Etchings

Brief ratings of the complexity of the 10 different Arcanums in Mage the Awakening, Second Edition.

Now you've done it. You've attracted the attention of a nation-state powered group of hunters. Well funded, well trained, and even supported with a bit of supernatural power, they're on your trail, and they want you dead. An unprepared mage is a dead mage - after all, you're only human. A knife in the back, a bullet through the head, or a quick poison in your food would be all that it'd take to get their revenge. A prepared mage, however, is one of the strongest forces in the Chronicles of Darkness universe. A mage needs to know who, what, when, where, why, and how. A good mage finds these out. A great mage controls some of these questions.

How do you handle this, then? A Life mage could entirely change their body: height, weight, skin/eye/hair color, and birthmarks. Think bigger. They could change their fingerprints, their blood type, even their DNA. This lets you hide. How do you strike back? How do you end this fight? Find a powerful person dying of an incurable disease. Cure the disease. Now they owe you, and if you're smart, you can use that.

With Mind, you have a few paths available to you. The first is to make yourself a strategic and tactical mastermind. Despite their training and resources, you know that everything they think they know is part of the Lie. You, at least in part, are Truth: control your path by controlling them. If you're really the puppeteer type, raise up an organization against them. Most everyone in power has enemies, and even if they don't, you can make some. Find another organization, and feed them. Bring them up in the image of your army, and deploy them to battle.

If you want this over without any bloodshed, and can't be bothered to take direct action, then simply destroy the connections between them and you with Space. If the links to you fray and fall through their fingers, then memories falter, emotions fade, and written records are misplaced. Control the ties that bind, and order them to slip away, just as you do. Any organization this strong must have other things to do, other paths to follow. Control the path to you, and control your future.

There's a simple option, of course. A mage skilled in Fate can control the way that future unfolds. Ensure that the hunters never ... get ... quite ... close ... enough. They made raid the building down the street, the hideout in the next lot, or even the house next door. But no matter how hard they try, no matter how many resources they pour into their search, something always goes wrong, and you always slip away. If they are willing to give more and more to find you, let that Monkey's Paw curl inward. You are Fate; you are the future; you spin the webs, you control the players, you are the chess board itself.

There are many ways to use different Arcana to solve a problem. Need to pass a math test? Could Fate it to be successful; use Life to give yourself more raw intelligence; use Matter to make your test a clone of the smart kid's test; boost your knowledge of math with Mind; coax the Spirit of the test to pass itself; speak to the last teacher's ghost with Death; or create more Time to study. Could even use any of those to make other people test worse and shoot for the curved grading.

What about being in a car going down the road, and another car runs the red and is about to slam into you? You could use Forces to reduce the other car's velocity, or create more space between them with Space or Time. Matter or Death could force the other car off its path. Life, Mind, Fate, Spirit, Forces, or Time could give you the reflexes to react. If you're going to get hit, Life, Death, or Time could fix the damage to your body.

Need to find someone? Could simply Fate your paths to cross; find where they were last with Time; find who last saw them with Mind; or trace their steps with Matter, Death, Space, or Spirit.

I like Zig's syntax more than Nim's, but Nim is much further along.

Yeah, Zig isn't 1.0 yet, but it seems like most new (relative) languages having the tooling squared away.

Zig does cross-compiling better than Rust, probably almost as good as Go, so that's cool.

Before Go sorted out package versions, it still had go get, which worked well enough for most people.

Looks like Zig tells people to go the "./vendor/" route, cloning in your dependencies. Not awful, but without at least some tooling, kind of a bummer.

I like having a standard, official package management solution. Python has many usable package managers, all of which have their own merits. It took me years to find poetry, which is my (current) favorite.

Go had a lot as well, before they sorted everything out.

Rust? cargo. Done.

Heck, even JavaScript has npm leading the pack, with some folks on yarn or pnpm. And, npm rips off the features that the other managers introduce after a while, so there's no major reason to switch off of npm for most people.

Nim has nimble.

Elixir has mix.

Technically you could install all Python packages to your global scope, but that is a pretty sure-fire way to dork up your entire system.

Zig likes to promote that their language compiler is also a compiler for any C program, and that's dandy, but still - fragmentation. Every Zig project comes with a build file that is 22 SLOC!

Rust allows the customization of its build process via a build file, but it's rarely required!

Go has programs that can bake extra stuff into the binary. I haven't used one in a looong time, but I remember them/it being fairly simple.

Python ... doesn't compile, which will probably forever bug me.

TypeScript doesn't either, not technically. Can webpack it down to a all-in-one runnable node file and distribute that, though still requires the user to have the runtime installed. Most devs will, sure, but users? Very unlikely. Deno moves to solve that with their executable builds, but they're still sort of buggy.

Java .jars don't count if Python doesn't.

Plus like holy crap, ever unzip an enterprise jar? It's like GBs of stuff. I stopped the unzip one time after like 50 GB.

I'm joining the most realistic flight simluation network, and starting with the most difficult position: ATC.

The programs and tools I use to be productive in the terminal.

I've been going back and forth on whether or not to post this at all for some time. I don't actually have any specific point to reach, no fact to claim. Between books, movies, TV, and video games, I've noticed a reoccurring trend in storytelling and world building: the use of decline.

I figure that there are 4 different types of development:

• Create something new
• Add features
• Maintenance
• Tie two programs together

Most of what I've done at work is 2, 3, and 4. Most of what I do at home is 1 and 2.

When I'm at home, I write programs from scratch or add to the ones I've already written. I get to be creative in what, when, why, and how. This is fun. If I need to maintain old software, generally I'll wipe it away and start from scratch with a new tech stack. I have a list of projects that would be interesting to work on, but most of the ideas that have been on the list for a while require me to interface with other programs - I can't just go and make something without any care about how it works with the rest of the world; I have to think about how other people have written their code and how I am constrained by that.

At work, I don't have the freedom to (completely) choose what, when, why, and how:

• The what is what PM/PO/etc. determine should be done
• The when is both "during work hours, generally", and "before so and so deadline"
• The why is because I'm getting paid
• The how is determined by the existing tech stack that the company/BU/Org/group/team uses

I don't have most of the freedom of working on my own projects at home, but I do generally have the ability to influence, question, and assist with the software that's around what I'm responsible for working on. If I have a question, I can ask. If I find a problem, I can either offer help to fix it, or just tell others to do so. If I need help, I can ask for it.

They're two very different environments, each with their pros and cons. Generally, the more programming I do at work, the less I do at home, and the opposite is also true.

I've played an additional 30 hours of Monster Hunter Rise since my last post. During this time, I've experimented with other weapons (hammer, dual blades, and bow), crafted several end-game meta armor sets, crafted many more decorations and talismen, and continued to train buddies. My hunter rank is 72.

The game is still fun, though I'm relying more on the online multiplayer interactions with random people to fuel spontaneity. Dual Blades is a fun weapon, and I'll probably focus on it after playing through Hammer more, which I am definitely enjoying. I expected to like Bow, but since I've played, almost exclusively, melee weapons in my time in Monster Hunter games, switching to ranged feels very weird.

Hunting for better talismen is annoying; I have a few that have a skill I want and a gem slot, and that's pretty much good enough. I've been able to farm monsters for decorations, which have gotten me most of the skills I want. When paired with following guides for end-game meta armor sets, I feel strong, but not overpowered. Monster Hunter is good about rewarding player skill increases, as well as character strength increases.

At this point, I think I've seen everything in the game - the additional post-story monsters, the apex variations, and the crimson something or other that has jet engines on its body (though I haven't fought it). I don't have another game to play right now, so I'm still going on hunts to get materials and have fun, but as I'm generally a very goal-oriented player, I'm starting to get blurry on what's next for me.

Monster Hunter Rise is the second Monster Hunter game I've played, the first being World. I've finished the "main" quests after 33 hours.