I have a problem with buying domains that just seem fun or cool to me. For example, I bought `sysalt.com` -- why? because it was registered in 1992 and that seemed cool to me.
What have I done with it? Nothing. What do I plan to do with it? Nothing yet either! Do I still want to get a domain that was registered earlier than 1992 just because it's cool? You know it!
Not an ad or promotion, I'm just also addicted to buying cool domains and I remember seeing this up for sale: DomainEmpire.com is currently trying to sell sesqui.net, registered in 1987, for $33,000. I think they have others that are cheaper, but you'll have to scrape WHOIS data for each domain to find their creation dates.
I was actually eyeing off a few pre-1990 domains, including sesqui.net, earlier this evening -- I generally use the service "ExpiredDomains.net" for searching and sorting by "Whois Birth Year" to find the old ones. Despite it's name, it's actually incredibly useful just to search across various domain marketplaces regardless of if they're expiring or not.
(Un)fortunately most of the super cool ones are way outside of what I budget for my "cool things to have (that don't take up any physical space)" spend.
I bought a copy of Afterlife from one of the Scholastic catalogues when I was in primary school after already having had a blast with Sim City 2000.
I absolutely loved the graphics and the theme and everything, but as it turns out, I had absolutely no idea how to play it and never got far enough into it to really appreciate its gameplay.
I should probably give it another go as an adult who has a bit more patience for reading through instructions than I did as a kid.
1. Find a map with the maximum amount of buildable space
2. Start the game with the maximum speed to above 5000 years
3. Build Hell first and only
4. Pause, build the portal already thinking in upgraded form.
5. Build long straight roads, columns spaced 4 from each other, avoid crossing
6. Check the sins demand
7. Usually, the green is the most demanded
8. Don’t touch anything about the planet
9. This is key: using green as example, build 2x2 spaced so the neighbor is diagonal, never adjacent.
10. Build your first wave of buildings, and essentials (dystopias, the trams, etc. I assume you know those things)
11. Open the portal, make a lot of money
12. Upgrade the portal, make more money
13. Max capacity reached, starting to lose souls and money, you adjust the building’s efficiency to white for every building manually until you are rich
14. Buildings start to reach its top version and capacity, lock them
15. Activate the bats , y to their guano are excellent to upgrade the buildings. Also keep other disasters away during a grace period
16. Then keep growing, adjusting buildings efficiency, more portals, more buildings
17. You only need half the Hell, to achieve hell’s Omnibulges
18. Then star heaven
19. Follow heaven best practices and you reach to Love Domes very easily and rich af
20. I would only train later in the game. Build the best training school, make it only accept top 10%, left side, watch and leave 20% no lower because it can cause excess oof demons or angels, unless you want to see the a special ending
21. Endings can be quite fun to achieve (then you want to mess up with the planet)
What I like about sim city 2K is that it is like an arcade sim game. It is super easy to get up and running without too much prior knowledge. You can build a successful city without reading through the manual.
I also like that there's no ending. Maybe this makes it "easy", but it promotes setting specific goals for yourself and exploration rather than going through certain expected motions to meet a preset goal. But there are the scenarios for people who like a preset challenge.
I'd recommend this. As kids my brother and I could never complete a game on the BBC Micro called Imogen[0]. It was amazing for the time in that your character could transform into three modes (wizard / cat / monkey) and on one screen a fourth mode, and the transformation looked smooth even back then. However - we never completed it. As an adult I found it again and while I completed it fairly easily, it was a nice memory.
I played it summer of 2005, the same year I binged Douglas Adams' complete non-HHG works (including 'Last Chance to See' on CD-ROM and the interactive fiction game, 'Bureaucracy').
Afterlife is wonderfully fun and satisfying to experience to completion for the first time, and what it might lack in replayability it more than makes up for with humor and design.
I still play once a year. But now I can reach full omnibulges and love domes in less than an hour. But I remember spending months to survive until I discovered the cheat code (btw if you use too much, it triggers something that I can’t remember, it can mess up the game as a punishment).
The I figured out to let the planet evolve and grow it’s population because then, your afterlife has high demand thus more money, that detail solves the hardest part of the game!
The other insight which came much much later, the better capacity per area is given by the top 2x2 and 4x4 multi color. 3x3 top buildings are badass looking but they offer smaller max capacity for souls, we are aiming in reaching 1 billion souls using the least amount of area so you always have free space to build as demand explode.
I could answer "the ball probably rolls off the table" and to everything else; I had no answer and would have to choose after the fact if pushed for an answer.
But say you're overexcited and drunk, maybe then you think about all these extraneous matters, for fun and because you're not focused on the main question, and then you do have answers.
I only learned about aphantasia a few years back and, like you, so many things in my life just clicked when I realised I was an outlier.
I could never relate with people when we'd read a book that had become a movie and they're like, "but they're not at all how I imagined them" and all I could think was "but the person in the movie has the exact characteristics described in the book!"
When people would ask me to imagine something then ask questions about it, I'd basically just be deciding details on the fly and then retaining them in a list. For example, if you said, "think of a car," inside my mind is just "a car" on repeat. Then if you asked me what colour it was, I might decide "red" and my mind is now, "a red car", etc.
I remember the massive hubbub about the Mortal Engines movie specifically.
The only thing I remembered about the main character was that she had a scar on her face.
Fans were nitpicking every single strand of hair and I was like "You guys remember that, do you make notes when reading or what?". Apparently people visualize books so hard that they "see" the characters and remember them.
Working on a web-based image editor with plenty of customisation and support for most Photoshop features.
Built overwhelmingly in vanilla JS with a couple of WASM modules for it.
It’s generally very performant across the app so far, but there’s still a handful of features that are functional but subpar in terms of performance that I need to address.
The most comprehensive tool I've built so far was a JSONPath playground [0] when I was working on a game where I found myself writing a fair bit of JSONPath (well, JSONPath Plus specifically) expressions by hand and wanted to be able to test them out in the same way that I would on regex101 when writing regular expressions.
I realistically probably would have only saved myself less than an hour of crafting those expressions if the tool had already existed (with this level of detail, there are lots of many simpler ones already for it), but I would have spent a solid 40-50 hours of bouncing between manually crafting and writing detailed instructions to direct the agents to get this tool there.
I work at SerpApi [0], and we offer a free tier that may serve your needs if you're just looking to do programmatic searches periodically.
Much of the reason people go with a service like ours is because of the difficulty with rolling your own reliable solution. Happy to answer any questions you might have as well!
What have I done with it? Nothing. What do I plan to do with it? Nothing yet either! Do I still want to get a domain that was registered earlier than 1992 just because it's cool? You know it!
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