games? I found a civilization port for the phone and it sucked up a lot of time. Turn based so you can do it for a few minutes at a time: https://yairm210.itch.io/unciv

learn a language? duolingo and other apps are out there

People should probably protest this. go in person and demand to speak to your rep. or whatever. i don’t know how to organize a protest. i just go when i hear about them happening.

https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Ald'ruhn#Notes

It’s the Ald’ruhn fighter’s guild. Apparently it’s not a full set, but it’s a lot of it.

I think “what’s good for me right now” is fundamental to the right wing viewset. Hypocrisy isn’t a factor because that doesn’t typically intersect with “is this good for me right now?”

You can point out they said X and now they say Not-X, but that’s going to be as effective as someone telling you that your math is wrong because yesterday you were wearing green and today you’re wearing brown. it’s just a non-sequitur to them.

Reminds me of my first big success at work. There was a weekly report that people wanted generated - it showed how much like each operator had done, how much each warehouse had shipped, how many orders we lost from stock issues, etc. it was a low tech company, so they had someone going through the limited UI, looking up each thing one at a time, copying it into excel, and making the report that way. It took hours, and was error prone from stuff like mis-pasting or accidentally skipping a user.

Took a look at it and was like you could definitely automate this. Used some very primitive scripting to pull all the info out of the system’s UI and dump it into a TSV. Took like a couple minutes to run it, import into excel, and add the colors. But it was super janky because it was manipulating the UI like a user instead of, like, directly querying whatever underlying data store it was running on.

Still, management was impressed. I later learned no one actually looked at the report most weeks, so that took some of the wind out of my sails.

This is an ancient joke but they replaced the original pigeon with a blue thing instead. :confused:

You know, I replayed it recently (with OpenMW) and for 2002 yes, but by more modern standards not really, not for me. The leveling system is really bad. The combat system is an awful mix of dice rolls and action, where neither is satisfying. Movement is glacial and it takes a long time to either level speed or get mark/recall. NPC interaction is minimal.

It certainly has a lot of cool stuff in it. Spellcrafting is cool (if janky). Enchanting was like spellcrafting, but better. Alchemy can get bonkers. The world is huge, and because it was less level-scaling and procedural-generation you sometimes could find really interesting things. Like breaking into a room in the fighter’s guild and finding a full set of glass armor. Super cool. Of course, the illusion of a believable world immediately shatters when you walk right out wearing the stolen armor and no one reacts.

So, yes and no. Amazing, for 2002. But also kind of limited, and sometimes kind of bad, and they haven’t really reached new heights in the past 23+ years. All of their games handle stealth badly. They all handle damage badly. There’s just not two decades of improvement by them.

The more I play Bethesda games the more I realize they’re not actually good. Fun sometimes, but also kind of bad.

Opportunity costs still exist

Where is “here” out of curiosity?

I’ve read that most of the lead from leaded gasoline is still in the environment, where it does cause harm. It it’s in the soil, and that can get into people through a variety of means.

It’s just myopic emotions. “Does this feel good for me right now?” If it’s actually good, if it’s good long term, if it contradicts a past stance - none of that matters.

Zohran ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zohran_Mamdani ) seems like a much better candidate. NYC has too more information voters and regressives than I like, sadly.

I recently reinstalled BL3 for a bit and I think I spent more time downloading it (like 100gb for unknown reasons) than I did playing it.

The pacing is bad. Too much walking around or listening to people talk, not enough doing stuff.

The itemization is kind of bad. Like yeah there’s millions of guns but most of them are trash, and looking through a dozen to compare [damage, clip size, reload speed, etc] in that fucking awful UI is tedious.

The gameplay is kind of bad. Most things don’t really react to being shot. It’s just shield and HP sponges.

They haven’t really changed much since like the first game launched in like 2009. That’s like 15 years. Still basically the same game.

It’ll probably sell a bunch of copies because of the brand, and a lot of people are low information, but I don’t think it’ll be good.

I don’t have any real disagreement, but I think the problem is capitalism. The abuses in sex work are more visceral, but capitalism will create horrors for a few pennies.

There’s a great band Priests that I believe are pretty lefty

i’m reminded of something mlk jr wrote, on a related topic:

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice;

That’s a lot of people - they just want things to be quiet and easy for them, and if there’s injustice for others they’ll just have to live with it.

Ars doesn’t let me say what I think should happen to all these DOGE traitors anymore, but man they are the fucking worst in every sense.

“not the onion” is exactly right - this would be too on the nose if it was satire

I said similar on another article like this, but I worry the kind of people who need to know this won’t read it. They’ll just dismiss it because “cnn is woke” or “they just don’t like trump” (which reminds me of the “missing missing reasons” post about estranged parents, incidentally)

But maybe a few fence sitters or accidentally-low-information types will read this and realize trump is not the way to go.