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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead! I don’t recommend it on mobile unless you have no other choice (I’m largely not a fan of mobile games anyway though) but it’s amazing on desktop. If you can get past the simple graphics (like dwarf fortress it hss ASCII graphics, but you can easily get different tile sets to add graphics for everything), it’s an amazing game with a ton of content.

    It’s a zombie survival rogue-like game, you don’t gain skills or anything between runs (you can unlock different scenarios and professions though, or just unlock them all from the settings), but you do gain your own experience. You can have a character for hours, then die and make a new one that dies in 5 minutes, etc. Save scum if you want, but the whole point is to let your characters die and try something new (I save scum on longer-running characters when I run into new mechanics or monsters but that’s it). When I say there is a ton to do, I mean it. People have added (and continue to add) a ton of content, and mostly with a focus on making interaction as realistic as possible.

    Want to kill zombies with traps? They can start with a basic tripwire to trip zombies to slow them down and alert you, and go up to mechanized blade traps that cut them in half quickly.

    Want to do a stealthy run? For melee, the Ninjutsu martial art has silent attacks and makes you walk quieter. For ranged, bows and crossbows are quiet (and can be made quieter with mods that reduce bow-string noise), but you’ll want to make your own arrows eventually - and you can!

    Want some transportation? Cars! Plenty of broken ones scattered in cities and towns - decent amount that still work too. There’s gas, diesel, electric, hybrid, and several other kinds of vehicles. You can train up your mechanics skill (or start with a high mech skill, if you want) for replacing/repairing parts, adding onto to existing cars, or even assembling them from scratch. Got something you don’t know how to kill? A random car you find driving 40+ mph works wonders for turning problems into smears.

    Want to eat just candy and junk food? Your character will eventually get to varying levels of overweight which reduces your stamina and speed. Don’t eat enough calories? Become skinny, decreasing your strength and health. It’s not hard to eat balanced, but it is something to keep in mind.

    Find too many things you’re trying to bring back to your car or base? Find a shopping cart (or my preferred item mover - industrial trash cans) and load items up, much easier to move more and heavier things in a single trip can even mount your shopping carts and trash cans to a car with bike racks so you can bring them with. Can also weld baskets or install trash cans in/on cars to increase your storage area.

    Want to do colony survival? You can recruit NPCs you find in the world and make a compound.

    Farming? Yep. Brewing/distilling? Yep. Magic? There’s a mod for that. Loony-toons esque killing a big scary zombie with an anvil (or other heavy object)? Just put one on the roof and push it over the edge. Guns? Whole stores of them. Fire? I like lighting 2 story houses on fire, they make a ton of noise and draw in all the nearby zombies, then the falling debris and fire kill them.



  • A vote for Stein this year was a vote for Trump. Vote green in your local and state elections to get support growing, don’t vote for them for president when they aren’t even on enough ballots to win and the alternative is a literal hitler-worshipper.

    Edit - Stein was actually on the ballot in 38 states so she technically could’ve won. I was thinking of Claudia De la Cruz and the PSL party - I have the same sentiment with them this election. These two divided the left and only benefited Trump. Vote green or PSL in your local elections and grow support for the non-democrat left.










  • Multi monitor issues are purely on your distro - and are pretty easy to fix. At least for me on arch and bspwm (I haven’t touched a Debian based install or full DE in years), setup was as easy as making my randr script run when my WM starts up, I imagine it’s even easier with a full DE.

    For 2.5 gb/s internet… I’ve never run into any problems or even had to configure anything. Fresh barebones arch install with lan, 2.5 gb/s out of the box. If you’re getting less (my guess is 1 gb/s?) it’s almost certainly a hardware issue (motherboard/network card is only 1 gb/s, port on router and/or switch is 1 gb/s, etc)

    If you’re having trouble with something, I highly recommend searching for the problem after checking a relevant wiki (archwiki is an awesome resource if you’re on arch). If you’re having issues you can’t find problems to, feel free to shoot me a message and I’ll try to help you out. I’m no expert, but I’ve been exclusively on Linux for 3 years (since I graduated and no longer was required to be on windows at all) and haven’t run into any issues that I didn’t find a relatively easy fix for)


  • Lutris is awesome.
    Open source games, games with their own launcher, games on steam, gog, etc are all in it. Can pick to run things natively on Linux, use proton (pick your version or just use latest), wine, or choose from others, and it does it seamlessly. For games you already have installed on steam, you don’t need to reinstall them, it finds them and makes them runnable from within lutris once you connect your steam account, you can also install games that you own on any of your connected launchers, and browse/download your undownloaded games from them

    Examples for some of the stuff I have all in it now:
    Catacyslm: DDA catapult launcher (free and open source game - highly recommend you try it out. Takes some getting used to, but there isn’t much you can’t do. Also, make sure you get cataclysm-tiles or use a launcher. ASCII is pure, but hard to get used to. Also, DO NOT buy it on steam.)
    All of my installed steam games
    Cyberpunk 2077 and the witcher 3 via gog
    FFXIV (the official launcher, not steam)
    Vintage story (open source but not free - highly recommend if you like open world survival crafting games with a big emphasis on survival)






  • If you want a more realistic (mechanics mainly, better graphics too but still blocky) and survival focused game, vintage story is great. It’s meant to be very realistic (mechanics, not graphics) so it’s a very different play style than Minecraft.

    Need storage? Make a reed basket with 8 slots and doesn’t help food preservation, or make a ceramic storage vessel with 12 slots that decreases rate of food spoilage. Manually build clay storage vessels voxel by voxel, put it in a pit kiln, cover in dry grass, sticks, and firewood and let it cook for an in-game day then you’re good to go.

    Food? Better hunt, fish, and grow crops. Make soups, stews, jerky, etc - better make sure you have a cellar with sealed jars of food for the winter though. Also need to balance soil nutrients for crops to grow well.

    Leather stuff? Have you to kill animals, skin them, get pelts, soak in limewater/borax and water solution in a barrel, scrape them with a knife, soak in weak tannin then strong tannin (made by soaking oak or acacia logs in barrels of water), then you finally have useable hides.

    Charcoal? Have to get a bunch of logs, cut them into firewood (crafting recipe so this part is quick), make a 2x2x2 to 11x11x11 hole and fill fully with firewood, light a fire on top, cover, and wait a day. If it’s not fully covered you’re just left with a bunch of ash instead of charcoal.

    Metal tools? Have to get the ore/nuggets, melt over a charcoal or hotter fire, pour into ingot mold, hammer and clip it into the desired shape, cool in water. Want to carry something hot by hand? Better have some tongs or you’ll take damage.

    Trying to cook inside? Smoke can build up if you don’t have a chimney - and your fire can go out if it’s raining and the chimney is straight down.

    Everything takes a lot more work than Minecraft because it’s meant to be more realistic - but there are so many mechanics that it’s a ton of fun to learn and complete stuff. My current playthrough I’m still sifting sand to get enough copper nuggets/items to make a pickaxe to mine some copper ore to make more tools, but I have a nice little stash of vegetable and meat meals stored in crocks in my hole-in-the-ground cellar/bedroom. Still need to get around to making an actual shelter and cellar, but I want a pickaxe first so I can make a nice sized cellar to preserve food through the winter.