My high-school friend group adopted “it goes” from our French class (“Comment ça va?” “Ça va!”, roughly meaning “How goes it?” “It goes!” being the common neutral greeting taught in French classes) and I slightly resent it being described negatively here.

The play-by-email mode was broken to the point of uselessness in Civ5 and I don’t think they fixed in it in 6 (you had to have an always-on Windows desktop system running the server, and because the game logic was integrated into the graphics engine you couldn’t run it headless, and then on top of that there was basically no working system to coordinate active DLCs between players so most of the time people couldn’t join even if you did get the damn thing running) so my friends and I tried once and gave up. I would love for 7 to have a robust PBEM system so that we can play together without needing to spend hours a week watching paint dry while everybody else plots their turns, but I’m not holding my breath.

When I was a kid, Dad would bring home these little foam airplanes that the FedEx office in his building handed out as swag for people who used their services. I loved those things, and I’d be lying if that childhood positive association with FedEx didn’t have some small effect on my preferences as an adult – but it was free.. I think that’s a bit less insidious than paying for the privilege of giving my kid merch pushing a particular brand association on them.

Inland is (or was, at least) relabeled eSun filament, and they’re considered a decent brand for basic filaments. I’ve only ever used their PLA(+) but it’s always been bulletproof.

I don’t like that Russia is using the ZNPP as more-or-less a dirty bomb threat against Europe, but at the end of the day the VVER-1000 reactors there are relatively modern GenIII pressurized water reactors. An intentional or accidental meltdown there would not create a Chernobyl-like event. It’d probably end up being more like Fukushima, which if I remember correctly lead to a couple orders of magnitude more deaths due to the stress of evacuation than it’s anticipated to create from radiation exposure.

Bottom line, when you’re talking about reactors that aren’t pants-on-head stupid designs like the RBMK the actual health risk of radiation exposure due to accident is lower than the health risks of most other forms of power, including some non-fossil-fuel alternatives. Long term storage of spent fuel is another issue, but one that’s reasonably solvable as long as we treat fission as a transitional base load power source as other alternatives like storage and/or fusion power become more viable.

In fairness, several others in the room died years-to-decades later of leukemias that were arguably attributable to their exposures. That said, the Slotin criticality accident is one of those cases where nuclear disasters end up being both completely horrifying and a lot less deadly than you think they ought to be.

The heyday of the Eve Online subreddit was great for this shit, and it was always good for a laugh when something that made complete sense in-game hit r/all and started freaking people out. Some bangers were:

• How do I sell a hanger full of corpses?
• I just killed someone for the first time! I’m so excited!
• Does anyone know if drug production is a good source of income?
• I want to kill someone, I need help.
• Did you ever regret killing someone?
• Industry Question: Drug Labs
• Assasination Request

For those of you who recognized the Transport Tycoon graphics, enjoy this magnificent recreation of the soundtrack with live instruments that the original composer put together several years ago.

It’s been many years since I read them, so I don’t know them off the top of my head. That said, as I recall the explanation was that:

• most violent crimes are crimes of passion, and since they tend to occur in the heat of the moment people aren’t thinking about consequences
• a significant amount of property crimes are acts of economic desperation and/or crimes of opportunity, where the consequences of being caught are either unimportant compared to the more immediate survival needs of the perpetrator, or not fully considered when presented with a tempting opportunity for quick gain

and as such, most of what people think of when they think of criminal activity isn’t well controlled by draconian punishment, and is instead better addressed by improving the general welfare of the most at-risk populations, and focusing incarceration on rehabilitating offenders so as to be able to safely reintegrate into society.

If I recall correctly, white collar crime is one of the few exceptions, since it tends to require quite a lot of planning and forethought to carry out… and if I’m perfectly honest, I’m fine with a billionaire CEO being sentenced to one hour in the Torment Nexus for every hour of stolen wages his company profited from, but alas, that’s not the world we live in.

Studies have shown that in most cases that you’d care most about, extreme punishment does not serve as an effective deterrent to bad behavior. Creating the Torment Nexus as a way to enhance prison sentences serves only to increase the degree of cruelty involved in our already vengeance-oriented justice system.

The management agency that leased the house I lived in while I was in college tried to withhold our security deposit because we didn’t provide proof of carpet cleaning.

The house had all hardwood floors.

Similarly, my grandma had a set of electric carving knives that would wash out the game on TV every time she started cutting the Thanksgiving turkey.

Had to do that with our 68k Mac with an external drive, yeah! 700MB CDs were amazing compared to the piddling 80MB internal hard disc. Being able to put so much stuff on one piece of removable media relative to what would fit in onboard storage had a big impact on how developers approached the platform.

If optical disc tech had kept up that differential until today we’d have 100-terabyte BluRays. Funny to think how that sort of capacity might change the way we use computers…

Pad thai? Panang curry? Larb? Lumpia? Adobong manok?

Good good, it is an Altima, isn’t it? I didn’t dare to assume but after a bit of Googling the interior is a dead ringer for an 07-12 Altima – objectively the hooptiest of all Altimas. This guy really is a walking stereotype.

• No trigger discipline
• No hands on the wheel
• Open container of alcoholic beverage
• Speeding egregiously
• Driving a Nissan

All checks out.

There is a certain sort of ennui that comes with the realization that the heat death of the universe is inevitable, and no matter what you do, no matter how much you manage to make your mark on the world/solar system/galaxy/universe or how successful and prosperous your descendants may be, it will all eventually be lost to eternal entropic stasis.

For some the optionality of it is less important than the notion that if it’s performative, you can be bad at it and therefore make yourself an acceptable target for abuse, and besides that the idea that some roles can be restricted to only those with a certain set of physical characteristics is deeply ingrained in many, be that in terms gender, career, or what have you.

The trick is that many of the factors that make wood more or less structurally desirable are environmental rather than genetic, and there’s always a tension between things that are good for productivity (I e., rapid tree growth) and performance (tight growth rings and dense fibers).

Engineered wood is already giving us better wood. LVLs, LSLs, and PSLs are stronger, straighter, and more stable than solid sawn lumber, for a price. In commercial construction cross-laminated timber is giving us the performance and fire safety benefits of mass timber construction without requiring the destruction of old-growth forests. You just gotta pay the premium associated with those products, rather than budgeting for utility-grade scotch-pine-fir and expecting every board to be so straight that it scores a 0 in the Kinsey scale.

Can’t forget the spineties!