Re: Download Doom 2
Siri Vonbank
As my client described doom piles as a messy consequence of her ADHD (especially undiagnosed ADHD), I immediately thought of the mountains of paperwork on my desk. Though I loved my career as a therapist, some parts of my work made me feel anxious all the time. It seemed like my work life was ruled by unopened emails, unchecked voicemails, and piles of incomplete case notes.
Diving deeper, I realized that doom piles have always been a part of my existence. Whether it was a messy closet behind a closed door or a school locker full of crumpled-up papers, doom piles were always there. I also thought about how disorganized, restless, and anxious I felt most of the time, even as a child, and how I believed I was lazy and prone to chaos.
Then came taking a hard look at the organizing systems (or lack thereof) I had both at work and at home. Each week, I would schedule a few hours to read about ADHD, planning, and organizing. I looked into how others with ADHD tackle their own doom piles, but the most valuable thing I learned is that there is no one-size-fits-all approach. What worked for someone else with ADHD may not work for me.
As I sorted through the doom pile in the trunk of my car, I grappled with the surprising difficulty of parting with items that had followed me for years. Still, I knew it was necessary. Organizing the smaller things gave me a sense of accomplishment that kept my motivation high.
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But for some of us, that time and energy never comes and we end up consumed by the doom. Instead of the perfect home, we shuffle our belongings around from place to place like an infinite clutter ballet. And it weighs on us.
It is worth knowing that some folks may see doom boxes as lazy (especially if those of us with doom boxes appear happy and healthy), but I resist that notion. Laziness does not exist. We each have a limit on the daily physical and mental energy we have, and keeping up with the demands of life in addition to staying organized takes effort. When you run out of energy for the day, or for the week, running on fumes is only going to make you more exhausted in the long run and lead to worse symptoms than doom boxes.
As you piece through your doom box, consider how you can most thoughtfully get rid of unnecessary items with the amount of energy you currently have. If there are a lot of important memories involved, learn more about managing sentimental clutter. For a cleaner closet, consider donating, selling, or upcycling your garments. For Days even has a textile recycling bag you can fill and return for store credit, great for fabric scraps that might otherwise be thrown away)
Emily McGowan is the Editorial Director at The Good Trade. Born and raised in Indiana, she studied Creative Writing and Business at Indiana University. You can usually find her in her colorful Los Angeles apartment journaling, caring for her rabbits and cat, or gaming. Say hi on Instagram!
This is probably the best-known example of how performing a cryptographic operation before verifying the MAC on a message can go wrong. In general, there are three different ways to combine a message authentication code with an encrypted message:
When receiving a message, one would decrypt it, look at the value of the last byte (call it N), and then insure that the preceding N-1 bytes also had the value of N. Should they have an incorrect value, one has encountered a padding error, and should abort. Since the MAC is part of the encrypted payload, all of this needs to happen before the MAC can be verified. And thus, inevitable doom.
We see that SSH has the same problem as above: in order to verify the MAC, one first has to decrypt the message. At first glance, however, SSH is safe, because the type of padding it uses does not make it vulnerable to Vaudenay. By specifying the padding length in a one byte field at a fixed location prior to the payload, it slips by.
SSH has another strange feature, however, which is that the length of the message itself is encrypted. This means that before a recipient can verify the MAC, they first need to decrypt the first block of the message. Not just so that they can calculate the MAC over the plaintext, but so that they even know how long the message is, and how much data to read off the network in order to decrypt it!
So before a recipient has verified the MAC on a message they receive, the very first thing they are going to do is decrypt the first block and interpret the first four bytes as the length of the message. Glossing over a few details, this means that if an attacker is holding a ciphertext block they would like to decrypt (perhaps from the middle of a previously transmitted message), they can simply send it to the recipient, who will decrypt it and parse the first four bytes as a length. The recipient will then proceed to read that many bytes off the network before verifiing the MAC. An attacker can then send one byte at a time, until the recipient encounters a MAC error and closes the connection. At this point the attacker will know what value the recipient interpreted that four byte length to be, thus revealing the first four bytes of plaintext in a ciphertext block. Doom again!
How long will a dunk last? One dunk treats 100 square feet of water for at least 30 days, says the package. Buckets have fewer than 2 square feet of water, so I break one dunk into 4 parts.
Each 1/4 dunk lasts longer than 30 days, but it is easier to simply add a new 1/4 on the first day of each month.*
Black has long been considered an attractive color for mosquitoes, and a recent article (linked below) confirms this, but also tests other colors. Winners are black, red, orange, cyan. High contrast is also good.
Hello! My bucket of doom has been going for about a month. It is absolutely fascinating to see it in action. Eggs have hatched and there are little beings swimming in the water. I have half of a mosquito dunk in the bucket. To be certain I am doing this correctly, will there be some larvae alive in the water for a short time before they die? Or should the dunk kill the larvae upon hatching? I do not want my bucket of doom to be a mosquito factory.
Chiron's Doom is a storytelling game about an ill-fated expedition to explore a mysterious monument. Designed as a solo journalling experience, Chiron's Doom can also comfortably accommodate up to 3 players. All you need to play is a deck of cards!
Chiron's Doom was originally inspired by Diamond Dogs, a novella by Alastair Reynolds about an increasingly disastrous attempt to explore a sinister alien monument known as the Blood Spire. It also draws inspiration from numerous tales of strange, ominous and deadly monuments and expeditions, including the movies Cube, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Sunshine, and Event Horizon, Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer, and Piranesi by Susanna Clarke.
Gameplay centres around your expedition deck, built from an ordinary deck of playing cards. When the expedition begins, the deck is mostly diamonds, representing the monument's secrets.
Each day of the expedition, you draw a card and respond to the corresponding prompt, either in your journal or by playing out a short scene. Each diamond brings you closer to final revelation, but if you draw a card from a different suit the expedition begins to unravel. When this happens, you shuffle a disaster deck into your expedition deck, diluting the pool of secrets and making it that much harder to reach your goal.
Have you purchased Chiron's Doom in print? Are you looking for a copy in PDF? Just reach out to me with some form of proof of purchase (a photo always makes my day!), and I'll send you a download key.
If you're unable to budget for a copy of Chiron's Doom, please claim one of these free community copies, no questions asked. These community copies are available thanks to generous Kickstarter backers, who made all this possible!
I played this game on my stream (link below if you are curious) and we enjoyed the game. It's a riff on the "Annihilation" theme and it is not the first solo TTRPG to do so. However, unlike a game such as "Exclusion Zone Botanist", "Chiron's Doom" is much more flexible in how it applies the narrative concept of a doomed team marching towards a mysterious but ruinous phenomenon. The game includes three of what might be called "Adventure Modules" in the back that demonstrate this genre-flexibility. They range from a D&D/Dark Souls setting to a Retro Sci-Fi Aliens type setting. The game has the foresight to grasp that "team of curious people vs. massive weird monument" is a strong enough premise to be tied to any genre's window-dressing the player prefers.
The mechanics are where it really shines, though. I should say, up front, this is a story-telling game, full stop. There are no resources to manage, no levels to gain, no stats to grow, and--well, no stats at all, actually. This isn't a good or bad thing, it just depends on your expectations. Rather, you should be aware the only mechanic is card drawing to get prompts and then decide if that interests you. However, within the confines of that simple prompt system, the mechanics are a shifting probability system that creates the effect of a calm growing into disastrous chaos.
The game has you build a small deck of prompts that are mostly populated by cards that help unravel the mystery of the monument. However, within that starting deck, you also place a few trigger cards that--when pulled--require you shuffle into that main deck a new deck of cards associated to prompts for problems or disasters. This means, as the game goes, your deck starts with mostly just peaceful exploration but eventually devolves into mostly in-fighting and death. This is exactly how "Annihilation" style stories unfold and I find this system to be very clever for using shifting probabilities to preserve that narrative momentum.