This brings back some memories! I used to play the Ancient Art of War at Sea on my dad's Mac Plus as a kid. Having never sailed, it was fun to learn about tacking while trying to broadside spanish galleons. Years later, I lied about my experience to convince a resort to let me check out a tiny catamaran. I made it back to shore!
One recommendation: make the boats not turn quite so fast. It allows you to outmaneuver other vessels by planning ahead or gaining speed ahead of time.
I still don't know much about sailing, but I have a lot of kitesurfing experience. Do boats really travel that slowly downwind? I assume that crosswind is faster, but downwind should still move at the speed of the wind.
I don’t play much, but some people who play the “commander” format build decks that are carefully balanced against each other. My buddy and I had a blast collecting most of the Lord of the Rings set and playing games of Hobbits vs Sauron, Gandalf vs Galadriel, etc.
That’s how I first played it when I was 14 too. My friend hand a deck of each color and we just took turns playing them.
You might be able to find someone who has built 4 balanced commander decks and you can just play
There are other RPGs with light rules that are WAY more fun than D&D. I've been playing "Blades in the Dark" recently, where the players run heists in a victorian ghost industrial city. It's an absolute delight.
D&D is better as a video game. Try Baldur's gate. It has the side benefit of teaching you the rules if you ever want to jump in to a local game
You’ll never be blown too high. Rocks can be dangerous, but only in certain places and only if you make bad decisions: there are many safe locations around the world. It’s probably about as safe as skiing overall?
Quite weather dependent, but there are places around the world that have very reliable wind during certain seasons. My home area in BC is good almost every day in the summer. Brazil is fantastic all fall, etc
One can take many good ideas from less wrong, yudkowsky et al without adopting a rationalist identity. Sure, it attracted wackos and they made a cult or two. But that could happen to anyone!
I work remotely, and my schedule is flexible. I live in Squamish BC all summer which is great for wind. In the winter we are in UT but my friends take lots of kiting destination vacations.
I’m fairly late in my career though (44yo), so I’ve opted for a lower salary, low stress and flexible job.
Not sure if you were looking only for indoor hobbies, but I picked up Kiteboarding recently, and it is the most outrageously fun thing I've ever done.
It's like being a kid and jumping off the house with a bedsheet, except it works. Most mistakes are laughed off by splashing in the water. I'm 3 years in and I can jump 7-10m then fly like a bird for 5-10 seconds without consequences.
Even as a beginner, sailing around or just feeling a kite pull you around is such a blast. Keep in mind it's really difficult and pretty much requires 10-20 hours of private lessons.
A lot! Maybe it's obvious, but I've long thought that religion's primary function is to help people process death (and other suffering). Now that life isn't constant suffering, many of us have discarded religion, but then we are blindsided by death.
I was very religious for 30 years, and have a very religious family. I've been athiest for more than a decade now, and it's sad to me that to leave religion behind I had to give up all my family traditions to process death. Those traditions are still there, but I can't relate to them since they are based on a belief I no longer agree with
Evolution doesn't care at all if we get to the top of the food chain. I think that we, as the dominant species on the earth, mistakenly assume that we are the most evolved since we are in charge. Which is more evolutionarily successful, the human or the wheat plant?
If another mass extinction occurs, we are toast (See "The Ends of the Earth"). Relatively minor ecological changes may even destroy us. Sapience has not yet proven to grant any long-term advantage.
For anyone else who discovers they are a fast metabolizer of coffee: try eating a big breakfast before drinking coffee to slow absorption.
I wanted to be a coffee drinker for YEARS, but it made me really high, and I felt super tired later in the day. I don't know why I didn't connect the dots until I searched my genome, but once you know whether you are a fast or slow metabolizer you can play all sorts of games. I can now drink coffee before dinner, and the crash hits right at bedtime.
What about the book made the difference? I'm 100% convinced that it's better to do as you say, and forget about the accounts, and also unable to resist the temptation to check them every day. I'm constantly tempted to make changes.
I work for the National Solar Observatory, creating Level 2 data for the DKIST Telescope’s observations of the sun. (For example, an image of the Temperature that lines up with the observation)
Just the other day, the solar physicist I work with said “yeah, that code that runs on the supercomputer needs to be rewritten in Fortran” (from C, I think.
He’s nearing retirement, but it’s not that he’s behind the times. He knows his stuff, and has a lot of software experience in addition to physics
The plastic straw thing makes me sad. We spent our societal outrage on those instead of single-use plastic bottles. Sigh. I think they're a distraction.
#2 is true of everyone. I'm not arguing against the kind of empathy you're describing, I just think we should extend it to all sorts of criminals. The murderer and rapist in the cell was screwed the moment they were born to dysfunctional, probably abusive parents. They have to fight hard to break the generational cycle.
All this means is that crime and violence are a systemic problem. Thinking about free will as the cause of crime isn't useful compared to thinking about how we might support and treat abused children and help them take a different path.
In that mac game, there was a tradeoff between speed and the number of cannons / health too