I recommend one of my favourite CRPGs of all time: Neverwinter Nights - for the modern hassle-free experience, get the Enhanced Edition. The first single-player campaign is pretty meh by Bioware standards, but the expansion packs (included in the NWNEE) are pretty great. Heard a lot of good about the premium modules (a few of the original premium modules come with NWNEE, the rest are available as DLC).

The official campaigns are set in Forgotten Realms, the same D&D setting as BG3, but you really don’t need to worry about diving headlong into horrors. More fantasy vibes and less visceral stuff. (the second expansion pack is a bit more in the direction of subterranean spooks, but not, like, excessively so.)

However, the real big strength of NWN was not the campaigns. It was deliberately designed for player-created adventure modules created with the included Aurora Toolset. There’s loads of them and some of them had really great production values and writing. They’re currently hosted at Neverwinter Vault and NWNEE also has a custom content browser (though the latter doesn’t have much stuff). Custom modules also have a whole bunch of genres and settings, as expected.

Oh and it’s a game from 2002 so it runs on any ol’ potato. (Well the EE needs a vaguely modernish machine, but not anything unreasonable.)

Reddit has an user data checkout feature (IIRC, check out the user settings or maybe reddit help pages to find it).

It’s a bit crap though.

It takes a long time to process, especially if you happened to post in the era when the Reddit data infrastructure was horribly terrible instead of merely ordinarily terrible, and apparently this involves some handwork in the worst cases on behalf of the staff.

Some data may be missing or truncated. It doesn’t give you data from privated/banned subreddits (which was a fun thing to discover because last time I tried to do this the blackouts were on), and even for legit stuff, long comments/posts may be truncated. Even so, I’m pretty sure that the dumps just straight up didn’t have all of my posts from several years ago, even if those were on public subreddits. So you need to make sure the checked out data is sensible.

In conjunction to the official dumps, I recommend a few other tools, especially since the dumps aren’t really magnificently usable on their own. One tool that I found personally invaluable is reddit-user-to-sqlite, which allows you to import Reddit data dumps and available live user data (I think it does this by scraping or something, I’m sure it worked despite the API being shut down) to sqlite database, and Datasette is a nice frontend for browsing the posts.

As for scrubbing, there’s tools for that are supposed to work. I think.

Yup. The robots.txt file is not only meant to block robots from accessing the site, it’s also meant to block bots from accessing resources that are not interesting for human readers, even indirectly.

For example, MediaWiki installations are pretty clever in that by default, /w/ is blocked and /wiki/ is encouraged. Because nobody wants technical pages and wiki histories in search results, they only want the current versions of the pages.

Fun tidbit: in the late 1990s, there was a real epidemic of spammers scraping the web pages for email addresses. Some people developed wpoison.cgi, a script whose sole purpose was to generate garbage web pages with bogus email addresses. Real search engines ignored these, thanks to robots.txt. Guess what the spam bots did?

Do the AI bros really want to go there? Are they asking for model collapse?

If musk pulled the same kinda shit, he’d be mocked for it too

Yes, it is funny how more people are not calling out the Electric Car Jesus for swooping around in private jets and single-handedly undoing any positive effect his customers can have…

I used to watch iilluminaughtii several years ago, probably because I’ve been grabbing popcorn and enjoying watching someone dunking on multi-level marketing since, uh, 90s at least. Then I watched some video that was about some topic that I was kind of in middle of a deep dive, too (I can’t remember which exactly. Elan School, probably?). And the video was bland as hell. And then I was like “yeah, most of these other videos are kind of forgettable shallow pap too”.

…and this year we found out about the whole landlordy corporate town fancier backstabby financial abuser helicopter-CEO situation. And the content mill situation. And the plagiarism thing. Can’t forget the plagiarism thing. …I was like, “oh this all just makes sense now.”

Yeah, the thing is, “a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors” is kind of a meme among non-Haskell developers. Personally, I think Haskell is a very interesting language. The mathematical jargon, however, is impenetrable, and this particular expression is kind of the poster child. I’mma go look at Erlang if I want my functional language fix without making my head hurt, thank ye very much.

Microsoft got repeatedly hit over this kind of shenanigans in MSIE during and after the anti-trust lawsuit.

Sadly, that was 20 years ago. I’m not having much faith in American justice system doing anything about this nowadays.

Technically, SQL is case-insensitive.

Practically, you want to capitalise the commands anyway.

It gives your code some gravitas. Always remember that when you’re writing SQL statements you’re speaking Ancient Words of Power.

Does that JavaScript framework that got invented 2 weeks ago by some snot-nosed kid need Words of Power? No. Does the database that has been chugging on for decades upon decades need Words of Power? Yes. Words of Power and all the due respect.

/serious Well, yes, most APIs are meant for system-to-system interaction, that’s kind of a given. But since this particular API is clearly meant for human-to-system interaction, returning a human-readable response is adequate. Yes, a better design would probably allow the client to specify additional parameters about the desired response.

/back-to-jokes Yeah, well this kind of sums up most of my job applications. I send an application and the recruiting people are all like “OK”.