swordsmanluke @ swordsmanluke @programming.dev

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2 yr. ago

Season 1 is wildly uneven. Some episodes are a TV-14 Seth McFarland raunchy comedy in space and others are Star Trek, but with real people. If you don't enjoy the (admittedly purile) sense of humor, The Orville probably isn't for you. The show never completely abandons that tone even as it explores more classic Trek style writing.

There are some episodes though, like S01E08 which are played almost totally straight and those are the ones that feel the most like a TNG revival to me.

Funnily enough, Diablo was originally a rogue-ish game inspired by the likes of NetHack. The engine was even (technically) turn based - there's a pretty cool anecdotes about how they made it real time over the course of a single weekend with some clever hacks.

I don't know if it was ever supposed to have permadeath outside of the hardcore difficulty setting though.

Alas, I am a lifelong Soul Calibur stan.

I got into it back when SC-II was the only game in the arcade I could beat on a single quarter.

I have played every game in the series - even the awful ones.

I love the stupid, overwrought storyline.
I love the wild assortment of weapons the characters bring to bear.
Though... I'd be okay if Ivy calmed her tits. Just a bit. Lady is one good sneeze away from a traction bed.

I'm hoping Bamco makes enough $$$ from Tekken to throw a few dollars to their other fighting game franchise.... but I kinda doubt it.

Nice.

I'm on wifi end to end unfortunately. Because reasons my internet comes into the basement and my main diet is down there. My PC and the Deck are both on the main floor and have decent signal strength but the extra latency and occasional dropped frames make real time games... less fun for me.

Still, I can go play games on my PC when needed. It's literally less than twenty feet distant....I just really like the Steam Deck. :)

I've streamed a few games but I'm on wifi and it's... fine? Like it works better than it has any right to, but anything that requires fast inputs has been iffy.

Even BG3 I generally preferred playing on the actual hardware instead of streaming.

I do a surprisingly large amount of my gaming on the steam deck these days. My poor PC lies abandoned. Anyway... here are some great games that I've played recently on the deck. Some of them are Yellow - usually to use the keyboard for something minor.

• Dead Cells: Roguelite action platformer
• Tekken 8: best entry in years
• Beneath Oresa: wildly stylish roguelite deck-builder
• Roguebook: another roguelite deck builder - by Richard Garfield.
• Talos Principle 2: Puzzles and Philosophy
• Chants of Sennar: explore a mysterious tower and learn the languages - and lost history - of the inhabitants.
• Doom & Doom Eternal: you know these
• Tunic: Zelda Classic - but with deep puzzles
• Inscryption: deck-building horror puzzler... that is soooo much deeper than what it seems.

A final, hesitant recommendation for

• Dome Keeper: Roguelike Mr. Driller meets Paratrooper, with a tight one-more-run game play loop that is insanely satisfying.

But.. the menus don't work right for me in docked play - the A button is only randomly accepted. ... but it works fine in handheld mode. (The controls work fine in-game as well, it's only menus that have trouble.)

As part of a destructive process of digitization.

Until a group of elderly men in loincloths show up and hand you a sword.

... but it's a really weird alley.

Ha ha - thank you!

Agreed! What's the level of personal responsibility for sins (or virtues!) vs our surroundings or flukes of neurology.

The older I get the more tragedies I see and fewer villains.

In Mormon theology such influences are considered as well! The flip side of understanding your own sins is that others will understand them too - so if you killed someone during a psychotic break beyond your control, your victim will see and understand exactly what happened. It's the truest form of empathy. Seeing through the eyes of everyone you ever interacted with, for good or ill.

Exactly. It's in you and just a matter of luck whether it flares up or not

Fwiw, I setup my pihole at home using docker. I run a full size desktop as my all-the-things server and use it as a docker host. Makes managing my services much easier.

I could, of course, use an actual raspi for this, but I run a bunch of other services - including my plex host and file server - on the same machine. Using docker makes it dead easy to update my various services as needed and no worries about dependency Hell between them.

There's a lot of great advice in here, so here's something a little more obscure - Get. The. Shingles. Vaccine.

Most insurance won't cover it until you're 50. Pay for it out of pocket.

I had the shingles at 40. It's a close 2nd for the most pain I've ever been in. (For comparison, 1st place goes to the time I took a training sword to the eye. It squished my eye down and smacked into the back of the socket. Nearly lost that eye.)

It's the same virus as chickenpox. A herpes variant like cold sores, once you've caught it, it's with you forever.

You'll get huge, burning blisters all along the pathway of whichever nerve the virus has taken residence on. And some nerves go to quite sensitive places indeed. The pain is akin to a hot iron pressed unceasingly to your skin. For weeks.

For me, it was the right side of my face and neck. I developed Bell's Palsy and couldn't move the right side of my face at all. Though my facial control eventually came back, I've lost some hearing in my right ear.

It's cheap at any price - Get vaccinated.

I was raised LDS and while I no longer practice any religion I still think the Mormon concept of heaven is an interesting one.

(Imma skip some of the finer details here for clarity - but I'm happy to explain further if anybody has questions.)

Mormons believe that (almost) everyone goes to heaven - eventually. Upon death, evil people go to Hell until they repent their sins. After truly repenting and recanting their hateful ways, their soul ascends to heaven. The LDS concept of Hell isn't one of physical tortures - Hell is simply a perfect understanding of your sins - your own shame and regret, from truly understanding the pain you inflicted upon your spiritual siblings.

So ol' Adolf would be left to stew in a celestial timeout, alone with the weight of his sins - from every petty insult to the pain of every child slaughtered by his command. Damned to remain there until he is truly, utterly sorry. Not the false sorrow seeking to relieve the pain of a guilty conscience, but the harrowing sorrow that comes only with the true recognition of one's own responsibility and the willingness to do anything required to make amends and never sin again.

Any Hitler who emerged from Mormon Hell would be a very different person from the one who went in.

[Digression: regarding "almost" everyone going to heaven - if you want to be truly eternally damned in Mormon theology you have to follow a simple, two step process.

1. Have a "perfect knowledge" of God - e.g. meet Him face-to-face.
2. Act against Him anyway.

Mostly it's Lucifer and his minions that qualify. Maybe Judas Iscariot too. Such souls are damned to "Outer Darkness" from which there is no release. Still not a place of fire and brimstone though.]

Growing up deep in the dusty heart of the American West, I lived far from the conveniences and attractions of city life. But once in a blue moon, my parents would take my siblings and I to enjoy the rides at the park in The City.

Despite being the region's commercial hub, The City was small - barely 50,000 souls - yet it contained a park with mechanical rides. It was less a theme park and more a clamorous set of decrepit carnival rides that had been once erected and never removed. Naturally, the rides at the park were a favorite birthday treat.

The years passed and I traded the wide open spaces for a major metropolis, but I never forgot that little park and its rides.

...And so it was not until my thirty-third year that I realized the many signs upon our nation's freeways were advertising commuter parking lots - and not a local "Park and Ride".

Spoilers for 1984 - so if you didn't get assigned that book in high school, look away I guess.

The villainous government in 1984 has a special "re-education" room they torture dissidents in. Famously no one knows what's inside - but everyone knows. It's simply "the worst thing in the world". The surveillance state - knowing everyone's worst fear - then puts people in contact with their worst fears in order to break their mind and coerce them to obey.

The protagonist of 1984 is pathological terrified of rats. So when the government breaks him, they lock his head in a cage with a rat in front and threaten to open the door keeping the rat away from his face...

Which is the scene above.

Hi! I feel strangely well-placed to respond here - my horticulturalist wife used to tend a garden of carnivorous plants professionally.

I asked her advice and she said,

"Avoid blogger sites. Some are good, but most have no clue and just regurgitate what they read on some other blog. If you want the super in-depth info, use Google scholar and search for the plant name plus whatever you need to know. Soil ph, propagation technique, etc. For more approachable info though, search normally for '

<plant name>

So... Searching for "Venus flytrap university extension", I found this page which gives a very straightforward breakdown on how to care for your own personal Audrey-jr.

pushes glasses up nose Ackchually...

The recent CPRA regulation in CA has essentially mandated automated data deletion requests. Technically it only applies to CA residents, but it's so hard to disprove residency that most companies will process requests from anybody.

It only went into effect last year, but yeah - everybody I'm aware of has implemented an api for processing requests.

I think $9/mo is pretty fair to cover paying for the engineering and infrastructure to support their ongoing integration efforts.

That said, you could absolutely build something yourself that sends automated requests to every data broker you can find, but... Mozilla already knows where they are and will be looking for more. It's going to become a game of whack a mole as companies that haven't received deletion requests will have more complete (and thus more valuable) data sets.

If you don't want to just leave it on though - just this a couple times a year as a sort of spring-cleaning event should cut down your presence on ad rolls significantly.

I work in an advertising-adjacent industry. My company doesn't collect data ourselves, but we do purchase and use advertising data on behalf of our direct customers.

First off, there's no single "advertising id" in use across the industry. Some companies make up their own, some companies don't have one at all. Several companies just link by your email address.

You may be interested to know that the CPRA legislation in CA from 2023 has made it a legal requirement to allow customers to request that businesses:

a) disclose what data they have about you

b) allow you to delete your data

.. and a few other things.

Technically, this only applies to CA residents, but (dis)proving residency is hard enough that most companies will just accept your request regardless of where you live.

If you poke around, you should be able to find a way to submit CPRA requests to any given advertising company to request to see your data.

This comes with a big caveat though - the Stalker Problem. What if some asshole goes to AdSense and says "My name is totally Jane Doe, what do you know about me? Recent addresses, especially." .. That gets into scary waters quick.

The compromise many places have landed on is to confirm what they know about a person, but not volunteer any extra info. E.g. "I'm Jane Doe - what do you know about me?" -> "We know about Jane Doe." or "We know nothing about Jane Doe." (and if you provide email addresses etc, those may be individually confirmed or denied.)

There's a new framework of intermediaries popping up that will automatically submit your info for deletion across the industry, so if you sign up for one of those you can have your data regularly cleared.