They are unwrapped and sitting pretty close to some meat and cheese. Feels like that’s just asking for disrupting vaginal health balance. Plus I’d be suspicious of holes poked in the condoms. Unwrapping them is such a weird thing to do.

Yeah golden parachutes are such a joke in this society that likes to pretend to be a meritocracy.

Though on that note, I’d love to see a law that limits golden parachutes to the lowest paid position in the company. Hell, I’d be ok with that being scaled to full time. Not because disgraced executives deserve even that much but because it would give some incentive to increase pay rates across the company. I’ve also long thought that executive compensation should also be limited by some multiple of the lowest pay. And yeah, I’d include stock options and grants in that (for both employee and executive compensation).

IMO a fumbled and later recovered launch is different from the enshitification of video games like P2W, MTX in general, lootboxes, releasing what should be patches as paid DLC, invasive DRM and anti-cheat. I’d file all of those under bad design, while a bad launch is more of a bad execution. There can be overlap, like if they fully intended for early players to fill the role of beta testers.

The way I approach it is I try to avoid the bad design stuff entirely but just avoid buying new games at release and definitely never pre-order. I’ll also support games in early release if I really like the concept and want to give them a better chance at being able to pull it off, but I go into those with the understanding that it’s not complete right now and there’s a chance it never will be. But I don’t see any reason to hold anything against the games that have messy launches but later recover.

Though I’ve learned to not jump on the hype train and that makes it much easier to not take any of this stuff personally.

If they can’t keep their committed date (or fold entirely), then the source goes open. If every copy happens to get deleted during the bankruptcy, treat it as criminal fraud by the top levels of the company and go after everyone that could have decided to improve backups and other IT methods of avoiding that but didn’t. That’s assuming it was accidental, higher penalties if it can be proven to be deliberate.

I’ve also been avoiding playing games that involve some third party launcher or login. I’m not perfectly consistent with this and have bought some games before realizing they had this, but even steam games can be subject to a company deciding they don’t want to support their game anymore (which IMO is fair) and just killing the game off entirely, which isn’t fair. I’d like to see a requirement that other steps be taken to keep it going without their active support. Like opening the source and relinquishing all copyrights on that code. If they want to keep parts of it, then pull it out into a library that they continue to maintain.

Maybe your fan is broken. Do you notice any wild performance variations?

Though if you’re used to loud fans by desktop standards, the Steam Deck is pretty quiet compared to that. Like yeah, it’s audible, but I’d describe it as loud as a loud exhale. Some desktop fans were referred to as jet engines from how loud they got.

I assume it’s like the new car smell. Pleasant or not, it’s from inhaling plastic and paint particles and other chemicals as the excesses evaporate and loose pieces come loose and become airborne.

Steam Deck is probably similar. Plastics, anti-corrosion coatings on heat sink fins, trace metals and solder, inks from the PCB, maybe the occasional ion leftover if there’s any micro-arcing.

I’d guess it lasts a long time because the cooling airflow continually erodes whatever is in its path, while new cars don’t have that continuous erosion so eventually all the particles that were going to escape do and the ones left over are more stable.

Sounds to me like he should be given veto power in projects he gets hired on to. I didn’t mind the Witcher because I hadn’t gotten very far into the lore myself and didn’t see how much it had gone off the original path, but I’m kinda tired of producers and directors taking an existing story but then changing huge parts of it.

There’s nothing wrong with telling your own story but enough with the bait and switch ones. Give it your own name, don’t leech off of the name recognition of already loved stories.

Yeah, I’m like that, too, and then eventually feel kinda guilty when I do replace it with a better one when it either no longer works or I get frustrated enough with it.

Worst is when the disappointing stuff are things you don’t think of until you use it. Like my convection toaster oven is the best oven I’ve ever had but I hate it because the UI is awful. It’s all preset based with presets I never use when there’s only like 4 options to adjust, so I need to figure out which preset is closest to what I want then adjust it from there because none of the presets are good for anything without adjust them.

It makes buying things a bit of an ordeal, but on the other hand, I can’t say I really dislike usually deciding to not buy something until I can do more research on it.

It also means that getting me a gift that would be something I’d really care about is going to be very difficult if you want it to be a surprise. I am picky as hell and hate badly designed shit, which includes most things. So I’ll appreciate the thought and effort of a gift but can also resent that either this thing that I didn’t choose is now a part of my life or I’ll have to feel bad and ungrateful for getting a better version that won’t annoy me each time I use it.

I read about a military AI that would put its objectives before anything else (like casualties) and do things like select nuclear strikes for all missions that involved destruction of targets. So they adjusted it to allow a human operator to veto strategies, in the simulation this was done via a communications tower. The AI apparently figured out that it could pick the strategy it wanted without veto if it just destroyed the communications tower before it made that selection.

Though take it with a grain of salt because the military denied the story was accurate. Which could mean it wasn’t true or it could mean they didn’t want the public to believe it was true. Though it does sound a bit too human-like for it to pass my sniff test (an AI wouldn’t really care that its strategies get vetoed), but it’s an amusing anecdote.

I dunno, I think he might have figured out how to bottle lightning because he had another show after The Room that was the same kind of “so bad it’s good” as The Room was. He’d have to be pretty delusional to think he was making high art after the way The Room was received, so to realize what people liked about his art (assuming he didn’t know that in the first place) and not immediately just churning out garbage instead tells me he does have talent. Entertainingly bad is a hard line to deliberately walk.

Plus there’s no evidence he was born into money. Maybe a bunch fell out of a plane with him.

We should do a workshop for that, it sounds like my kind of week.

How does mid 2031 sound? You’re probably busy then. Yeah, I’m just going to assume you’re busy that mid-year and hope someone else reschedules and runs the workshop with a bunch of other people that aren’t me and that they figure out a great week so that I can one day read about sloth week having just passed and briefly consider trying to catch it next year because it sounds like my kind of week (assuming I can just passively experience it).

Or, interesting in the opposite direction, I was once on vacation in another country over summer break during elementary school years, visiting a tourist site of some sort, and saw one of my classmates there. Parents didn’t coordinate plans or even share them, just a random coincidence that we happened to not only go to the same general area at the same time, not only the same specific tourist location in an area that had a bunch of options, but ended up on the same section of path at the same time.

Makes me wonder how many other times I’ve randomly been even just an hour away from someone else I knew in an area neither of us were often in.

I’ve never been to Europe but I’ve seen it. It’s more of a thing in high pedestrian traffic areas.

It might if you ask it if it’s sure, at which point it will continue completing the text with the correction.

Yeah the joke was none of the first paragraph was helpful or necessary and wordpad doesn’t need to be a part of the flow. And that notepad only handles text, so you don’t have to worry about the formatting being pasted anyways.

Notepad is my goto for files that I’m not sure what type they are and I want to check if it’s text-based.

First you copy, then open word pad and paste it there. Then remember that word pad has text formatting and open excel and paste it there. Then remember excel also has text formatting and open calculator and paste it there. Then remember that calculator can only handle numbers (or a few letters if you are a hacker and put it in hex mode) and open Minesweeper and try to set a new personal best time. Don’t you just hate it when you have one mine left and two squares with equal chance of being the mine?

Eventually remember the pasting thing, act impressed the computer still remembers what you were trying to paste and just paste it into your notepad document and hope no one notices it’s different.

MS getting rid of word pad really messes up my usual work flow. Or would if I wasn’t switching to Linux instead of W11. I hear the word pads grow on trees there and that it comes with sudoku built right in, but they are fancy and drop the “ku” to save typing time.

Reminds me of the bash.org quote that went something like:

User1 joins channel

User1: HELLO EVERYONE!

Mod: Try hitting the caps lock key

User1: OMG THANK YOU THAT’S SO MUCH EASIER!!!

You could get an external keyboard to use with your laptop.