I know it’s an unpopular opinion given current circumstances, but I’ve always been a huge nerd about Russia. The history, the geography, the music, etc. And as an American, I’ve always found it fascinating how U.S.-Russian relations have fluctuated over time. We’ve gone from allies, to enemies, to frenemies. This doesn’t mean I support Z or Putin, of course. What are you a nerd about?
Comic Books
You have to get special collectibles insurance. Varies depending on what you have.
My friends would all tell you how tired they are of hearing me go on and on about urban planning and infrastructure.
The ways in which our communities are built have such a large and profound impact on our lives, yet most people give little thought to it. IMO a great deal of the social woes we’re dealing with (at least in North America) are caused or made worse by our lack of sensible city-planning, from carbon emissions to social isolation.
There exists so many cool and interesting ways to build solid, sustainable communities! It’s really exciting! Sadly I have to live that excitement by researching other countries. The only form of city-planning that seems to exist here in Canada is “highway going through a parking lot interspaced with strip malls and encircled by single-family housing suburbs”.
Are you me, but Canadian? I completely and entirely agree with your comment (USA checking in). Some of our biggest issues are directly caused by our utter dependence on cars, but also by different driving laws in different areas, dumb exit / entrance designs, lack of signage in critical areas (especially regarding high-speed turns) and general disrepair of the roads. These things all compound to make accidents one of the leading causes of death worldwide.
There should be more uniform rules and regulations regarding letting just anyone drive a 2+ ton vehicle, and it’s abhorrent how little you need to know to pass a driving test
I want to be nerdy about infrastructure, but I think, just like being a vet, it would make me way too sad lol
How many hours of cities skylines have you played and what is your opinion on the second part?
Honestly, maybe two hours? I’m not much of a gamer anyways, but the little experience I had with the game focused too much on cars for my liking. I hear there are mods that fix that but I never got around to installing any.
It’s definitely extremely car centric, and it’s always annoyed me how it just magics away cars instead of modeling parking. However they do have the tools (through expansions/dlc) and there are community mods that allow one to live out some public transit fantasies. I’ve been working on a certain city concept for years that’s nearly entirely car independent and I could probably make it the entire topic of one of my nerd-outs.
this is the one i always get most worked up about, just because it’s so important and no one seems to realize it
like good god if we just agreed to stop building terrible infrastructure we could have so much more pleasant lives, we would save lives, and we’d save money! AAAAAAAAAAAAA
I’m into this too. Is there a good Lemmy community dedicated to urban planning and infrastructure?
There’s a ton of good resources out there! If you’re in North America, Strong Towns is a great place to start. On YouTube there are great channels like Not Just Bikes, RMTransit, and City Beautiful.
I second the recommendation for Not Just Bikes on YouTube, probably one of the online content creators who’ve had the biggest effect on me. Another good one is Oh The Urbanity!
I haven’t gotten around to reading it yet, but I’ve heard many recommend Confessions of a Recovering Traffic Engineer written by the founder of Strong Towns. Honestly, a lot of sources I’ve seen reference this book or are inspired by Strong Towns.
Boardgames! I used to be more into trading card games like Magic, but got tired of the cost and constant churn, and then spent the last couple years delving deeper into boardgames, including hosting a weekly game night that regularly has 8-10 people :)
Ankh is a fun game but boi howdy does it take a while. That said though, one of my favorites it Scythe and that can take a while too. Have you been to GenCon?
Love your organization! We are struggling hard with that, we have a lot of littler games and idk where to put them.
Very nice collection. We have a few cross over. What’s your opinion of Voidfall?
It’s really fun! It’s definitely a completely different kind of game than an Eclipse or Twilight Imperium, but if you like heavy euros there’s a lot to like about it. I really enjoy the unique technologies in each game, and the ability to define your own scoring criteria through agendas.
Inis and Brian Boru!
High five.
If Innovation is not in any of those small boxes, my recommendation is to try out Innovation(because you’ve covered everything else nicely). (c:
It’s there! Right on top of the Root boxes :)
I love Brian Boru, but I’m still not very good at it! The drafting feels like it has a pretty high skill ceiling.
Mead. It’s such a simple recipe: Honey, water, yeast. Thats all you need to make a basic mead. Its so easy. Once you start researching more though, good lord. Ph balances, Sparkeloid v. Bentonite, fruit addition before, during, or after fermentation, Primary fermentation, secondary, racking. Don’t even get me started on the chemical additives for stabilization, and sanitation. My kitchen becomes sterile operating room every time I do a brew. I’ve also got this dope refractometer that makes me feel like a goddamn scientist every time I use it.
I am a computational chemist and biochemist. Ive been an insurance agent and worked in IT at the DOD, I am a masters Starcraft 2 player, Minecraft mod pack creator and Mod dev. Aside from English, there are 4 other languages that I understand well enough to be conversational. I have had some of my art featured in a museum. I am a mathemagician. I have tutored thousands of students in Math, chemistry, biology and physics. I built a spreadsheet that tracked 30+ parameters of 600+ foods that I used to help my mother with her kidney disease and me with diabetes. Her kidney disease has been stable for 5+ years and I dropped over 80 pounds in a year.
Take your pick.
You’re too powerful, Valve pls nerf
(Actually though that’s impressive, congrats and I salute you)
Speaking of nerfs, I found out that I was/am ADHD in my final semester of college.
Honestly I mostly played Starcraft because I liked the lore surrounding it. I started playing in junior high back in 1997 and liked the universe it built. But after 30,000+ games getting to where I am, I am kind of burnt out by it. Stormgate would have to have its unique charms for me to want to jump ship to it and from what I have seen, its too close to starcraft for me to want to play it. As it is, I would rather play something like balder’s gate 3 or something else story heavy, pve or creativity focused rather than pvp.
Theyre unreleased and theyre kind of garbage as theyre mcreator mods :/. I dont really have the patience to code them from scratch. One adds terrain blocks eg. coral, colored sand, lunar soil, martian soil and rock etc. The latter blocks are textured based on NASA photos of the actual dirt and rock of the moon and mars. I added the moon and mars as places you could fly to using the elytra. Venus and a few other places were added and are based on old scifi depictions. The elytra flight mechanic was based on an old DnD campaign I was part of where planets and moons could be visited via hot air balloons.
The other mod adds custom potion effects. eg. a potion that burns the player when theyre in the sun, one that deals damage if theyre in water, “cursed” potions that do things like close containers as if a cat was sitting on them, technical potions that do stuff behind the scenes eg. execute commands etc. I think its up to 40 or so by now.
Id like to eventually recode them from scratch but there are hundreds of more pressing issues with the pack.
