Dragoness Eclectic's Journal

None of today's tornadoes touched down near us. We're fine.

I finally got all of SimpleOres and its add-ons that I've been maintaining ported to Minecraft-Forge 1.19.2 as of last week.

To prevent burn-out, I refuse to do any Minecraft coding for another week. I will, however, look at missing documentation.

I broke my ankle Thursday morning, and have been wearing a boot and walking on crutches ever since. I already hate crutches. We'll find out what the orthopedist has to say about it later in the week.

I managed to get myself banned from /r/wow. Well, I had already quit the game, so... *shrugs*. That's the second forum I've ever managed to get banned from. I need to work harder on my cranky old lady reputation, obviously.

Note to anyone who posts on that subreddit: the mods don't like being argued with over whether or not something is hate speech. I don't like ridiculous language-policing. I do not believe that calling a concept "retarded" is hate speech.

I'm not sure I actually believe in "hate speech" as an objective concept. As actually used, it's a form of insult--and since any word can be used as an insult if delivered with the right tone and intent, all words are potentially "hate speech". I figured that out years ago and refuse to go down the road of crippling my native language because some people are stupid, hateful assholes. I refuse to self-censor out of fear that someone, somewhere might deliberately take offense. I refuse to jump on the Euphemism Treadmill.

In general, I don't write to intentionally offend people. If I deliberately offend you, you'll know it unless you are spectacularly oblivious. If you are the type of person to seek out sources of outrage and take offense where none was intended, I'm not here to please you.

The more I work with ad-hoc APIs, the more I appreciate formal, written standards. Means code doesn't break because some dev suddenly decides it would be more aesthetic to re-arrange the order of parameters in an API call in the newest version. With a standard: forty-year-old C code will compile and run just fine as long as it follows one of the international standards the compiler recognizes. Without a standard: yesterday's Minecraft mods may be broken because some dev decided to re-arrange the terrain generation code overnight.

I have encountered both situations. There's a lot of open-source devs out there that don't seem to understand that an API (Application Programming Interface) is supposed to be a STABLE interface to back-end code; you can re-arrange the back-end code to suit, but the interface (API) is supposed to remain the same.

I have completed and posted my Yuletide fic! Yay!

Ganked from changelog:

Build: 1.17.1-37.0.31 - Tue Aug 10 22:45:23 GMT 2021
gigaherz:
Redesign the tool system to rely on the new vanilla tags. (#7970)

Changed:
- ToolType is replaced with ToolAction, which can selectively represent which actions are supported by an item.
- Added a canPerformAction method to query ToolActions.
- Renamed canHarvestBlock to isCorrectToolForDrops to match vanilla.
- Added TierSortingRegistry, which can be used to add custom tiers and supports sorting between vanilla or with other mods.

How to use:

For the breaking system there's 2 methods:
- getDestroySpeed decides if an item *can* mine the block fast. Override if you have multiple tags or your item isn't a DiggerItem.
- isCorrectToolForDrops decides if an item will get drops. Returning false will also slow down mining, regardless of getDestroySpeed. Override if you have type-dependant tiers or your item isn't a DiggerItem.

For the tier system mods can just call `TierSortingRegistry.registerTier(tier, "name", List.of(lesser tiers), List.of(better tiers));` to register their tiers.
There's helper methods to query tiers such as TierSortingRegsitry.isCorrectTierForDrops.

The ToolActions solve 2 problems:
1. distinguishing which kind of digger an item can be
2. querying if the item can perform specific secondary actions.
Any item can override `canPerformAction` to customize which actions it performs.

Additional notes from Gigahertz on updating tools:

Remove the harvestTool and harvestLevel calls from the blocks
and instead, add the block to the relevant tags
ToolType.AXE -> minecraft:mineable/axe
ToolType.PICKAXE -> minecraft:mineable/pickaxe
ToolType.SHOVEL -> minecraft:mineable/shovel
and so on

• harvest level 0 -> forge:needs_wood_tool
  
• was harvest level 0 but you want only GOLD tools to mine, not wood -> forge:needs_gold_tool
  
• harvest level 1 -> minecraft:needs_stone_tool
  
• harvest level 2 -> minecraft:needs_iron_tool
  
• harvest level 3 -> minecraft:needs_diamond_tool
  
• harvest level 4 -> forge:needs_netherite_tool
  

if you define a custom tool type, define a custom tool type tag, can be optional if you don't have any default blocks
if you define a custom tier, register it into the TierSortingRegistry
if your tier is supposed to be equivalent to a vanilla tier, specify the tier you want to be equivalent to in the "after" list, the tier right after that in the "before" list, and have an empty optional tag in your tier.
you can use ForgeTier as a convenience

I have been using an old Call of Cthulhu adventure as the basis of a fanfic, and as a result, I have been combing over it in minute detail so I can describe and/or modify the action. In doing that, I have discovered several things:

• Someone at Chaosium skimped a bit on the copy-editor budget--inconsistent name spellings abound. Except for Mythos monsters, those are always correct.
  
  
• Evil Cultist Guy gets mad at the gangster he hired to buy the Evil Cursed Artifact, because said gangster stole it instead and pocketed the money. I'm not sure why this is a problem; if he'd bought the Evil Artifact as instructed, the money would still be gone.
  
  
• Evil Cultist Guy kills gangster by doing a ritual sacrifice. Since part of the ritual involves slicing his throat, I suppose the gangster would hold still after that. Apparently doing a lengthy, bloody sacrifice and a full summons of Nyarlathotep is more important than picking up the money that the cops later find all over the floor. Even though he killed his hireling over it. I'm not sure why he was summoning Nyarlie at this point, but SAN 0 baddies do the whackiest things. Meanwhile, the cops are kicking in the front door...
  
  
• Nyarlathotep fails at body disposal, only partially incinerating the corpse, but obligingly leaves before the cops finish kicking the door in and Evil Cultist Guy bolts out the fire escape. There's an awful lot going on in a few minutes in a small tenement apartment.
  
  
• Nyarlathotep handed out an Evil Cursed Artifact capable of banishing himself. Remedial reading of the Evil Overlord List recommended.
  
  
• Ethnic Religious Figure introduced at the beginning to help the PCs with the Evil Cursed Artifact. Ethnic Religious Figure is summarily killed by Evil Cultist Guy the GM mid-adventure, only to be replaced by another Ethnic Religious Figure from the same religion, same monastery even. This one's leveled up his magic and lore skills and knows how to fix the Evil Cursed Artifact problem. Why wasn't he introduced in the first place?
  
  
• Well actually... that was done so the Evil Cultist Guy (whom no one has seen in person yet) can pretend to be the real Replacement Ethnic Religious Figure and mislead the PCs, who have to guess who to trust. My money is on most groups deciding they don't trust anyone and pitching them both off the train/boat/whatever.
  
  
• Replacement Ethnic Religious Figure is the only one who knows how to fix the curse from the Evil Cursed Artifact, so if the party ditches him, they are screwed. If he gets killed, they are screwed. He also summarily disposes of the Evil Cultist Guy if the players let him. Guess the adventure didn't need him after all, and the PCs don't actually need the closure of defeating Evil Cultist Guy themselves. (He was only the guy who caused all these problems, including casting the curse.)
  
  
• If not disposed of, Evil Cultist Guy continues to make a nuisance of himself, summoning lesser things to ambush them, leading them into packs of ghouls, that sort of thing. Apparently he and Nyarlathotep aren't on speed-dial with each other, because Nyarlathotep is waiting at the Evil Temple for the party to arrive with the Evil Cursed Artifact, so why waste time with ambushes?
  
  
• The adventure makes the usual mistake of assuming all monsters are on Team Evil and work together. True Lovecraft aficionados know that, for instance, ghouls do not work for Nyarlathotep and don't give a shit about him.
  
  
• The boss fight at the climax of the adventure is pretty much guaranteed to kill one party member per round. It would really suck if it were the Replacement Ethnic Religious Figure, because he's the only one who knows how to uncurse whoever got cursed by the Evil Artifact. Unfortunately, he's written as the person who will initially try to banish Nyarlathotep with the Evil Cursed Artifact, which Nyarlie takes major exception to, so he will be target #1. Oops. Better hope he's good at "Hitting Mythos Diety with Evil Artifact" combat. Even if he is a kill-stealer. It's not like the PCs could use the SAN gain from defeating a Mythos Diety themselves.
  
  
• It doesn't look too good for whoever got cursed, either: the cursed visions occurring during the whole trip to Egypt have been steadily draining the Accursed PC's sanity: Best case: 21+1d3 loss. Worst case: All SAN and then some. Also, given the likelihood that the PCs will pfaff around for the first few days and not realize that the Accursed has to go to Egypt ASAP, said Accursed will lose another few points of SAN, and so exhausted that he has to be all but carried to the final confrontation.
  

At least the ethnic stereotyping is fairly benign in this adventure. There's another, much beloved CoC adventure that isn't so benign (and mutilates the hell out of not just Lovecraftian lore, but Chaosium's own previous Mythos lore). Said adventure is, however, a really well-structured and -paced adventure for a diverse group of PCs, which is why it is so beloved.

After last night's possum adventure, I concluded that living with dogs turns your life into a weird comedy.

Dog decides she wants to go out after bedtime. I let her out. Shortly thereafter, I hear enraged barking right out back, so I go to look. Elsa (my dog) has treed a baby possum in the bird feeder, and is trying to leap up and get it. She can't quite reach it--YET--but she managed to tear off the bottom of the bird feeder (it was old and getting a bit fragile). The poor possum is clinging to the top half of the feeder, paralyzed/"playing possum".

Since I didn't really want to watch an opossum being torn to shreds in front of my eyes, I restrained Elsa and wrestled her back indoors. "Wrestled" being the operative word; she really didn't want to let that possum get away.

A bit later, she got me up again, insisted she really, really had to go out. I shined my flashlight out the backdoor. Possum was still there; it had climbed to the top of the hangar for the bird feeder. Told Elsa "nope", and went back to bed.

Some hours later, Elsa got me up again, assuring me that she really had to go out, honest! I checked with the flashlight; no possum. Elsa ran for the bird feeder at high speed, and stopped short, realizing there was no possum there. She cocked her head, and looked around, and sniffed the ground, as if to say "There's supposed to be a possum here. Where is my possum?" She eventually gave up and came in, disappointed.

The very next night, Elsa got me up to go out, bolted for the wooded area at the back of the yard, and then came back to the door and tapped on it as if to come in. When I opened the door, she dropped a stunned mouse at my feet.

Life with dogs is weird comedy.