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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Your info was probably already out there, somewhere. It’s most likely in a massive list with thousands of others. It’s still not great, but you’re not being targeted. This is why it’s important to freeze your credit with each bureau.

    Just another reminder that using your SSN for ID verification purposes and acting like it’s a secret code only you could ever know is a dumb fucking system. Even the “verify with your last 4 digits” is a dumb fucking system. If you have a date of birth and a decent idea of birthplace, you can take a pretty good guess about the first 5 digits because they’re sequential from known blocks. It wasn’t until about 20 years ago that the government randomized the first 5 to stop that.









  • Astronomers like using eye patches to minimize the risk of having both eyes getting bleached. I set my dslr to the lowest brightness and swapped it to a red-only color pallete for menus, but the image result can certainly still be blinding while I do some f/2.8 5s ISO 25600 framing shots. If you can’t dim it enough and don’t have a red menu option, maybe some tint film or even sunglasses could help. Maybe red plastic wrap for style points. Red doesn’t bleach your eyes.

    As for focus, even on my crop sensor dslr with a 11-16mm lens, I can use live preview and 10x screen zoom to find some bright stars to hone focus. For this picture, it doesn’t get better than Sirius just to the left and down of this frame. Planets are good for the first attempt at focus if there’s no lens markings or manual focus is still electronic, but any appreciable zoom makes them lose usefulness as they become disks instead of points.

    Phones have come a long way but focus on those is still the most frustrating thing. The native app doesn’t allow manual focus on my pixels but the pro mode apps don’t have the 4 minute astro modes.

    And yes, bleaching is the issue. Your pupils take a few seconds to dilate, but light will bleach the rhodopsin in your receptors. It takes more time to refill rhodopsin stores and dope your receptors again which is where the “dark adaptation takes 20 minutes” comes from.

    I just came back from the grand canyon/arizona and that is a place you don’t want to lose night vision. So much to see, even in winter with the thin side of the Milky way. Happy trails. Pack your red flashlight


  • For me, it depends how much of the game is story-driven, how long a campaign takes, and how dynamic the gameplay is. I’ve never replayed an assassin’s creed game (from 3 thru Odyssey), but rank them highly. I consider racing/sim games “replayable” in the sense that I never finish the absurd number of championships but will binge them for a while as I buy more dream cars. Similar story for battle Royale/arena/non-story games like rocket league or fortnite. My most-replayed game series is Ace Combat (4-7), but that’s because the campaign is only about 5 hours typically and offers more variation in gameplay along with attainable medals. Puzzle games like Portal 1/2 or The Turing Test offer replayability to me because I never really remember all the tricks to the puzzles, but that’s like 5 years between replays to not spoil the entire story.

    This is also driven by having less time available to game. I wish I could learn 2 games every week but a good gaming week has 10 hours of gameplay for me. It’s usually less than 5. So there’s a little more motivation to play something familiar so I can start having fun faster. Ironically, Elite: Dangerous is a comfort game despite the common complaint of its complexity. Some PS2 era games come to mind





  • I played AC:Oddyseey in 2021 and am currently playing through AC4:BF now for the first time. I’ve been wondering if the Ody ship mechanic was as great as I remember of if it was just a nostalgic feeling having it for the first time in the tail of Origins and throughout Odyssey. Sounds like it was actually great. Not-true-to-AC argument aside, Ody was an excellent game as someone who started on Unity.

    I do recommend AC4: Black Flag as a pirate game. It does take a fair amount of somewhat normal AC gameplay (and Ubisoft side quest trinket distractions) to get enough upgrades to the ship to feel like a real pirate of the Caribbean and not just a poop deck swabber, but my ship is nearly maxed at ~75% story completion. I make sure my wanted level stays maxed so the pirate hunters chase me in level 60 men’o’war every time it loads me at sea. Two types of side cannons, forward chain cannons, rear fire barrel mines, long range mortars, front ram, and the option to board disabled ships for swashbuckler combat to gain different rewards. Plus a little tabletop smuggling across the Atlantic with turn-based sprite battles for a laughably insignificant amount of money compared to the work it takes to capture proficient ships.