Saturday morning coffee and writing.
Friday puppy sunbeam update; puppy is in the sunbeam.
I can have some new keycaps, as a treat.
Okay, 45mph springtime winds, I have taken down the hammock. Happy now?
🎮 This is a fun, super-smart review of Outriders, a game I’ve had a good time with the past couple of weekends. It’s on Game Pass, XBox micro.friends!
Calling R specifically and data folks in general: anybody using the M1 routinely with a broad analytics/data sci set of tools now? Things look pretty promising but I wonder if the day to day still relies on too much fiddling in/out of Rosetta to feel effective.
Today I dusted off my latest video game hobby project, ArmoreR, my Destiny 2 armor stats profiler, and finished some improvements that have been on my list. I haven’t been motivated to dig back into it for a while partly because I just … didn’t feel like it … and partly because I had hit a point of complexity with it that made it hard to approach again. But I had a really nice time catching up with just how it works and then gradually identifying and implementing the improvements I wanted to make. It’s a good lesson that is sometimes hard for me to remember, that small but concrete steps add up.
Destiny nerd warning, most people can probably stop reading now: This version adds something really useful to loadout building: class items! I had to think on how to do this for a while, because most class items don’t add much to the stat value of an armor build, and each added class item combinatorially increases the number of armor set combinations that have to be measured. I settled on including only masterworked class items because they add enough stat points to tip one or more categories into the next tier. Still, for characters that have a lot of armor to choose from, doubling (or more) the total number of builds does add to the time that the tool requires. I added some ways to optionally include/exclude more armor to try to make this processing time more bearable. I also found a few improvements to make and fixed a number of bugs along the way, and will plan to return for a round of efficiency-finding later.
The tool is at a neat, workable point right now, where it’s actually useful for finding armor builds and, really critically, the armor pieces that work across multiple builds of interest. I’ve learned a ton working on it, and am pretty proud of it. There’s more documentation over at the application and if you happen to be into Destiny I’d love to hear what you think.
It’s a great time to hop into the Friends at the Table real-play RPG podcast. They just started a new season in a fallen, spooky and cursed world, after some great worldbuilding episodes. Check it out!
