There’s an Aztec city building game called Tlatoani. It’s in early access, but has enough meat on the bone that it’s one of my goto games.
Out of curiosity I checked Steam DB for active player numbers. I have discovered at any given point I am 10% to 25% of the given player base BY MYSELF. I am 1 of 4 people playing this game right now in the world. With the prevalence of the internet I always assume whatever weird bullshit you’re into there’s at least a thousand people talking about it; making memes outsiders could never comprehend. It’s actually novel to fly under the radar for once.
What do you do that doesn’t have a community associated with it?
the fediverse.
weirdo
A truly sick and disturbed individual.
I have a lot of obscure interests, but not as obscure as yours.
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Finding former Pizza Huts in North America. It’s just such an iconic building design. There’s a documentary out now on them, but I’ve been fascinated for almost a decade now.
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Meshtastic
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John le Carré novels. He was huge decades ago, but basically nobody knows the name now besides Boomers and genre fans.
The amount of Pizza Hut buildings I’ve seen turned into Lions Den adult stores is too damn high. In second place, is the local wing place Jerk N Go.
In my area every single one is a Mexican restaurant and I’m not mad about it.
Probably more in Edmonton, but this one came to mind. Pretty heavily modified.
Meshtastic
If someone could find an extra 8 hours a week, I would so make this one of my hobbies.
What do you need 8 extra hours for? Affording the 8 other nodes you buy after your first one?
My experience with DIY home networking and self-hosting has been “This is going to eat up your weekend if you want it to work as intended”.
We started a meetup group in my local area. Someone put a node on the mountain now the entire city gets longfast. Its so cool.
[email protected] in case anyone else is interested!
I’ve been thinking of setting up a node at my local ski area, both for others to use, but also to make custom timing equipment that can send start and finish messages to the timing computer and keep us from having to haul wires up icy race courses all winter.
I’ve never actually set one up or used one yet though, so it’s probably a few years off.
It doesn’t take too long to set one up but hooking into the python can sometimes be a pain. Sounds like an excellent use case!
I was going to ask if you were in my area, because we recently got some nodes on mountains, but I figure at this point if there’s a mountain, it’s got a node on it at this point.
Now that I live in a dense urban city, the number of nodes is wild.
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Thermodynamics, specifically refrigeration cycles.
Its probably my autism showing but the fact that we can just move funny fluid around and make heat move is absolutely fascinating. I can spend a lot of time making theoretical refrigeration cycles with different fluids, thermoelectrics, heat capacities, repurposing car junkyard AC systems, etc.
Millions of people do it for work, sure. I doubt any of them are “into it”.
If you haven’t before, you should play Stationeers. It sounds like you’d love it.
Oh god I already play both Space Engineers and Factorio, don’t give me another 500 hour logistics game time sink…
But this one simulates the refrigeration cycle! It has proper phase changes and everything.
Empire fucking booked it to steam and has been playing it for the past 10 hours, for sure.
What’s your favorite refrigerant
I touch r134a the most in my day to day life, cuz i fix a lot of people’s car AC… But I have a soft spot for propane (R290) or propane/butane blends. Yes it’s flammable to a degree but it’s naturally provided, cheap as hell, zero ozone depletion and very low GWP. It has usable pressure/temperature curves that are easy for compressors to handle and can produce temperatures as low as -30C.
I’ve refilled old farm trucks with propane from a BBQ can and gotten good AC out of them. It’s kind of cool.
It’s kind of cool.
I’d say it’s objectively cool
I bet you also enjoy Technology Connections.
:)
Ohh yeah! Though I do wonder: Why limit themselves to the guy who is evangelizing (and rightly so!) when he could also hang out with crazy swamp guy HyperspacePirate who not only thinks of the crazy cycles but actually builds some as well?
You’d get along great with my dad. All he’s talked about for the last year is heat pumps.
Earlier this year I tried out a Steam demo of a game called “That Time I Found a Box” and got hooked on it. It’s a very unique card game where you create and enhance the cards as you play. I played it for days and eventually beat the demo - the devs told me I was the first person to beat it.
The full version just came out on Steam - I’d recommend taking a look. It’s a bit janky and not for everybody, but it does something unique that really clicked for me.
Well… I’m using an instance that has 10 active users according to https://piefed.fediverse.observer/list :)
I wanted to move from Lemmy to PieFed, because its development is faster than that of Lemmy’s and because its maintainers have values I have nothing against and because I want to help a cool project grow.
And then I had a bunch of criteria that I wanted my instance to fulfill, and piefed.ee was the only PieFed instance that fulfilled all of my wishes. So, now I’m apparently one out of ten :)
You’re one in a million to me
i.e., there are approximately 1,400 people in China just like you.
Glad you found a happy cozy home. Appreciative that I can reply to you from heart of the old beast!
Relative to all the well known commercial social media platforms though aren’t we all into something here hardly anyone else knows about, whether 10 users or a few thousand?
Whenever I’m going abroad within Europe, for a bit over month before that, I start buying stuff only with banknotes. I put all of the coins made in Finland or (other) Baltic countries in a separate pocket and then make sure to use those during my travel.
It feels nice that people get to see coins that they don’t see that often. And at the same time, I’m increasing the relative amount of non-Finnish coins in Finland, which I also think is good, as that helps people here notice that there’s more to the EU than just Finland :)
I would guess it’s unlikely that all that many other people do the same.
I like checking what kind of Euros I get, but never thought about purposefully taking coins with me. You convinced me to try it next time =)
Probably not rare in general but rare where I’m from. Racing, asphalt circle track stuff. Like NASCAR but much smaller, cheaper, and local tracks.
Making almost all of my food from whole ingredients.
The most processed ingredient that I would use is corn flour and such, or maybe cheese. I’m not gonna find wheat or whole dried corn and fire up a grindstone lol. But yeah everything is made from the whole ingredients to the greatest degree reasonable. An example I think everyone can relate to is ketchup … If I want it I start with fresh tomatoes and a cutting board.
But yeah it’s fun as hell for me - a wonderful blend of nerdy science & chemistry, plus that beautiful artistic side which allows me to be a rule-breaking creator.
Most people think its cuckoo that I ferment my own peppers for hot sauce, make tortillas from scratch, braise my meats for hours, cut and desiccate potatoes for fries, pickle various vegetable concoctions, make mustards, fry my own chips for nachos…
I love the hell out of the craft but many think I’m a little overboard. Fair enough. No family, kids, girlfriend, mostly a loner… I got time plus it’s super fucking nerdy and process-driven (in many ways) if you lean into it that way!
I also developed some great “systems” so I can batch cook, and its become so routine after 5 years that I’ve slip-streamed it all into my daily puttering so its like hours of time overall, but minutes of actual work.
FoundryVTT, baby! Somewhere north of 70,000 downloads for a very feature rich virtual tabletop that you’d think more D&D / Computer Nerds would be into.
If you want to get even more bespoke, I’m the proud owner of a version 2 box of “Kingdom Death”, a $400 boardgame designed in the spirit of Monster Hunter or Dark Souls. You play a primitive band of survivalists, hunting horrifying monsters for their body parts, in order to slowly claw your civilization’s way out of a Lovecraftian dark age.
I’m right with you on both of those things. I just spent more time than is reasonable on a gatehouse over a chasm in foundry, and have a screaming antelope on the shelf next to me that I’m reasonably proud of.
I’m really, really into what I can only call technological bootstrapping. Like, we started out on this planet with nothing, and then built everything. How did that happen? Primitive tech is another name, but the emphasis is usually on the very first stages.
That itself has gotten me into obscure things like metrology, greenwood working and small-scale semiconductor fabrication.
Wait, I work in cleanrooms professionally. Fabricating my own semiconductors at home always seemed like a cool idea, but really out of reach. I kind of always wanted to keep old machines from the labs I worked at, but with such expensive things they never threw anything away (of course)!
Isn’t it prohibitively expensive and/or noisy? What type of projects do you do?
Have you seen the Sam Zeloof videos? He’s the main person I’ve seen actually build a chip in a garage.
He buys his wafers, which is critical. Given a hot furnace you could refine your own metallurgical silicon in a crucible, but cleaning it will be a whole thing. The machine needed would probably be based on spinning band distillation, which you could make in a pre-existing machine shop. To avoid toxic gases and explosion hazards - which are the two things chemists have told me not to mess with - you’d want to use SiCl4, which is a bit different from the standard approach which uses hydrogenated species. The Siemens process back to silicon and monocrystalline casting is all that’s left, and I wonder if they could be combined in a step if scalability isn’t a concern.
What type of projects do you do?
If only I had space for a workshop, so it’s all theoretical ATM.
Which machines are noisy? Polishers?
I’m the only person I know IRL who uses lemmy (lol) and openstreetmap :)
I’ve tried telling a few friends about Lemmy but they give no fucks. Sad face yo
Ha, I actually know quite a lot of people who use Lemmy (and OSM) IRL, but I met all of those people on Lemmy.
Lemmy is like internet jail. We got sent here for breaking the rules on Reddit, but now we’re institutionalised and it feels safe, even if there are some very odd people here with us - they’re mostly nice and just serving their time…
Not all of us…
I recently switched to CoMaps, performs so much better than OSMAnd on cheap hardware
When watching incest porn, I try to figure out how everybody can be in a step-relationship with everybody else there. How is it possible for step-mom, step-dad, step-bro and step-sis to all live in the same house with no one else?
That’s just porn with extra steps!
Slinging. Like David and Goliath, but I’m better with the over the shoulder method than the spin it in circles method. Based on discord and other sites, there are dozens of slingers worldwide.
How to use game design for education around political and social issues and complexity science
Edit since a few people asked: I don’t have good answers for this yet, but some thoughts:
- According to C. This Nguyen, games are the art of agency (in the same was as music is the art of sound). Agency is core to politics and activism, and the antidote to apathy and despair. I think (some kinds of) games can make you think in really interesting ways about how you can approach agency, or how it is taken from you.
- Some excellent examples include Wintergreen and Bloc by Bloc. Basically any storygame can, if you want it to.
- Games are basically a voluntary and temporary acceptance of an arbitrary set of rules, with an arbitrary goal that you strive to overcome. They often include metrics that tell you how well you are doing. To some degree, the same can be said about modern bureaucracies (albeit less voluntary and temporary), where the metrics might be KPIs or money.
- Games can satirise this in educational ways, e.g. this was the purpose of The Landlord’s Game (the precursor to monopoly)
- This is another C. Thi Nguyen thing - really worth listening to his podcast episode on the Ezra Klein show.
- Some games show amazing emergent complexity. That is, complexity that isn’t due to underlying complexity of the system parts, but emerges as a result of their many interactions, like turbulent eddies, or bird murmurations.
- Go/Baduk is an extreme example of this. 2 rules that have produced 3000 years of culture surrounding one of the most difficult and engaging games I know.
- Tak is another example that’s a lot easier to learn (because it doesn’t require building up a bank of pattern recognition)
- TTRPGs are also super interesting to me, because narrative is one of the tools that the human brain has developed to help understand complexity. I don’t think they exhibit emergent complexity so much, but they bring in a lot of complexity via the players’ life experience, and via the setting/world.
- Different game mechanics and story tropes provide different affordances - that is, they allow or encourage some behaviours, and disallow others.
- No one ever forments a revolution in monopoly, right? Why not?
- Affordances is an excellent frame for understanding how agency relates to systems, because all systems have attributes with affordances (and constraints). What are the affordances of a capitalist democracy? I think games are an ideal vehicle for explaining affordances easily.
There are probably plenty more links. I’ve been playing some of those games for years, but am still relatively new to some e.g. story games. And I’m just starting out looking in to game design…
edit 2: also, a plug for [email protected]
- According to C. This Nguyen, games are the art of agency (in the same was as music is the art of sound). Agency is core to politics and activism, and the antidote to apathy and despair. I think (some kinds of) games can make you think in really interesting ways about how you can approach agency, or how it is taken from you.
I am the only person I know IRL who reccomends browsers to people in-person
