I used to love getting stoned and playing quake. Grab that quad power and go crazy!
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I know about the Kentucky people. In a very weird twist, my AIM screenname was [myinitials]bluefugate.
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I was very very good at quakeworld (a friendlier port for higher ping players). DM6 was my house, only a small handful of quakers stood a chance.
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I’m thinking about getting into it again, minus the drugs 
I used to play under the name Jeff Kennett, a bastard right wing premier. I always said that made it easier if I got killed lol.
Yeah Quake III Arena is basically what ended my arcade days. There was a killer arcade on campus but we had this new internet thing called a T1 in the dorms. These dudes down the hall would play games all day long. From talking to people, this wasn’t an experience unique to me either–seems like everyone knew a guy who flunked out playing Everquest or w/e. After Quaking, they’d be up at like 4 AM blasting this game I wanna say was called Asheron’s Call (?) farming gold by killing hordes of feline-looking humanoids in forests. Sounded like a cat-murdering factory.
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I like to read old newspapers. It’s an endlessly fascinating window into history. Obviously contemporaneous journalism shouldn’t be mistaken for history. Most of it is probably close to true, but never the whole truth. Nevertheless, it reveals at least what people were exposed to as part of their day-to-day lives.
Google had a project for digitizing newspapers, and although it ended years ago, the archive is still freely available at Google News Archive Search. There are lots of obscure papers, short-lived papers, and Canadian papers (many in French). But also a lot of complete collections of papers that span decades (e.g., 38,000 issues of the Reading ¶ Eagle from 1868-2008).
Sometimes it’s interesting to pick a noteworthy event (e.g., the Scopes Monkey Trial) and explore how it was covered at the time it happened. And that coverage of course might be different in different parts of the country.
But more often, I’ll just start exploring randomly. It’s almost impossible not to find something interesting that leads to further research. I came across the page at the top a few months ago while wandering aimlessly through 1925 (reading mostly about battles between Prohibition agents and moonshiners). At first I thought it was a nautical disaster and was confused about how it had happened in Ohio. I simply had no idea the US Navy had a fleet of Airships (i.e., Blimps) in service in 1925. This led to me getting sidetracked into research about this disaster, and then airships in general including their role in polar exploration in the 1920s.
I find myself drawn to exploring coverage of racial politics and racial violence, especially in Southern newspapers. Mini race riots, Klan meetings, editorials about civil rights, etc.
I found a 1949 week-long series of articles in the Tuskaloosa News about local Klan activity. I was prepared for the worst, but it was surprisingly anti-Klan. It’s a bit nuanced, but while the paper seems to agree with the general aims of the Klan, they take great issue with their terrorist tactics and secrecy and think the organization is counter-productive. From an editorial published at the end of the series:
Often there’s something that seems interesting but lacks context. Townsend, Montana, 1897:
I wondered what this was about and kept looking until I found just the bare bones of a story about a famous big-city (Helena!) Black boxer who runs into trouble with the local Sheriff when he tries to bring his traveling boxing exhibition to town. How is this not a movie starring Michael B. Jordan as Ike Hayes and Tommy Lee Jones as Sheriff Poole?
Finally, the greatest nugget I’ve unearthed, demonstrating that snarky petty White grievance goes back farther than you might think.
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I have played a lot of Yahtzee in my life. I find it to be relaxing. I have a touch of OCD so that helps. When I was younger I would play a hundred games in chunks and record all my scores. I don’t have that kind of time now but I still play some games to unwind while listening to music.
I’m very good at it. Top 0.001% easy. There is a lot of short-term variance, like in poker. If you want to see how good your decision-making is, you can analyze your game here:
I can roll perfect games maybe 3-5% of the time. Usually my delta is 1-2 points or better if I am really paying attention (delta = expected points lost because of sub-par decisions).
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I should clarify, by “perfect game” I mean one with zero delta, i.e. every decision you made was the mathematically correct one, even if your luck was bad. So you could roll a perfect game and still have a bad score
Just tried and got a delta of 12. Dunno if that’s good or not.
It’s not bad, especially if you haven’t played in a while
Awesome site thanks for linking. I grew up playing Yahtzee online with Polish relatives. Always owned them by taking a more mathematical approach but this site shows me how off I am!
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4.76
Lower is better right?
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Yes lower is better. 4.76 is pretty good!
Awesome site, thanks!
I feel like my choices were kinda straight forward for the game I tried, but got a mean delta per choice of 0.231
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Not sure exactly how many choices you made, but it’s usually around 35. So that would be a total delta of 8 or so (total delta is bottom right of result chart and easy to miss).
Yeah some games are fairly easy when most choices are obvious. Some games turn into clusterfucks and there are lots of tough choices
It’s addicting
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I realized today i don’t know how to play yahtzee
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Got a delta of 2.35 despite feeling like I was rolling so badly the whole game. Total score was only 219.
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I got a disappointing 9.
5, 1, 1, 6, 2
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