehrad

N…not have Emacs installed…?! 😰

@loke

Sandra,

@Mehrad

But also lazygit doesn't work well with screenreading apps whereas Magit has emacspeak 🤷🏻‍♀️

@loke

Sandra, to random

From the history of dice notation:

Someone would yell out a number range (“7-34”), and the winner was the first person who could come up with a way to generate that range with dice (3d10+4). They could get convoluted (e.g., 1-26 = 2d8 + 1d12 -2).

Yeah, I can’t stand those “number ranges”. I’m not very good at them. My method is “it’s probably Nd4”, like if it says 3–12, I check if it fits a bunch of d4 and in that case it does. Just wish it’d use dice notation honestly.

https://playingattheworld.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-origins-of-dice-notation.html

Sandra,

@RogerBW

I wish the book would just say 1d10 then, instead of this range notation 😭

Sandra,

When the first number cleanly divides the second number it's pretty straight forward. Ifnit doesn't, I should decrease both numbers by an offset, starting at one and keep increasing that offset until there is a clean division and then add it back. So 5–14? No, 1+4–13? Not yet, 2+3–12? That works, i.e. 3d4+2. Not that that excuses this system one iota

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