A long, complicated story, summarized: (apart from Tildes, on which I lurk) I swore off all social media years ago. Then my job required that I have an account on LinkedIn. I reconsidered, and attempted to make the least disclosive account possible in an effort to protect my privacy. Things aren't going well. Despite logging in with the correct credentials, on the same device, using the same browser; and with access to my signup email, and access to the phone I used to enroll, LinkedIn has flagged my account the second time I tried using it and now requires me to upload images of myself and my government ID to regain access to their cesspool. Are you familiar with their protocols and can share insights, so that if I start again I don't face the same problem?

I have read what LinkedIn says and I have read discussions on Reddit on the topic. LinkedIn says you can opt to "use your work email" or mail them an affidavit. These options were not given to me. Everyone else I have seen reporting facing this seems to have triggered the system by losing their login credentials or moving countries; what brought this upon me and can I avoid it?

1. Is it that I use a VPN, and it may have routed through a different IP address on the second login?
2. I use an email alias. Is LinkedIn purging accounts with email domains that offer aliases?
3. Is it a result of clearing cookies?
4. Is it easier to maintain a Google account (!) which LinkedIn allows as login without this ID thing coming up?

Please be gentle with your advice as I am kind of panicking.

The Party

• Jeff, half-elf Druid 6 / Fighter 4 / Magus 4
• Lee, gray elf Fighter 4 / Magic-User 4 / Thief 5
• Oryn, high elf Magic-User 5 / Thief 6
• Rudy, halfling Druid 2 / Thief 3
• Takeshi, human Ranger 4
• Varda, human Cleric 6 / Magic-User 4
• Vordt, half-ogre Cleric 4 / Fighter 5

Ran the group through some werewolf hunting the other day. Thanks to the local army scouts, they knew where the hideout was; a chapel on a hill in the badlands, about ten miles from town. The party arrives, takes a look in one of the side windows, climbs the bell tower for a vantage point around the thing, including the graveyard and mausoleum, and then pushes their way into the building.

There's no light inside, but Takeshi has a broadsword with continual light on it, as well as a ring that increases the radius of light sources he commands, so the hall and sanctuary ahead are well lit through the 80' of luminescence in his hands. As they enter the sanctuary, three people materialize behind the altar, outlanders in appearance, claiming to be using this building as protection from the elements. Some players noted the lack of a "lived in" feeling here, no bedrolls or typical litter you'd expect of a temporary living space, and these people appeared well-fed and hale. Sensing that the party is about to lash out, the werewolves attack pre-emptively and gain surprise.

(Round 1) Takeshi and Lee ended up targets between these three werewolves. Four more tried to ambush from behind, but Vordt was in the back filling up the hallway, blocking their way. Oryn casts amplify damage at one while Varda fires magic missile and Jeff fills the hallway with web as Takeshi and Lee retaliate in melee; Rudy provides missile support with their sling. (R2) Oryn and Varda wait for an an opportunity to capitalize on while Takeshi and Lee continue trading blows, with Rudy continuing to provide missile support and Jeff casting a magic missile; Vordt is 5' deep in the web begins to leverage his obscene Strength to break free of them. One werewolf lies dead. (R3) Varda continues waiting, confident in their allies' abilities as Oryn charges in, Rudy provides missile support, Jeff supplies another magic missile, Takeshi and Lee continue trading blows with the two remaining werewolves, and Vordt is working himself free of the webs. Three werewolves lie dead.

Over the next couple of minutes, Vordt breaks free from the web. Not wanting to try and jump through windows, the party opts to wait for the spell to expire, as the remaining four werewolves trapped in it yell muffled requests for mercy. Their progress was much slower than Vordt's, and they had to go through 8' of web rather than 5', but after about an hour they'd all suffocated. During the wait, both Takeshi and Lee ate some belladonna to stave off potential infection.

The party finds a trap door to a cellar and checks it out. There's a wight hiding in the shadows, but it doesn't surprise them. It still slaps Lee and eats about 5k XP off his thief levels, but it dies by the end of the first round. In exchange, they found an iron chest, within which was 21k gold, 13 gems, a scroll of protection from magic, dwarf-sized field plate +1, and a pouch of dust of dryness.

Then Takeshi and Lee both vomit up their lunch and pass out on the floor. Lee is no longer breathing. Ingesting belladonna does a few things: (1) small chance of curing lycanthropy if taken quickly after infection, (2) incapacitates you for 1d4 days, (3) has a 1% chance of killing you. Lee is the 1%.

They get both of their bodies and the treasure out and back to town, then broker a deal with the local lordling MU to get Lee poked with a rod of resurrection, which drops him from 20 to 19 Constitution, removing his natural regeneration. Takeshi remains incapacitated for a day and Lee for a week, due to resurrection sickness.

Sydney Sweeney has been the subject of a lot of controversies as of late. But what I want to focus on is how media outlets have been covering the release of her two new films, Americana and Eden.

Some background:

Americana is a genre film. It was shot and screened in 2023 to relatively positive reviews. The company that financed it, Bron, went bankrupt shortly after the film's screening. Due to this bankruptcy Lionsgate was able to acquire the rights to the film for cheap. While the film was made on a nine million dollar budget, Lionsgate purchased it for three million, with two million of that coming from international rights sales. Meaning that Lionsgate only spent one million acquiring the domestic distribution rights. In order to get more VOD sales and streaming deals, Lionsgate gave the film a small theatrical release with next to nothing in marketing.

Eden premiered at TIFF in 2024. Directed by Ron Howard the film also stars Jude Law, Vanessa Kirby, Ana De Armas, and Daniel Bruhl along with Sweeney. The film was financed at a net cost of 35 million dollars. It received mixed to negative reviews and only Netflix was willing to purchase it. Ron Howard opted to go with a smaller distributor, Vertical (who are mostly known for straight-to-video trash but have been slowly building themselves as a more legitimate art-house distributor), due to wanting a theatrical release which no one wanted to give the film. Vertical made a deal for less than 20 million dollars for the film.

Now, each distributor had their reasons for acquiring each film. Lionsgate saw a cheap film with a rising star which was well-received. It was an easy profit for them and helps build up their library as they are looking to be sold off. Vertical, having released last year's acclaimed The Order, is trying to build a filmmaker friendly reputation. Buying a non-commercial film with a high profile cast and a high profile director gives them more exposure and allows them to be more in the conversation for prestige filmmaking.

The film's financiers, however, are the money losers in both situations. Whether or not the distributors lost money doesn't really matter. Money losers are money losers and these films should be described as such.

And this is where it gets weird.

In the wake of Americana's opening we got two different articles about the film's box office. One from Deadline and one from IndieWire. Covering for the film, arguing that they weren't money losers for the reasons I myself just gave earlier. This weekend, as Eden just released, Deadline releases yet another article defending the film's performance.

This is too much coverage for these films that no one saw. Comparable films never get articles like this. So what's going on?

Here's my conspiracy theory. Sydney Sweeney is friends with Jeff Bezos. She attended his wedding and a few months ago there were heavily circulated rumors about her being the new Bond girl a franchise that Bezos unfortunately owns.

The media outlets that cover the entertainment industry: Variety, Deadline, Hollywood Reporter, and IndieWire are all owned by the same person: Jay Penske. Penske and Bezos run in the same circles, rich guy circles, and have attended philanthropic events at the same time. What I believe is happening is that Bezos is using his influence and connections for these outlets to write out positive headlines for Sweeney, due to her controversies, to create a more flattering image of her and her career.

It's odd, to say the least.

Kingmaker was last night. Some minor spoilers to follow.

Party, Level 3

• Marisiel, Elf Witch
• Nok-Nok, Goblin Rogue
• Linzi, Halfling Bard
• Amiri, Human Barbarian
• Titus, Human Fighter
• Valerie, Human Fighter
• Stik, Kobold Monk

Variants in Play: Ancestry Paragon, Free Archetype, Gradual Ability Boosts, Slow Leveling, Stamina. I also allow Hero Points to adjust the degree of success on a check by one step rather than re-roll; this primarily gets used to either mitigate a crit fail or turn a failure into a success.

Realizing they had just under a week before the Stag Lord's bandits tried to strong-arm Oleg's Trading Post for goods again, the party stopped their trip towards the tatzlwyrm lair and immediately turned around to return to Oleg's to stock up and then head towards the fort.

On the way back, they encountered yet more bandits and, on one evening, an owlbear and its mate. Once at Oleg's, they spent a day turning in their quests and buying some of the goods available at the trading post. When ready, they set out. About twelve miles from the fort, they were about to start cooking dinner when some of the Stag Lord's bandits showed up in a neutral manner, presuming the party to be aspiring recruits. Linzi takes the opportunity to try and get some information out of them by indulging their fantasy.

Titus eventually gets bored and challenges one of the bandits to a duel. The bandit rightfully declines, but Titus begins pushing forward with intent to attack him anyways. Linzi threatened to force him to spend his night in a laughing fit to get him to back off, and he calmed down. Unfortunately, after dinner was taken care of, the bandits took their leave, not wanting to be shanked in the night by the crazy man.

The next morning they stop a few hundred feet from the fort and Marisiel sends her familiar, Youmu, forward to scout the hills since the bandits don't seem to be paying them much mind. Youmu returns shortly and informs Marisiel that something's off about the hill; he suspects undead. Armed with that information, the party decided to waltz up to the front door and just infiltrate by providing the password.

Once inside, introductions are made, stories are shared, and after the party learns that there's a late shipment of alcohol and the Stag Lord loves the stuff, Stik taps into their knowledge of alchemy (via dedication) to create a bottle of booze. The Stag Lord quickly comes out and snatches the bottle before returning to his chamber.

Stik is quickly inducted as the brewmeister, but instead of delivering alcohol to the other bandits, they deliver lightning. In a bottle. One Extreme encounter later (as they triggered the entire compound, including the Stag Lord, and the owlbear was let free at some point), the Stag Lord lies dead on the ground along with most of his lieutenants.

First of all, I want to say very big THANK YOU for all who contribute to various libre, open source etc. projects. I'm so happy that people love sharing knowledge, skills and fruits of their work.

But to the topic - how do you find time for it?
Whenever I update my Debian or Axpos or any other libre software I see soooo many updates/changes made by (probably soooo many) people. And I always ask myself a question - when did they do that? Where have they found time for contributing? For me full time work makes me so tired that it's the last thing I think about after work hours. Especially in the office job, after x hours of sitting before my monitor I truly hate every next minute after work. I would love to contribute some code, I would realllly love to. Sometimes I find some bugs and try to report them and that's all I am able to do. What frustrates me the most is that I have abilities to code because it's my daily job, but I don't have energy to do that.

So, could you tell me how do you find time and energy to contribute to libre projects?

PF2, Kingmaker tonight. Minor spoilers re: names of potential companions and side-quest details.

Party, Level 3

• Marisiel, Elf Witch
• Nok-Nok, Goblin Rogue
• Linzi, Halfling Bard
• Amiri, Human Barbarian
• Titus, Human Fighter
• Valerie, Human Fighter
• Stik, Kobold Monk

Variants in Play: Ancestry Paragon, Free Archetype, Gradual Ability Boosts, Slow Leveling, Stamina. I also allow Hero Points to adjust the degree of success on a check by one step rather than re-roll; this primarily gets used to either mitigate a crit fail or turn a failure into a success.

The group had set out at the end of last session with the intention of picking some radishes and hunting two local monsters of some renown, a boar called Tuskgutter and some tatzlwyrms. Amiri was especially excited about going after Tuskgutter.

They arrive at the radish patch to find four kobolds suffering from The Itis™ that quickly scramble to protect their patch, but the monk eases tensions and ends up receiving an entire basket of the spicy radishes.

They spend a few days following the edge of the forest, crossing a rickety old bridge, disturbing some hunting spiders but dispatching them quickly. One evening, just after a meal, several of the Stag Lord's bandits had managed to sneak up on them, which turned out to be the last thing any of them did. Another afternoon saw Stik, Amiri, and Valerie attacked by thylacines while out foraging for ingredients, but by now they're used to that kind of thing.

They get into the general area of where they expect Tuskgutter's lair to be and spend the day searching for it. They eventually find it and have themselves their third proper Solo encounter since starting the game; I took the base profile for Tuskgutter and scaled it to be a Creature 7, so as to make the anticipation set up by the bounty poster and Amiri's vibrating in place worth it. With some good use of debuffing actions/spells and Hero Points, they take it down within a couple of rounds, albeit Titus did fall to an attack routine. One lesser healing potion and a soothe later, along with a short breather, and he's fine.

Trophy in hand, they make camp. As they're breaking camp in the morning, a hunter approaches the group to warn them of the dangers of Tuskgutter, only to be offered bacon.

Next stop, the tatzlwyrm lair.

Sometimes I feel like there's something wrong with how I use technology, or I'm just incredibly biased and predisposed to cynicism or something, so I wanted to get a pulse on how everyone else feels about AI, specifically LLMs, and how you use them in your professional and personal lives.

I've been messing with LLMs since GPT-3, being initially very impressed by the technology, to that view sort of evolving to a more nuanced one. I think they're very good at a specific thing and not great at anything else.

I feel like, increasingly, I'm becoming a rarity among tech people, especially executives. I run cybersecurity for a medium sized agency, and my boss is the CIO. Any time I, or any of her direct reports write a proposal, a policy, a report, or basically anything meant to distribute to a wide audience, they insist on us "running it through copilot", which to them, just means pasting the whole document into copilot chat, then taking the output.

It inevitably takes a document I worked hard on to balance tone, information, brevity, professional voice, and technical details and turns it into a bland, wordy mess. It's unusable crap that I then have to spend more time with to have it sound normal. My boss almost always comes up with "suggestions" or "ideas" that are very obviously just copy pasted answers from copilot chat too.

I see people online that talk about how LLMs have made them so much faster at development, but every time I've ever used it that field, it can toss together a quick prototype for something I likely could have googled, but there will frequently be little hidden bugs in the code. If I try to use the LLM to fix those bugs, it inevitably just makes it worse. Every time I've tried to use AI in a coding workflow, I spend less time thinking about the control flow of the software, and more time chasing down weird esoteric bugs. Overall it's never saved me any time at all.

I've used them as a quick web search, and while they do save me from having to trawl through a lot of the hellhole that is the modern internet, with blogspam, ads, and nonsense people write online, a lot of times, it will just hallucinate answers. I've noticed it's decent at providing me results when results exist, but if results don't exist, or I'm asking something that doesn't make sense, it falls flat on its face because it will just make things up in order to sound convincing and helpful.

I do see some niches where the stuff has been useful. Summarizing large swathes of documents, where the accuracy of that summary doesn't matter much is a little useful. Like if I were tasked to look through 300 documents and decide which ones were most relevant to a project, and I only had an hour to do it, I think that would be a task it would do well with. I can't review or even skim 300 documents in an hour, and even though an LLM would very likely be wrong about a lot of it, at least that's something.

The thing is, I don't frequently run into tasks where accuracy doesn't matter. I doubt most people do. Usually when someone asks for an answer to something, or you want to actually do something useful, the hidden assumption is that the output will be correct, and LLMs are just really bad at being correct.

The thing is, the internet is full of AI evangelists that talk about their AI stack made up of SaaS products I've never even heard of chained together. They talk about how insanely productive it's made them and how it's like being superhuman and without it they'd be left behind.

I'm 99% sure that most of this is influencer clickbait capitalizing on FOMO to keep the shared delusion of LLM's usefulness going, usually because they have stake in the game. They either run an AI startup, are involved in a company that profits off of AI being popular, they're an influencer that makes AI content, or they just have Nvidia in their stock portfolio like so much of us do.

Is there anyone out there that feels this technology is actually super useful that doesn't fall into one of those categories?

If so, let me know. Also, let me know what I'm doing wrong. Am I just a Luddite? A crotchety old man? Out of touch? I'm fine if I am, I just want to know once and for all.

Party hit level 3 at the end of the last session. Started tonight's session with an encounter with three hunting spiders (Low threat). Barbarian got inflicted with the poison and managed to stay on stage 3 (2d6 poison, clumsy 2, off-guard) for the majority of the six-round duration, which ran its full course.

Still on the way back to the trading post, they encountered more thylacines (Moderate threat), but they push through that just fine. A wolf approached them as they were walking alongside the great forest and was beckoning them to follow. They did, and were led to a man bleeding out and trapped under a couple of boulders. In the distance they hear crashing and bellowing as something big approaches them. They get the guy out from under the boulder and put an elixir of life in his mouth, which wakes him up. His immediate suspicion of the party allayed, he quickly fills them in on the fact that a troll is approaching and tells them to use fire or acid. Also don't let it get its hands on you.

The fight ended up being a bit of a slaughter due to dice rolls. I kept rolling low, they kept rolling high, so the troll went down at the very end of the second round despite being Creature 6. They nab the cold iron kukri and +1 light hammer from the troll's sack, and the man, a ranger, accompanies them back to the trading post.

They spend a week here doing various things; retraining, crafting, Earning Income. At the end of the week, they get their 70 gold reward from the quests they turned in, as well as the +1 striking bastard sword they'd ordered from a relatively distant city.

After spending some time going over their plans going forward, such as what quests to tackle, they head southwest to pick some radishes for the wife of the tradesman. We ended the session after wrapping up a bandit encounter during the camping portion of the day.

So, who wants a fun rabbit hole?

The Future I Saw is a 1999 manga by mangaka Ryo Tatsuki about supposed prophetic dreams. Supposedly many of those predictions would come to pass 15 years after each dream, or else in 15 year cycles (e.g. if something didn't happen in 2001, it could happen in 2016, then 2031, etc.). Purportedly this includes the deaths of Freddie Mercury and Princess Diana, and the 1995 Kobe earthquake, though those are debatable based on the fact they occurred before the manga was published. Or at least, Freddie Mercury's death was. There are currently two chapters translated and based on the foreword they were published in 1995 and 1996, and I don't know what year the Princess Diana prediction was published. I also don't think she published before the 1995 Kobe earthquake since she claimed that dream was only 15 days before.

As an extra note: she wasn't publishing the manga to spefically taut herself as a psychic or prophet. The two chapters that have been translated feel like a pretty standard example of a mangaka recounting some weird or mysterious event in their lives. In these chapters, she specifically focused on the bit about Freddie Mercury, a dream about her uncle's funeral, and a recurring dream of a woman in what she later learned to be an air raid shelter after finding it on a walk. And then the news reported a woman being found murdered there with the same clothes as her dream.

She's far from the only one who I've seen illustrate a story about a wild or creepy coincidence, I'm sure I've seen others also recount dreams that turned out to feel semi-prophetic. She just apparently had enough such stories to compile into a thematic volume, which makes sense since she apparently kept a very detailed dream journal to at least the 1970's. So lots of chances for her dreams to match up with reality.

However, some predictions that did come to pass afterwards, and the reason this manga became viral? The 2011 earthquake, and COVID.

Specifically, the cover included text on a notebook page saying "great disaster March 2011" which she added based on seeing the text in a dream shortly before the deadline. In regards to Covid, she supposedly predicted a great virus would strike the world in 2020 and peak in April, but it wouldn't be too deadly. The not deadly part was wrong... But she also predicted it would come back in 10 years even worse, so... Yeah, let's hope she's not psychic.

Now, to emphasize: a bunch of it is most likely coincidence. I've seen sources claim as many as 12 or 13 of her predictions have come true, but I can't actually find a full list of predictions to gauge the actual accuracy. The only one I can find is this Medium article, but it got the "death as a manga artist" wrong since she did retire around 2000 after publishing this volume. That said, there's definitely confirmation bias going on by people who want to believe she's psychic. She has some very avid believers. And also, again, she kept a dream journal since at least 1976. It makes sense some of those dreams would coincidentally line up with future real world events.

But it's still interesting. It feels rare to have two different big events predicted by a single source, so that adds a layer of intrigue and just a hint of "but what if...?" as you look at the other predictions. Based on the articles I've scoured, the big ones that have yet to occur are an eruption of Mt. Fuji (originally predicted for 2021, now pushed back to 2036 because of the 15 year thing), and an earthquake and tsunami in Kanagawa between June and September 2026.

The one that's currently making news and prompted this writeup: in the 2021 reprint, she predicted a major tsunami would occur in July 2025. So naturally people are saying last night's earthquake was that one. The details don't match up: she predicted the earth would crack open under the seabed between Japan and the Philippines (so the opposite side), that the waves would be worse than 2011, and people thought her descriptions of "boiling seas" indicated a volcanic eruption. But it's still an interesting coincidence that there was, indeed, an earthquake and tsunami in July 2025. And apparently that's good enough for some people to count it as an accurate prediction. Also, July isn't over yet, so uh. Who knows?

For some bonus reading if you want to dive into the rabbithole: There's a full Wikipedia page about that prediction, and the mild frenzy in the leadup to July this year. Most of the information I've shared came from various articles published just this year as a response to the growing rumors about it. That said, a lot of articles also seem to be either AI translated or maybe even AI written or researched with little human oversight, as many wrongly use male pronouns for her. I also haven't seen any articles reference the actual content of the manga beyond the big predictions, so chances are they're all regurgitating information that originally spread from a small selection of articles. So that just adds to the quagmire of iffy information available in English.

Still, like I said, it's kind of fun to look at and wonder. It's almost certainly just coincidence, but it's also the kind that leaves you wondering if maybe, just maybe...

Just wanted to share an update on the stuff I overshared in this thread nearly a month ago.

It's been an incredibly long, frustrating, but successful month. Within a few days of writing that post, we took my son to the doctor and I just explained everything going on. The doctor seemed as unsure as we were whether my son was experiencing illness or anxiety, so she decided to tackle both. He got some medication for the stomach issues and we got the ball rolling on getting him into therapy.

The following few weeks were very hit-and-miss. I tried to get him to drive with me on little errands here and there throughout the week to get him out of the house, comfortable in the car, and to try to work through the fear he was experiencing. At first it would take quite a lot of convincing and sometimes I got frustrated and acted like an idiot. Eventually we got to a point where the convincing took less time and resulted in less tears (and frustration). But we are at a point where he's getting better at calming himself down and going in the car even if he's a little scared.

We still haven't made much progress with getting him in the car with his sister though. We've done a few trips to the nearby park all together, but my wife had to sit between them to calm him down. Likewise, he's still hesitant to sleep in the same room as her (they share a room for now). And again, it has nothing to do with her, aside from her overreacting to him being upset and him being upset by that. It's a vicious cycle. Honestly this is the most difficult part right now because it's making doing anything really complicated. We literally cannot do family trips anywhere without taking two vehicles. More on this later.

One of my biggest concerns in the other thread was that he was scheduled for eye surgery toward the end of the month and pre/post op appointments and the surgery itself would require a lot of driving. I'm happy to report that he handled every single car trip relating to it like a champ. And the surgery itself was a success, and recovery is going really well. Also apparently thanks to COVID, parents are no longer allowed to go back to the operating room until their child falls asleep, which we didn't realize until a few seconds before they took him back. Which was really difficult for us as parents and for him as well. He keep mentioning it and I try to talk him through and explain that we didn't know and that we're sorry, but wouldn't have let him go if we didn't know the doctor and nurses would be taking good care of him.

And he had his first therapy appointment this morning. It was just an intake appointment so the therapist could get a feel for what's going on and to get to know my son a little bit. But I feel a lot better about things than I did a month ago. I know we still have a lot of struggle and work ahead of us (he starts 1st grade next month...Getting him and his sister there is going to be interesting).

I think the next few weeks are going to be spent working on getting him and his sister together in the car more. We're already working on the bedtime issue. The last two nights we had them together in the same room to read a bedtime story together and then afterwards she slept elsewhere. Just trying to baby step our way toward solving that problem.

Lastly, I wanted to thank you all for your support and comments in the original thread. It was very helpful to be able to write everything out and get some validation, advice, etc.

The party tonight consisted of

• Jeff, half-elf Druid 5 / Fighter 3 / Magus* 4
• Lee, gray elf Fighter 4 / Magic-User 4 / Thief 5
• Oryn, high elf Magic-User 5 / Thief 6
  • Henchman Takeshi, human Ranger 4
• Varda, human dual-class** Cleric 6 -> Magic-User 3
  • Henchman Rudy, halfling Druid 2 / Thief 3
• Vordt, half-ogre Cleric 4 / Fighter 4
  *Magus is a custom subclass of Magic-User I created.
  **Varda intends to become an occultist, another custom class of mine; becoming one functions similarly to bard, where you begin as Cleric, transition to Magic-User, and then finally become a proper occultist.

To recap the prior session, the party went into the dungeon again and explored a new direction, finding a long hallway with bas reliefs in brass decorating the walls. Behind a set of brass double-doors was a 90' by 40' chamber with four major points of interest.

• An oblong, 4' tall x 10' wide altar with a basin filled with water and treasure.
• A fountain streaming endless water without overflowing.
• Four pillars with gargoyles atop them, unmoving.
• A drape along the south wall covering something.
  After a cursory search, Rudy set to looting the basin, which triggered the entire altar to begin rolling forward and the marine life carved into it to animate. Rudy jumped out of the way as several combatants closed in. Many attacks and spells were slung its way, and it lashed out with teeth, tentacles, and pincers as it slowly rolled to face individual combatants. As Lee was caught by the fury of the altar, the gargoyles animated and began flying in to harass the party. Though the altar was defeated, the gargoyles seemed keen on taking Takeshi out, as by the end of that round he is bleeding on the floor. Varda then invokes a chant and uses a limited wish to revive Lee and transport everyone to a safe location. As everyone blinked, they found themselves in the domicile of the two old clerics hiding out in Woodpine, sage and incense filling their noses rather than the brine of the altar chamber.

They spend a week licking their wounds and allowing the clerics to tend to them, then set out again. Oryn casts invisbility, 10' radius on the party as they leave town and travel to the Temple dungeon. They work their way back to the altar room and have an easier time clearing out the gargoyles, afterwards noticing that these appear to be zombies wearing cloaks. All but one of the cloaks were too damaged to be of any use or value, so they remove the one and continue on.

They enter a room whose main attraction is a pool with a triton in it. The triton telepathically connects with the party and pleads for assistance before a kraken is summoned through his sacrifice and they all die. Varda, through knowledge granted by their patron, is slowly becoming suspect of the situation. The triton pleads individually with several party members, attempting to suggest they enter the pool and remove his chains, unbeknownst to them; I am rolling their saves in secret and they're passing them. Lee attempts to shoot it with an arrow, and the arrow dissolves before reaching the triton.

Finally, its gaze meets with Vordt's, who was ready to leave, and he fails the save. Vordt begins removing his armor to jump into the pool. Lee (4'9" 191 lbs accounting for gear) attempts to stop Vordt (7'8" 441 lbs accounts for gear) via grappling. He gets a lucky waist cinch that is immediately broken by Vordt as he lands a knee to Lee's jaw, dealing a staggering 11 points of subdual damage to him, but he takes it like a champ as he sits out, stunned from the blow.

Jeff casts web in a wall between Vordt and the pool as they figure out how best to handle him as Oryn and Takeshi move to open the door behind them. Varda, in a desperate attempt to save Vordt, utilizes a clerical dispel magic and fails to remove the charm from Vordt. Varda then utilizes their anything item to turn it into a rope of entanglement, which then hogties Vordt.

The party drags Vordt out of the dungeon safely and regains his senses the following day, shortly before the rope returns to its original form, t hen makes the several-day journey back to town to split the loot. Varda will receive no XP this go around, but the gems the party found elsewhere amounted to the PC shares totalling about 3700 gold each. Oh, and Oryn is now partially gargoyle, as they put on that cloak I mentioned earlier and then took it off.

Inspired by a conversation with my mom about how our poor dog didn't get fed until 5:08 instead of 5:00, poor thing seemed convinced we forgot she needed food. Mom joked that Zoey would call the ASPCA to report animal abuse for starving her. And I realized it's really good animals can't call because the lines would be flooded with reports of their humans closing bedroom doors or daring to stop playing after 45 minutes outside on a snowy day.

So, what silly complaints would your pets make?

Note: This is NOT a sponsored post. I'm just a happy customer.

Background

When the G'AIM'E Kickstarter was announced, I got the itch to play light gun games again. I grew up playing Time Crisis on my PSX, stepping on a controller plugged into port 2 which acted as a makeshift pedal so I could mimic the arcade experience. A local pizza place near me had an Area 51 machine that I could play for a quarter, and over time I memorized the enemy layouts for that game so that I could play further and further on one coin.

There are a variety of modern light gun models available now, though all of them are at the hobbyist/tinkerer level. There isn't one that "just works" smoothly and easily.

The most well known is the Sinden, which achieves calibration on games by setting up a white border around the game on the screen. This allows the gun to establish its position within that border and "know" where it's shooting.

Unfortunately, when I looked into the Sinden, it seemed like reviews were very mixed, with many mentioning that the border can be kind of a mess to get working. Apparently it can require a lot of legwork and messing around with settings and external programs and whatnot.

After searching around for alternatives, I landed upon a different line of modern light gun and decided to, well, pull the trigger.

Gun4IR Intro

Gun4IR on its own isn't a standalone product so much as it is a framework for making a modern light gun. You can buy the individual components and put them all together in a gun casing, making a functional light gun of your choosing. For example, see the User Guide which goes into detail about which boards you'll need, pin guides, etc. People have made them in Nerf cases and 3D printed ones.

Now, if I'm going to ding the Sinden for requiring too much tinkering, surely soldering wires onto PCBs is a step in the wrong direction?

That's absolutely correct! The good news is that you can sidestep all of this. Gun4IR has some official pre-build sellers, meaning you can buy an already made gun -- no soldering needed! Their site sells builds for the UK, while, RPEG Electronics is their official pre-build seller for the US.

From RPEG, I picked up a pre-built Gun4IR setup in a Guncon 2 housing.

Gun4IR Basics

As is implied by the name, Gun4IR uses 4 different IR clusters for calibration. You can buy a pack of LED sensors that plug into the USB port of your TV. You stick these, facing out, to the midpoint of the top, bottom, left, and right of your TV. The LEDs are black and their light can't be seen with the naked eye but can with a camera (you can check to make sure they're working with your phone).

The gun comes with calibration software that gives you lines on your TV to show the mount points for the LEDs, check how the gun is seeing the sensors, line up shots, etc.

I'm happy to report that, once calibrated, my gun is VERY accurate. I was honestly expecting a bit of jank, but it's genuinely spot on. There's a small bit of jitter that's noticeable when you have a crosshair on (some of that also might be coming from my unstable hands), but when you're playing a game without a crosshair, it's not enough to make you miss shots. The shots I've missed have been because I'm, well, bad at videogames.

Games

Because I wasn't wanting to tinker, I found a big download pack that promised me a pre-configured set of ROMs and emulators that were turnkey and compatible with Gun4IR. I spent days downloading all the individual parts from one of those sketchy download sites, getting all the parts of a multi-part RAR file.

And when I started extracting it, wouldn't you know, it was INFESTED with viruses. I uploaded one of the .exes to VirusTotal and I've never seen so much red.

Shame on me, though. I'm not an internet newbie, and I should know better than to trust random executable files, especially on Windows.

So, I went seeking an alternate solution.

Batocera

Batocera is a Linux distribution focused on retro-gaming. You wouldn't use it as your daily driver, but you would use it if you want to just boot into something so you can play games. Additionally, Batocera has built-in light gun support! Perfect!

I did my usual "setup emulation" dance that I've done so many times before: looking up worthwhile games to play, locating ripping ROMs, getting the right extracting BIOSes, etc. I also bought an external hard drive and attached it to my Windows TVPC. I can now boot off the hard drive to go into Batocera directly (because I didn't want to try to figure out dual booting with Windows).

Batocera is like booting into an arcade cabinet, loading right into ES-DE. It doesn't really expose its file system to you by default, but it's got a killer feature that makes setup easy: Batocera automatically sets up a network share for you. This lets you access all of its folders from another device, meaning I could set everything up on my laptop and transfer it over easily to Batocera.

Furthermore, Batocera automatically knows when you've got a light gun attached and will show a gun icon on games that are compatible. In theory, I'm able to navigate the interface just using my light gun, but in practice I also paired a bluetooth controller. (See Caveats section below for more on this.)

You don't HAVE to use Batocera of course, but it ended up being so easy that it became my preferred setup.

Gaming

So, I got the gun calibrated, and I got my games set up in Batocera. It's time to shoot!

I'm happy to report that the gun works fantastically. Like, seriously good.

For most games and emulators, it "just works" which is exactly what I wanted. I tested out several different games on several different platforms, and it worked on stuff ranging from the Atari 2600 to Naomi arcade cabinets.

I played through the first 10 rounds of Duck Hunt on the NES without missing a shot before getting bored and moving to something else. Time Crisis on the PlayStation (my original light gun love) plays wonderfully.

I had a friend over this weekend who also loves light gun games and has nostalgia for TC (though his is for TC2 and TC3). We traded off rounds playing Time Crisis 2 (which ended up being a good way to do it, as I forgot how my arms and eyes need a rest after 15 minutes of light gun gaming). We beat the full campaign in 2 and almost beat 3.

I also tried the gun out in some Windows games off of Steam, just to make sure that my Batocera success wasn't a fluke. Sure enough, it worked just fine!

I now have an accurate, easy-to-use light gun setup that works on my large, modern LCD TV. I have hours of light gun gameplay ahead of me, and I'm thrilled.

Caveats

Wow, kfwyre, this sounds great! I can't wait to get one for myself!

Easy there, cowboy/cowgirl/cowthem! Let me surface some of the rough edges, lest you think that this is too good to be true.

Conclusion

I am quite fond of my Gun4IR so far. It works better than I hoped it would, and it's unlocked a type of gaming that I thought was extinct. (For some reason, light gun games have a different feel to me than VR shooting gallery games. Maybe it's just nostalgia, but I like them a lot more?)

I would recommend it ONLY if you're someone who knows they're going to get their money's worth out of it and are also willing to put up with the mostly minimal tinkering required to get it working. I say mostly minimal because, no matter what gun you're using, you're still going to have to set up emulators and ROMs and whatnot. The configuration that is specific to Gun4IR is really just installing the sensors, using the calibration app, and making sure your gun isn't catching other LEDs.

Compared to the G'AIM'E (which is a bit of a fool's errand at this point because that one's still theoretical while this one's here to kiss you in real life), Gun4IR doesn't offer the "plug and play" promise, but it also is compatible with far more games. If you're in the market for the G'AIM'E, however, it's probably worth waiting out that release to see how it fares (and whether people can get it working with more games besides the included ones).

On the other hand, if you're like me and need some light gun fun NOW then I give the Gun4IR a pretty strong recommendation, with a secondary recommendation for Batocera. The two of them together are really great, and I'm delighted that I have hours upon hours of shooting games ahead of me.

If anyone has any additional questions or wants me to test specific games/systems, let me know. I'm happy to report back and help in whatever way I can.

As some of you on here may know, I was made redundant from my Assistant Commercial Reporting Analyst job three months ago and have been struggling to find permanent work since. Many of my interactions with recruiters and hiring managers have been negative and have felt like they were wasting my time, but one particular (ongoing) experience has taken the cake.

In mid-April, I applied for an Assistant Client Accountant position through LinkedIn. The role was with a large property management and building consultancy firm (offices based in the UK & France), who have some pretty big-name clients. Fully office-based, advertised pay between £25k - £29k (already similar payscales to what credit control and purchase ledger roles near me are offering), and the position ideally asked for fully AAT qualified or ACCA part-qualified candidates (I have full AAT membership, am 3 exams into my ACCA, and have over 6 years experience in previous accounting and financial reporting roles.)

Nine weeks later, I am still going through this application process which has been nothing short of a shitshow:

• It has taken multiple weeks to schedule and conduct interviews for each stage, due to unanswered emails and heavily delayed responses from both the Finance and HR teams. I had emailed on nine separate occasions to schedule the the second and third stage interviews I was invited to, and only twice did I get replies. At first I was told it was due to staff sickness, but then the trend of replying in business weeks just kept going on, even after the third-stage (which I'll get to.)

• The first stage interview was a 15 - 30 minute phone interview going through my CV and salary expectations. Stages 2 and 3 involved a series of hour-long competency based interviews, one conducted via Teams and the other in-person with the Head of Finance. This is already a ridiculous number of hoops to jump through for an office-based role with this salary level.

• During the third-stage interview (3rd June) I was asked a lot of supervisory/leadership questions which I honestly didn't expect. It made me question whether I was being interviewed for the correct role, so I checked the job description of what I applied for. Only 4 of the 590 words contained within the job advert even alluded to me leading junior colleagues - so maybe it was easily missed?

• On the 5th June (two days after my third-stage interview), I received an email from HR thanking me for accepting the Client Accountant position and asking me to confirm RTW (right-to-work) details. The thing is... I never received an offer letter, and after immediately chasing this up I found out the email was sent to me by mistake. This HR rep apologized and said they'd chase feedback. I emailed twice to chase this feedback and promised it would be coming.

• Today when I emailed again to chase feedback, the HR advisor responded to raise concerns about the salary expectations I communicated in the first stage, insisted the role actually paid £26k at most and asked me to confirm a salary within their range. This is false (I know, I actually double-checked the job ad and even did a screen recording on my mobile of me going into the LinkedIn app and opening the job posting) and I get the impression that they're now trying to lowball me. I emailed again asking for clarification where I linked the job ads and I get the feeling they confused the salary bands with a Purchase Ledger role I applied for several months prior but was not considered for.

I will find out Monday (after nearly three weeks) if I was successful in my application, but even if they offer me the job at a reduced salary rather than outright reject me, I am already seeing a shitload of red flags.

At this point I've had enough. Normally I'd cut my ties and move on but with how desperate I've been for work and how much I feel like this company has taken me for a ride, I feel the need to take things further. Not sure whether I should (or even could) formally raise a complaint, drop some negative feedback on their Glassdoor page, or go public (with receipts) and openly name & shame the company on LinkedIn, Facebook or Instagram. The latter options feel like I'd be going nucelar and as cathartic as it would be, I'm worried it would be seen as unprofessional and hurt my future job prospects.

What would be the best way to proceed?

June 2025's Humble Choice is now available with the following eight Steam games.

Does anyone have experience with any of the games and, if so, would you recommend them? Is there anything in here that you're particularly excited to play?

I saw both of these stories on Lemmy today. They show two different facets to the topic of AI.

This first story is from the perspective of cynicism about AI and how it has been overhyped.
If AI is so good, where are the open source contributions

But if AI is so obviously superior … show us the code. Where’s the receipts? Let’s say, where’s the open source code contributions using AI?

The second story is about crony capitalism, deregulation, and politics around AI:

GOP sneaks decades long AI regulation ban into spending bill

On Sunday night, House Republicans added language to the Budget Reconciliation bill that would block all state and local governments from regulating AI for 10 years, 404 Media reports. The provision, introduced by Representative Brett Guthrie of Kentucky, states that "no State or political subdivision thereof may enforce any law or regulation regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems during the 10 year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this Act

I saw these stories minutes apart, and they really make me feel even more cynical and annoyed by AI than I was yesterday. Because:

• In the short term AI is largely a boondoggle, which won’t work as advertised but still humans will be replaced by it because the people who hire don’t understand it’s limitations but they fear missing out on a gold rush.
• The same shady people at the AI companies who are stealing your art and content, in order to sell a product that will replace you, are writing legislation to protect themselves from being held accountable
• They also are going to be protected from any skynet-style disasters caused by their recklessness

May 2025's Humble Choice is now available with the following eight Steam games.

Does anyone have experience with any of the games and, if so, would you recommend them? Is there anything in here that you're particularly excited to play?