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Cake day: March 19th, 2024

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  • Currently playing MGSV on PC. I never got into the metal gear franchise because I wasn’t willing to keep up with the play stations. But it’s a surprisingly good game. A little fan-service here and there (cough, Quiet) but the gameplay is solid. I like how they tie achievements with in-game rewards, things like rescuing a certain prisoner unlocks a new type of weapon or something. It’s a good motivation to complete all the optional parts of the missions. And the missions are replayable, which gives you plenty of opportunity to get the best ratings and rewards.


  • Nothing is ever 100% safe. Risk assessment is a big part of federal regulations. (See refs at JSTOR and NCBI) One of the key questions is what is the cost/benefit balance for a product. Kitchen knives are hazardous, but it’s very hard to cook without them, so they balance heavier on the benefit side despite the risks. Radithor is all risk and no benefit, so it was an easy decision to ban it.

    The point ContrarianTrail was making is that there is some risk in nearly everything. People have died as a result of garden tools, cars, house pets, shaving, buckets, toothpicks, baseball, etc. Here’s a list. The part he left out is the cost/benefit analysis. I prefer pull cords on my blinds, and I find the new regulations annoying. But I guess some federal agency decided they aren’t so useful that it’s worth the risk to children. And it would be selfish to be all upset about it if it saves some child’s life.


  • I played Satisfactory for a while. Got a little past oil extraction and power generation. I think I was doing it wrong, though. I only made one actual factory, like with a floor and such, and it was one of those little templates you can design and make several of. Most of the stuff I built was just scattered about the map with miners and constructors and smelters just laying about everywhere and conveyer belts connecting them. It felt disorganized and, well, unsatisfying. The transport tube (the futurama style one) was fun, but most of the rest of it just felt like work. That and the fact that there was no provided reason to do any of it caused me to just lose interest after a while. I think the Christmas gift construction tree, where the last item required like 10,000 gifts collected was kind of discouraging too.

    What keeps you motivated to improve, rebuild, and progress in the game? And what am I missing?



  • We’ve been arguing about this in the US for my whole life, and I’m not young. At this point it should be obvious neither of the two faces of our government has any interest in doing anything more about guns than using the topic as a wedge to divide us and as a source of campaign funding. So you want to ban guns. Is that the hill you want your children to die on? How about instead of insisting that’s the only way, we enact a solution that keeps kids alive and that both the red and blue team can agree on, like, say, mandatory armed guards (a paid job, not volunteers) at school entrances. Is it in conflict with our ideal vision of a peaceful society? Maybe, but it works. Other countries have done it and it stopped school shootings entirely.



  • Although he was married briefly, and many years later his former wife was moved to state, peculiarly, that he was an “adequately excellent lover,” it is clear from all available evidence that sexuality, procreation, and the human body itself were among the things that scared him the most.

    He was also frightened of invertebrates, marine life in general, temperatures below freezing, fat people, people of other races, race-mixing, slums, percussion instruments, caves, cellars, old age, great expanses of time, monumental architecture, non-Euclidean geometry, deserts, oceans, rats, dogs, the New England countryside, New York City, fungi and molds, viscous substances, medical experiments, dreams, brittle textures, gelatinous textures, the color gray, plant life of diverse sorts, memory lapses, old books, heredity, mists, gases, whistling, whispering—the things that did not frighten him would probably make a shorter list…. The things that did not scare him generally are absent from his work.

    source




  • It’s well established in the Star Wars universe that all you need to create gravity is a floor. Take, for example, any scene from within any of the space ships. Gravity is never a problem.

    Of course, a deep chasm also seems to create gravity, as seen in the first movie when Luke and Leia swing from one ramp to another to escape the stormtroopers chasing them.

    Regardless, it’s easy to see from the blueprints that the layout is stacked like your first image.

    Edit: upon closer examination it turns out it’s both. The plans show three ‘concentric surface decks’ that apparently work like your second image. So I guess the answer is ‘it depends on where you are in the death star’, and, I guess, which way ‘down’ is where you are.