Very impressive breakdown, and it looks like you’ve built an awesome foundation. I’m excited to see where you might take this going forward - different ship wreck types seems like an obvious next step, but I can see the potential for a whole lot more. Maybe this system could be used to improve things like trail ruins and other archeology related structures? This is very cool. Kudos

It also seems like there’s some sort of unlock mechanism for what civs will be available for you to choose from in the next era - you’ll assumably have to do certain things in an era to unlock specific civs for the next era

I NEED IT!!!

I’m about done with Winter, the last book in the primary Lunar Chronicles quartet. It’s been a really great read thus far, like the rest of the series. I’m excited to see just how the big bad gets their comeuppance, as well as what becomes of the cast of characters. Then I’ll be on to the two addendum books to the series - the first is a series of short stories, but I didn’t know how they relate yet. The second is a novela about the backstory of said big bad, which should be intriguing.

Wait… But what buttons are missing that you actually use?! Maybe I’ve just gotten too used to my remote, but I don’t think I’ve ever wanted for another button on the remote, aside from maybe a source button.

I finally picked up Cinder by Marissa Meyer last Thursday. I knew immediately that I was going to want to read the whole series, so ordered them to be shipped to my house. Unfortunately, I finished the first book on Friday, and my package still hasn’t arrived. I was able to check out the 2nd through Libby, but I read that in 2 days as well, and the 3rd is checked out through my library, so I’m stuck waiting for the shipment.

In the meantime, I started reading Top Ten Games You Can Play by Yourself In Your Head - I found it through a random role playing game blog, and bought it on a whim. While I support expanding your imagination, and the games and structure included do seem pretty entertaining, the author has managed to write the most pretentious book I’ve ever encountered - it’s insane.

So, to take a break from that, I’m rereading The LEGO Book - LEGO’s retelling of their history. I’ve read it once before, but it’s been a while, and it’s a pretty fun walk through the history of the company, from tiny wooden toy shop to globally dominant construction toy company.

I just started Ordinary Monsters, by J. M. Miro. Too early yet to have any real opinions, but it feels like it’s setting up an intriguing story, so I’m looking forward to getting further.

Very much so, although the author manages to make it much more poignant than I expected, but it was for good reasons.

Yeah, H.G. Wells. I finished it a couple nights ago. It’s very… Pompous? It’s so over the top that it wouldn’t surprise me if it was actually supposed to be satire… but I don’t think it was. I’m glad I read it, but I highly doubt I’ll ever pick it up again. Oh, and it’s The Time Machine, not Traveler - sorry for the brain fart.

On Monday, I finished The Winter of the Witch, the last in Katherine Arden’s Winternight Trilogy - it was absolutely fantastic from front to back. Last night I picked up The Time Traveler - I got a physical copy for super cheap from a second hand book store. I’ve never read it, so I’m excited to see how it reads. So far, it’s pretty good - a bit pretentious in some of the word choice, maybe, but I suppose that’s kind of to be expected.

Nope. They push the yeerks off of Earth, and then chase them out into space

As someone who read all 54 core books last year, this is factually incorrect

I finished The Bear and the Nightingale a bit ago, so moved onto the rest of the series. I pretty quickly pushed through the second book, The Girl in the Tower, and have just started the last book, The Winter of the Witch. It has thus far been a fantastic series, and I’m very much looking forward to a certain character finally getting his well deserved comeuppance (and it had better really hurt…)

I’m taking a break from Animal Crossing to try and finally finish Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch. We’ll see how far I get this time. It’s got a lot of classic RPG feel that I really love, and the Ghibli animated cutscenes are gorgeous, but I’m really not used to having to “watch” my games, so we’ll see.

The oldest system I have would be the NES. My brother received it sometime before I was born. I’m just holding onto it for him, though - it doesn’t get played right now. I actually intend to clean it all up and retrobright it before sending it back to him… eventually… The oldest system I have that still gets occasional use would be my Gameboy Color, which I received, with Pokemon Red, for Christmas when I was 8 or 9. Unfortunately, I need to find a better plastic polish, to take some light scratches out of the lens, and until I do, it will remain disassembled… I’ve also been contemplating using the board for a complete boxypixel overhaul, but there’s something about still having my full original GBC that I’m having a problem getting over…

Continuing with my wizard’s island in Animal Crossing, although I’m more just putting my daily time in right now. I finally worked up the drive to continue on my Minecraft chateau build, so that’s eating most of my creative energies right now.

I’m not super sure. If I recall correctly, we’ve known for a while that something was going on, because surface hearing alone couldn’t account for all of the water evaporating from oceans, but we couldn’t tell what. In defense of humanity here, the concept of photons interacting with something as comparably massive as molecules is kinda wild. We were caught way off guard when the photoelectric effect was announced, and that’s photons interacting with whole atoms instead of just elementary particles. The idea of the photomolecular effect is thus even wilder.

If you read the article, it’s pretty clear. Instead of the energy of the photons being used to heat the water molecules to state change, that energy is used to break the molecular bonds between small groups of water molecules, and those groups are small enough to then be picked up by the air and evaporate. This way, the energy contained in a photon is converting much more liquid water to water vapor than if that same amount of energy was actually used to excite the water molecules, as in a microwave.

I recently started The Bear and The Nightingale by Katherine Arden. Its the first book in a trilogy, and while I’ve read - and loved - this book, I haven’t read the rest of the trilogy yet. I’m quite excited - my wife blitzed them and said they were very good.

Something similar happened with the one I repaired for my mother-in-law. I had to scrub the cartridge loader contacts in the game boy pretty vigorously with a toothbrush and 99% isopropyl alcohol before it would reliably load appropriately. I would suggest doing the same scrub in the cartridge, as well.

IIRC, Game Boy games do a handshake with the system before anything can load, and that is shown on the screen. When the handshake is successful, you get the normal Nintendo logo. When something in the handshake is wrong, you get the corrupted logo screen.

If that gets you past the logo screen, but you’re still having lines on the screen, that’s probably a bad ribbon cable connection. You can reheat the connection points to get a proper connection again, but it’s definitely an exercise in patience. There are a bunch of guides on this one on the Internet.

Silver Dragonborn Ancients Barbarian - I wanted to try a tanky build again, after not liking my attempt with paladin. He was Con primary, Str secondary, using a Warhammer and shield, and I was excited to see how the path of the ancients intersected with things like shield Master or sentinel. He was from a tribe of remnant Dragonborn after Abeir split back off. His tribe used to rely on shamans that communicated with their ancestors, but the last one had passed in his grandfather before he was identified as a new shaman. His sister died in a horrible accident, and his communication with her spirit was how he was identified. No one in the tribe knew how to help with his gift, so he went out into the world, accompanied by the spirit of his sister, to see what he could learn. His rage manifested as an icy white cloud rolling over him and falling to the ground, slowly revealing the spirits that accompanied him. I planned for him to notice and get to know more and more of his ancestors’ spirits as he got more powerful - including his grandfather, a taciturn half-dragon, and a happy-go-lucky silver dragon. Unfortunately, I had to bow out of the campaign just as we hit level 3, so I never got to experience any of it. ☹️