Ethereal87 @ Ethereal87 @beehaw.org

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80

Joined

2 yr. ago

Interestingly, I feel like I've found more "new" music using Spotify's Release Radar playlist instead of their Discover Weekly playlist. I'll typically (and aggressively) mark things as like/don't like in those playlists and add what I like to my own "Testing" playlist to see what sticks to me. Release Radar tends to have more likes than Discover Weekly does, despite what the two are named, and it's providing new artists on top of existing ones I'm already a fan of.

That's usually good enough for me, though the occasional time I'm listening to the radio or a song comes on over the speakers when I'm out and about gets a quick Shazam from me to know what it was.

Sorry, but this feels unnecessarily hostile towards religion. If you hadn't read his full remarks, I would encourage you to do so (and if you did, apologies but this is the internet and we all usually read just the headlines/blurbs!)

He outlines really well why they're striking and what they need to fight for. He's clear to draw from the Bible for his own personal inspiration to why he does what he's doing and leaning on two passages out of the Bible about having faith and the old "camel through the eye of a needle" quote. The faith he talks about though is a faith in their fellow workers and doing what is right, driving towards the overall mission towards a better life for the members. I thought he was very clear in that regard and not excluding/being insensitive towards non-Christians.

It was supplemental to the message he wanted to tell about this being the time to stand up and to have faith in their mission. It didn't come off as instructive in what to do as your comment lead me to assume.

Not sure if this van_dam might work for you. I found it randomly searching through my Unraid server's App store and it seems to be built around 3D printing files. As a note, I haven't worked with this one personally yet since I haven't had the time to get Postgres and Redis set up, but I have this pinned to come back to it. Could be worth a look!

If you can test them in person, a magnet on the underside should stick to a pan that will work with induction ranges. That’s how we figured out what pans to keep when we switched to an induction range earlier this year.

I think a cast iron pan will also work, but not entirely sure. We ended up picking a Rachel Ray set we found, so not high end but this might give you some ideas for materials to search for that will be induction ready.

I think term limits really depends. I get why it makes sense in the abstract and I would love to see it implemented but I've stopped really advocating for it as a long term fix. It just moves the "institutional knowledge" about how Congress works into the hands of lobbyists instead of Congress. The revolving door just gets worse. It would have to be something like term limits + campaign finance reform to make a meaningful impact. That's a noble goal but we've needed campaign finance reform for a while and no one seems to want to address it.

Age limits seems to be a good balance of making an individual Congress critter's term long enough to still have some sway/power/authority (instead of lobbyists) while making sure they don't blue screen on us during a press conference. Given such high profile issues with McConnell and Feinstein I'll be a little optimistic in hoping for some change.

But for a beautiful moment...

I've been looking for some kind of alternative to io9 over the years and this looks perfect! Not as exhaustive as their list but theirs is also monthly vs. this one appears to be twice a month (September is here)

Since I already skimmed through the io9 one, a few of these were already on my radar to check out this month. Androne, The Circumference of the World, and City of Bones all were interesting to me off this list.

I'm also excited to see Gundog is getting a proper release. I loved listening to the podcast version last year. It felt just like a chapter a week of an exciting mecha audiobook.

Yep. I hit a wall with a couple of the final battles in the DLC missions (Morbius and Storm) that I finally ratcheted down my difficulty level back to "normal" just to get through and not sour my experience with the game.

It did mean I annihilated the final boss of the campaign but I didn't mind. It was still fun :)

(finally) Finished Midnight Suns. About 80h towards it and while I did enjoy it immensely, I'm glad it's over and time to move on to other things.

I started and finished the first Frog Detective game last night. I figured it would be short but not 1.5h short! Quirky and it got a couple of legit laughs out of me. I'm definitely interested in playing the other two episodes.

And I decided to play Overwatch 2 now that it's on Steam. I stopped playing OW1 years ago and this seemed a good excuse to try it again. I am starting from the ground up since I apparently deleted my old Battle.net account, which is frustrating to not have all the heroes/skins available but it's also easing me back in. The monetization at least seems to be an improvement over loot boxes. I'm really just playing with whatever I've managed to unlock and not paying for the BP until I know how far a super casual player like myself can get. The core game is luckily still solid and since I don't have the bad blood of the scrapped PvE mode or anything, I'm just enjoying playing more Overwatch again.

This is interesting to say the least. I tried out Vortex on my last major Stardew Valley playthrough and I found it a bit clunky. I got it to work, but I feel like it had a learning curve to its own vocabulary and how it organized everything. Then when I found a few of the mods recommended skipping Vortex and just doing a direct download, I keyed in to a much simpler workflow I could wrap my head around with updating the mods.

Interested to see what the new app might look like in time. If they can take lessons learned from Vortex and apply them forward, that's great.

That's the most infuriating part. You pay for it no matter what. You're gambling that you won't get sick and you can keep yourself healthy. But the thing this always ignores is the human body ALWAYS breaks down over time. We all need healthcare at some point, whether it's for a surprise tumor, a pregnancy, or just getting old. You can do everything right and at some point you will still need to engage the system, either for yourself or for a loved one. You're still going to pay for it.

But heaven forbid you pay for it out of your (shudder) taxes.

I think I’m nearing the end of Midnight Suns. Story seems to be wrapping up so I’m trying to get the last few friendship levels for folks. This has been such a blast to play and I’m glad I picked up the complete edition for ~$35 in a Steam sale.

Not sure what the next one will be. Really tempted to grab Baldurs Gate but I’ll probably go back to some indie backlog games for a few.

Skimming through my Steam library, here are the games that I'd call memorable/left an imprint for me in the last year.

• Neon White - Score attack/leaderboard chasing is NOT my genre at all, but the game felt so good to get into a flow state and solve the puzzle, chasing that last Ace medal timing. There are more things I could have gone and chased, but getting all Ace medals, gifts and finishing the story was sufficient for me. I'd be curious to figure out if playing again, almost a year later, if I could do any of the later levels!
• Security Booth: Director's Cut - A very short experience but such a fascinating and creepy one. You're asked to man a security booth and let in or reject cars based on a list of license plates. Things get weird and that's all I really want to say. This is also a game that feels like it was originally released on a PS1.
• The Case of the Golden Idol - Both Outer Wilds and Return of the Obra Dinn are some of my favorites of all time , so when I heard that Golden Idol was like both of them together I was extremely curious. It's more Obra Dinn than Outer Wilds, but the core mystery in each level is so interesting to uncover. Nothing ever really comes out and says "So this is what happened" in a cutscene, but you read a letter in one room, maybe a letter in another, then you're checking between them for the dates and trying to figure out what happened when. I felt so smart when a puzzle came together and when I saw/solved one of the big mysteries before they basically tell you the answer. So so so much fun and I need to get into the DLC.
• Marvel's Spider Man and Miles Morales - I played the first Spider Man on Sony's streaming service a couple years ago, so I knew all the story beats already. That didn't stop the emotional impact from STILL hitting me from some of the final villain's speech to Peter. I had also never played Miles Morales, so it was great to put them both back to back. The story can feel very routine/by the numbers but I almost didn't care because I was having so much fun swinging through New York. Cannot wait for Spider Man 2.

For work, it's really about capturing what my customer(s) are talking about in case I have follow ups myself and some basic CYA in case someone wants to come back and complain.

For my personal life, it's filing some stuff away for future use, sometimes it's databases/inventories of my hobbies (like Transformers collecting) or random scratch comparisons when we were looking at daycares for the little one.

I used to have a big Excel spreadsheet with a list of tables but I've moved both my work and personal note taking over to notion.so. I've got a solid workflow that lets me track to-dos, manage my team, and organize my notes where possible and I've come to really like it. At work, we're also looking into Microsoft Loop for something already built into our Office subscription but it's still in preview and not as fleshed out like Notion.

Honestly, my biggest use case is listening on the phone and listening on my PC while at work. The two sync together extremely well and it's pretty seamless. No idea if Apple Podcasts can do that (or plays that nicely on a Mac) but that's my biggest use case for their sync capabilities.

Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod - https://techpod.content.town/

Brad Shoemaker of Gamespot/GiantBomb/Nextlander and Will Smith of Tested.com and several other things (but not THAT Will Smith) both dive into tech issues and are more to the left. They also have a separate FOSS Pod.

I used to pop everything once it showed up, now I tend to wait. I'll typically have a game already prepped before playing so we can jump into the rules explanations from the get go if possible.

Nothing in the last week. My copy of Expeditions showed up from Stonemaier Games though and I cannot wait to get into it, maybe next week when I'm on vacation. I played it back in May at a convention in St. Louis and loved it!

I mean, the job of a governor (or President) isn't to legislate like this. Laws should come from the elected representatives under the guidance of the head of state. And of course we'll all be outraged when an Republican does this when they're in power and they enact some god awful nonsense. We should push for better accountability from our elected officials and less of this universal declaration of whatever our current overlord sees fit to do.

With that out of the way, holy crap is he clever to edit "2024-25" into "2425" and set this program up for a very long time (assuming it doesn't get struck down somehow).

Democrats fall in love. Republicans fall in line.

It's reductive, but look at the Christian Right and Trump. Trump is nowhere close to the picture of a Christian. It's astounding he can safely cross the threshold of a church. But he promises to make sure abortion is illegal and men can't pretend to be women to steal kids, so they vote for him. Replace the abortion issue with guns and you get another set of voters who will vote Republican regardless of what they might personally feel.

Meanwhile and to your point on the left, each candidate's worst flaws are held as some kind of uncrossable line by people who are terminally online (which isn't helpful) and the Democratic Party does what they can to feed this and make sure they don't have to enact meaningful change. They just want to maintain the status quo but they get to do it with a pride flag waving behind them. If the Party establishment would just stop putting a thumb on the scale (not just against Bernie but ANYONE remotely progressive/left of the neoliberal center) and let the primary process shake out the most popular candidate, they might actually find themselves winning elections.