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wjrii

@wjrii@kbin.social

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wjrii,
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I'm sure some do, but there's also a certain simplicity to "back up the Win95 machine" and "collect working Pentium 2's from eBay," particularly for fields that are not interested in IT for its own sake. A virtual machine adds an extra layer of abstraction and complexity, though I'm sure there's a slow trickle as entities have trouble replacing hardware or luck into technically savvy and ambitious staff. I've certainly seen my share of data being entered into a Windows 10 app that sure as shit seems to be a terminal emulator running some green-text dinosaur, or else it's got a set of Visual Basic widgets that seem like they'd be compatible with one.

wjrii,
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With all the development around Waxahachie, Midlothian, and Ennis, There's a very good chance that many backyards are now built over the loop's proposed path.

wjrii,
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My kid is ten. I don't like most of them, but the ones I hate are the one who punctuate their prosaic Minecraft and Roblox adventures with blood-curdling screams.

wjrii, (edited )
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Neutral Zone Line. I'm not really into Robro Space Country though. More of an Alt-Space-Country/Federana guy.

wjrii, (edited )
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REY DAX has no time for this nonsense.
https://i.ibb.co/FK1MgrQ/reydax.png

wjrii, (edited )
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I left it absolutely invigorated and optimistic for the franchise. I saw it had some flaws, with one sizeable one being that it should have ignored the cliffhanger in TFA and caught up 6-12 months later*; the OT (and less successfully, the PT) got to handwave a LOT of character development by simply letting life happen offscreen. Still, TLJ took a needlessly derivative setup from TFA and set the stage for a much more interesting Episode Nine than we got, and I utterly disagree that he didn't get or like Star Wars. Shit, Rian Johnson is the only one who was willing to SAY the words "Darth Sidious."

I thought he gave a thoughtful fan's perspective on what Star Wars needs to be to remain relevant, the theme of growing from failure being particularly well done for a big popcorn franchise. The scene with Rose's sister, the Yoda scene, the acting from Adam Driver after the throne room scene? All peak Star Wars IMHO. Then of course TROS came along and was so clumsy and petty in how it blew up Rian Johnson's new directions, and so generally messy, that it didn't even please the people who hated TLJ.

TFA was useful as a palate cleanser for the generation who rejected the PT, and it gave us a compelling new batch of heroes and villains (Snoke honestly being the least interesting as a character), but it didn't really DO much, and its worldbuilding was absolutely retrograde. TLJ was a needed course correction, but Disney not only recoiled from the backlash, but took all the wrong lessons from it even if it did need to affect the direction of Ep9. JJ was, in the end, very wrong for Star Wars, though if TFA was his only one, it might not have been so obvious.

*-Two others being the framing device of the "slow speed chase" and Finn's arc being such a minor step forward . A few tweaks to the technobabble or moving them to Crait earlier and having it be a bit more of a formidable facility could have helped the first one, and having Finn more explicitly trying to save Rey and Poe at the cost of the Resistance might have better highlighted the additional layer of growth RJ was thought he still needed.

wjrii,
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The Pacific Ocean is massive and if a ship turns off its transponder it is invisible unless you have satellites in your game.

So it seems like the key will be some combination of deactivating the transponder, getting away from other ships, being low profile in various EM wavelengths (difficult if it's also large), traveling with a significant cloud cover (hurricane?), escaping detection by military submarines and other sonar sources, and ending up in a place and condition where they're sheltered from all of the above. This seems very nearly impossible if everyone is already hunting for our intrepid vessel, but if there's some reason for people not to be looking right away, I can imagine plausible scenarios where the data takes long enough to come together for the necessary storytelling beats to play out.

wjrii,
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Between Kai Winn and Nurse Ratched, Louise Fletcher was "gentle menace" personified and a national treasure.

wjrii,
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The ZAZ movies had a very specific style that relied on that. Every single character was the "straight man" and the bonkers shit was the universe. Mel Brooks was much more side-eye and poking at the fourth wall. In either case, I wanted Nick Rivers and Lone Starr and Sheriff Bart to succeed though. It wasn't complete anarchy or loosely connected sketches, and the juxtaposition of the absurd being hung on a pretty generic narrative structure makes it funnier, I think.

wjrii,
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I do kinda wonder how many modern SW fans remember the hilarious Naked Gun movies. I guess this might look pretty ridiculous if not.

I hope we're not to that point yet. The spoof genre reached its apotheosis in that period from '74 to '94, with Python doing Holy Grail and Life of Brian, Mel Brooks going from Blazing Saddles to Robin Hood Men in Tights, and the ZAZ run from Airplane! to The Naked Gun and Hot Shots movies. For ZAZ, Top Secret! is even better than Airplane! or TNG, IMHO.

Their successors forgot that however thin, the underlying movie has to be watchable, or you lose something. Maybe it's just generational (always have to allow for that at my age), but I kind of think that Scary Movie et al is stuff that is not nearly as timeless.

wjrii,
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Star Trek must have got annoyed when I repeatedly referred to The Expanse as "the apotheosis of Toronto warehouse sci-fi."

wjrii,
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Yeah, well those folks can go to hell. They're the worst, I assume.

wjrii,
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Good luck, if thin drainage is troubling you, that might help even if you're not the mucus faucet that I turn into. Mostly it's just treat the most annoying symptoms and let your body heal.

wjrii,
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Beyond all the stuff you likely know, rest, pain reliever, nyquil, etc., I find that with a cold my life really goes to shit if my nose is running. It's god-damn miserable and keeps me from sleeping, and even lotioned tissues only delay the chafing (of my NOSE, you creeps!). A generic Claritin every 14-16 hours (I don't get a full 24 hours, but they do tend to work well) dries me out enough that I can ride it out.

Gamers who have gamed for a long time

do you find it difficult to get into games? I’ve got Epic Games and Steam Games libraries chock-full of classic top-tier games along with many other newer games like Stray or 2077, and a bunch of indie titles. I just can’t be bothered to download and install them, much less try to get into the characters and storylines. Used...

wjrii,
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I’m in my 40s, and in particular I don’t find I love the AAA, over the shoulder action games. Assassins Creed, Spider-Man, Jedi Outcast, all of them feel very samey to me and more like the evolution of Dragons Lair + SF2 special moves than anything else. I find the cinematic complexity of the actions caused by my simple button press actually disconnect me from the world. I don’t feel like the character is my avatar, more like an actor in my movie. And then it all usually happens with a lot more barriers and more linearity than the design implies, kinda the difference between playing make believe in the park, and visiting Galaxy’s Edge at Disney.

Now I don’t think it’s bad on a philosophical level or anything, but it doesn’t work for me personally. I grew up with a very direct and often simple relationship what it means to control a game, even those SF2 style fighters; whatever is there to be done, you’re in complete control. I just get taken right out of it when “back + A” does a 360 spin melee while simultaneously targeting three enemies and summoning my helper NPC (I’m exaggerating, but you see the intended point).

Like others, I don’t really find as much time for gaming, what with work, family, and other hobbies, but when I do, I like retro gaming, RPGs with a fair amount of stat and inventory management, Minecraft (that blunt instrument of click to “mine”, rclick to “use” is the opposite of cinematic AAA actioners), and other stuff that naturally connects inputs to resulting actions, like driving games.

wjrii,
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I guess... he mimed being a mine, but he has magic mime powers that make him really a mine if he mimes it?

wjrii,
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A lot of the very few surviving samples do of course look really primitive, but at the high end, cobblers in the Roman world were not fuckin' around.

UC28327 here is a pretty ornate sole with a very modern shape.

The upper on this one must have been super nice when new.

Then, there's no reason to suppose that Marcus Aurelius' (and/or Hadrian's) sandals on their statues were idealized past the point of plausibility, though I'm sure once one government contracted statue with approved Imperial sandals gets made, there's a temptation to stick with the motif regardless of the current Emperor's footwear preferences.

wjrii,
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Yeah, we always wonder what he had to deal with. He's still very sensitive to any pressure at all on his ribs, and he hoards soft toys in a den (under a bed), though he responds with exasperation rather than anger if one is taken. When we first got him, he tried eating acorns (hell on a dog's stomach, I understand), pre-emptively winced the first time he barked in view of me, and despite generally hating to go outside any longer than it took to potty, climbed up on our patio furniture to investigate the fence the first time we had to leave him with a sitter.

These days, he's fat, which is a negative of course, and he's still an idiosyncratic homebody, but he's also confident enough to ask for affection, isn't reactive to anything other than vacuums, and has a great relationship with our other dog. The turnaround has been lovely, and if being a chonk came as part of it, I think it's a trade worth having made. Our other rescue was born after his mother arrived at the foster, and has a very different relationship with food, exercise, and new people. His super playful but emotionally aware energy has worked well with our "seen some shit" heeler.

wjrii,
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Between the thousands of years of semi-selective breeding and the parallel evolution that made our ancestors want the selective breeding to happen, the emotional compatibility between dogs and humans is amazing. They're not humans of course, and we do well to remember that, but the connection is eerie, and when you see a dog display that kind of pack/family oriented behavior, it's heartwarming.

wjrii,
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We have a dogsitter when we are on trips. According to her, our heeler would politely take blueberries that were offered and then wander off, returning not long after. It was only later that she found a stash of uneaten blueberries on the couch. My little man was a desperately skinny and frightened stray in a kill shelter before he came to us, and on the theory that whatever makes him feel safe and content is better than the alternative, he's, uhhh, put on weight. If he liked the blueberries, they would not be left on the couch.

wjrii,
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Yup. I'll go with the linguists on this one.

Textualism and originalism
A group of linguistics scholars describe developments in the field of corpus linguistics, which did not exist when District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. City of Chicago were decided, that have allowed for a new understanding of the language used in the Second Amendment. Researchers in American and English history have digitally compiled thousands of Founding-era texts, making it possible, for the first time, to search and examine specific terms and usage from the period. The resulting evidence demonstrates that “keep and bear arms” had a “collective, militaristic meaning” in the late 18th century. The scholars write that, consistent with that meaning, Founding-era voters would have understood the right to be subject to regulation.

wjrii,
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It would be unfortunate if Dame Judi Dench had to leave a garrison lien here.

wjrii,
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The actual first strip is not exactly all sweetness and light either.

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