Have no idea if the pic is from China, but during a trip there, I saw people growing vegetables in the most incredible ways, lots of apartments with plastic bucket gardens and such. My favorite was this hutong courtyard building where we did a cooking class as a tourist thing—the courtyard had a trellis over it for sun blocking, but the trellis was grown out by a bunch of different types of squash—such a neat combo because the squash leaves were great at max blocking direct sun, and there were all these perfectly spherical squash hanging overhead. The cook grabbed one off a vine during the class for the recipe we were making. Have wanted to try that method ever since.

The movement is bad. I like your description of UE5 asset flip. But since the movement isn’t really important (except for the mostly optional plat forming—why the hell did that include platforming, so weird) it didn’t really turn me off. I found the physical environment design to be a little weird and repetitive—it works well at the overland scale but feels kinda vague and goofy when you’re in an instance.

But I found the story intriguing, and honestly, the combat just hooked me. The combo of the turn based format with some reactive skill elements was appealing, and it continued to be interesting because of the vast array of pictos/luminas. I also thought the Act pacing was strange, after act 2 it feels like they kinda ran out of steam and you just wander around grinding up to kill optional world bosses.

Anyhow I enjoyed it, but it doesn’t seem crazy to me that if you weren’t that into turn based combat to begin with, you didn’t click with the game.

I mean the guys already making this joke himself right? So you’re just laughing along with him. Unless you made the T-shirt text for the meme, and even still, he’d probably chuckle at it if that were the case.

Yeah somehow all of the mechanics really come together to create these really memorable battles that are far more interesting than just point and clicking unit groupings. I like how you get attached to stuff also, so that losses feel very impactful. Some of the defense missions where I’ve just been hanging g on by a thread, very fun stuff.

It’s a really excellent game. Offers a huge spectrum of experience; you can play it very simply at a remove, or micromanage down to supplies foraged from dead enemies. You can FPS control any units. You can capture enemies vehicles that aren’t destroyed and level them up in dynamic campaigns. Great visuals also. Strongly recommend if you like complex RTS and the timeframe.

Gotta love a dude getting upset over mistaken personal understanding of history… in a game where psuedo-Paris has magically been thrown into the ocean and people can fly and cast spells against animated machines.

I went on a blind date years ago with someone a work colleague set me up with. The date was perfectly fine, but when we left the restaurant to leave—I was going to drive her back to where she was staying—it became clear that I had parked in a tow zone and my car was no longer present. This was around midnight, and so I had to drag this poor girl around as I called my father to come pick us up, get a bunch of cash from an ATM (he had to get it because I didn’t have 300 in my bank acct, yep lady I’m broke!) and go over to a very sketchy part of town to reclaim the car from a towing company. We offered to drop her home first, but I guess she was intrigued by the adventure and elected to come along.

Anyhow l was suitably embarrassed, having to call in my family to bail me out was something I was fairly sure was a romance-killer, not to mention having to go to a very sketchy part of the city at 1 am to deal with surly impound guards. But turns out she found it amusing and I guess it never hurts to show a little vulnerability, because we ended up dating for a year after that. We broke up based on distance and life directions, not any real conflict or dislike of each other. It definitely taught me to not sweat about macho crap as much, and just to be genuine, since surprise surprise, potential partners like honesty and knowing who you actually are!

I love this, because it makes me think the basics for how the Jack Reacher character was constructed were definitely sourced from some career military folks, like your dad. Anyway this is way better because it’s real. I bet ol handsy Hans never forgot that night—and hopefully the lesson you taught him slowed his roll on someone else in the future. Great story.

The “I did that” Biden pin is a fun detail. These Vance lollipop kid memes are gonna haunt me forever.

Seems like a good bet. I looked up 4-5 movies that I was sorta interested in based on trailers last couple of months. They were all sorts of genres: all of them were +-.3 of 6.5 on IMDB.

This is what my wife keeps saying, with certainty. I thought it was weird at first, but then I remember that he had that protective order specifically because of the strong threat of violence to him if he was deported back… to the country they sent him to.

I am hoping it’s not the case, and that this is just them wanting to avoid having to back down, but it really wouldn’t have been a big blow to them to bring one person back.

Yeah this was my reaction a while back when I saw their promos about how they want to de-extinct wooly mammoths and dodos. Like ok neat, but where are the mammoths supposed to slot in, a rapidly warming arctic that will more likely have palm trees than ice by the end of the century?

I mean I’m being a little obtuse here on purpose—these species choices are obviously guided by marketing potential. No one will pay attention if they resurrect some niche mouse that went extinct a couple years ago, so they’re picking stuff that looms large in pop consciousness.

But in the end, it’s a private company, and I very much doubt their whole goal is to make money off of conservation societies and zoos to make extinct animals—far more likely it’s to refine and recreate new genetic editing procedures which will then get ported into making purpose-built animals for industry (think the sheep who’s milk has certain valuable enzymes or chemicals built in) or like human biotech (so, like, GATTACA).

The “founder” gives off strong Palmer Luckey vibes. (This is based on visual aesthetic and his general demeanor vibes only, he could be a saint, I have no idea)

Exactly. I’m sure it’s a different set, but I immediately thought it was an article about grand Budapest hotel because of the wallpaper and angle.

This article resonates strongly for me, thank you for posting it. I often muse that some of what gets termed a disorder or an illness is just a lazy way to hand wave over someone not being happy about fitting in with certain aspects of “normal” behavior or culture. There is of course actual mental illness, but once you start investigating stressors or traumas, the concept gets more complicated than “something’s wrong with your brain” in terms of cause and effect.

I read about a study that was about instilling “learned helplessness” in the participants, and the one group that was mostly resistant to the effect were the chronically depressed group. This led the researchers to speculate some of what was termed depression was actually an inability to suspend reality; ie the “depressed” group saw reality a little too clearly, and aside from this making them resistant to the effects of induced “learned helplessness” it also made them distressed.

Thanks again, you’ve managed to improve my education twice today!

That is very helpful. Now I want to know silly stuff like, what happens if you fly through the beam, and could you in theory reaim the array towards a completely different receiver plant, and be able to shift power around as needed (albeit very slowly)

I was hoping the article would explain how they planned to transmit the energy in a useful way. It says beaming back my microwave, but I have no idea how that works or if it has a good scale potential. Guessing they’re targeted at some surface that vibrates or heats up and that geberates the power on the terrestrial side of the equation?

Removed by mod

Removed by mod

I’d imagine for the same reasons that people study the past and try and understand how events unfold. People still mention the name Chamberlain when discussing the rise of the third reich for instance.

When Snowden released his collection of files way back when, he made the argument that the panopticon that was being built wasn’t being used in the worst way at the time of his decision to whistleblow. But his point was that the construction of such tools could not be justified based on their eventual use by a worse form of American govt.

When the liberal mainstream—and this includes Biden, major media, and most other center/center-left politicians and pundits over the last year and a half—presided over the framing of anti-semitism as the act of being critical of Israeli govt actions and supported that govt in a year long punishment campaign to destroy an ethnic group, they normalized the positions that are now being used to deport green card holders and leverage higher ed into submission. Free speech on this issue was fought over last year, and generally, the anti-free speech side won.

It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re worse, or even equal in vileness to the current admin, but it is a point worth recognizing. Enshrining Trump, as horrid as he is, as an exception may be comforting, but it removes the broader narrative that brought our present about. If we don’t work to understand this sequence with clear eyed judgment, our resistance to it will likely fail.