Oh, the hours I sunk into this game, a decade or so ago.
Someone on a friend’s Discord brought up “Nolvus,” one of the mod pack manager bundle thingies (technical terms? what’s the fun in using those?) for Skyrim and how it made them want to revisit the game again and I thought… why not? Surely, after the better part of a dozen years, the Skyrim experience has been perfected and polished.
I took a few days off. I didn’t have any particular reason nor much in the way of goals (though I had some of those, mostly unmet). My boss keeps reminding me that I use the least PTO of all employees so, here I am, having burned a few days’ worth.
I suppose I should apologize to somebody for that post title, but it’s true in its own way, right? Right.
A couple of years back I threw some money behind the idea of a self-produced, non-Netflix-y 13th season of Mystery Science Theater 3000. And it was good! Very, very good. Albeit not without the sort of technological growing pains one might expect from cobbling together a whole streaming environment out of available parts. (Not entirely unlike using special parts to make robot friends, after all.)
But seriously. Several sets of hosts, some superb(ly bad) movies and top-notch riffing, exactly what one hopes for from another batch of newly-minted MST3K. I got what I paid for, no argument there.
Oh, but I also had signed up at a level which suggested there’d be… physical goodies. At some point. Well… it took a couple of years but today’s that “at some point.” Behold:
I never know what to do with stickers. It’s not like I have a car. Maybe I’ll look into some magnetic backing material and turn them into really big fridge magnets.
Stickers! A t-shirt! A popcorn bucket! A guzzler of a drink cup! Posters! (Not pictured in an unrolled state; they didn’t want to stay unrolled without heavy weights for eight corners’ worth, oh also they’re huge. Just trust me that they’re really nifty.)
It’s not like I signed up to back Season 13 specifically to have physical goodies shipped to my doorstep, but I’m sure not complaining. And I’ll definitely get some mileage out of that t-shirt if nothing else.
Maybe I’ll pour some non-popcorn-y snacks into the bucket and curl up with “Beyond Atlantis” some evening soon…
Anyway: Since that-which-was-Twitter continues its slide toward both irrelevance and hostility toward the masses who made it what it was, I should mention that I’ve (more or less) moved elsewhere. If you look on the sidebar you’ll see the “Find Me Here” link list. Other than the webcomic and the self-referential link to… the website you’re reading now… no, I don’t know why that’s there, honestly… you’ll find the social-media-ish things I’m inhabiting (to greater or lesser degrees) in the meantime.
I wouldn’t say that any of them are my exclusive hangout. Even Twitter was never my exclusive hangout, just… where the bulk of my time & energy went. (Maybe I should thank the emerald edgelord for freeing me from that? Er, no. No, never, never will I thank that jackwagon for anything, ever.)
Anyway: I can be found at “the fediverse” (on a Mastodon server), Tumblr, Bluesky, and I really ought to pick my Pixelfed account back up again, plus potentially whatever else may come down the pipe later. (Technically I have accounts at Spoutible and Cohost but… eh. I haven’t touched those in months, not going to bother linking them.)
Things are a hot mess, aren’t they? Find me somewhere and we’ll chat about it.
I’ve reached endgame for my “ChooChooingScenery” game of Satisfactory, the point where I gear up to send off the final Space Elevator shipment consisting of four products: Assembly Director Systems, Magnetic Field Generators, Nuclear Pasta (which, despite its name, contains zero radioactive source material), and Thermal Propulsion Rockets.
The math is all sorted out, source materials (almost) entirely in production, and I have a vague notion that I’m going to build a gigantic factory in the “dune desert” to house this last great project. But I want to make it nice and neat for a change. I want to build a set of machines that not only fit together well but looks good doing it.
And I can’t do that if I’m not absolutely clear on the exact order of what things I need to go into which other things to make the next things.
It was the jankiest of builds, it was the jankiest of builds.
Sorry, Charles Dickens, but in this case repeating myself is the most accurate way to start.
This past Tuesday evening, the kids and I finished up the “Tier 8 Products” factory build. Which is to say, we’ve now automated the final three requirements for the final milestone unlock: Turbomotors, Fused Modular Frames, and Cooling Systems. (Electromagnetic Control Rods are built elsewhere for various reasons.) I noted in voice chat at the end of the session that our co-op build was vastly more efficient and elegant than my personal version of this same (basic) factory had turned out. Spud found this amusing, as he sees our version as being quite “full of the jank.” Which isn’t wrong, but there’s janky and there’s janky.
Please allow me to illustrate.
Yes, it “needs” supports underneath. We’ll get there some day. There’s beautification to be done all over this co-op map.(more…)