Schadrach

Hypothetically it does, they just don’t block any instances, so it’s empty. They are unlikely to start outside of extreme circumstances.

Likewise for their Mastodon instance, which has been around for a long while.

They literally just need to add a way to “repackage” a game from your library into an inventory item and then they could use the Marketplace they already have

Eh, since that law applies to classroom instruction, they’d have to save that one for a Bully sequel.

Our democratic system is broken to the core though, and there is basically no way to fix it which is why he still won.

The biggest fixable issue is the whole thing where all electoral votes in most states go to one candidate. That is a thing that is fixable. Because that is a matter of state law. The problem being of course that most states don’t want to change that, because for most states it would mean less attention from presidential candidates because they’d be playing less of a role in determining who wins (by being worth a smaller, harder to shift margin). Convince every state to switch to the way Maine and Nebraska hand out electoral votes (2 based on statewide popular vote, one for each house districts vote - states get one elector for each member of Congress this assigns electors based on who would vote for that member of Congress) and the problem is mostly fixed (everything except not being able to win the presidency by just winning California and New York by large enough margins and having an average showing elsewhere). Importantly, it’s fixed in a way you don’t have to get most of the states to agree with all at once to make happen.

Abolishing the electoral college outright would require a constitutional amendment and those are intentionally very hard to do. An interstate compact to functionally eliminate it by getting 270 electoral votes worth of states to agree to assign their electors based on the national popular vote rather than anything at the state level is somewhat more doable but will also be legally challenged under the doctrine that the federal government is supposed to approve any interstate compact.

Several states have even proposed banning him from the ballot for his coup attempt, including mine. Unfortunately they are being tossed out, probably by judges that he put in power.

Any judge that gives a fuck about the law and the Constitution is going to toss those out, as they are premature. He’s a fuckwit that’s awful in all kinds of ways, but he is still due due process. Arguing 14th Amendment Section 3 applies to Trump requires arguing he has engaged in insurrection or rebellion or given aid or comfort to an enemy. Which he probably did, but “probably” is not generally a standard we punish or restrict people over, nor do we do that without due process and the only process so far in this case is “has been investigated and formally accused”.

This is one of the reasons that the Trump legal teams first and highest goal is to delay. If they delay long enough they can argue that the courts are being used as a form of electoral interference and possibly give Trump an election boost, if they delay even longer and he wins they can argue executive immunity. Because that’s the path with the best odds for Trump - he’s much better at manipulating crowds than at lying to judges.

This is all stuff you hash out when you create a co-op. But normally you create a co-op, you don’t convert a giant multinational into one.

I tried something like that in the oven, with a sort of honey garlic glaze. Crisp outside, but the inside still has that spongy texture she doesn’t like. Maybe if I cut it really fine, into like thin pieces where there’s not much bulk to it, so theres a higher crust:sponge ratio? I hadn’t seen a recipe try really thin pieces, and I just assumed there was a reason.

But tofu isnt a meat fill in and in fact many traditional recipes use it in conjunction with meat.

My best experiment with tofu to date involved a marinade and replacing half the chicken I would have otherwise used with it in a dish, and cooking it in the drippings from browning the chicken.

Tofu is tofu. It is its own ingredient and recipe,and if you use it as such instead of trying to pretend it’s something else you can do good things.

I’m good with tofu, but my wife HATES the texture of it. Is there some trick to make it less spongy?

Are these morons suggesting that the union will take over for management?

Some unions make disciplinary processes and who can be terminated under what conditions part of the contract. In the worst cases this creates a scenario where bad workers are functionally impossible to fire and the people there actually trying to get their work done have to deal with it, because the bad apple hasn’t been written up for identical violations on at least 3 different dates in the last 90 days, then been provided with explicit written directions of how not to do what they’ve been doing in a meeting with management and the union rep, then given another month before reevaluating if they’ve corrected the issue, then suspending them if they haven’t, then doing the whole process over again before being allowed to fire them. Passing the improvement plan evaluation resets the whole thing. Presuming what they’re doing isn’t an immediate risk of injury or death, that is (that has an expedited process).

Actual Sunlight. It has one achievement, “Actual Sunlight”, whose description is “Thank you.” It’s awarded at the end of the game. 37.8% of players have the achievement.

It’s a short RPG Maker game about depression that probably resonates a bit too much with a bit too much of it’s base. It’s bleak, and inane, and all the other sorts of ways that life generally sucks, especially for lonely, introverted, geeky 30-somethings. And the ending of the game is

I wouldn’t be shocked if a good half or more of players can’t bring themselves to drag through it, and some number further just shut the game down and quit when they reach

But to a lot of people this will still be a lot of time, thought and energy they don’t feel able to give.

Part of the reason I was very vague about specific ingredients is because you can basically drop nearly anything of the general type into each slot and the result will generally work. Meaning it doesn’t take much thought, because just about anything will work passably.

And a lot of people who never learned cooking skills will feel daunted by it.

Part of the point is that it requires limited cooking skills - literally preheat the oven, mix the ingredients in a baking dish, when the oven dings put it in and set the timer. You may need to experiment the first couple of times because ovens and ingredients differ a little, but it’s pretty forgiving.

If you’re dealing with a lot of stress at work and/or chaos at home, you’ll easily forget to turn off the baking and burn the whole dinner.

That’s why there’s an oven timer on virtually all ovens, and you can set a timer on your phone as well. This also isn’t something you’ll burn if you go slightly over, it’s pretty forgiving. And if you do burn it a little, it’s probably just a crust on the top you can remove and save the rest of the pan.

It’s complex when compared to most of these products which are “open, (optionally microwave/add milk/etc) and eat.”

Yeah, but literally everything is. Unfortunately to eat better than instant garbage you have to put forth more effort than opening the package. But the whole point of the basic recipe structure I threw out is that you set the oven, can do all the prep work in less time than it takes the oven to preheat, set the timer on the oven when you put it in and now you’ve got at least a little time to relax/spend with the kids/spouse while it sits in the oven and cooks and you end up with real food to eat.

The main reason I laid out a casserole style dish instead of a stew or a curry is because a casserole goes in the oven and thus doesn’t require as much direct attention.

However, just last night I made a fancied up version of quick and cheap curry, but it’s a bit more complicated than the previous casserole (still doable in half an hour and doable by someone with limited cooking skills). For that you’ll need:

1 can coconut milk (ethnic foods section in most grocery stores, near other Asian stuff)

1 can tomato paste

1 Tbsp garam masala (this is a spice blend you can find at most grocery stores, either with the other spices or in the ethnic foods section near other Asian stuff)

Some kind of protein (I used chicken last night, I’ve made this with beef, tofu, and even mixed proteins before)

2 cans of veggies (used carrots and potatoes last night)

a few tablespoons of some kind of fat to fry the protein with - I used butter last night, I’ve used olive oil or even vegetable oil in the past.

Step 1: Heat up your fat in a saute pan (this is the one that looks like a skillet, but has a taller wall around the outside and usually a second handle on the far side from the handle - you can use a fry pan, but a saute pan is more convenient because this is the only pan we’ll be using to cook and the taller wall makes it easier to stir later on without spilling while not being too much of a pot to be comfortable to fry in)

Step 2: Cut your protein into pieces and fry it in the pan until it’s browned and cooked through.

Step 3: Remove the protein from the pan and set it aside on a plate.

Step 4: Empty the can of tomato paste and the tablespoon of garam masala spice mix into the pan with the remaining fat and whatever drippings your protein left behind.

Step 5: Reduce heat to low while stirring until the tomato paste turns a darker red and starts to loosen up.

Step 6: Empty the can of coconut milk into the pan, stir until everything is thoroughly mixed.

Step 7: Drain your canned veggies, then add the veggies to the pan and put the protein back in the pan.

Step 8: Let simmer on low, stirring occasionally until the sauce thickens to the point that it’s about as thick as an especially thick BBQ sauce.

Serve over rice, I recommend 90 second microwave rice, basmati rice if your store has it. You could actually cook rice on the stove at the same time if you wanted (you boil water, add the rice, get it back to a boil, then cover, drop the heat to low and don’t touch it for about 15 minutes) if you wanted to save money, but I’m trying to minimize time, effort, cleanup and how forgiving the recipe is here and I’m at around 20 minutes, one pan, one plate, a tablespoon and a spoon to stir and serve with.

When I say “fancied up”, I marinated my meat (chicken, used Angry Orchard Mango Ginger, soy sauce, and the same spices I was going to use in the sauce as the marinade) and added a few more spices to the process - garlic, chili powder, paprika, and curry powder all added at the same time as the garam masala.

Another cheap cooking tip - marinate beef in cheap lite beer overnight, the alcohol will help tenderize it and flavor it and a lot of cheaper cuts become a lot better as a consequence.

Without meat or copious cheese you’ll also start running low on protein, prompting need to complicate your dishes further by exploring weird foods you’ve never heard of or know how to prepare, like chickpeas.

You’ll note I specifically mentioned both, depending on budget. The general casserole structure is flexible enough that you buy meat on sale and whatever you get you can make work. If you’ve got freezer space, post-holiday clearance sales are great for ham. If you’re willing to learn a little bit and put up with a single weird food, tofu is extremely flexible and also cheap (about $1.50/lb around here), but I’d probably add a can of soup or jar of gravy into the mix of a casserole that tried to use tofu as it tends to soak up moisture (and flavor) like a sponge and you don’t want the result to be dry. I’d probably use more tofu at home, but my wife finds the texture unpleasant.

So, let’s cook like someone with limited money and time then.

1 box pasta, rice, or whatever other starch. 2 cans of veggies, which veggies is a matter of taste. Cheese, whatever they like and isn’t too pricey. Optionally meat, if you have room in the budget since we’re trying to do this on the cheap. Shop sales since meat is usually the most expensive thing.

Preheat oven. Mix all ingredients and toss in baking dish, either topping with the cheese or mixing the cheese in as well and topping with some breadcrumbs or similar. Bake.

This is filling, cheap to make, holds up for a few days so you can have leftovers, and the actual time you are directly acting to cook it is minimal. Vary each of the parts and you have a distinct dish in the class.

For a variation, use mashed potatoes (even cheap boxed ones), carrots, peas, and ground beef. Swap out the cheese for a jar of gravy and that’s Shepard’s pie.

I guess that’s just the next evolution. Old country was basically gospel that wasn’t about religion. Country in the 80s and 90s was basically old rock but about cowboys, trucks, beer and being cheated on. I suppose by now you have to transition to the kind of music that was the in thing in the 90s to keep up with being the appropriate number of decades behind.

It didn’t say what mechanism would be used for the drugs to ruin your life. Prison works just as well as turning tricks for smack as far as life ruining goes.

Heaven’s Vault

You play a space archaeologist, and the big central mechanic of the game is translating things written in the Ancient language.

Ancient is written using ideographs, and more complex ideas are represented by combining glyphs that describe the concept, like ever more complex compound words. There are art of speech markers, glyphs that describe how other glyphs in a word relate to each other, intensifiers, and even a few cases where super common words are just the combination of other basic glyphs into a single composite like a Norse bindrune (for example the symbols for creature and knowledge overlap to make person, an intelligent creature). 46 base ideographs, but that includes digits, so it’s only 10 more than English.

So for example, a word that reads NOUN-person-Sub/Obj CONNECTOR-NOUN-knowledge-person means “Emperor”, because noun-knowledge-person means “law” and thus the result is a person who the law belongs to, aka a ruler or in the context of an empire the emperor. Replace that noun marker glyph at the beginning with the adjective marker glyph and you would have “imperial”, the quality of being emperor-like.

One of the longest words to appear in the game translates as “mouse” and it’s 21 letters long and is literally something like creature-CONNECTOR-many-many-Sub/Obj CONNECTOR-ADJECTIVE-NOT-ADJECTIVE-CONNECTOR-many-creature-CONNECTOR-ADJECTIVE-ABSTRACT NOUN-person-CONNECTOR-light-NOUN-plant-CONNECTOR-rock, which is several words stitched into a compound word, where some of those words are themselves compound words (the idea is something like “creature like a very small pig”, but the word I’m calling “pig” means “creature that is happy in the soil” where happy is something like “the quality of a person who is metaphorically full of light” and “soil” is “plant-earth”). Those CONNECTORS are letters that are used to build compound words.

I had a moment in Tunic where I realized what the references in the manual to the [HOLY CROSS] were talking about, but I don’t think my revelation was the typical.

I’d actually figured out the [HOLY CROSS] really early on, solved a bunch of puzzles using it, got some manual pages I probably wasn’t supposed to have yet, but didn’t know that the thing I was using was the [HOLY CROSS] because I lacked the context of a certain page that spells it out and based on some comments and videos elsewhere is the point where a lot of people first figure out how to use it.

It probably didn’t hurt that I was fresh off The Witness and my brain was subconsciously looking for tricks of perspective and environmental puzzles, which Tunic is absolutely full of.

Majesty (Majesty 2 is okay, but lacks the charm of the original, but YMMV) - you run a kingdom full of heroes. The catch? You don’t command the heroes. They have their own AI and goals and you have to offer incentives and place the necessary buildings appropriately to both enable and encourage them to do their jobs of saving the kingdom.

I loved that you could build temples and get specialty priests for 5 different gods, but never more than two in one level, because some of the gods were opposed to others, including the one I never used because they were monotheists and I didn’t want to give up all other types of priests.

Also that every hero type had their own priorities and preferences and would do what they preferred barring a significant bounty on something else. Also that Rogues could fuck you over if a hero died and you wanted to use the resurrection spell on them because a rogue near where they died might just rob their grave.

Star Trek: Bridge Crew. Multiplayer only (at least practically speaking). Each person plays a separate member of the titular bridge crew, and cooperation to achieve even simple tasks is key.

Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator did it before that, in 2010. ST: Bridge Crew is more or less “Artemis but with Star Trek branding”. Artemis just released a remake/sequel-sort-of-thing a bit over a month ago (called Artemis Cosmos, though it’s had a…rocky…launch so far) that’s a complete rewrite from the ground up.

And when I say they did it first, I mean to the point that some of the reviews describe Artemis by likening it to being a member of the bridge crew on the Enterprise, because there wasn’t a game like that on the market.

Gods Will Be Watching. A series of puzzle scenarios about calculated risk, failure, and learning the rules anew each time.

Under known, under appreciated but fantastic.

Majora’s Mask: a 3-day timeloop where everything resets when you go back

As far as time loop mechanics go, there are some other strong contenders for playing with the concept:

The Sexy Brutale - you are stuck in a short time loop in which people die, and you need to save them. Successfully saving someone grants you a special power that can be used to try to save others. You have to untangle who and how to save each one and exactly what’s going on. You keep the powers between loops, and also start each loop from the last clock you checked in at.

Deathloop - Arkane stealth shooter stuck in a one day loop. Several locations, different events in each location each day, goal is to arrange the right day so you can kill all your targets in one loop.

Death Come True - interactive film game. You wake up in a hotel room, and have to figure out what’s going on. Loop continues until you die, at which point you wake up in the hotel room again.

12 Minutes - You come back to your apartment, and unless you change the course of events (or on the first loop, do not touch the controls at all) you will die in less than 12 minutes. Then loop until you understand what’s going on.

The Turing Test is a puzzle game like Portal, but instead of portals, you have a gun that can be used to move energy orbs from around the rooms to unlock doors. The game feels like it encourages creative problem solving a lot more than most puzzle games.

Along those lines I’d want to recommend the Talos Principle as well.

And also the Witness, which does fantastic things with environmental puzzles.

That’s called a massive dose of opiates. You are highly unlikely to reboot after complete shutdown, so it’s generally not recommended.

Currently. Of course in the past it was exploding heads for being Nazis, Lemmygrad for being insufferable tankies, then Burggit for lolicon, now hexbear for being insufferable tankies.