cbfrench

Was fun to have a Series in which each team was the best in its league and in which each team was competing for its first championship. I’m a Red Sox fan, and I remember 2004. It’s a tremendous experience as a fan (of the team or just of baseball). Go Brew Crew.

I grew up in moonshine country (or at least what was once moonshine country before they moved on to pot and then meth), and I never heard of a still causing a forest fire.

They’d occasionally go blind from methanol in the shine or slowly give themselves lead poisoning from the solder in the still, but no fires. So, they were at least safety-aware enough not to want to lose all their product and get the authorities on their case by burning down the area around their still.

I’ve played this for several hours now, and it’s fun! Acknowledging that this probably wasn’t intended for long-term game play, I might nevertheless suggest a few tweaks:

1. The purchasing agent AI makes some incredibly unhelpful decisions. I’m not sure what triggers a decision to order, but often it seems either not to order inputs that I am running low on (i.e., after it’s a problem), or it will order them to be delivered by rail, when I need them in the next day or two. The number of times I’ve been in the middle of handling a list of RFQs only to be hit with a notification that I’m out of something is frustrating.

Also, it seems to have a weird attachment to ensuring that I have an excessive stock of materials that get used up relatively slowly (e.g., urea), while it constantly lets me run low on materials that run out quickly (e.g., muriate of potash and dolomite filler).

It would be nice if I could just set a minimum amount of each input that I want to keep on hand and let the agent keep it at or above that amount, perhaps with a threshold triggered if it wants to order by rail.

2. Some way to automate bids a bit more. I’ve been running at 1.5x order volume, and having to edit each individual bid before sending it off is a chore. Maybe allow the user to set a certain predicted probability of success for all bids, and then autofill the bid with the amount that satisfies that condition? The user could still modify the bid as needed, but if I have a standard probability threshold I’m shooting for, it could make things easier.

3. The net worth calculation is opaque. I’ve been sitting on level 7 for what seems like forever, and I’m still around $2.45M. It would be helpful to know what is factoring into it, apart from cash on hand.

On the whole, I’ve enjoyed playing this. It’s a nice little diversion.

It’s good—better than the much-revered Elements of Style, imho, which is overly prescriptive and frankly unhelpful at turns, even if it’s well written.

But my all-time favorite is Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style. It illustrates the variety of English sentence structures in an ordered way with a plethora of examples. The approach is not prescriptive; rather, it allows you inductively to develop a feel for the syntactical rhythms of the language.

Also, I love Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One. It’s a lovely, entertaining little book, filled with Fish’s insights as an eminent literary critic. What I appreciate most about the book is that Fish walks you through a number of examples and explains how and why they work, so you can walk away as both a better writer and a better reader.

I grew up in East TN, and this feels like the death of Queen Elizabeth, Mother Teresa, and your favorite fun aunt all rolled up into one. Except no one had a bad word to say about Dolly. She was beloved around the world, but she was an institution back home.

Ham radio websites might be my favorite genre of website. Their design is always a throwback to the internet of my youth, and they almost always have tons of interesting technical content.

Once I got to 37% total countries identified (seen?), it basically stopped showing me new countries. I went through five or so rounds without seeing anything that I hadn’t seen before. Which was gratifying, since I was getting 20/20 every time, but you might tweak it a little to add in new countries more frequently.

I always love when a literary piece ends up in my feed from HN because I can always guess the one of three users who posted it (usually one of lermontov, apollinaire, or samclemens—there may be a couple of others). I just want to say that this English major appreciates your work and the variety you bring here. I’ve found some excellent stuff because of y’all.

I got mine a month ago, and I’ve read 13 books on it so far. Its chief advantage is its size: the ability to carry it with me all the time and to pull it out whenever I have a free moment is great. (And also, although I have no evidence to support this, I think the smaller format helps me to read better, as I am able to focus on a small block of text rather than letting my eyes wander all over the page, as they are wont to do.) This little device may be the best $60 I’ve ever spent.

I loaded mine with cpr-vCodex. It has some useful features, and it gets updated almost daily. I find the “reading achievements” a bit gimmicky, but it’s otherwise a solid firmware option.

I did, and then I flashed Crossink, and I’m currently using vCodex at the moment, just because I wanted to check out the various options. I’m not sure if I’ll stick with vCodex, since I don’t really care that much about all of the stats, and I liked the interface of Crosspoint/Crossink marginally better.

That is very true, and certainly I’m in agreement that fast, digital reading isn’t necessarily desirable as a mode. Then again, my academic background is in English lit, and I’m a priest, so my professional reading has generally been slow and analog! Reading novels quickly allows me to become immersed in them without allowing my analytical lit-crit brain entirely to take over, and that itself is a nice change of pace, so the e-reader has been a welcome introduction. I do enough wrestling with dense theological texts that I appreciate being able simply to read.

I’m a big proponent of physical books: I have several thousand in my home. But last week, I finally got my first e-reader, the Xteink X4, which I got because it was small and cheap.

In ten days, I’ve read J.-K. Huysmans’s Durtal tetralogy, Nancy Maguire’s An Infinity of Little Hours, Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, and I’ll finish Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest this evening. I don’t think I’ve ever read at this pace with physical books. There’s something about being able to pull out the X4 rather than my phone wherever I am that has really made a difference for me, and the tiny screen allows me to find my place immediately and dive back in. Even when I carry around physical books, I don’t always carry them in places with me, forget them in the car, etc.

This only works for a certain kind of reading—mainly novels. But it has been a remarkable development for me. I don’t think I’m a convert away from physical books, but my wife appreciates that I can now put novels on there rather than trying to find more space in our house for books!

I may be one of the few HN users for whom this is an extremely useful resource. I’m an Anglican priest, so I’m often scanning and pasting bits and pieces of chant into our bulletins. This will, I hope, allow me to create much cleaner looking chant texts in the future! Thank you for sharing it!

Anyone know the little padfolio case that’s featured here? I’d like a better carry solution for my pens and notebooks, and that one looks about perfect for the job.