I picked this thing up in a Steam sale at 75% off after having avoided it like contagious illness since launch, reasoning to myself that for a cost of about £7.99 it'd still pay for itself through sheer amount of content.

And content is what I got, all right. Nebulous, homogenous, thoroughly unexceptional content. My experience has been, more or less:

• Find the three unmarked items in this room and craft them into a parcel, then deliver that to another settlement.
• Pick up and listen to countless audio tapes made by people long-dead and never particularly captivating when they were still alive.
• Boil some water.
• Read through reams of discarded notes about the daily minutiae of life in Shitsville.
• Grill some steak to go with that water.
• Slowly feel your initial interest fade as it dawns on you that this isn't a story, this is what somebody thought constituted lore.
• Realise that some people paid up to £59.99 to do this on launch day, while the fanfiction on AO3 is free.
• Struggle to see the landscape, and enemies, through the film of clown vomit that is the Gamebryo engine's gasping attempts to render lighting effects and shadows that aren't pixellated.
• Shoot at enemies who move in fits and starts, or not at all, in response to your presence.
• Shoot at them again because the lag means you can't be sure if the first shot connected.
• Question what you're doing with your life.
• Christ, shoot him again, he's still dancing. - Re-level your wobbly desk leg.
• Stare in wonderment at a game which is somehow uglier, and runs worse, than Fallout 4.
• Appreciate a passing three-headed opossum.
• Check out the pop-up for the overpriced store, which is the first thing you see every time you log in.

I thought I'd at least enjoy exploring the wilderness of a new location full of fresh landmarks, enemies and particularly cryptids (none of them yet), but I think I might've already checked out in a matter of days. I just...don't care. This is the least compelling Fallout game I think I've ever played. I can't imagine how bad this must have been on launch.

And the Camp UI is an absolutely headache-inducing abomination.

Anyway, do you think I can still get my money's worth? Can this be saved?

Are there...mods???

My wife is thinking about signing up for the Master Workshopper program from AJ & Smart. It’s a relatively big financially decision so I thought I would pass along some of her initial thoughts and questions here in the hopes anyone had some experience with this program either personally or just anecdotally.

Hey everyone,

I'm thinking about signing up for the Master Workshopper program from AJ & Smart and would love to hear from anyone who's already gone through it. If you've done it, I'd really appreciate your thoughts!

Here’s what I’m curious about:

1	Quality of Content: Is the material solid and up-to-date?

2	Instructors: How are the instructors? Do they make the content engaging and clear?

3	Practical Application: Were you able to use what you learned right away in your work?

4	Community and Networking: How’s the community aspect? Did you make any good connections?

5	Value for Money: Do you think it was worth the investment? Why or why not?

6	Career Impact: Has it made a difference in your career or skills?

Any other thoughts or experiences you can share would be awesome too!

Thanks a lot for your help!

Next up of blockbusters is Mission: Impossible - Fallout from 2018 which made $791 million at the box office. Second M:I film directed by Christopher McQuarrie.

IMDb
Letterboxd
Wikipedia

Is this a proper blockbuster with all that entails? Any thoughts on the franchise in general?

The rest of the schedule is:

• 15th: Snatch
• 22nd: Barbie
• 29th: Edge of Tomorrow

There are two relevant passages that signal what I mean when I used the word profound. The first is about Lovecraft.

The universe of modern science engendered a profounder horror in Lovecraft’s writings than that stemming from its tremendous distances and its highly probably alien and powerful non-human inhabitants. For the chief reason that man fears the universe revealed by materialistic science is that it is a purposeless, soulless place. To quote Lovecraft’s “The Silver Key”, man can hardly bear the realization that “the blind cosmos grinds aimlessly on from nothing to something and from something back to nothing again, neither heeding nor knowing the wishes or existence of the minds that flicker for a second now and then in the darkness.”

Fritz Leiber, “A Literary Copernicus”, 1949

The second is by weird lit author Thomas Ligotti. I think it describes a certain kind of sensation I get from his stories.

In the literature of supernatural horror, a familiar storyline is that of a character who encounters a paradox in the flesh, so to speak, and must face down or collapse in horror before this ontological perversion —something which should not be, and yet is. Most fabled as specimens of a living paradox are the "undead," those walking cadavers greedy for an eternal presence on earth. But whether their existence should go on unendingly or be cut short by a stake in the heart is not germane to the matter at hand. What is exceedingly material resides in the supernatural horror that such beings could exist in their impossible way for an instant. Other examples of paradox and supernatural horror congealing together are inanimate things guilty of infractions against their nature. Perhaps the most outstanding instance of this phenomenon is a puppet that breaks free of its strings and becomes self-mobilized.

[…]

Whether or not there really are manifestations of the supernatural, they are horrifying to us in concept, since we think ourselves to be living in a natural world, which may be a festival of massacres but only in a physical rather than a metaphysical purport. This is why we routinely equate the supernatural with horror. And a puppet possessed of life would exemplify just such a horror, because it would negate all conceptions of a natural physicalism and affirm a metaphysics of chaos and nightmare. It would still be a puppet, but it would be a puppet with a mind and a will, a human puppet—a paradox more disruptive of sanity than the undead. But that is not how they would see it. Human puppets could not conceive of themselves as being puppets at all, not when they are fixed with a consciousness that excites in them the unshakable sense of being singled out from all other objects in creation. Once you begin to feel you are making a go of it on your own—that you are making moves and thinking thoughts which seem to have originated within you—it is not possible for you to believe you are anything but your own master.

Thomas Ligotti, “The Conspiracy Against the Human Race”, 2010

I think these passages illustrate the rich philosophical subtext that is found in the said authors' work. I'm looking for other cosmic horror or weird lit stories that evoke a sense of profoundness or philosophical deepness.

Flesh and Blood is a trading card game (think Yugioh, Magic: the Gathering, Pokemon, etc) which only launched in 2020 but has been rapidly gaining popularity across the world.

If you’re familiar with other trading card games, this has some key differences in the pace of the games. Usually, players have limited resources to begin with, and build up resources throughout the game. In FaB, however, players start at their strongest with the most access to resources, and slowly exhaust these resources as the game goes on.

I played MtG casually for a bit over a decade, and I have a number of friends who all enjoy the Commander format. I never had the skills or budget to play in tournaments, but that’s never been my thing anyway.

I’m just curious if there are many other players here on Tildes.

If you play, which classes or heroes to you prefer? What do you think of the way the game has been managed so far? Do you play casually or are you more ambitious than that? Do you play online or do you stick to exclusively in-person games? How did you get into the game, did you play other TCGs before or is FaB your first foray?

Following this month's discussion of the Dispossessed, we are set up for Project Hail Mary towards the end of June. After that we will discuss Ocean at the End of the Lane at the end of July, Small Gods at the end of August and This is How You Lose the Time War at the end of September.

I look forward to reading with you.

Apologies if this isn't an appropriate place to post this.

Inspired by a paper I found a while back (https://publications.lib.chalmers.se/records/fulltext/215545/local_215545.pdf), I tried my hand at implementing a program (in C#) to create ASCII art from an image. It works pretty well, but like they observed in the paper, it's pretty slow to compare every tile to 90-some glyphs. In the paper, they make a decision tree to replicate this process at a faster speed.

Recently, I revisited this. I thought I'd try making a neural net, since I found the idea interesting. I've watched some videos on neural nets, and refreshed myself on my linear algebra, and I think I've gotten pretty close. That said, I feel like there's something I'm missing (especially given the fact that the loss isn't really decreasing). I think my problem is specifically during backpropagation.

Here is a link to the TrainAsync method in GitHub: https://github.com/bendstein/ImageToASCII/blob/1c2e2260f5d4cfb45443fac8737566141f5eff6e/LibI2A/Converter/NNConverter.cs#L164C59-L164C69. The forward and backward propagation methods are below it.

If anyone can give me any feedback or advice on what I might be missing, I'd really appreciate it.

It's 2024 if I remember correctly and budgeting is a fairly common practice. Companies are obsessed with data. Yet when I got to the store and buy a videogame, dap drywall joint compount, and 3 avocados the transactions is just the store and the amount. It'd be nice if I could track what I've been buying, categories them into entertainment, home improvement, and groceries respectively.

I'm guessing this information actually is tracked but is only used for marketing purposes. But I'm curious, does anyone have more information on why transactions can't at least optionally support extra metadata about what was actually bought?

We begin June with Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man from 1973 which is now considered a horror cult classic.

IMDb
Letterboxd
Wikipedia

Since this is the month of horror movies, did you find it scary, unsettling, creepy, eerie, spooky or horrifying?

The rest of the schedule for June is:

• 10th: Ravenous (1999)
• 17th: X (2022)
• 24th: The Exorcist (1973)

Great moment in time
What a surprise Canada has been, congratz to the Canadian fans. Odds are against them winning on their next game but here I am thinking. IMO if the game develops like that of Germany vs Spain, I think Canada has a chance. The biggest thing that is controversial is if Messi is not in the lineup. If Messi is in the lines up I see Argentina not playing as well and Canada having the upper hand. I love watching Messsi but he is not playing well, playing hurt etc., I was lucky to go to the stadium, in the Chile vs Argentina game and it's very noticeable his participation is not great though arguably one would want him in vs out. Alright Canucks let's see what you got!