I agree! And I’m thankful that lots of games build that in.

I hate using AWSD as direction keys. I don’t understand why some games refuse to map the arrow keys to the same commands, but some don’t and it becomes up to me to manually set that right before playing anything.

It irritates me so much to me that if a game doesn’t let me change the key mappings, I’m probably going for a refund rather than play at all.

Recent big sites that closed down: Jezebel, Pitchfork, Vice, Popular Science, and my hopes for the Messenger were dashed when they announced their demise: https://thehill.com/homenews/media/4440773-news-startup-the-messenger-shutting-down/

LA Times and the like are hit with layoffs and – worse – Sinclair heavyweight added the Balitmore Sun to the list of ‘compromised’ media outlets: https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/media/2024/01/15/baltimore-sun-sold-david-smith-sinclair/

That said, there are always new sites, but gaining trust and reputation takes time.

Social sites seem doomed to crest and then fall. Digg? MySpace? Friendster? Who remembers the good old days of (moderated) UseNet? Do we want any of those back? Would any of them have remained were it not for spam/bad-actors?

I’m not the lego person, but I am not taking that selfie because: 1) I don’t want to clean the house to make it look all nice before judgey relatives critique the pic, 2) my phone is old and all its pics are kinda fish-eyed, 3) I don’t actually want to spend the time doing the task right now when AI can get me an image in seconds.

Watch out for the sloppy reporting in the Salon piece. For example, it states:

“Hur’s claim that Biden couldn’t remember the day his son died was an outrageous lie,” argued Tommy Vietor, a former Obama staffer and commentator.

Vietor DID tweet that, but Salon doesn’t mention that Hur didn’t make that claim. Rather, Hur claimed Biden couldn’t remember the YEAR (not DAY).

“He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died,” the report said. (source NBC).

I liked Tamara Keith’s more accurate coverage posted over here: https://www.wbur.org/npr/1237745840/biden-hur-report-memory-classified-documents

Thank you! Reader View does the trick!

I appreciate that the “Gradient Canopy” roof is covered in solar cells and collects rainwater while also letting in natural light, so maybe the problem is they didn’t do enough by not adding in some shielding, too.

It might be because I block a bunch of stuff, but is all I see:

The United States is rapidly shedding historians—and the national security implications are dire. Even as it grapples with challenges and conflicts rooted in complicated regional histories, the United States continues a decade-and-a-half-long path of defunding history departments and deprioritizing history education. This threatens to produce a generation of policymakers and advisors whose view of the world is increasingly, and dangerously, shallow.

After that, it is just the author credit and end-page layout (and side bars and the like).

The warning message said the port was not open, but my guess is that the message was inexact. I doubt the port was ever restricted at all. In fact – and with no evidence one way or the other – it wouldn’t surprise me if the only issue was my old video card and the ‘port’ error was simply the first error message the game found on initial launch. For my theory to make sense, though, some initial setup piece must have completed on 1st launch such that the 2nd launch had a newly made config file or something and that extra piece let me proceed to a more accurate error.

Ooooh, I’d like that! Well, there’s 3 parts to the (random user input / scripted game output) conundrum:

1. I think it is fair that if you ask, ‘Why didn’t you say something?’ the NPC might either respond as if it is being accused of sabotage, answer the damn question, lie, or prefer not to talk about it (it’s personal).
2. I’d keep a short list of standard options – probably in a collapsed scroller kinda thing so you could either verbally say or type whatever you want, OR you could click an arrow to pick from a list. That way lazy or stuck players wou;dn’t have to think of all the options, and players interested in roleplaying could do as they please.
3. I’m OK with, “I’m not going to respond to that”. I’d hope each character had several variations of that, but I think it is legitimate for NPCs to dislike being pestered. Shopkeepers might have replies like, “Are you gonna buy something or are you just here to bend my ear?” or “I don’t see how that relates to my inventory.” Random townies might reply, “Do I even know you?” or “Would you PLEASE stop bothering me.” or “You’re harshing my mellow, man. Shhhh… Just chill.”

It is probably easier. I used to run a program that ran its own mini server-like process to send input to other open programs. It used local ports. It didn’t need internet, but it did need ports. My first guess is that programmers already know a bunch of dev libraries that deal with ports so it is easier to use that than write something else from scratch.

NOTE: I just downloaded the game and on my first attempted launch, it complained that the port it wanted was not open. My only option was to close the game. I ran netstat and did not see the port listed, so I tried again. THAT time, it complained about my older video card :-/ The warning is clunky and there’s a typo, too (within -> withing). It says (if I transcribed accurately):

You are using an: NVIDIA GEOFORCE GTX 1080. This video card is currently not recognized withing the recommended specs. We only support a limited amount of NVIDIA GTX graphics cards, all NVIDIA RTX graphics cards or all AMD RX graphics cards since the local AI requires a lot of performance.

So please note that the game might not work properly. Refer to the Steam guide for more information.

When I closed that warning, the game loaded.

In addition to the delay, the court asked for arguments to an over-broad question:

“Whether and if so to what extent does a former president enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office.”

Note that they COULD have asked something more like, “Were Donald Trump’s actions on and surrounding the January 6th incidents official acts of a President and is Trump therefore immune from criminal prosecution because the conduct was both within his tenure in office and within the scope of his duties?” Of course, that is not what was asked. The actual question asks for long and careful considered speculation on all possible contingencies where the relevant case is about a specific set of actions that could be quickly assessed.

see also: https://www.salon.com/2024/02/28/the-is-indulging-immunity-claim-further-delaying-his-trial/

This Op/Ed expresses my sentiment better than I’d do: https://crooksandliars.com/2024/02/mitch-mcconnell-steps-down-senate

As gun control advocate Shannon Watts writes, “Sen. Mitch McConnell’s legacy will be that he purposefully undermined America’s first Black president, he broke the Supreme Court, he helped elect a fascist President, and he abetted up an insurrection on American soil.”

(and)

Let’s not pretend his successor will be any better. He is likely to be a Trump toady who will bow before the pressure and screw this country even more.

Msnbc’s Alex Wagner pointed out on her show that, “After all, it took just 51 days from the time Trump was kicked off the ballot in Colorado on December 19th to when the Supreme Court heard oral arguments for that case – the 14th Amendment case – on February 8th. Now on December 11th, 2023, Counsel Jack Smith asked the Supreme Court to quickly weigh in on Trump’s immunity appeal and to do so early , which the Court rejected! And now by the time we get to April 22nd, which is when the Court plans to hear arguments in this immunity case, it will have been 133 days since the Court was first asked to hear the appeal. So the pace is… curious? Around 50 days when it helps Donald Trump, and over 130 days when it doesn’t.”

Skip any bit of Maggot Brain?!? Sacrilege!

“Free your mind and your ass will follow”

Go back. That was En Vogue’s shout-out to this mind blowing album.

Sooo… more Jimi Hendrix, less Sousa Marching Band, eh? What about stuff like Kraftwerk? Their stuff is intentionally ‘robotic’ so I’m wondering if you find it either boring or disagreeable – or if instead it becomes pleasing for achieving its goal. I am in the last camp for that, but I have to be in the mood.

Regardless, I think most musicians intuitively know audiences prefer variation (or just have that preference themselves). I mean, for decades now drum machines/software has had a “human drummer” option to make beats come in slightly off-beat (but don’t tell that to the characters in “Whiplash”).

For those who expect RTO == “Recovery time objective” (for data backups)… and who then wondered if this was going to be about Required Time Off – because it couldn’t make people unhappy if it was Requested Time Off, no, it is none of those. It’s yet more junk jargon:

Return to Office

saved you a click

I prefer more casual games, but I do like Slay the Spire. I don’t think I’ve tried to get past A4. I got bored with it a while back and downloaded expansions. I LOVE Downfall and kinda like PackMaster, too. If I am feeling lazy, I will do a custom run and pick my starting cards, and choose ‘slow’ and ‘big game hunter’ options as well. It makes me overpowered, but – again – is enjoyably casual for a change.