FlatFootFox @ FlatFootFox @lemmy.world

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Joined

2 yr. ago

Deep Space Nine Young Adult Book #5: Arcade

There's a new player on the Promenade: a Ferengi shop owner, Bokat. His Games Bazaar specializes in hard-to-find virtual reality computer games. He approaches Jake Sisko and Nog with a tempting offer to play a hot new game called The Zhodran Crystal Quest. No non-Zhodran player has ever won this game, but then, Jake and Nog have the best scores on all the other games at the Games Bazaar. And Bokat is willing to bet on their ability to win the game, and -- as a result -- win Bokat a lucrative business deal with the Zhodrans.

But soon, kids all over the station are falling into comas, their minds trapped in an ever-changing game. Suddenly, it's up to Jake to go into the game and rescue them. It he wins, so does the Federation. If he loses, he'll be trapped forever in a deadly game with a very real Borg!

I’m glad Star Trek novelists were given exactly zero guard rails on what they could write about. .Hack//Trek? Sure, why not!

Scanners indicate high presence of FODs.

Keep Calm and Disregard the 1202 Alarm.

Wide Lightening cannot harm you. Wide Lightening is inaccessible without the aid of a SIM opening tool.

These memes are spoofing Reddit’s “Am I The Asshole”? subreddit. The original posts are usually personal anecdotes about someone having to cancel plans at the last minute or stealing a coworker’s lunch. They’ve been replaced here with first person perspectives from various Vulcan episodes, with Illogical being swapped in for Asshole. The acronyms everyone’s using are letter swapped versions of popular responses on that Reddit. (NTA, cars break down. YTA, don’t steal your coworker’s lunch. Etc.)

Chicken tortilla soup with a healthy dose of lime! My local taco place does a soup special when it gets cold, and I’ve had this one enough that I wanted to try and recreate it. I usually skew more towards stews in chilly weather, but this soup’s on my short list next time I’m in the mood for something brothy.

Hell yeah. 🙌

Ah yeah, the Unicode Consortium ran into an issue a while back where they realized their emoji descriptors weren’t specific enough and were leading to confusion in cross-platform conversations. Apple used to have a woman in a red dress for “Dancer”, while most Android distributions showed a man in a disco suit. They started getting more specific in their emoji definitions and in 2016 and introduced a few emoji pairs like “Woman Dancing” and “Man Dancing” to clear up the existing confusion.

By 2019 the emoji concepts which were gendered (dancing, etc.) and non-gendered (skiing, surfing, etc.) had become pretty arbitrary. They decided to standardize offering a male, female, and generic version of every human emoji. It’s, you know, a standard, so they generally don’t make that many exceptions. Even emoji like “Santa Claus” have a female “Mrs. Claus” and a generic “Claus” options.

It sounds like there might not be much in your stew to thicken it. The beef fat helps a bit, but you can toss the beef chunks in flour to give the stew a bit more body. This recipe I used just straight up has you add some unflavored powdered gelatin to it to give you that coating-the-back-of-a-spoon texture.

I’ve used red wine and beef in dishes together in the past. Usually you just need something a little salty to balance the sweetness out. The UK condiment marmite usually does the trick for me, although soy sauce can work in a pinch.

Nah, it just has a few stout pints in it.

…okay, but for real though. It’d be nice if the Texas power grid kept hangin’ in there.

Yup!

My favorite one of these shows up in 3D printing. The most popular open source 3D print server gives you a head’s up if your printer’s firmware lacks “Thermal Runaway Protection”. If you click the learn more link, it patiently explains, “There aren’t preventative measures to stop your printer from accidentally catching itself on fire”.

(It’s fine, you usually just need to install a decent MOSFET in the cheaper printers.)

Whoops, already made the second part of the verse.

“I’ve dealt with the constant pain of being unrecognized and under-appreciated for almost a decade. You think a phaser set to stun level 4 even registers to me anymore?”

That cart was a friend. Exits Room.

There’s a whole linage of arcade game button design, but you occasionally see keyboard switches show up in custom fighting game sticks.

Mice and trackballs often borrow from the whole universe of buttons to make their sculpted formfactors work. I feel like I’ve seen one or two with mechanical keyboard switches in them.

Like rockSlayer mentioned, they just bridge a physical connection between two pins and can technically be used anywhere a typical button could be. Keyboard switches are so optimized for their large square footprint and particular travel distance that they’re usually not the best fit for random industrial needs. You could make an elevator control panel out of key switches, but there’s probably a cheaper, more well suited button you could use instead.

You’re my new favorite person in this comment section.

Have Brands™ started astroturfing Lemmy yet?

I’m not completely sold on Kagi yet. I’m still in the trial period right now. But paid services can be a tough sell online. I figured I’d be up front about the costs rather than wait for the inevitable “$10 a month for search!?” comment.

The signal to noise ratio has seemed particularly out of wack with Google lately. The amount of blog spam SEO nonsense that crops up into the top 4 results has been pretty noticeable.

I’m not sure it’s entirely a Google thing. Reddit’s decline has made it harder to find quick answers for, “My washing machine’s making this weird string of beeps?” Niche hobbies moving from forums to Discord chats means, “How do I safely remove a keycap without damaging the switch?” is becoming a pinned message in a server you have to hear about via word of mouth. Basically any technology troubleshooting topic has moved from a blog post / forum to a YouTube video. And a 10 minute long one at that. Gotta hit those higher ad tiers.

For what it’s worth, I’m starting the new year off giving Kagi a try. It’s a startup trying to make a paid search engine work. You get 100 free searches to give it a try. After that it’s $5/mo for 300 searches, or $10/mo for unlimited. I’m not sure I’ll sign up for it just yet, but it seems pretty nice. No ads, custom components for things like Stack Overflow and Reddit, and some other nice touches for people who care about search. Their image search actually has a “View Image” link in addition to the “View Page” link. It’s hard to quantify how “good” a search result is, but I’ve been pretty impressed with it so far.