Kind of a hard question to word, but is there anything in your life you have recommended to other people but no one’s ever gotten into?
I love podcasts and have friends who still thank me for getting them into this one or that one. But I’ve never gotten anyone to listen to My Brother, My Brother and Me. I don’t know if the name is unappealing or the concept but people seem to bounce off immediately.
So what can’t you get people into and why should we check it out?
I have asked many a friend to play modded Minecraft with me.
Unfortunately, I am reminded time and time again that the Venn diagram of people I know who are interested in that and people with PCs who can run that is two circles.
Three separate times now someone’s invited me to a Create server and 2 hours later I’ve somehow instead ended up joining a 300+ mod modpack that takes roughly 45 minutes to load on my laptop, crashes and errors out every few hours, and dies within a week after someone uses some random mod to gain infinite diamonds or something.
I tend to burn a little slower than that, but yes. Post-scarcity is usually the goal and the game needn’t overstay its welcome.
The problem with modded servers is that the guy who’s done this 10 times is havingg a great time building a mega factory and outpaces or outshines (depending on versus or coop mentality) everyone else. You might be different but this is a very consistent experience for me.
I’ve been trying to get a LAN party together with some IRL friends for a little bit, but we all are so different in experience level that even playing vanilla, we’ll inevitably have some people run rings around others.
My current pitch is that we all share one house and bolt different spaces of different styles onto the sides of it whenever we need a new space, share all resource except a small personal chest and the experienced players can only do specific tasks like going caving or into the nether if it’s as a whole group, so the newer players get to experience some of those parts fresh.
Doing things as a group is much more fun anyways. We always do that with the ender dragon but even something like caving is more fun with a few other people.
Yeah, this is inevitable.
My limiter tends to be that anything I make has to do things not only efficiently, but fashionably. I like to be immersed in a factory that looks vaguely like a real factory, rather than laying down a bunch of minmaxxed spaghetti. So I spend a lot of time faffing about with where a thing should actually go and how do I hook it up in a novel way.
Casuals still can’t keep up and tryhards pass me by. Stuck in the middle, lol.
I respect the effort lol
The other thing I try to do that I didn’t think of in the other reply is not mixing mods together.
Most major tech mods are balanced for standalone play. They merely contain integrations with other mods as convenient curiosities. So when you mix overpowered machine from mod ABC that is regulated by some restriction, and combine it with machine from mod XYZ that trivializes that restriction, the progression collapses and it’s boring.
Some people like that. I try to avoid it.
Some might wonder what the point is in playing with all the mods if I don’t actually use all the mods. And my answer is I do, but all separately in parallel. I like being a botanist and a thaumaturge and a blood magician and an astral sorcerer and a pressure mechanic and a mekanism engineer all at the same time, but like… in shifts. When I get bored of one I put it down and advance another. I want to feel like I’ve mastered them all rather than cherry picked the best parts of each. I get all the variety but few of the problems.
All of this context switching means I waste a tremendous amount of time, but it does make the game last longer. But not too long.
Also, in coop, it pays well when players specialize. I do this magic, you do that tech, etc. Share one or two things in common, but also be different. You might end up wickedly out of power balance depending on which mods you picked to specialize in, but imo that’s not really the mark of success.
Good ideas
Have you tried increasing your RAM usage on the MC launcher?
CPU requirements are usually fine, but RAM can get out of hand rather quickly. I usually try to put at least 8 GB, although 6 works in most cases.
Unfortunately I have a laptop with no RAM upgrades so it’s cranked up as far as it can go lol
My friend and I tried this with sevtech ages. Too heavy, too much, too slow.
We switched to life in the village with iris shaders, and we’re much happier!
Is Minecraft heavy now?
When you cram it full of tech mods it is.
If you don’t have at minimum 4 GB of RAM to dedicate to the game alone, you are not going to be able to load the packs I want to play. And yet, this is apparently how much RAM a lot of people still have in their PCs total in the year of our lord 2024.
I also have a lot of friends using underpowered netbooks as daily drivers, which will quickly be CPU-bounded in a game like modded Minecraft.
Minecraft, especially modded Minecraft, is almost an anti-game. Unlike nearly every other big game, where it’s a neat and tidy compiled package that stays in its lane memory-wise, loads relatively quickly, and only makes you ask questions about how many pretty settings your GPU can handle and what FPS you’ll get doing it, Minecraft instead is a bloated, memory-hogging dumpster fire written crappily in Java (many of the mods are, anyway) that runs like a dream on integrated graphics but can bring nearly any processor you might have to its knees on single thread performance.
pretty sure ATM9 recommended minimum RAM is 10GB…i have it at 12GB.
but i also run it at about 100fps and view distance set around 16 with shaders…
It amazes me that my laptop, which would have been sold alongside phones with keyboards, still has more RAM and pixels than some people, and an appreciable number of cores. The GPU is caca and increasingly unsupported though.
Are there any mods that are surprisingly economical? CPU-heavyness is pretty much just the genera - Dwarf Fortress has long been the same - but coding your thing well can make a huge difference. DF itself just got multithreading, and apparently some of the sorting tasks were implemented very naively before.
Myself.
Others generally dislike me cause I’m a total asshole (not wrong) 👍
I was expecting someone to mention their dick
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to get my friend to watch Stargate SG-1. They’re fellow nerds and love sci-fi, but the 10 season run is too daunting for them.
I’ve watched the whole run twice now, and Atlantis, and Universe.
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Who was doing it with whose mom?
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It does, thanks!
Genesis when Peter Gabriel was still with them.
That’s the only Genesis worth listening to
THANK YOU
Mbmbam is fantastic. Haven’t listened to it in years but that’s cuz I listen to the adventure zone mostly.
If you work on a computer for any appreciable length of time per day then you absolutely should build or buy yourself a split ergometric keyboard. You will never regret it, you will be faster at typing, your body will hurt less, you will be able to program it to do literally anything you want, and it will last longer than any other keyboard you can buy from major brands like razer or Logitech. I’ve only ever been able to get people to go into mechanical keyboards, but never ergometric or splits.
It’s funny how you can mention one of the most popular podcasts and still it’s true that a lot of people will just never get into it.
It’s been a long time since I checked in directly with MBMBAM, but I don’t think I’ll ever stop having a man-crush on Justin “Hoops” McElroy.
Mbmbam sounds like a talk radio channel on Omicron Persei VIII.
Their best show is “Women are from Omicron Persei VII, men are from Omicron Persei VIIII”
In that same vein but even more obscure:
F**kface
Genuinely the podcast that brings the most joy to me in my daily life. It is not obnoxious like Dynamic banter, it has elements of MBMBAM, but hasn’t fallen into the rut of following a formula (the movie + munch squads have gotten a bit too much for me recently).
I haven’t laughed like that since 2015-2018 mbmbam where they released so many bangers.
Demoscene stuff. Basically just digital art written for fun and to show off your coding skills. People have been doing it since the Amiga. If you’ve ever pirated software in the 90’s to 00’s, you’ve probably seen a realtime animation and mod-based techno track accompany the keygen - that’s an example of Demoscene art.
I can’t find anyone in the US, not even one of the nerds that works in tech with me, who gives a single shit about this stuff. There are parties and conventions all the time, none of them in North America…
I’m traveling to Germany at the end of March to go to a Demoparty just for the chance to meet a single other person who cares. It should be fun.
I made my own prod discovery service if you ever want to check it out: https://prods.page/ (Yes, I need to update it).
The Deathworlders
Mage: The Ascension - I’m super happy that TTRPGs are having a renaissance but there are so many systems out there and D&D isn’t anywhere near the best. You can imagine this like the board game revolution and how “Catan is like so amazing” when actually it’s a rather mechanically underwhelming and repetitive game.
D&D is a role-playing game with almost no support for social actions, it’s bizarre.
It takes an especially skilled GM to run M:tA. They need to be able to handle things getting very weird very fast. But it’s what makes the game and stories so great. Toon was like that too.
LSD haha, its insane and awesome, so many people should experience it before thinking they know themselves.
Chipotle tobasco is some of the best hot sauce I’ve ever had. I honestly have no idea if they even sell outside of Louisiana, but if you ever get the chance, try it.
The denizens of Louisiana have such an elevated taste for spice that any time I even mention it to anyone here they say “oh that shit sounds basic, try this one” and I can’t get anyone to actually try it.
It has a kick, but not as hot as a full fledged hot sauce. Nowhere near making you sweat hot. But the flavor profile is 👌
My second favorite tobasco, the lime one being my actual favorite. But it’s never in stores so I always settle for chipotle, since it’s great too and the burn is tolerable for a non “heat-head” such as myself.
I sometimes steal bottles from Chipotle when I go there as I never see it in stores and it’s so good. I literally am willing to commit crime for that hot sauce.
I prefer a lot more kick, and found a chipotle habanero sauce. But yeah, chipotle is best jalepeńo. Smokey goodness!
So what can’t you get people into
My weird fetishes
why should we check it out?
Uuuhh…
In reality, tabletop games, including RPG. There’s even a local, free event that happens every 2 months, but out of everyone I invite, nobody shows up, not even the people who say “I’d like to play once”. It really saddens me how many people reply with “I don’t have the skill to play, it’s too complicated”, actually meaning “I doubt I can develop the skill I think is needed to play and I’m not willing to try” whenever I get excited about RPGs.
A lot of things but from the top of my head: boardgames, Space Engineers, RimWorld, Frasier
Frasier
I came expecting a weak spin-off of Cheers, stayed for David Hyde Pierce.
Excuse me, did someone here just said Space Engineers?
I let my wife try to get me into boardgaming. That meant I spent six months playing ten minutes of boardgames at a time before the rest of the table ganged up to eliminate me because I was the weakest player. Thirteen years later I still want nothing to do with the hobby, the culture and 90% of the people who are serious about it.
You need a group that plays games like Pandemic, where the whole table is working together - although some games in that genre do include saboteurs.
I got to the point with my friends where I’d refuse to play some games like you describe, very long games where you can get screwed over early on and never have a hope of recovery.
My current favorite is Terraforming Mars, where everyone is cooperatively terraforming the planet but also trying to outperform the other corporations. It’s less about actively attacking each other and more taking advantage of opponents weaknesses and missteps.
When this conversation started at dinner with boardgamers after Der Spiel in Essen I asked the waiter to bring me the appropriate knife to saw my own leg off to escape the trap.
Those kind of games seem fun, but I’m also just talking about a small game every once in a while, something like one or two rounds of MtG, Machi Koro, Claim, Sushi Go. The light stuff, not the stuff that takes hours per game.
Sushi Go! is fantastic. Also Jaipur.
Well that sucks, if you ever get in that situation again, but I doubt you will, ask to play a co-op game.
Prime opportunity for their partner to get mad because they’re shit at the game. I know some couples are like that
If your partner is going to bully you while you are trying to learn a game, they are a lousy partner. It isn’t cooperative games that are the problem. I have a partner and several friends who all love cooperative games and are patient with anyone new to the game, I’ve never had issues with them being a jerk to newcomers. The more people you can welcome into learning and playing a game you like, the more likely you will have someone available to join you when you feel like having a game day. The best person to get into a game you enjoy is your partner who you likely spend most of your time with anyway, they are the number one best source of having someone to play with so long as you have some overlapping interests in games.
Having a lousy partner is all too common
Communism, but thats because i have a hard time talking to people irl
Communists when they find out community cooperation requires talking to people in person
Being a communist introvert is hard
I STILL DO IT OK
Bebop and cool jazz.
Bebop is my shit. Can confirm, no one else likes it around me.
Is that you Howard Moon?
I like Charlie Parker but that’s all I know of bebop. I also own a replica of one of his suits from the 40es
I, too, tried it once.
Schlock Mercenary. Amazing webcomic, by one of only like 2 webcomic authors that I’m familiar with that have the simple capability of putting out a comic on time (although this no longer applies as the story is finished) and is a fantastic story from beginning to end.
Yet, none of the friends I’ve ever recommended it to have been willing to read it
Yeah, it’s amazing. Definitely my all time favorite comic series.
