I’ve started playing through some classic SNES and GBA games.

Chrono Trigger – Oh man, this one’s good. The soundtrack is on fire, and the game does a good job at making you feel like your actions make a difference.

Metroid Fusion – If you told me this was made in 2024, I’d probably believe you. It has a sense of pacing and suspense that I wasn’t expecting for a metroidvania.

I haven’t gotten very far in either, but so far it’s looking like they’ve aged like wine.

I gotta say, this was a weird week to start HRT.

I don’t know whether or not an entire month is the right timeframe, but I definitely agree with the principle of counting to ten before you speak. I’ve already made at least one discussion worse by failing to consider my tone. If my ideas are worth sharing now, they’ll be worth sharing when the moratorium is over, and they’ll only gain nuance by being left in the oven for longer.

They made their decisions and you made yours. If you decided that we’d be better off with Trump, that’s on you. Own it.

Putting Trump in office makes Gaza worse. He’s promised us as much. Maybe you proved a point to the Democrats, and maybe you didn’t. Maybe now they’ll lean even harder to the center. Who knows. That’s a gamble you took, and you made steep sacrifices to make that gamble.

Gambling with someone’s life to make a political point does not make you their ally.

In the Weimar Republic, the Social Democrats (SPD) were the largest party as late as 1930, and had control thanks to a coalition with centrists.

In 1931, the Communists of Germany (KPD) – who had long taken offense at the compromises of the SPD – caucused with the Nazis to topple the Prussian government and remove the SPD from power, believing that Nazi rise would accelerate the collapse of capitalism and would trigger a “German October,” a proper communist revolution that would eliminate the Nazis and solve the shortcomings of the SPD.

On April 1, 1933, the Executive Committee of the Communist International stated:

Despite the fascist terror, the revolutionary upturn in Germany will inexorably grow. The masses’ defense against fascism will inexorably grow. The establishment of an openly fascist dictatorship, which has shattered every democratic illusion in the masses and is liberating the masses from the influence of the Social Democrats, is accelerating the tempo of Germany’s development towards a proletarian revolution.

They were… incorrect. Their gamble cost 85 million lives, and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union can be traced back to the knock-on effects of the war. Accelerationism is creating a monster to defeat an enemy you cannot, then being startled to discover you can’t defeat the monster either, and then blaming your original enemy for the product of your own hubris. No matter how you justify it, no matter what issues drive you, refusing to find common ground and build coalitions against the fascists helps nobody but the fascists.

The initial contract is plausibly just for 12V car batteries, but if Zoolnasm’s goal is 10GWh/yr, they definitely have their eyes set on larger-scale applications.

Also, if they’re actually capable of 190Wh/kg, that’s better than current-gen automotive LFP. That’s a pretty huge “if,” though.

I’m guessing (hoping) you’re joking here and having a laugh at us all taking you too seriously. But I’ve seen enough of lemmy to doubt that.

If your accelerationist ideology is unironically promoting nuclear holocaust as its self-evidently ideal endgame, you’re long overdue for your “are we the baddies” moment. Maybe (definitely) stay off social media for a bit as you re-examine how you got here and who’s lied to you along the way.

Based on Drew Builds Stuff:

• Stuff Made Here, applying high technology and robotics to low-stakes challenges.
• The Thought Emporium (Also on Nebula). One day, they’re artificially aging whiskey with ultrasound, the next, the host is editing his own genes to remove lactose intolerance.

Based on the intersection of building and the great outdoors:

• Quiet Nerd, who’s been building a lot of camping equipment lately.

Some shots in the dark, based on exploration and documenting the unseen:

• Exploring the Unbeaten Path, urban exploration with some unique locations.
• Crime Pays But Botany Doesn’t, identifying plants.

Based on Baumgartner Restoration:

• Hand Tool Rescue, a channel where they lovingly restore antique tools and machines.

Ships can register any nation as their flag state, so they often choose flags of convenience based on whoever has the lowest fees or regulations – or more insidiously, whoever has the least ability to hold companies accountable.

This is why so many shipping companies register in Liberia, Panama, and the Marshall Islands. Also Mongolia, which is landlocked.

So unless we want to fill the oceans and ports with ships that have nuclear reactors with no regulation, no safety measures, and no accountability, we’re gonna have to fix the last hundred years of international maritime law.

While I don’t say this as a criticism of the author, it is worth pointing out that she’s also failed to adapt to the new technologies. She talks about how teachers will need to adapt to the new tools but ultimately places the blame on the students rather than reconsidering who her audience is.

How would you propose adapting to this? Do you believe it’s the teacher’s responsibility to enact this change rather than (for example) a principal or board of directors?

The average teacher does not have the luxury of choosing their audience. Ideally you’d only teach students who want to learn, but in reality teachers are given a class of students and ordered to teach them. If enough students fail their exams, or if the teacher gives up on the ones who don’t care, the teacher is assumed to be at fault and gets fired.

You can theoretically change your exams so that chatbot-dependent students will fail, or lower your bar because chatbots are “good enough” for everyday life. But thanks to standardized testing, most teachers do not have the power to change their success metrics in either direction.

This article is about PhD students coasting through their technical writing courses using chatbots. This is an environment/application where the product (writing a paper) is secondary to the process (critical analysis), so being able to use a chatbot is missing the point. Even if it were, cancelling your technical writing class to replace it with an AI-wrangling class is not a curriculum modification but an abdication. Doing that can get your program canceled, and could even get a tenured professor fired.

The author was really stuck between a rock and a hard place. Re-evaluating the systemic circumstances that incentivize cheating is crucially important – on that we absolutely agree – but it’s a responsibility that should be directed at those with actual power over that system.

[Edit: taking the tone down a notch.]

If resin is a non-starter for you, FDM printing can also make cool miniatures, but it will take more effort and the details won’t be as fine.

People are getting good results printing minis on the Elegoo Neptune printers which are around USD$190. The latest fad is multi-material printers like the Anycubic Kobra 3 combo (USD$380) and Bambu A1 combo (USD$490) which can make colorful figurines at the cost of wasted plastic.

Tomb of 3D Printed Horrors has been getting pretty good results and is a good channel to follow if you go down the FDM route.

(Elephant-in-the-room sidenote: If you look at FDM printers, you’ll run into fans militantly promoting Bambu Lab as part of an ongoing corporate-sponsored flamewar, and the community has a laundry list of grievances against the company. It’s a mess. Bambu printers are good but not spectacular, and easy to use but hardly the only user-friendly printers out there.)

I think for a small, detailed figure that you’re going to photograph, I’d recommend resin sprayed with a food-safe clear coat such as shellac.

Resin of all kinds requires rubber gloves, cleanup, and a well-ventilated room because it’s smelly and generally bad for you in its unfinished liquid form. A small resin printer will cost under USD$200. Creality has one on sale for USD$100. They also sell washing/curing stations – I built my own stations out of junk, but for USD$99, I’d go with theirs. Much more compact.

Nerdtronics made some excellent videos introducing resin and explaining how and why we print the way we do. These days, almost all printers are plug-and-play and the software is super smart, but I think these videos are highly educational anyways.

First, what kind of models are you curious about making? Big, small, decorative, springy, strong? Cosplay helmets, bike parts, tabletop miniatures?

This will inform whether you should look at tutorials for FDM (filament) printing or MSLA/DLP (resin) printing.

It’s more about the how and why.

How: CCS pumps liquefied or pressurized gas into an exhausted oil or saline reservoir. These reservoirs didn’t hold pressurized gas before, so it’s difficult (if not impossible) to prove they won’t leak. In the Decatur case, about 8 kilotons of CO2 and saltwater either found or created a crack in the reservoir, exactly as critics predicted. Locals are worried about groundwater contamination.

Why: CCS is largely unregulated in the US, and the companies interested in it are ones with awful environmental track records – ADM is no exception there. To claim the 45Q tax credit, they only need to store the CO2 for 3 years. Why would they care about preventing leaks if they already got their payout? Doing shoddy work is in their best interest.

Does this event prove that underground CCS is literally impossible? Of course not. But feasibility isn’t a pass/fail test, it’s judged by factors like cost and risk. This event proves the approach isn’t foolproof and the companies aren’t trustworthy. So it’s high time we stop acting like they are.

It seems that IPL effectiveness varies a lot based on the texture of the hair, not just color. It eventually worked on my legs, but not my face.

Beyond All Reason is my favorite RTS at the moment. I enjoyed Planetary Annihilation (despite its flaws), and BAR provides the same sense of exponential growth, escalation, and strategic pivots.

One of my favorite things about the game is that it’s not ridiculously APM-intensive. The controls have a learning curve, but they enable you to “fire and forget” most of your tasks.

If you want to get a sense for the game before diving in, Brightworks does some good casting for both competitive and community-level games. https://www.youtube.com/@BrightWorksTV

a bit melancholic sometimes

Viewer be advised: If you’ve ever lost someone you took for granted, or hurried through what should have been a formative time in your life instead of slowing down and appreciating it while you had it, then this show knows how to punch you in the tender bits, and it will not stop.

I cried during every one of the first four episodes.

10/10

Playing hardball.

The graphic there looks like an Embassy Suites hotel without the roof.

I’d strongly suggest a retractable canopy for the peristyle (Atrium? Courtyard?), because you basically have an enormous chimney – on windy days, the draft pressure caused by a flue that size would threaten to break peoples’ windows or suction their doors shut.

She doesn’t have the bona fides for the presidency, but I’d love to see Katie Porter show up to a presidential debate carrying that whiteboard.