Thank you for all that you do!

This was great, as always. A couple of super minor QoL things:

• Would it be possible to keep the undo button available for a few extra seconds?
• Is better color detection for templates possible? I saw a couple of cases where certain pixels in the image were clearly one color, but the number/symbol/dot guides said they were something different (see the programming.dev template, for example).

Thank you for hosting this again!

Sounds like maybe The Viewing episode from Cabinet of Curiosities?

I would add The Addams Family (1991) and Addams Family Values (1993) to your Funny and Spooky list. I’ll also second the The Fog (1981) suggestion.

[email protected] is excellent.

I wanted to see this thing in motion, so I tried to search up the youtube video, but no dice. Every article on it is just copy-pasted from the original on the Express site, and I can’t get the embedded video attached to it to work. I did find an article on NIWA’s site about a species of sea pig, which looks similar.

I think my parents have a copy of this (or something that looks very similar)! Not sure anyone’s actually made anything from it, though. Really unique design.

That’s really cool (and involved)! Thanks for writing that up. I hope you get a chance to actually try it.

Iirc from my time on kbin, posts are for the “microblog” part, i.e. the part that interacts with mastodon.

True, but I think maybe you missed this being about additive and subtractive color mixing.

Oh, really? Thanks for the heads-up.

100% agree; I was so bummed Riddick was just inferior Pitch Black. The animated one, Dark Fury, was fun, though, iirc.

So, I feel like 2, maybe with 3 in certain high-traffic areas, would be a good idea, for a couple reasons:

1. increased visibility for vehicles, particularly in places with a lot of pedestrians, who might not all have their own lights or be too inebriated to use them.
2. nighttime socializing outdoors, such as markets, streets with lots of nightlife, plazas, etc. Sure, small personal lights could become incorporated into fashion, but those also need to be powered, and would have to illuminate faces without blinding anyone. Public lighting just seems easier.
3. less isolating for night shift workers (if that’s a thing in the world you’re writing).

Could even have 2 shut off in quieter neighborhoods that have no open businesses during the wee hours.

Not Gamescom-related, but there was a Nintendo Direct that showed off some indie/partner games on the 27th, and a CoD thing today (the 28th), if either of those were what you were thinking of?

Only other thing that comes to mind is maybe the Future Games Show, but that was last week (list of trailers here).

Oof, that sounds tricky, yeah. I spent some more time this morning poking around at references and testing ideas, but mostly it feels like going around in circles (no pun intended).

Do post how you end up going about it, or if you find a better solution; I’d love to know!

I mean, if you’re willing to cheat and use the length of your straightedge (assuming it’s long enough), or cordage anchored at one end, then you have a substitute compass, and the solution’s trivial.

For a variation on this with fewer tangents (from A. S. Smogorzhevskii’s The Ruler In Geometrical Constructions):

• Pick point 1 on the larger circle.
• Draw two tangents (2) on the smaller circle, such that they go through point 1 and intersect the larger circle on the other end (3).
• Draw one line segment from 2 to 3’, and one from 3 to 2’. **
• Draw a line that goes through both the resulting intersection and the original point (1) you made on the larger circle. This line goes through the center of the circle.
• Repeat steps 1-4 from a different angle to get the center point.

The issue, of course, is that any tangent you draw (without other circles, lines, or tools) is going to be approximate, and so the center will also be approximate. Every solution for this that I found just assumes accurate tangents, or parallel lines, or whatever, but I don’t see a way to get those (I say, having only browsed through the topic briefly) when these two circles and a straightedge are all you have to work with. If that’s not a big deal in your practical application, cool.

–

** I’m shortcutting, here. The long version is to first draw two line segments, one that uses the smaller circle’s tangent points (2) as endpoints, and one that uses the intersections on the larger circle (3) as endpoints. Because the two circles are concentric, these segments are parallel and centered on one another, so you end up with an isosceles trapezoid. You then draw its diagonals to get its midpoint.

Hackers.

Fanart of artist rendition:

I have the sound of this stuck in my head now, thanks.