Talk nerdy to me :D
Characters. I love designing characters and doing a deep dive into who they are and why they’re designed the way they are. For example, I did one recently about a girl who is a mechanist in my Victorian modern world who works on robots and airship but likes to go to a dance club at night. She keeps her goggles from work since they’re seen as fashion in this world and wears a distinctive hair clip that was given as a gift to her from someone dear to her before the war. And, then there’s another guy I did that is basic rich kid egotistical. Looks like and ultra Chad and has the dance moves to show for it. Basically, he’s like the ultra Chad meme in this world.
Star Wars and history - in particular how Lucas had aspects of Nazi Germany and the Vietnam War because he was an anthropology student and knew that empires most often fell from within.
So yeah I’m still on a big Andor high right now, waiting for some novels and other books to drop after that.
Other books I can recommend:
The History and Politics of Star Wars - Death Stars and Democracy (the author is a World War I historian)
Star Wars: Battles that Changed the Galaxy
Star Wars Propaganda: A History of Persuasive Art in the Galaxy
I’ve come to the conclusion that if you’re buying tools, you should go for the sets. Take a socket set, for example. Realistically, you’re probably using the ratchet, an extension, and three to four sockets the most. At some point the cheap ratchet breaks and you replace it with a high-quality one. You may also lose or break a few of the most commonly used sockets and replace them with high-quality ones. In ten years you’ll have a set with a high-quality wrench and a few high-quality sockets that you commonly use, plus the rest of the other sizes you’ll only touch once every few years.
Had you gone for the high-quality set right away, you would have paid even more - and now you’d have a 4mm made-in-Japan socket you spent 10 euros on that you’ll never use.
Self-hosting, device modding and homebrew, and getting the most out of PC hardware/DIY gaming setups.
IT jobs are a ton of fun for me when I’m helping someone new to the hobby because they love to get invested in all of the little tips and tricks to bring the most out of their machine (Even if they have to use Windows ;-;).
Every single console I’ve ever owned has been cracked open with homebrew installed, and it’s a large reason I got into retro gaming and 3D printing spare parts for things.
Also, hosting PC game servers for yourself and friends instead of paying a provider is so liberating, you start looking at it as “I paid for the whole machine, how far can I push the experience?” and start pushing mods and configs in games that would bring most VPS systems to their knees.
Mechanics in nature.
There’s a protein that’s basically a tiny little mobile suite that literally walks along microtubules.
Some bacteria propel themselves with a literal electric motor.
Your ears are more something that belongs under the dashboard of a helicopter than something growing organically… they can literally detect an air-pressure change caused by a pin dropping on the other side of the room, by allowing that pressure to beat on a drum connected to a chain of bones that transmit pressure into a little snail that squirts little jets of fluid over a tiny little field of grass stuck to the inside of the snail shell, and depending on how much grass wiggles, it sends a jolt over to your brain as an interpretation of pitch. AND IT DOESN’T STOP THERE! Connected to that snail are three little hula-hoops made of bone, each oriented to a different plane, and also filled with tiny grass and fluid; and when you move your head along that specific plane, the tiny grass wiggles and that’s how your brain knows which way you’re moving / gives you a perception of balance.
There’s a type of grasshopper with gears in its legs.
I love this shit.
Art history :3
Any specific regions or time periods?
I just love studying how culture cross pollination leads to art movement’s throughout history ie. how Japanese prints are largely responsible for the Impressionist and Post impressionist movements in Europe or how the Mughal Emperors of India had Paintings of a Greek God on the ceiling, in the Palace of Muslim rulers.
Old mechanical things.
The Japanese have a myth called tsukomogami. It’s the idea that things get a soul after 100 years.
And while I don’t believe that’s technically true, per se. It’s fundamentally based on something that I adore, and that’s the fact that mechanical things all age individually and that it’s something that we’ve lost with modern technology.
My go to examples are always typewriters and vintage camera lenses.
Each typewriter will age differently. Different keys will become sticky, it’ll become misaligned in different places. They develop individual personalities as they get older. So much so that forensics can actually pinpoint when a specific typewriter typed a specific note.
In terms of camera lenses it’s much the same thing. Different lenses will wear differently depending on what aperture/focal length, etc… that the photographer uses most often. Mold and discolouration between the glass elements will eventually form a unique look to a specific lense.
It’s magical (to me) and something that I am sad that we are losing with modern consumer technology based on on “throw it away and get a new one”.
Sorry. Longer than I intended. But you asked for it.
Machine spirit 40k lore
Retro handhelds.
My favorite is between the monster (steam deck) and the custom build (miyoo mini plus). A few friends and I geek out over them. And custom Roms, indie devs, ect…
There’s a ton of Indies onastodon as well.
Aperiodic tilings! Just a couple of years ago someone discovered a single tile (down from the set of ~20000 that was first used to prove that aperiodic tiling was even possible) that can completely cover an infinite plane without ever falling into a repeating pattern.
The use of “aperiodic” is somewhat loose here compared to what I would expect. Like… I can instantly see several places with the same pattern just on that small sample…
Aperiodic, in this sense, doesn’t mean that there aren’t some bits that don’t repeat. In fact, if you pick any patch of tiles of any arbitrary size, that patch will be repeated infinitely many times. What it means to be periodic is that if you slide the whole tiling over so that one of the patches aligns with the repeated bit, there will still be something outside the patch that doesn’t align. Compare that with, say, a repeating grid of squares, where if you slide one square onto a different square then everything lines up, all the way to infinity; it’s impossible to tell that it’s been slid over.
Neat!
Oh, goddamn it, this is gonna take a while.
- Code. Like, I actually get real pleasure from seeing elegant and well-structured code. I have no idea why, but I’ll almost start salivating at particularly beautiful code.
- Anime. Yeah, I’m a walking stereotype, a software developer who likes anime. But have you seen Frieren? It’s so goddamn good.
- Philosophy. No, not bullshit continental philosophy. I’m talking real philosophy. Analytic philosophy. Distilled and legitimately useful logic. Which of course leads me to…
- Science. My YouTube feed is full of fascinating deep-dives into esoteric mathematical and scientific topics. Fuck yeah.
- Tabletop RPGs. Surprisingly, not a huge D&D fan, though it can certainly be fun. These days, I’m much more into story-focused systems, like Fate or Blades in the Dark. Most people I mention that to have never heard of either.
- Science fiction and fantasy. I mean, are you surprised at this point?
- Writing science fiction and fantasy. I mean, are you surprised at this point?
- Politics. Less so nowadays, since our political system is falling apart and we’re being overrun by fascism, but I still do enjoy a meaty policy discussion.
That’s a good list for starters.
Who is the most criminally under appreciated philosopher/author and why is it Ursula LeGuinn?
Go read Joanna Russ.
imho she writes rings around the popular woman.
I will. Thank you.
Ha! My glob, she was so amazing. I had the opportunity to attend a reading she did from The Lathe of Heaven years ago, and I was struck anew not only by her creativity, but by the philosophical ideas underpinning it. A lot of people think The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas is her most philosophical work, but I actually found what Lathe had to say about control, obedience, and power incredibly compelling.
Adventure Time fan as well?
Agree. AND. Left Hand of Darkness. Dispossessed.
You might be interested in a video game called The Last Sovereign. I discovered it during the recent fiasco around payment processors trying to block lewd stuff, but the nsfw visuals can be turned off if you’re not into that. It’s a very serviceable RPG with turn based combat that is well balanced and engaging. But I’m recommending it because you said philosophy and it’s basically a series of Platonic dialogues between characters discussing life, the nature of man, morality, ethics, sexuality, power, and much more. I’m pleasantly surprised at how often I find myself deeply invested in the conversations. I think the writer(s) must’ve needed an outlet for their philosophical musings and chose this quirky “lewd” RPG as the medium.
I’ll check it out. I’m very much interested in video games that delve into deep topics that way. Have you ever encountered The Talos Principle series? Fantastic games that do surprisingly accessible treatises on philosophical topics while forcing you to think through pretty mind-blowing puzzles. Highly recommended.
What is a good ruleset for a table that absolutely refuses to read more than an index card of rules but will follow the lead of the referee? Freeform, story-forward, ages 14 to 65? Swords and magic.
Unrelated, what do you think about the various versions of Traveller?
Oh, you need Fate Accelerated. Six stats, five descriptive phrases that define your character (one of which is your character’s “trouble,” giving the GM automatic story hooks) and a smattering of stunts your character can perform, and off you go!
Regarding Traveller, I’ve never had the stomach for it. Me and a group once sat down to create characters, and discovered it was so rules-heavy that by the end of two sessions dedicated to character creation, we still didn’t know for sure that we’d done any of the characters correctly.
What is your relationship with Tolkien and his corpus?
I’ve read Lord of the Rings a few times. And The Hobbit. And his lesser-known works (e.g., Leaf by Niggle, which is just great). And The Silmarillion. And The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (which, honestly, isn’t his best). And I know what an Istari is (and why Gandalf, being a lesser Ainur, is actually so much more than a mere “wizard”). And I know that while they changed the line from “you cannot pass” to “you shall not pass” for dramatic purposes in the movie, the original line subtly says a whole hell of a lot more about who and what Gandalf is and why the Balrog should have actually been shitting itself.
So you might say I’m passingly familiar with it.
Aztecs.
Mixtec-Pueblo culture before European contact was vibrant, dynamic, and layered. It was reflected by its surrounding cultures of K’iche’ (Mayan), Chichimeca, Iréchikwa (Purepecha), and Otomi. Their books look like comics painted on accordions. I’ve been to Teotihuacan so I’ve seen the massive pyramids the peoples of the valley built millennia ago. I’ve read about how cities were planned and zoned then built with stone and you can still witness the logic behind those decisions today. The comida is good too.
I wish I was smart so I could learn Spanish easier.
On the words of Hernan Cortés: “Su casa es mi casa.”
Jokes aside, I am positive a Game of Thrones or Vikings-like tv show based on the birth of the Mexicas, then the expansion with finally the fall of the Aztecs would be brutally fantastic.
I always look at the Mexican flag in awe for what it really means and how it became.
Any books that you would recommend but aren’t academic?
“Aztec” by Gary Jennings.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/aztec-gary-jennings/784861bf1a137811?ean=9780765317506&next=t
It’s a novel about coming of the Spanish.
I had to read it when I came across an article the author wrote. He wanted a word for ‘orange.’ He wanted to book to sound authentic, and the Americas didn’t have oranges. He ended up using jacinth
Any books that you would recommend
Oh absolutely I got a mini library of…
aren’t academic
Nope.
Typewriters. I love these machines, and the effect they had on our societies, and how they still have a strong influence on our keyboards and typographical likes.
And they are beautiful.
Found Tom Hanks.
Oh I’d love to nerd with him about typewriters 😅
Type faces (“fonts”) and typesetting. I personally like a face with a large x-height, double story open loop g, and a full range of f-ligatures. The art of lead typesetting has disappeared in favour of software solutions; TeX does a beautiful job, particularly when using Knuth’s faces. (Adobe’s InDesign also deserves an honourable mention, but it’s unfortunately proprietary and closed-source). And when using standard TrueType or OpenType faces, the difference between a page generated by either of them, and one output by Microsoft Word, for example, is noticeably staggering.
One of my favorite parts of being a math teacher is getting to write in latex all the time.
It’s such a bummer collaborating on a document because they all use Word.
I used latex once for a technical documentation.
It certainly makes handling large documents way easier than all the convoluted features word has
New discoveries in astronomy, astrophysics, and quantum physics.
Please nerd out. I want to knowwwwww
How do you think AI can best contribute to these? Can advanced paternity recognition be helpful for spectrum analysis? Can it be used for closed loop control of the many variables inside a fusion reactor? What do you think about 3i?
How do you think AI can best contribute to these?
AI is a generic term for a number of different things. Most people these days seem to use it referring to LLMs and automated image or video generation. I don’t think either of those is likely to contribute a ton until they mature a lot more. Having said that, machine learning is already being used in a lot of these fields. For example, automated systems using machine learning are being used to find new information about variable stars from old stellar images. We’ve been taking pictures of the stars for more than a century. No human team could ever hope to go through all those images looking for changes in stars over all that time but a computer can.
Can advanced paternity recognition be helpful for spectrum analysis? Can it be used for closed loop control of the many variables inside a fusion reactor?
No idea on this one. This is a little too much on the engineering side of things. I geek out more on the theory side.
What do you think about 3i?
ATLAS/3i? I think it’s frankly amazing that we’ve detected three interstellar objects passing through our solar system in the last 8 years or so. Interstellar visitors must be extremely common for use to spot so many in such a short period of time.
advanced paternity recognition
Maury intensifies
Arduino, ESP32, smart home automation. I could talk for hours. I’ve started to get into PCB design this year, and I’ve had a lot of fun with it!
Which esp32? There are so much options nowdays!
The ESP32-S3 has become my standard goto device. If power usage is an issue, the ESP32-C3 is a great option. And the ESP32-C6 opens up Thread capabilities. I recently picked up a device with an ESP32-P4 that I’m wanting to play around with some more.
If only the C6 was actually supported correct everywhere…
Have you done any Thread/Zigbee with an esp32? I cannot wait to get a C6 to test it!
Here’s the guide I’ve used. Super easy to do in ESPHome. I’ve only tested it, but it seems to work very well.
https://smarthomescene.com/guides/how-to-create-thread-devices-with-esphome/
Where can I learn how to link different tech through HA? Insteon switch to flip a wifi bulb. Z Wave switch to open the Shelly relay for the garage door. ZigBee water sensor trips insteon siren. Etc. Is that all YAML? Is the Ecobee thermostat worth it?
Just install HA and try it out! It’s a lot easier to do than you might think. Every vendor or connection type has its own Integration. Most integrations can be set up through the UI very easily. I have dozens of integrations.
And the automations have had a lot of work the last few years. They are getting much easier to set up in the UI without having to worry about code or yaml.
The integrations are working. I just don’t know how to cross link them…
Here’s an example. The first picture is part of the UI configuration for this automation. The second picture show the yaml that was generated from this. Utility Room Occupancy is a Zigbee door sensor. When it turns on (the door opens), it triggers the Utility Room Lights on. The light is actually a WiFi LED bulb. The rest of the script turns the light off when the door closes.
What’s beautiful about Home Assistant is that it just creates devices that look identical no matter what integration you’re using. A light is a light no matter how you interact with it.
