As a reptile keeper who knows full well they don’t know when to stop eating, I find this story charming. I want to feed her a basket of eyes (pre-frozen to kill parasites)
One hour from new classic myth to kawaii. I think that’s near Rule 34 turnaround speed.
I was always disappointed that celebrity and character voice packs weren’t a thing for the voice-assistant platforms. I’d pay literal ones of dollars for a voice assistant with a Sebastian Michaelis intonation and theming.
Cortana for Windows Phone came closest, I think they did use the same voice actress as the game character.
I suspect that democracy is a “good times” system. It works well enough when the problems are either low-stakes or widely agreed upon.
When you get into a world of hard choices-- for example, anything where we have to devalue some existing wealth – suddenly there’s going to be both a lack of consensus (likely manufactured) and leaders too afraid of losing the next vote to pull the trigger.
That’s why I expect to see China solve its climate change and housing problems faster than the West. Without the almighty polls lurking in the shadows, they can say “petrol is 100 yuan a litre to discourage its use” or “we’re nationalizing second homes and disbursing them to schoolteachers.”
Fujifilm successfully repositioned towards other chemistry. I know there’s that Eastman spinoff but why wasn’t it as successful?
ARM has a high probability of blowing a tire.
They have a complex relationship with their licensees which may try to cause self-sabotage trying to pull more of the money home. See the various licensing fights.
If you don’t want or need x86, what does ARM have to offer-- in the long term-- over RISC-V, which is much less coupled to a single firm’s caprice? We can assume the gap in performance will continue to shrink ovrr time.
That does seem like something that would violate some rules-of-war convention.
Booby-trapping something that might be mistaken by civilians as a legitimate humanitarian aid drop risks non-combatant casualties and makes it harder for actual aid operations to operate.
Wasn’t that why he loves fast food? It’s easier to target the White House supply chain for a precision poisoning than to try to hit every McDonald’s in a 50km radius and hope to get lucky.
How to Keep a Mummy is sickeningly adorable.
Or As Miss Beelzebub Likes, but then I just want an Azazel of my own…
“Ten Bits” seems viable, although nobody cares much about the Spanish real anymore.
Not even an isekai.
Arguably, one of the best possible worlds.
I put out one of those big plastic storage units with like 30 little drawers recently, figuring although 2 were missing, someone could still use it. I stood it next to the dustbin, on trash day where it would be optimally visible for anyone who wanted to scrounge it.
The bloody HOA took a picture and sent a nastygram.
A month or so ago; I had a 32G card, and bought a 128G card.
My objections:
Instead of writing the code now, you end up having to review and debug it, which is more work IMO.
Not to mention the Xbox Box, and the shipping cintainer full of 'em, the Xbox Box Box
Legit multipolarization?
NATO, in particular, is highly coupled to the American/anti-Russian agenda. How much chance did Europe get to discuss the pros and cons of bankrolling a long-term conflict in Ukraine vs getting railroaded into it with the insinuations of being the next Chamberlain?
Even Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin don’t wake up every morning asking “how can I be evil today?” They may have a different agenda than the West, but it still comes from a place of caring for their country, legacy, and position. These are not wholesale foreign concepts. They can be understood and worked with. But I suspect the sort of organizations that would get the best out of them would require certain countries to acknowledge their place among equals and be willing to comptomise their sphere of influence.
My idea was a worm that just torrents random shit and dumps it on your desktop like a cat bringing you a dead bat with “I broughted you a pwesent w” energy.
Gacha can be moderately acceptable if the math is fully documented and enforced. If you know it will take <= 180 pulls to get Raiden Shogun, and each pull costs $3, then it’s just a $540 DLC with extra steps and the tease thst it might be cheaper if you’re lucky or have banked pulls.
But transparency is key-- the developer should be expected to offer a calculator or lookup table for any RNG item, especially if it’s some combination of multiple drop mechanics or hsrd-to-convert currencies that dissuades back-of-the-envelope estimates.
Even in Vegas, the slot machines are required to disclose their payout rate.
There’s also significant differences in the gacha appeal factor. If there are no leaderboards or PvP, and the game mechanics can be completed with F2P only, that is inherently less pressure to spend then on a game where you regularly get your ass handed to you by a someone with a Black Amex and all seven-star limited banner units.
Can we get the politicians to shift from illegal aliens to Sasquatch? Build a wall across Washington state and make Canada pay for it?
The experience could be somewhat tamed by a lottery process.
Accept a token deposit for a week or two, and then draw from people contending for a given seat, then give them another week to pay the balance. Any unclaimed seats are put up at will call night-of-the-show. Limit the number of deposits taken from any given card to prevent “I’ll claim 30 seats and only buy 1” gaming of the lottery.
There’s probably some more complexity about it (if you want N seats together), but I think that would dramatically cut back on the frustration for “the tickets were only available for 14 seconds and the server was being DDOSed by scalper bots.”
Having to put down a deposit with no guarantee of a ticket also makes “buy All The Seats” scalping theoretically impossible and economically riskier. If there’s 5/1 contention for a ticket, you’d have to find a way to get 3 lottery slots for a better than even chance of getting it. If the deposit was $10, you’re spending $30 for the chance to buy a $50 ticket-- so if you can’t resell the ticket for at least $80, you lose. Under current policies, if you can sell that $50 ticket for $51, you’re ahead.
The Apple II’s big selling point, compared to the other two big brands introduced in 1977 (the Radio Shack TRS-80 and Commodore PET) was colour.
But it was a weird and colour scheme that took advantage of clever Wozniak hacks to make it viable on a cheap machine. Good video hardware, and enough memory for the colour display, were spendy. That’s why even into the 1980s you’d have machines like the ZX Spectrum with limitations like “every 8x8 block can only have 2 colours” which used less memory, and 40-column screens that were readable on TVs instead of dedicated high-res monitors…