Yeah, I have rejected increased cost games for this very reason. But Nintendo is one of the few companies I believe would do it to cover their costs instead of just preying upon general apathy towards inflation since covid to jack up profit. They are too rich for my blood at the time, but if I had the income to splurge this would be one of a vanishingly small number of places I would be willing to put up with it.

Just speak the incantation of motive energy and light the incense to soothe the machine spirit.

For a while people tried to differentiate roguelikes, which maintained the lack of metaprogression, with roguelites, which did have progression. But that was pretty clearly a losing battle, the two names were far too similar to stay distinct as long as one or the other took off. Some few pendants still try to maintain the distinction, but that ship sailed ages ago.

People overestimate the fiduciary responsibility of public companies. It’s true they will often pursue aggressive short term gains to attract more investment in several forms, including higher stock prices. But as long as they are arguably trying to help the company they are considered to have fulfilled their obligation. You have to be able to prove in court they are trying to harm the shareholders to run afoul of that responsibility, which is a fair hurdle. And it isn’t really that difficult to avoid a forced IPO by keeping under the 500 shareholder threshold if one really wants to avoid it.

Everything bends when you move it, usually to such a small degree that you can’t perceive it. It’s impossible to have a truly “rigid” material that would be required for the original post because of this. The atoms in a solid object don’t all move simultaneously, otherwise swinging a bat would be causing FTL propagation itself. The movement needs to propagate through the atoms, the more rigid the object the faster this happens, but it is never instantaneous. You can picture the atoms like a lattice of pool balls connected to each other with springs. The more rigid the material, the stiffer the springs, but there will always be at least a little flex, even if you need to zoom in and slow-mo to see it.

While it is true that will always result in a winning line, it’s not true that it is the only way to force a win. Half of their moves will allow you to play adjacent to you starting corner towards an open corner and still force a win, as long as their first play isn’t the opposite corner or any of its 3 adjacent spaces. In fact, if they start in one of the adjacent sides or non-opposite corners, you have 3 winning moves. If they start on a side, you can take either the open, non-opposite corner, the side leading to that corner, or the middle. If they start in a non-opposite corner, you can take the first two moves above, or the opposite corner.

That’s not true, you can force a tie at worst from a middle start. The issue is, if you start middle, you can only force a win if they take a side, not a corner. If you start corner you can force a win as long as they don’t take the middle.

It wasn’t as unrelated as it might appear. Firstly, they used their D+ account to make their Disney account. Secondly, the whole point of that argument was that in the Disney account EULA, the relevant one, there is an arbitration clause. They only brought up the D+ account in passing because it has the same clause, emphasizing that they had to read and agree to the clause twice, and if they didn’t catch it it’s not Disney’s fault they lied about reading it. They basically said “look, this is an issue regarding the Disney account, and they said right here they read and understood the terms that include arbitration. And here, they read and agreed to the exact same terms a few months earlier on D+. This shouldn’t be any surprise if they were truthful when they claimed to have read it.”

Disclaimer, arbitration clauses are bullshit and need to be reworked/eliminated as they are generally very anticonsumer and I don’t think it’s good that they have that clause. But accepting that this exists, Disney didn’t really do anything particularly scummy.

Specifically skeletons are a big deal. Lots of games edit them out, WoW had alternate models for the Undead players, who generally have exposed bone joints and other bits of bone protrusions, to cover them all in flesh. I think it is sometimes OK to use skeletons as enemies, but never for player characters, IIRC.

I mean the graph starts in 09, and Chrome launched in 08. I assume that did more to them, but both were probably notable.

There isn’t really much about eternal torture or damnation back when Satan was still an agent of God, and he certainly wasn’t in charge of Hell. All the talk of gnashing teeth and lakes of fire was originally metaphor for how much it sucked, not literal.

Hell isn’t a place, it’s a state of complete lack of Grace. The idea is that everyone has a 2 way connection to God, and all good feelings and emotions must come from it. People are free to reject that connection by committing mortal sin, but “the line stays open,” as long as someone lives. Honest repentance is accepting the connection back. If one dies before accepting grace again, God shrugs and accepts they aren’t interested, and cuts his side of the line. This leaves an existence with zero positive thoughts or feelings, best case scenario is eternal meh. Of course, it was hyped up to be awful to help convert and maintain control. And, ofcourse, Satan did do a bit of torture here and there, but it was generally all on living folk to test them.

The “doctor” was a monster.

The monster was a Frankenstein.

My favorite is the gif of the skubbah diver with a lassear beam on their frickin head.

Lawful>chaotic isn’t about better>worse. If anything, using the gear that came with the product is the definition of lawful in this context. Lawful is more about following the expectations of society. That’s not the full meaning, but close enough for this post. If anything, I would swap true neutral and chaotic neutral.

The super over simplified version is all matter is essential very compressed energy. And the whole matter vs energy spectrum is more of a continuum than a hard line. Photons are pretty close to the middle of the continuum, it is useful to use photons for some math, and waves for other math, but they’re both equally valid.

As a fan of both, neither are truly Sci-fi. They both use it as dressing, but one is an action fantasy and the other is drama with emphasis on social commentary. Neither are really harder sci-fi than the other in the grand scheme of fiction. Star Wars may even be a bit better in that at least they don’t try to explain most of the tech so it can’t self contradict as much as Trek does.

Don’t forget they had previously been ordered several times to reduce the temperature and refused.

They were all celestial bodies. The rest just got more myth attached to them. The Norse names are all sort of kinda mostly the equivalents of the Roman counterparts, and those are famously where we get the names for the planets.

Sunday

Moonday

Mercuryday

Jupiterday

Venusday

Saturnday

Ther wasn’t a great Norse version of Saturn, so it just kept its name. Even as it is, some of those conversions are pretty flimsy.

A remaster with some QoL improvements would be much appreciated. I mean. A straight poet would be great, upgraded graphics would be amazing, but some tweaks would be really nice. Some of it just hasn’t aged well, especially the grinding needed for some stuff like unlocking parts. I’ll gladly take a port, but a little extra would be nice.

What level of abstraction is enough? Training doesn’t store or reference the work at all. It derives a set of weights from it automatically. But what if you had a legion of interns manually deriving the weights and entering them in instead? Besides the impracticality of it, if I look at a picture, write down a long list of small adjustments, -2.343, -.02, +5.327, etc etc etc, and adjust the parameters of the algorithm without ever scanning it in, is that legal? If that is, does that mean the automation of that process is the illegal part?