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wjrii

@wjrii@kbin.social

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wjrii,
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I remembered this episode existed, but forgot what they looked like. That facial appliance and makeup looks a lot like the Odo/Founders ones.

wjrii,
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I thought Jupiter Ascending was kinda half decent, though super uneven and sometimes distractingly bonkers. I thought Valerian had its moments and different casting could have made it into something. I even liked "65" once I realized it was just a small-scale rumination on fatherhood and loss, an acting exercise that happened to have dinosaurs and a light glaze of bad sci-fi.

I made it through 45 minutes of Rebel Moon.

wjrii,
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Wrong answers only?

Fuzzy
Nurture
Vegan
Morn
Iceman

wjrii,
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One: Hello, fellow Xennial. I'm just a couple of years older than you.

Two: I find we sort of sort ourselves based on life experience, family structure, etc. I have an brother 7 years older than me, so I skew Gen-X. My wife is less than a year younger than me, but she's the oldest and her parents are a touch younger a d fair bit less traditional than mine, so she skews Millenial.

The generations are a convenient shorthand to discuss broad trends about how certain cultural and economic factors affect the shared experiences of certain cohorts, but they're pretty silly, especially on the edges. Chronological astrology, really.

wjrii,
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Millennials remember when video games weren’t pay to win.

And Gen X'ers remember when they WERE. 😂

wjrii,
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Sorry, I know I'm outside genre parameters here, but all I can think of is THIS.

What inconsequential or surprisingly good thing can I get from Aliexpress?

Im curious as I usually use the site very occasionally to get certain electronic parts or order from PCBway like I just picked up some cheap but infinitely better than stock gps antennas for my LoRa T beams and im about to get a set of also still cheap but much better than stock 915mhz antennas but i kinda wanna throw some other...

wjrii,
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Tons of good mechanical keyboard stuff on AE. Not the absolute top of the line customs boards or keycaps, but almost everything else is hiding in there somewhere.

wjrii,
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Tangentially, the DS9 shapeshifter makeup looks EXACTLY like the people who go way too hard on their plastic surgery. You know, the 60yo people who want so badly for me to think they're thirty that they get enough fillers that they no longer look how humans of any age are supposed to look so my brain resets and I mentally assume they're seventy.

I'm not even completely opposed to cosmetic procedures. People have different priorities and psychological needs, but you've got to accept that you can only shave off so many years and approach your vanity with some strategy. We're all fighting a rear-guard action here.

wjrii,
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Where's the typo? My horse is glorious, and she is my personal heroin.

wjrii, (edited )
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Don't overthink it. Minecraft. Vanilla survival world. Don't try to optimize and automate everything (unless you find that relaxing). Make your farm look like a farm. Mine until until your inventory is full. Build towards an Ender Dragon or Wither fight if you have time. Go mining or fishing or do base chores or a beautification project if you don't.

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

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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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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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, (edited )
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LOL. While overall I'm a big fan of "More Star Wars, Please," I do sort of roll my eyes at the fixation on stories that are prequel to something and then end up bending over backwards to juuuust barely maintain continuity but require the audience to recontextualize conversations in ways that send our characters off on bizarre psychological and logistical tangents.

Leia sort of gets the worst of this:

  • This meme.
  • Ep3 turning the "real mother" conversation on Endor into a Simone Biles level of mental gymnastics: "Well, the memories must have been imprinted on me by the Force as an infant before Padme immediately peaced out, and I know you're a 99% trained Jedi and were in the room with me, but I'm the only one who remembers (because girls?), or maybe there was just some other bitch on Alderaan that they told me was my real mom... so anyway, she was very kind."
  • Rogue One turning the cheeky "We all know I'm a sympathizer but I'm also a Senator and leveraging that last bit of leverage before the Emperor dissolves the Senate in a later scene" and dialing the delusion up to eleven, with Vader thinking something like, "You motherfuckers, I JUST saw this ship leave a massive space battle two hours ago. I was literally striking a pose as you left."
wjrii,
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It was a legitimate protest of a stupid law that uses a legacy of inconsistent thought and limited perception to do an end run around the first amendment, but the text of the law requires a poster per building, so if they have enough in English, there would be no "need" to accept or post them. Now, if a principal or administrator had some balls, I certainly don't see why they couldn't use one of these or to flank the posters they do post with lots of context or more diverse ideas.

wjrii, (edited )
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IIUC reddit said something along the lines of "we shouldn't be unprofitable while third party apps are profitable."

They did, ignoring the fact that the scales are completely different and the fact that the 3PAs helped mods and engaged, contributing members provide content and services that Reddit didn't have to pay for, thereby mitigating or maybe even completely counterbalancing the costs of supporting them.

wjrii,
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At the most barebones level, I think kbin was meant to be "Lemmy and mastodon with a cohesive UI on one account." So far it has ended up being, "Lemmy but for people who were eeshy about tankies when they were trying to figure all this out to get away from Reddit."

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