An extra six percent isn’t really the difference between a big purchase and a small one, so it’s pretty much just background noise for me. I know to leave some wiggle room if my budget is tight but don’t make the effort to calculate my technical maximum. Worst case scenario I get one less item than I planned.
I am colorblind, so no.
Magenta
Cyan
Yellow
Cyan
Red and blue are tied in this image but in darker shades the answer is always red.
I thought it was another one of their Ctrl F removals where they unintentionally deleted a bunch of pages that used the word in other contexts.
Reading how it works, it sounds nightmarish. I only have the myopia so I only know bifocals in theory but it sounds like they’re replacing something dependably consistent with something that’s constantly trying to guess what I want it to do. I don’t like that in any technology but I extremely don’t want it applied to an entire sense.
Put a button on the side that manually toggles between a preprogrammed close mode and far mode then I’m into it.
An adult dressing like an adult feels completely appropriate to me.
Imagine the world as we know it is a work of speculative fiction: you’re reading a book about a world that has harnessed the power of electricity to achieve all kinds of incredible things. Electric power’s not just magic, though, right? This is hard sci-fi, there are technical limitations on how this fantastical technology works. There are ways to generate electricity enough for everyone to use but to actually use it they need the electricity to travel long distances from its source to their location and the route is required to be more or less contiguous.
Now electricity, according to this wild sci-fi premise, is a force that kind of wants to travel; it is possible for it to move, then it will. And I said “more or less contiguous” up there because it can actually cross small gaps as long as the rest of the route remains valid. And one thing it is possible for it to move through is a human body, which can be nightmarishly harmful to the human it travels through. Indeed, there is a history of intentionally placing humans into that route in order to execute them. And living creatures aren’t the only thing it can harm: electricity traveling through a flammable medium can start fires and, if misdirected in some way, can even destroy the very technology it’s being harnessed to power.
Even setting aside the destruction it can cause should it end up traveling where they don’t want it to travel, there is also the fact that if it fails to travel along the desired route then electrical technology that people have built their lives around will simply stop functioning. There are ways to generate one’s own limited supply of electricity as a stopgap until the main course is reestablished but most people in the setting don’t have that and it’s a temporary measure even if they do. And I don’t just mean stuff like their business failing to function, I mean that even the basic day to day operations of their lives will fail. They have stores of food kept safely cold by electrical technology that will spoil if the electricity stops, they have kitchens that run on electricity to cook that food even if the ingredients are still good, and most of them never learned how to do these kinds of basic things the old fashioned way and if they want to learn how then their primary source for information is itself a technology that requires electricity to function.
So you’re talking to a friend about this book you’ve been reading about this electrical world. And your friend asks you about these “routes” you told them the electricity travels along:
“How do they move this super dangerous yet super integral substance across such long distances that even people in the middle of nowhere have access to it?”
“For the millionth time, it’s not a substance.”
“Whatever it is, how do they get it from A to B?”
“Well… mostly they the put wires that conduct it on top of thirty foot tall wooden posts.”
“Wouldn’t those just fall down whenever there’s bad weather?”
“Yeah, ‘power outages’ as they call them are not entirely infrequent.”
“So these wooden posts that if they fall over could start fires or kill bystanders or, like, melt stuff. They keep all that away from where people are at least?”
“Well, okay, I was simplifying. There’s these bigger and sturdier metal constructions for carrying wire the longest distances and they build those in the middle of nowhere. These wooden posts that fall down easily are mostly situated around where people are, like roadsides. They were first on my mind because they’re more what’s present where the story takes place.”
“Didn’t you say earlier they’ve all got these individually operated vehicles on the roads that are measured in the strength of dozens of horses, thousands of pounds of metal that move faster than jungle cats? Wouldn’t they just hit the poles by accident and, like, demolish them?”
“Yeah that happens sometimes.”
“…I guess I’m being uncharitable. If I were in this scenario I’d probably be more excited and not thinking as clearly as I do from this distance. It makes sense that such a radical new technology would have some unforeseen negative consequences.”
“Actually it’s not new. Electrical power’s been commonplace for something like a century as of when the story takes place. The characters don’t remember a world without it.”
“And they’re still just… putting it on sticks?”
There’s like an emotional component to it, though. Having lots of options doesn’t necessarily feel like lots of options. Deus Ex and hundreds of gigs of not Deus Ex feels like a yes or no decision, trying one of the multitude of other options being psychically equivalent just turning the machine off. At least in my experience.
Hence the suggestion of a compilation. Multiple other games but connected to each other to form a greater whole. Five minutes of Balatro and five minutes of One Way Heroics feels like ten minutes of not playing Deus Ex, whereas five minutes of Magic Garden and five minutes of Mortol feels like ten minutes of UFO 50.
Deus Ex is great but 55 hours of having nothing to do but Deus Ex sounds overwhelming. Grab UFO 50 as well so you have some low-commitment alternatives to fall back on.
If my schedule was tight enough and the hotdogs were convenient enough, I could see myself doing that. They’re a classic street food, so it’s not like that’s an unthinkable scenario.
Why these feet were nearly a foot long!
If I were given carte blanche to redesign 3D Sonic gameplay, making it control like a faster-moving Tony Hawk game seems like the way to go. Sort of the middle ground between conventional platforming and vehicle control.
On my seventh attempt, I walked into a store and was told yes when asking if there were any Switch 2s in stock. The young cashier adorably turned to his older coworker and unironically said “Wow, that’s four in one day! You weren’t kidding about these things.”
So anyways the past few days have been a blur of Mario Kart World. The new mechanics are a challenge to learn but they’re a challenge I’m delighted to have and make me feel incredible when I’m using them well, the soundtrack full of remixed classics on par with the best of Final Fantasy VII Remake’s that are just there to fill the empty space between the proper racetracks, and I was not prepared for HDR in the hands of Nintendo’s artists. This game is by far the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen on a screen and that was already true before I looked up how to use that shockingly unhelpful calibration tool the Switch 2 has and now it’s twice as beautiful on top of that.
The sole complaint I have about this game is that I’m not enjoying Waluigi’s new voice actor. I can’t hear the pain underlying the mania that Martinet understood was core to the otherwise ill defined character. His animations and his costumes are so fucking good, though, it’s hard to even care that his voice is downgraded.
I have lost so many Baldur’s Gate 3 Honour Mode runs because I’ve accidentally blown up the Zentarim hideout.
Did you know that having a torch equipped as your melee weapon means you’re considered to be carrying an open flame even when you’ve switched to have your ranged weapon out? I just found that out yesterday. Always learning new and exciting ways to explode.
The pockets are nets.
Shower curtain with pockets. Never again will you knock bottles off of those inadequate shelves.
Jeez, what was starting with 3 like?
I finally picked up Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, this being a game that’s been on my radar since well before it came out because I was a big fan of Jet Set Radio Future back in the day. It’s kind of too much like it and not enough like it at the same time? I tried the original Jet Set Radio when that came out on Steam and bounced off it but based on that limited experience I think this is kind of splitting the difference and that’s where most of the frustrations come from. Movement is more like JSRF but level design is more like JSR. And the soundtrack seems to lack that variety of some songs being made for the game and others being licensed that kept the monotony at bay. No “Aisle 10” to slow things down for a bit.
I am enjoying it, though, for as little as it sounds like I am. Movement feels good enough that it’s making me search for combo lines for the sake of combo lines and at the end of the day that’s what’s really important about this kinda game.
Also finally finished Zelda echoes of wisdom.
Never would have guessed going in that that would have the most graphically violent last boss sequence the series has ever seen. I beat it feeling like I was the real monster.
I think the Saturn hole is Saturn.
The Terminator TV show feels the most prescient. They took a chess playing computer and said “This seems to play chess like a human would and that means it’s basically the same as human consciousness. Let’s try to teach it morality by talking to it and then have it run the military.”
Then it spent the rest of the series more interested in Lego Bionicles than Jesus and nobody on the project ever said “You know, maybe this thing that wasn’t at all designed to run the military is a bad fit for running the military.” They were just chilled by its indifference to their values and really hoped they could reason it into being something it’s not by the time they give it the power to kill everyone.
Fresh air has kicked my ass harder than any virus ever has. Allergies have straight up bruised my ribs from the force of my own coughing.
Make sure fresh air agrees with you before you make any rash decisions about how much to get.