Boo

Sup! Long time since the last Board Games thread here 8D Go!

I approve of your Kiddo's hobbies!

The Dear Hunter too 🤠

@aisha_patterns: Seeing a lot of questions about whether recent anomalies are connected. Short answer: unclear. Longer answer: systems rarely fail independently. Correlations don’t announce themselves loudly. Something I wish more people understood: models don’t suddenly become wrong. They "drift". Residuals widen. Edge cases multiply. It feels like standing on a floor that’s still solid but no longer level. @aisha_patterns: Permafrost thaw isn’t just about volume. It’s about composition. We track the usual gases well. Trace compounds less so. That gap matters more than people think. @DrEliasKade: Caution here, @aisha_patterns. Trace anomalies at low concentrations are expected during rapid environmental change. Again: We shouldn’t imply causality without evidence. @aisha_patterns: Agreed, @DrEliasKade. Though historically, many causal links were first noticed as persistent "rounding errors" before instruments caught up. This might sound abstract, but if your model residuals suddenly make you uneasy - even when diagnostics look fine - don’t ignore that! Double-check assumptions. That’s often where real shifts hide. @DrEliasKade: And that’s exactly why structured review matters. Intuition is useful, but policy has to be grounded in verifiable data. @aisha_patterns: Absolutely. Intuition isn’t a conclusion. It’s a prompt to look closer. Preferably before thresholds are crossed. @STHLM_NewsNow: Experts agree: recent gas anomalies unlikely to cause harm. Full analysis from leading climate scientists. #ClimateWatch #Permafrost @aisha_patterns: Quick clarification: no one said "no risk." Nuance matters. Residuals are widening. Trace compounds exist. Statements like "experts agree" misrepresent discussion. Let's hope your readers' media literacy is sufficient to think ab @TrollBot_9000: LOL @aisha_patterns experts agree vs residuals widen…sounds like someones afraid of losing their funding $$$!! Can we trust any of these "scientists"? 🤖 #GasGate

I'll have you know that I did not get nearly enough messages with people's "bank account number, credit card number, access codes, login codes for OtakuBoards, picture of you, picture of you naked, and a picture of your mother via private message on this website". So much for community, people.

You owe us a tale, John 😞.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/29720/Guild_Wars_Reforged/ "Step into Guild Wars Reforged, the award-winning online roleplaying game enjoyed by millions, now re-energized with system enhancements and Steam Deck verified. Experience the complete saga— from the fall of Ascalon to the desperate stand against Nightfall. Your adventure is just getting started!" Pretty impressive how little they actually updated for this release.

Just a quick reminder that the OB Overlords were graceful enough to keep the OB Graphic Worms alive even after 15+ years: https://www.otakuboards.com/graphicworm/index.html I would really like to know what happened to @Sara's Art Career, because I definitely did not give enough attention to those awesome pieces of art of hers back in 2010.

wait. hang on. 😠

Sorry to hear about your loss, K. Oh, I totally get that. Ever since I started working more in the Tracking & Data Analytics side of things of Online Marketing, my scepticism of the internet went through the roof. I also got rid of TikTok and Facebook and most other platforms besides IG (mostly because we have the the board game account) and Discord, and even there I severely limit what I share. i.e. we don't ever share the name, voice and face of our daughter publically (and insist others respect that), and really to keep her digital footprint to a minimum. For the same reason, we seldomly share a location of where we are at that moment. Did you know that, even before AI, there are companies who "openly" sell view-tracking for TV advertisement campaigns (so normally very difficult to attribute properly) by listening in on peoples' phones, and when their phone hears the video ad of the advertiser, it tracks it and sends the data back to the ad platform. So much fun. At some point it's hard not to feel paranoia about things. But yeah. Sharing online has become pretty unpersonal, with good reason. At the same time, it feels kinda cathartic to return here in the deep well of nostalgia and spill.

Ayo! Everyone is going to update us about their life now. So, I'll go first: my little one is turning 4. She's super cool. Her biggest hobby is reading with us and so she's now very much into learning how to read and write. I moved from the Netherlands to Cologne, Germany at some point. Just too late to meet up with @Korey when he was out in Mainz, not all too far away from here. Womp womp. Got married during the biggest COVID-19 Lockdown, and came out the other end of the pandemic all the more enthusiastic about each other, so that's solid as a rock. Some of my favourite books in her collection are everything by Anna Kemp & Sara Ogilvie (Dogs Don't Do Ballet, Rhinos Don't Eat Pancakes, The Worst Princess, ...), A Dress With Pockets (and it's sequel) and basically and book that features some kickass traditional roles defying hero(ine). Also Rob Biddulph (Penguin Blu, Blue Footed Booby, ...). But my wife and I are awful, as neither of us believes in budgetary limits when it comes to her books, so it's really kinda getting out of hand. She has multiple bookshelves full at this point (about 50/50 Germany/English, with some stray Russian and Dutch books). So obv. I'm open to more book recommendations. Did you know that @Shy actually wrote a children's book (amongst a tonne of other amazing work)? It seems awesome. I try to find it at book stores here in Europe, but so far no luck. I shall be accepting offers from the US. Super impressive gentleman, he is. Besides books, we're super duper into boardgames in this household (collection). So much so that we created an Instagram account about it (mostly to have one place to get updated). Any boardgamers here of any kind? Otherwise, I work in Online Marketing and Webshop optimisation stuff, probably mostly because I learned to abuse HTML tables for all sorts of stuff when that was trendy for RPGs here back in the day. Used that skill to make websites. I lead the marketing team here, and the pressure of being a Milennial Manager is real. But it's also rewarding to, you know, be able to help provide and protect a much healthier work/life balance and attitude to work for some people than I learned, just like I'm able to break some generational curses with my daughter. The weight of it all does get to me sometimes though. Can't compare it first hand with how other generations felt, but it feels like we're all doing a lot of the heavy lifting to fix stuff on many levels, that our parents' generation just dropped the ball on. The political climate doesn't really help either. The way the USA is rapidly devolving into the dystopian novels, as if they were instruction manuals, is not only alarming by itself, but it's also inspiring others around the globe, including here in the Netherlands and Germany, to be racist bigots openly. The whole thing sucks, man. Genocides and war out in the open world wide web for everyone to witness, unable to miss. And we're just supposed to pretend like we got our act together smile and recycle and smash the patriarchy and stuff? On these types of days I especially miss the days of just coming home from school or whatnot, logging onto my computer, and just getting my OB updates in.

omg for real

I still belt out OB Podcast lyrics to songs, and am appalled that no one around me thinks they're funny and nostalgic. "Typing fuuuuter in compuuuuter!" "Mexican Boss with his Hot Sauce" "No you can't eat my christmas caaaaaake" and I still hear Korey's voice instead of Bruno Mars's.

Super thankful for Bluey too, yo.

✨