I'm 50/50 on the episodic plots. I think that DS9 hit a good balance there: The plots were mostly episodic but usually connected to an overarching metaplot. That felt pretty good; not too loose and not too tight.
That's why I'm going to vote for a party I don't believe in. Normally I would vote for one of the parties I do believe in and help them build momentum on their path toward 5% – but with the AfD on the rise and the Union blatantly putting personal opportunism over the interests of the country, I can't afford my vote to not count.
Once more I wish we had a preferential voting system so people can vote for who they believe in and fall back to a less preferred alternative if necessary.
My bad. I went with the WD Red Plus, model WD40EFPX. It's basically the successor to the old CMR Red line. The Pro line has 7200 RPM and is a bit noisier, which isn't great for a living room server.
Yeah, it doesn't take a lot to build a decent home server. I just rebuilt mine (the old one's Turion II Neo was perhaps a bit too weak) and the most expensive part were the HDDs. I didn't want to reuse the old ones.
A slightly underclocked Athlon 3000G, 16 gigs of spare RAM, and three 4 TB WD Red Pluses give me all the power I actually need at a reasonable power budget. I initially wanted to go with an N100 but those never support more than two SATA drives directly.
Depends. If you want something that will keep your files reasonably safe and accessible then a laptop isn't great because most of them won't let you mount multiple hard drives without doing something silly like running everything over USB.
Of course that's where an old desktop is the computer of choice.
It depends on how busy the day is, I guess. Today I arrived 5 minutes early and waited for less than a minute. But my GP is pretty good at scheduling anyway; I don't think I've ever waited for more than 15 minutes.
System Shock (the remake) with a cut-down version of the Ironman mod to provide randomization. It's only slight loot randomization so there's no major pathing changes but it's fun nonetheless.
I like randomizers. They add some additional replay value to already good games. I must've played through randomized Bloodstained a down times already – and twice that for Super Metroid. (And then there's the beautiful mess that is randomized Borderlands 2. I don't think I'm ever going to finish a run but man are they wild.)
That does make encryption was less appealing to me. On one of my machines / and /home are on different drives and parts of ~ are on yet another one.
I consider the ability to mount file systems in random folders or to replace directories with symlinks at will to be absolutely core features of unixoid systems. If the current encryption toolset can't easily facilitate that then it's not quite RTM for my use case.
Good point. If you look at the Yakuza games, they're typically set in a little entertainment district. The map isn't huge but it's not supposed to be. It feels the correct size for a busy little part of town.
Meanwhile, yeah, Fallout 3 gave me the impression that even before the war the DC metropolitan area was home to maybe a thousand people.
It wasn't that early but early enough that a) a major news site hotlinked an image from some random website and b) that website redirected the image to point at a sexually explicit shock image without anyone panicking.
That still has early Internet energy to it. Not quite Mahir Çağrı energy but still markedly different from today's relatively sanitized interactions.
Not to mention the granddaddy of link pranks, Goatse. This excerpt from Wikipedia gives a nice little window info how the web operated back then:
The goatse.cx image has been used by website authors to discourage other sites from hot-linking to them. By replacing the hot-linked image with an embarrassing image when hot-linking has been discovered, an unsubtle message is sent to the offending website's operators, visible to all who view the web page in question. In 2007, Wired.com hot-linked to another site in an article about the "sexiest geeks of 2007"; the site subsequently swapped the hot-linked image with one from goatse.cx.
Vita + amine, actually. Amines are compounds with an NH₂ group; amino acids are a subset of that.
The person who coined the term thought he had isolated an amine that was effective against a certain disease. What he had actually isolated was neither an amine nor effective against that disease but was actually a different essential compound. (He was looking for what we now know as thiamine but had actually discovered niacin.)
The name "vitamin" stuck around despite the fact that most vitamins aren't amines.
Victor Willis (the lead singer and effective owner of the band) has had some interesting interactions with the Trump campaign. To quote Wikipedia:
In the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump once again used the song at his rallies, usually performing the "Trump Dance" while it played. Willis has lamented his use of the song since 2020, and even considered a lawsuit to block Trump from using the song, but confessed there's "not much he can do about it" and decided it was "beneficial" to have the song back on the charts. He later reversed his position and thanked Trump for using the song, pointing out how it had earned him several million dollars.
On January 13, 2025, Village People announced their participation at Trump's second inauguration.
In December, Willis also stated that Y.M.C.A. had never had any homosexual connotations whatsoever in one of the most transparent attempts at marketing something to conservatives I've yet seen. I get the feeling that he's probably not a MAGA believer but he's perfectly willing to pose as whatever he has to if it makes him money.
If he keeps flipping like that we can hook him up to a turbine and use him as a renewable energy source.