BeasMeeply

I actually got into woodworking as a side effect of amateur astronomy! Buying a large telescope that works properly is super expensive, so I tried making my own and enjoyed it.

It’s the kind of hobby where you can spend as much as you want to. You can get a lot done with a hand saw and a drill and pine boards from Home Depot, but it’s hard to go back once you’ve smoothed a bit of Honduran mahogany with a colonial era plane and finished it with oil and wax. The sense of improvement through trial is also really appealing as an RPG fan. There are about 18 months of learning between my wife’s first desk and the one I recently completed:

Edit: Also, yup, the drawers are all touch open.

Hello dudes! I guess first, I’m not actually a “battlestation” person, but this is a better title than “building a better desk”.

In addition to games, I am also a hobbyist woodworker. I recently built a new desk for my wife, and was rewarded with permission to build a new PC. I don't keep up with hardware too much, so I just used PCPartPicker to get "a good one" for each of the components. For the case, I opted for "the big one". I put it all together and after the usual round of nearly catastrophic boot troubleshooting, everything's great! Except the case was two inches too tall to fit under my desk where I want it to be.

I had some nice ash boards on hand that I had intended to use for a wall cabinet, but figured they'd work for a desk just as well. Here's the before and after:

Just wanted to share!

Welcome to adulthood, sir?

Sort of sad to see the team breaking up, as it were, but Vinny's a great human dude! Do what needs to be done, Vinny.

The story this game tells may not be groundbreaking, but it is solid and human which are adjectives that don't apply to many games. More interesting to me is the fact that the story is only as effective as it is because it is told in a game. In almost every case, games with memorable stories communicate those stories with techniques borrowed from film. Namely, you stop playing the game while a cutscene plays out, or maybe you get some background information from an audio log that plays while you perform unrelated gameplay.

In Gone Home, the gameplay is the story -- this couldn't be done in another medium. There are "audio logs" that play while you rummage around, and I can't decide if that's unfortunate or not. The acting and writing is great and affecting, and I think the game did enough to ultimately contextualize them, but I did feel like the artifice was a little too close to the surface if I let myself think about it for a few seconds. I almost wish Sam's story came across through the same mechanisms the parents' stories did, but that's probably just because I want there to be an example of a well-told story that didn't have to lean on that particular trope.

I'm white, my wife is Vietnamese. Both of our families love each of us, but there's certainly a palpable barrier between me and some of her family members at times. I don't like fish sauce, for example, which is totally incomprehensible.

To some extent, I think this kind of thing is totally understandable among immigrant communities. They are insular because they have had to be. Particularly for refugee populations who didn't leave their homes by choice, this just isn't the family life they'd envisioned. They grew up expecting a three generation household with grandchildren singing a certain set of children's songs, and I'm an ever-present reminder that they'll never have that. If a person simply isn't able to look past that kind of thing, it shows a weakness of character, but I think it's at least helpful to try to understand why they feel the way they do.

Cross posting because I really hope the crew sees it:

Thanks. Very much. Never doubt the value of your dumb careers.

I'm not a social guy (see post count), but I honestly consider everyone at GB my friend. I've had one friend vanish, and that's certainly hard. Almost worse is watching the remaining friends go through such a hard time and knowing that I have nothing to offer in help, because they do not know me. IT IS A CONFUSING SITUATION.

Just know that for every one person sending their vague, distant support, there are probably fifty like me quietly wishing we could help.

Very much. Never doubt the value of your dumb careers.

I'm not a social guy (see post count), but I honestly consider everyone at GB my friend. I've had one friend vanish, and that's certainly hard. Almost worse is watching the remaining friends go through such a hard time and knowing that I have nothing to offer in help, because they do not know me. IT IS A CONFUSING SITUATION.

Just know that for every one person sending their vague, distant support, there are probably fifty like me quietly wishing we could help.