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Cake day: June 5th, 2025

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  • I’ve started Shadow of War. It’s sad what WB did with the game when it released, but in its current state it’s a blast to play. The pacing is just a smidge to the slow side but I’m taking it more as a marathon than a sprint, because I am enjoying the core gameplay loop. It’s one of the few games where dying is fun. The story is essentially nonsense and you can see plot twists coming from a mile away, but you’re not playing it for the actual story. You’re playing it for the stories the nemesis system creates.

    It’s such a simple system that just creates such memorable stories and enemies. In my playthrough I have an ork who killed me, I then got revenge on them by poisoning them, they then came back from the dead as a legendary with epic poison trait and now I run away from him because he keeps getting stronger. I have another ork who followed me from one area to another, he’s an epic ork with iron will (meaning I can’t turn him to my side) and I keep humiliating him in hopes that eventually I can break his iron will trait. No luck so far but I’ll keep trying.

    If anyone is planning on playing it my recommendation is to either start on the hardest difficulty (and focus on collecting skill points because the game does get easier one you have more skills unlocked) or raise the difficulty as you progress until dying is relatively common. You’re simply not going to get the full nemesis system experience if you’re never dying.










  • I decided to give Vintage Story a try. I was not prepared for what I was about to experience. I can already say it’s not for everyone. It’s like if you took Minecraft survival mode and then turned it into an actual survival mode. One of the first things everyone makes in Minecraft is a pickaxe. It took me about 2 hours to get the first pickaxe and then another 10 hours (though I did a lot of other things before upgrading my pick) to get the next tier of pickaxe. I probably would’ve gotten it quicker if I had only focused on that but I had a lot of other survival needs that had to deal with. But to go over what you need to make your first copper pickaxe.

    Obviously you need copper. Copper bits can spawn above ground (and a small hint that everyone mentions. If there’s copper on the ground there’s a small vein of copper right below it in the first layer of sedimentary rock). When you’ve collected enough copper you need to smelt it and cast it. To smelt copper you can’t use wood, you need to use charcoal. How do you get charcoal? You make a charcoal pit and burn wood into charcoal. You need an large amount of wood. How do you get wood? You make an axe. How do you make an axe? You flintknap an axe head and combine it with a stick. Now we can smelt copper but how do we cast it? For that you need to create a pickaxe mold. To create a pickaxe mold you mold clay and then fire it in a pit kiln. A pit kiln is pretty much a hole in the ground that you fill with the clay mold, dry grass, sticks and wood and then let it burn for a whole in game day. When you have a mold you put molten copper into the mold. But you can’t just take molten copper and stick it into the mold. You need a crucible to hold the liquid copper and tongs to hold the hot crucible. A crucible is made the same way a mold, you form it from clay and the fire it for a day. Tongs are probably the easiest part of the part of the process as you need just sticks and rope (which you make from cattails). If this feels like it takes forever it’s because it does. This is why it’s not for everyone but my god did this push the right buttons because unlocking the pickaxe felt like a real milestone.

    And in case anyone cares what I did for the next 10 hours, I harvested probably about 1000 tule plants to make a thatch roof. I started a farm and collected different kind of seeds (because you need to rotate crop to keep the soil healthy). I made a cellar because your food will spoil within days if you don’t stick them in the cellar. I collected enough copper to make a copper anvil so I could make more advance copper tools. I prospected the land to find tin and lead veins so I could make other metals than copper. I foolishly believed making leather might be easy so I hunted some animals until I looked up leatherworking and then gave up because I hadn’t found limestone (or it’s equivalent) to start the tanning process. Instead I started to make compost from the leather which I will later use as a fertilizer. Oh and I made a fruitpress to make juice from all the berries I’ve found.

    It’s a real survival experience and I’m definitely enjoying the complexity of it all. There’s an in-game survival guide that is pretty informative so I don’t need to go online to understand how something works. The game also has a very customizable gaming experience. You can very much tailor your experience to be a bit less survival or significantly more survival. You can also modify the worldgen to fit your needs which is something that got removed from Minecraft. There’s also a really good modding support. So far I’ve added the Carry On mod that lets me move chests and barrels around because when I expanded my base (to have more space for my stuff) moving my stuff around was a pretty annoying experience. I also have my eye on some other mods but those require starting a new playthrough and I want to get a bit better grasp of some of the mechanics before pulling the trigger on a new playthrough.

    TL:DR I absolutely recommend Vintage Story to anyone willing to put in the effort it demands. You will be rewarded for that effort.








  • There probably isn’t a central database to verify against so the solution would be to come up with a distributed system where each country implements its own verification process and then implement a standardized messaging structure that all countries would have to use. It would be a significant development effort to make something like that and it probably wouldn’t pay off to if it was made just for citizens initiative. Considering in the last 5 years there has been only 4 (5 if we also count SKG) initiatives that have passed 1 mil it’s probably cheaper to collect all the signatures and then have each country verify the dataset that relates to their country.