Tonight!

That reminds me, Mindustry just updated with a patch, and oops, where did me free time go?

Also, one of the small things that brings me joy is that I sprinkled in a bunch of Pirates-era shiny LEGO coins into the planter tray so it sparkles a little bit. ✨

HELLDIVERS 2 – Exo Experts Warbond YouTube video by HELLDIVERS™ 2

More mechs? YES PLEASE. 😎 youtu.be/kK10IoDsiZ0

It is time. 🌸

(switches LEGO bonsai tree to cherry-blossom mode)

Pretty soon they'll just go back to the old model of just selling/renting games individually.

I still kind of want to get a spare bicycle bell that I can ding when people in front of me are walking too slowly.

Yup, as expected. It'll be interesting to see what happens to subscriber numbers. Definitely a numbers thing comparing the CoD player base vs. the overall subscriber demographics. But what's next? Will they start excluding other titles?

Build yourself flowers Living and working in a world of generated code.

Last week, I gave a keynote at appliedml.us/2026/ on machine learning and engineering.

Like a lot of us, I've had questions and anxiety around software development today. The talk covers why good engineering is still important (and 🌷).

vickiboykis.com/2026/04/20/b...

Once again, I'm puzzled why anyone follows me or reads my stuff. Maybe for entertainment? For educational purposes? Out of spite or horniness? Because I was in a starter pack you thought was interesting? (Sorry about that last one; I hardly post about any specialized topic consistently.)

Haha, yeah, I'm hyperspecific theme. Like the three years between the breaking of the Treaty of Amiens and the Battle of Trafalgar. Or megacorporations jockeying for control of Neon City.

Gambling is a blight on society, and you should avoid it whenever possible. Recreational gambling is less bad, but I dislike that it normalizes the practice. What I'm specifically opposed to is the problem where adding a financial component incentivizes people to tamper with the outcome.

There needs to be an alignment for "extremely petty and ill-tempered but not actually evil."

It's fine, but use a pseudonym.

Tomorrow!

Think about how exciting it would be in the future; you'd get to rediscover basic science again from first principles!

Yeah, I gave up on Marvel after it became apparently that I'd have to watch 19 movies and 2 streaming series to keep up with the plot. (I'm sure those numbers are higher now.)

I guess I could muddle through and enjoy the spectacle, but I could also just rewatch "Dredd" or "Jupiter Ascending."

Oh, so like 1990. 🤔

I did this in my first apartment many years ago and made some furniture out of cardboard. The trick with chairs is that you probably actually just want to make a stool, with interlocking supports directly under your weight. Anyway, not trying this again except for entertainment value. 😂

Welcome! Warning that unlike most survival crafting games, you literally *cannot* do everything. The game is designed to force specialization.

But also, the joke is that there are "cooperative" games that we still just can't get our heads around, like Barotrauma, which we've tried a couple times and have yet to make work.

Partly we have very high trust because of shared IRL experiences, and because we want all participants to enjoy the game for out-of-game social reasons. We're also self-selected to be highly organized. It's sometimes actually a "problem."

It's a fascinating game for several reasons, not the least of which is that it almost *requires* some form of cooperation. I actually consider it to be more of a simulation than a game. Our group tends to be very highly cooperative, but we've tried variations on this in the past, with mixed results.

It's specifically a problem with placing food on tables. I did discover that you can skip individual tutorials though, so be aware that you might want to skip that one.

Wooo! 🎉🎉🎉

The game is complex enough that you do actually need some guidance. But I wouldn't make it all-or-nothing. You should still be able to play the game even if you skip or defer parts of the tutorial.

And bugs in your tutorial are game-breaking. If you're going to debug anything, debug your tutorials.

My biggest complaint is that the tutorial is bugged, but some of the game's core mechanics are locked behind completion of the tutorial. Thankfully you can "skip" the tutorial, but then you still need to learn how to play the game.

The game starts you with easy "objectives" like "harvest some edible plants." The good news is that these are generally not modal, but when you do them, they trigger a modal text-based info dump of how the food system works. Worse, the UI element for food is hidden until you do this.

My cooperative gaming group is currently diving into Eco again. The game is interesting in many ways, but the tutorials are terrible and follow a bunch of what I consider to be antipatterns.

You can argue about whether the stock market is gambling or not. I think the key difference is that the people exchanging money are typically not the ones pulling the levers. And you can't entirely separate them, but *theoretically* insider trading laws are supposed to prevent this.