“Fake it till you make it” doesn’t mean pretend to be happy until you are happy. I committed to a relationship I wasn’t happy in, a career I wasn’t happy in, and hobbies I wasn’t happy doing, all because I wanted the approval of others. A divorce, career change, and hobby swap made me much happier.

The wiki page on leading and lagging current might as well be “demons and shit”. Practical Engineering talks a bit about it in this video on power grids.

Peanut butter out of the jar.

Technically he’s a tanuki, which is in the canine family

Don’t forget buying social media and amplifying the voices of Gotham’s worst

The context is irrelevant because nobody wants Ubisoft to fail because they don’t make content that caters to them. It’s a strawman argument. Does this Director of Monetization want to uplift his competitors? Absolutely not. He would love if all his competitors failed. Yet he gets on his high horse saying we must uplift his corporate venture to extract as much money as possible because we’re all in this together??

How can you wish a company to fail

Very easily, actually.

My friends are addicted to League of Legends. I often ask them how they can put up with such a toxic culture and they said they like being toxic themselves. Just reminded me of Monty Python’s “I’d like to have an argument, please”.

The opposition Labour party expressed its strong distaste, protesting the Government’s move by putting out a statement entirely in te reo. Luxon’s office said he couldn’t respond to Labour’s criticisms, as he was unable to read them.Labour leader Chris Hipkins, when asked to explain what his party’s statement said, drew a blank. “Uh… hm… well… uh…” he demurred, staring down at the printout in his hand.

Love it

Reminds me of the Oil futures drunk-trading incident (2009)

I’m glad Microsoft realized allowing any company to push kernel-level code to consumers was a terrible idea. A bug at that level can brick a PC and needs to be thoroughly scrutinized before being pushed out to end users. If a company dedicated to computer security wasn’t doing proper code reviews I really doubt game studios were either.

While it’s great they’re not going to somehow make it a subscription based game, I’m confused by something else now:

We are still considering skins and DLC for Palworld in future as a means to support development

Didn’t this small team just make tens of millions of dollars in sales? An amount the CEO said was “too big for a studio with our size to handle.” Why do they need more money to continue development?

I just got it and have already put dozens of hours into it. I can definitely see it being the next big multiplayer game.

However, I already see some of the same problems that other multiplayer games have. Matchmaking struggles to make fair matches. There’s toxicity when games start to snowball towards one team. Lots of players will disconnect midway through a match if they don’t think they’ll win. These things are common in pretty much every multiplayer game now but I wonder if Valve will find a way to mitigate it.

The manipulative tactics listed in the article:

• Consumers cannot see the real cost of digital items, leading to overspending: the lack of price transparency of premium in-game currencies and the need to buy extra currency in bundles pushes consumers to spend more. In-game purchases should always be displayed in real money (e.g.: Euro), or at least they should display the equivalence in real-world currency.
• Companies’ claims that gamers prefer in-game premium currencies are wrong: Many consumers find this unnecessary step misleading and prefer buying items directly with real money.
• Consumers are often denied their rights when using premium in-game currencies, tied to unfair terms favouring game developers.
• Children are even more vulnerable to these manipulative tactics. Data shows that children in Europe are spending on average €39 per month on in-game purchases. While they are among the ones playing the most, they have limited financial literacy and are easily swayed by virtual currencies.

I heard The Birds was a classic movie so I watched it one day. The only thing I remember is that the woman who is being chased by murderous crows runs into a bar and asks for a ride home to avoid being attacked. A guy downs his whiskey and then says “I’ll drive you home, miss”.

Everything is 0s and 1s to a computer. What a pattern of 0s and 1s encodes is decided by people–often arbitrarily. Over the years there have been attempts to standardize encodings but, for legacy reasons, older encodings are still valid.

The 0s and 1s that encode ’ in UTF-8 (a standardized encoding) are the same 0s and 1s that encode ’ in CP-1252 (a legacy encoding).

The � symbol is shown when the 0s and 1s don’t encode anything of meaning.

My brother has been playing for years and has a few paid accounts. Here’s how he explained it to me. All paid accounts had their prices locked in until you cancelled them. His first, and main, account had a price of $5 a month because he first bought it 15 years ago.

There are also “ironman” modes that exist in the main game. It’s an option at character creation that will restrict your account from trading with other players forcing you to obtain all items on your own instead of just buying them from the trade board. Since you need to make a new character, this is also another payment. My brother has two ironman accounts.

There are “leagues” which are new temporary servers where the rules are different and XP gain is incredibly fast. You’re given tasks to complete before the “league” ends and are awarded cosmetic items based on how much you complete. This requires its own paid account to play. My brother has one of these too.

In total he spent about $20 a month on the game for his various accounts. This change to the subscription will set every single one of his subscriptions to $14 a month raising his monthly payment to something like $56 a month which is ridiculous. He plans on ending all of his subscriptions since there is now no incentive to stay subscribed (the price is no longer locked in). So my brother, a long time and devoted customer, will play the game less and give less money because Jagex is hoping most people like him won’t go through the hassle of unsubscribing.

He, and lots of other long time players, are hoping that Jagex does what other MMOs do and allow multiple accounts for one subscription price.

I always enjoy how these guides always warn about guys and girls being alone together but never mention two guys take a break from studying together if they become aroused. I guess that’s still allowed!

In this thread:

The secret is to under cook the onions regulate the industries.