Oh that looks interesting, thanks

Kind of doing Megabonk, i suppose

I stopped playing it after s few hundred hours and a couple of DLCs, but I’m glad to see Vampire Survivors is still doing well

If you like retro, you can’t go far wrong with UFO 50. 50 retro-style games with a modern twist for £20 normally, but £15 on sale now. Ridiculous value for money, because I don’t mean mini-games, i mean games.

Just in general, I’d go the “several indies” route, rather than the “single AAA” route.

That’s an excellent point! You’re right that you don’t need 500 word blurb to fill the void with. Would you like me to explain more about mass data guzzling? Or is there something else I can help you with?

Webp is a smaller file size than jpeg for the same image quality in almost all circumstances - so it’s more efficient and quicker to load. It also supports lossless compression, transparency, and animation, none of which jpeg do. And the jpeg gets noticable visual artefacts at a much higher quality than webp does.

People didn’t adopt it to annoy you. It’s started to replace jpeg for the same reason jpeg started to replace bmp - it’s a better, more efficient format.

Most of their money comes from business. On the one hand, there’s the argument that business owners will notice that most of the tools they use these days are actually web apps and that you don’t need anything more than a browser to use them and therefore will have no problem moving away from Windows. On the other hand…inertia is real and people tend to equate value and cost. My brother is a senior IT person and he’s been a linux specialist for almost all of his career. Until the day that a company he worked at got new leadership and they insisted on moving everything to windows and retraining all the IT staff because “nothing that’s free could possibly be good or secure”.

For some people, the fact that Windows costs money will absolutely be seen as a plus.

I’ve never noticed this. Mostly because I basically never close Task Manager. Because programs hanging is common enough that it’s actually useful to have Task Manager open on a separate screen.

On an unrelated note, I must set myself a reminder for tomorrow to give installing Linux another go…

What an odd response

They entertained TVs first interracial kiss

This is not true, in several ways.

Firstly, it needs the modifier “American” in there. The UK’s first interracial kiss on TV, for example, was in 1962.

Secondly, if we’re defining “interracial” as specifically between someone Black and someone white, then Nancy Sinatra & Sammy Davis Jr. preceded Star Trek by a year.

Thirdly, perceptions of race change. The studio which made I Love Lucy was extremely hesitant to allow Ball & Arnaz to portray themselves as a married couple, precisely because the fact that Arnaz was Cuban meant that the marriage was “interracial”. The kiss they shared in the first episode - in 1951 - would have been seen at the time as an interracial kiss.

Fourthly, even without a changing definition of race there had been previous interracial kisses on the lips on US television - William Shatner himself had previously twice shared a romantic on-screen kiss with someone of Asian descent, once actually in Star Trek.

None of this is to diminish the importance, impact, or progressiveness of the Uhura/Kirk kiss, but it is often overstated. It doesn’t need to be the first ever interracial kiss on TV to be significant. If it really does have to be the first ever something, then it’s the first ever kiss on the lips on US television between a Black person and a white person.

Maybe we are do, but it’s undeniable tjsybwe experience reality.

I’m sticking that as text over an image of Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

Thank you

I recommend it anyway. It’s always fun to play with someone else’s ideas. You end up writing stuff you otherwise wouldn’t. And there’s something to be said for “I’ve got x amount of time to finish this” due to external factors. Just don’t pay attention to the competition aspect and you’ll almost certainly find it rewarding.

How is it with nVidia?

I once did a remix competition. Not to win, just to have fun playing with samples and the discipline of having a time limit. I knew going in that what I was going to do had 0 chance of getting anywhere near the top.

The winning three entries were judged by the website, the artist, and 3 executives from the record label. And the winning 3 entries were all exactly the same.

They were all the same style of EDM (bear in mind, this was a poppy guitar song being remixed, so there was no particular driving factor towards that direction), they had similar bass lines & synth parts - both in terms of the riffs themselves and in terms of the sounds used. They all sped up and pitched up the vocal and chopped it in a very similar way. And they all had the exact same structure. You could literally play all three simultaneously (after timestretching by a couple of BPM to make them the same tempo) and the intro would be the same number of bars, the beat would come in at the same time, the vocals would come in at the same time, the dropdown would come in at the same time, the build-up would come in at the same time and lasted the same number of bars, they had the same bar of silence after the build-up, and then the drop did very similar things with the bass and all three went into half-time simultaneously.

There were hundreds of entries, and really what you had to do was make something that sounded like everything else. It was depressing, honestly.

Yeah, we can basically just put every speedrunner of every game into this topic. “Man, I love this game so much. Let’s see if I can break it so I can 100% it in under a minute!”/“This is the best shooter ever made! Let’s see if I can complete it without hurting anybody!”

There seems to be one or two Sims channels on YouTube where the people running the channel have little or no interest in playing the game and instead just build and furnish houses/shops.

Not me, but there’s a great example of this in chess.

There’s an opening called the Bongcloud. You move the pawn in front of your king out for your first move, and then for your second move you move your king up a square. It’s memed as being the strongest opening possible, but it’s actually almost the worst 2 opening moves you can possibly make. Because modern chess does have a large online component and the current best players are young and like memes, it has been played in tournaments, which means that if you play it in an up to date chess programme the programme will name it as the Bongcloud.

A lot of people seem to think that it’s called the Bongcloud because you’d have to be stoned to play it. But almost all chess openings are named after one of three things: a person, a place, or an animal. In this case, the Bongcloud is named after a person - Lenny Bongcloud.

Lenny Bongcloud is a now-inactive user of chess.com. He would always open with the moves described above. That’s because, unbeknownst to them, Lenny wasn’t playing the same game as his opponents. They were trying to checkmate him. He was trying to walk his king to the opposite side of the board as quickly as possible. If he gets checkmated, he loses. If he gets his king to the other side of the board he counts it as a victory and resigns.

So, yeah. One of the oldest known games in the world has an opening the “official” name of which comes from a jokey alias adopted by someone who was deliberately playing the game wrong.

It’s because they’ve been right about that their entire lives.

They’re called Boomers beause they’re the largest generation. Being the largest generation means that you’re the generation with the most purchasing power, the most cultural cache, and the most voting power. Corporations, the media, and political parties have spent the past 50-60 years making the Boomers the foundation of their strategy.

The whole of mainstream society has been telling the Boomers for their entire lives that they’re the most important people in society.nIt’s only now that they’re dying off in a significant way that this strategy is starting to fail.

I think it’s a little more nuanced than that, but I’m not going to argue.