elephantium @ elephantium @lemmy.world

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2

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545

Joined

2 yr. ago

Strange, I read The Player of Games relatively recently, and I didn't care for it all that much. I just really couldn't root for Gurgeh. That kind of wrecked it for me.

I sort of lost interest in the series because of it. Does the next book in the series have a more sympathetic protagonist?

You'll be waiting a long time for that one, I'm afraid. I've pretty much given up on that series ever being finished.

I'd recommend The Killing Star by Charles R. Pellegrino. It plays with some of the same ideas in a rather different way.

It's a great book. The sequels are also excellent. You're in for a treat :D

My grandma used to call her town a "bedroom" community. 600ish people lived in town with most commuting for work. IIRC, there are a couple of nearby towns with around 3k people, the biggest city in the county having 12k people. One of the state's major cities is around an hour away; think 100kish people.

I used to think that would be too far to commute, but from other comments on this post, it sounds common.

If you like Star Wars (original trilogy, that is), I'd recommend Heir to the Empire by Timothy Zahn. I can also recommend his Conquerer's trilogy and Cobra series.

I liked The Lost Fleet, personally. The space battles are excellent, and they're quick reads. Agreed about the plot, though, it takes a while. Worth it overall IMO.

You might consider the Iron Druid series, too. It's written in a lighter tone than the Dresden Files, but it's got a similar vibe.

You might check out Dead Witch Walking by Kim Harrison, too. It's another urban fantasy with an interesting world premise. I struggle a little to recommend it -- I lost interest fairly quickly, but if you don't mind some romance in your urban fantasy, you might like it more than I did. And if you do like it, it's a long series, over a dozen books!

Screw them, they're going downhill.

Ah, but how did the designer of the first trebuchet have time to perfect their design? Someone else grew extra food for them. How did the farmer produce this surplus bounty? By using the plow!

But you're right, the trebuchet is indeed the superior siege weapon.

It's where you find inner peace

The plow. The greatest of all inventions.

Thanks for the recommendation, I'll check it out.

Mostly what I'm looking for is fire-and-forget screenshots. I'll hit alt-printscreen to capture something during the between-turn processing, then go back and crop it and upload it later along with everything else. Tweaking that to a new hotkey -> select the area to screenshot would be fine, but I still want it to automatically save the screenshot in a folder. That was the "killer feature" of the screenie helper I've been using for ages.

I use MS paint on a regular basis! I play Civ succession games, so I take some screenshots of the game during my turns. I use Paint to crop them.

The helper utility I've been using can save as bmp, png, gif, or jpg.

The built-in Windows snipping tool can save as png, gif, jpg, or mht (which ends up being bmp under the hood).

Hmm, it might just be time to find a replacement tool.

The take-home message here is definitely that WebP is secretly evil :P

Heh, in 1993 I wasn't online at all. '97 or '98 is more like it in my case.

That's a fair point, too, better image quality for a given size. I was more focused on raw bandwidth demands.

people taking screenshots of photos such as from Instagram

This one really grinds my gears. Why do so many people insist on sharing text by taking a picture instead of pasting the text? Or better yet, just linking to the original? It's such a waste of bandwidth :(

Shoehorning formats that were made for 640x480 pictures

Err...nothing in the file format spec restricts jpg to a particular size. I would actually argue that this undermines your point -- bandwidth was incredibly limited in the 90s compared to what I see today.

Simple example: a 640x480 image is (at least) 307,200 bytes = 0.3M, so it takes at least 5.4 seconds to transmit over a 56k modem. A 4k image, same color depth, is 16000000 bytes = 15M. On a gigabit connection (what I have), that takes about 0.02 seconds.

Jpg is ancient

Sure, but so is .zip, and that's still useful.

IMO a better argument would be how and why webp improves on jpg (better compression, etc), not just "it's newer".

I shouldn't need to say this, but here goes: "old" and "shitty" aren't actually synonyms.

I'll make one as soon as I quit slacking off.

they’re just trying to enjoy life

Maybe. A neighborhood bully went after me with a makeshift whip around that age. I lost my boot in the snow trying to run away fast enough. Most people are fine as you say. Some...are just broken.

You don’t dump five-year-olds on the side of the road

Strongly agree here. I don't care what they were doing; they're still kids in need of adult supervision.

Yeah, I hope so. He's had a rough time of it lately, so it's nice to see things looking up for him.

Thanks for the well-wishes :D

My wife did see some people tailgating in the parking lot beforehand, ha! I haven't really been to any dry weddings that I recall (maybe when I was a kid?). I chuckled at the image of 30-somethings taking shots like teens sneaking off at school -- also unexpected!