I feel like this describes me a lot but I also feel like it gives me a broad and eclectic knowledgebase that my employment has nothing to do with and has no mutual relevance to
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
Very niche, but if you ever need to decode a simple oldschool encrypted/encoded text (caesar cipher, reverse alphabet, substitution cipher, morse code etc) for an AR game or whatever, Canonn Decryptor is amazing, being able to decode most cryptograms virtually automatically.
Alien. It's the pinnacle of horror movies. And what makes it so good is the believability of it all. There is no supernatural, no ghosts, no masked mass murderers, no silly "monsters" that defy all the laws of biology and physics.
My favourite part is when the conservatives start talking about all children absolutely needing mother and father. Not just parents, not a parent, not a family; mother and father specifically. Yeah, sure, now what about the millions of single parents? Shall we start forcefully assigning a new spouse of opposite sex to them the day after their current spouse dies, divorces (if we keep that as an option, that is), runs away or whatever? All pregnant people who are not in a relationship are immediately married off to a random person of opposite sex? No opt-out. Because think of the children!
Forever War delved into the problems with super strength. The power armor took a humongous amount of training to be used finely enough in everyday tasks and not break something or someone. A simple handshake between someone in power armor and someone without could result in crushed bones or a ripped off arm. A great show of skill in using the power armor was the main character sitting down in office and writing a letter with pen and paper while wearing the armor!
Another great example of how dangerous superstrength is when dealing with non-superstrength people was in anime Beastars where one big carnivore accidentally ripped off the arm of his smaller non-carnivore friend. In-lore was said to be a very common thing to the extent that limb reattachment is a common medical procedure.
Winter:
-10°C outside, sometimes colder; comfy +22°C inside. Sun sets at 1600, but that's what tea, candles and mood lighting is for. Everything is nice and quiet outside, with an occasional noise of snowplows after it snows.
Summer:
30°C outside, 30°C inside (aircon is not common here in older houses). Hotter in the sun in the middle of the sea of asphalt and concrete that is called "city". Sun sets at 2200 and rises at 0400.
When the sun rises it's like fucking Jurassic Park outside when all the birds wake up and start making noises. And by "birds" I mean not lovely songbirds like blackbirds and skylarks but pidgeons, crows and seagulls (and no, I don't live by the sea; I live pretty much as far from the sea as one can in my country. The city is overrun with seagulls.). They seemingly love to scream right into the ventilation shafts of apartment buildings.
When the sun sets in summer all the inebriated revellers come out and start making noises including loud and off-note singing, loud laughing and loud inarticulate screaming. Add loud boomboxes to the mix and it's one hell of a racket.
Probably it doesn't quite count as a gadget, but repurposing my old PC as a home server. Firstly it makes a great mass storage solution making all my media accessible from any device, no matter what architecture it is and what apps it can run. I also self-host Home Assistant, Syncthing, Radicale, Navidrome, Jellyfin and UrBackup. The ten years old 2 core Pentium with 8GB of RAM can do it all, it's much cheaper to run than half a dozen subscription services and I have total control over my data and privacy.
I actually bought just one new 6TB HDD and repurposed an older 3TB one as a redundancy drive for mirroring most critical data using a simple rsync cron job (no need for realtime mirroring of media files that are write-once), plus another old 1 TB drive just because. I haven't run out of storage yet and I have automated download/sharing for OpenStreetMap and some Linux distros which takes up half a TB or so, but I plan on expanding the array using MergerFS and SnapRAID when the need arises.
The rest is just SMB shares, Navidrome, Jellyfin, DLNA and FTP. Remote access from outside my local network is done via Tailscale VPN.
Navidrome just seems to be faster and more responsive. But the main reason of using both is that I just like to try things out and tinker. I also use Foobar2000, Kodi, MPC-HD, AIMP and other media players.
For scissors, however, nothing is more expensive and delicate than a decent set of haircutting shears
I have a very cheap pair of haircutting scissors. I've used them to cut thin aluminium sheet. Still work OK for trimming my beard. I'm an absolute monster🙃
As for knives, some 10 years ago I bought a cheap (I think 2 or 3 €) Swedish-made fixed blade with nylon grip—the kind contractors and builders use. Thing is pretty much indestructible, cutting open tin cans and splitting of splinters from logs for firestarter like it's nothing. Has a nice carbon steel blade and used to have very nice hollow ground that has been long been downgraded to flat ground due to many, many sharpenings.
Water only gets stuck in your ear if you have wax built up in your ear canal. Regular washing of your ear with warm water (and nothing else!) keeps the wax build-up under control and water will just pour out of your ear canal as soon as you level your head.
tons of titles try to go for realism and showing off the scale correctly, which is neat for space nerd
As one of those space nerds, I'm glad we have games like Elite: Dangerous, Starfield, X series, Independence War etc. Choice is good and I, along with many others, love 1:1 scale sandboxes to fly a virtual spaceship in, fight , trade and explore. There are plenty of fast action games including space shooters like Star Wars Squadrons for those who don't appreciate the emptiness and loneliness of space and don't want the travel-and-life-in-space part in a space game.
Starfield is the only new game from past 5 years I'm excited about and going to buy once I upgrade my GPU. It's a life-in-space sandbox that complements E:D well by doing things the latter does not.
I'm an Elder Scrolls veteran (Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim), I know quite well what Bethesda games do well and what not. And they have always clicked for me, even though all of them are flawed in different ways.
As for ship combat, as long as it's comparable to X3, it's fine. I'm not expecting Children of a Dead Earth or Independence War🙂
To be honest, Freelancer was kind of "meh". Graphics and character animation were very nice, but ship and station design was weird and the combat felt shallow and one-dimensional. In short, too arcade-y. No joystick support was the real downer, space ship combat never feels good with mouse.
For the perspective, though, before Freelancer I played and modded the absolute crap out of Independence War 2 and that is still the pinnacle of space combat that doesn't feel like WWII dogfight arcade in space while still being rather accessible and intuitive.
I use youtube across different devices with the same account. sometimes, i even use it in multiple browser profiles or apps on the same device (with the account logged in)....
Vivaldi with uBlock Origin works just as well as it's always been, I don't even need to do regular manual filter upgrades. Only two tweaks I did was disabling Vivaldi's built-in adblocker for YT (triggered the player blocking while logged in) and installing the pop-up blocker script for TamperMonkey.
So, business as usual. Google can go'an'fuck 'emselves.
I love horror movies especially the cheesey type of horror movies that are so stupid that they are great. I do prefer the ones that would always appear on SyFy, but any other type (that is not like the ones on SyFy and look a lot better) is fine too.
Passkey is some sort of specific unique key to a device allowing to use a pin on a device instead of the password. But which won’t work on another device....
I don't use Google account on my phone. In a rare occasion I need to access gmail outside of my home, I just log in via a browser, either on my phone or work computer or wherever.
My home PC has no authentication whatsoever. The three physical locks on my apartment's door is the access control. Couldn't lug it around for authentication, anyway.
I have no other devices that could be used for this passcode thing, and my phone is usually laying around somewhere, probably shut off with empty battery.
In fact, I have not bothered even with 2FA for google accounts. At this point these are just "garbage collection accounts" for spam and youtube subscriptions/playlists, anyway.
After updating my drivers to get screen recording working again (last version was 22.something and ReLive mysteriously decided to stop working) I find that whenever I try to overclock my old RX570, the whole system crashes, no matter what settings I use (even if I increase the GPU frequency just 1 MHz). Used to be rock solid for...
I got interested in SF because the librarian in my elementary was a SF lover. There were racks of paperbacks that I gobbled up and it’s stuck with me for decades since. It makes me sad to think that kids don’t have the same chance I did to get interested at an early age in the most imaginative genre of fiction. We all need...
Lem's Eden was one of my favourites as a kid and works on many levels:
Cool action and adventuring on a mysterious alien planet.
Plenty of gadgetry of both human and alien origin. Including some of the earliest description of nanotechnology.
Social commentary about interfering with an another civilization, oppression, totalitarianism and control of information.
Niven's Known Space series, especially short stories like Neutron Star.
Clifford D. Simak has two fabulous stories, They Walked Like Men and The Goblin Reservation which have the perfect mix of action, humour and societal commentary. It's hard to beat the latters main cast consisting of a university professor searching for dragons, a neanterthal man, a girl with a pet sabertooth tiger and a ghost with amnesia. Hilarity is quaranteed to ensue.
OK, this is dumb, but it’s gone through my head a couple times. I’ve seen a few science fiction movies and shows where the people in the spaceship use a gravity assist and lean into the turns like they’re driving NASCAR or riding a roller coaster....
In that Expanse clip Kamal is leaning around just like I am when in combat or hooning in Elite.
In both cases, neither Kamal nor I feel any extra acceleration, sitting in a comfortable 0 or 1 G constantly. Leaning around is just a human thing. (While Kamal is using attitude thrusters to rotate the ship around, assuming the pilot's station is at or near the ship CoM as would be desireable for a spaceship, he would feel very little acceleration from that)
But in my case, if I were actually pulling these maneuvers in real life, I'd need to be highly trained on a centrifuge, strapped in tightly, wear a G-suit, have some cybernetic enhanchements and still not only moving around in the seat but black out regularly. Ships in Elite can easily pull 20 or 30 G-s, 3 to 4 times more than modern jet fighters can and 30 to 50 times more than any near-future spaceships can. Realistically, with currently viable drive tech (which includes nuclear propulsion schemes from NERVA to nuclear pulse drive) we're talking about 0.1...0.5 G accelerations for spaceships. Torchships could handle maybe 1 or 2 G-s, comparable to what a street-legal sports car can do.
Is it at all possible that instead of being pushed away, we are instead getting pulled toward something huuuuuge via gravity? As if we are falling into something way greater than ourselves? I thought this was a wild idea but after I Googled it I found out that there is such a thing as a “Great Attractor”. Something 150...
Geometrically speaking, if you draw a really, really big triangle between, say three galaxies, the angles of the triangle add to 180° in a flat universe. In a non-flat space, this would not be the case. For example, if you draw a triangle between, say, New York, Berlin and Rio de Janeiro on the surface of the Earth, the three angles between the lines would add to more than 180° since Earth is topologically a sphere and not flat. And if you draw three lines beween three points on a saddle shape like a Pringles chip, you'll find that the angles add up to less than 180°.
Fun fact: topologically speaking, no matter how you fold or bend a sheet of paper, it remains flat. A cilinder is a flat surface with zero curvature!
Your experience really makes me wish I was back in school. I'd love to see teacher's reaction to the character and plot analysis of Peter Watts Rifters series or Blindsight🫠
I think even the plot summary of Killing Star would make them doubt in their, my and the author's sanity—"The book starts with near-total annihilation of the human species and Earth's biosphere by the highly energetic event of multiple relativistic kill vehicles impacting the planet at 0.92 C. And then it gets worse".
Skyrim, while praised, has always been critiqued for being as wide as an ocean and as deep as a puddle.
I think most people who say Skyrim is shallow never dived below the surface (story/questlines, roleplay and combat mechanics), only fast travelling and rushing through questlines. Thing with Elder Scrolls is, all the games are shallow on the surface. But they all get bonkers if you have the patience to really observe the world (many of the stories are told via the environment), read the in-game books and seek out answers. For example, I don't think many people have given any thought to the Sleeping Tree near Whiterun and very few have an actual understanding of what it actually is. Without spoilers, Ysolda tells you the lead but dismisses it as a silly rumour. You'll find the answers in Infernal City and Lord of Souls.
Most mechanics are only surface level and don’t actually affect much of anything at all outside of combat, if even that.
Correct. That's exactly my point. Mechanics have never been the strong point in any of the Elder Scrolls games. But the worldbuilding is something else altogether, that's where all the depth is, and it doesn't stop going deeper and deeper.
To an extent, motherboards, too, and even before the GPU prices went ballistic. I bought a Z87 mobo back in the day for 80 or 90€ and the most expensive mobos were around 300€ or so. The X570 mobos in 2019 started at 250€ and 550 mobos didn't even get released until at the end of 3000 series Ryzen. Who in their right mind would pair a 200€ R5 3600 CPU with a 250€ mobo?
I bet most of the budget-minded people who bought a R5 3600 CPU never got to use PCIe 4.0. And to add insult to injury, budget GPU-s started using PCIe 4.0 x8 (or even x4) instead of x16, effectively gimping them on budget mobos.
Todd Howard agrees that it was a bit of a pain to get right, as he said in a recent interview with the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences. "[Space combat] was way harder than we thought … We see a lot of space games where you're gonna have like, derelict ships or other things to fly around, just to get a sense of motion,...
Elite: Dangerous is a 6DOF "simcade" and the higher level AI ships have almost no restrictions as to how they can fly (low level ones can be quite clumsy and clueless). They can pull off shots with railguns and fixed lasers a human player never can. A wing of 3 or 4 of these can absolutely shred an unprepared player—just go into a medium/high intensity conflict zone in a lightly engineered ship and face off the opforce spec ops team solo. The only reason why the high level NPC-s can be defeated more easily than experienced players is that they have non- or lightly modified weapons, hulls and shields (meaning less speed, DPS and "health" than player ships) and they don't use the really advanced flying techniques players have figured out and learned to use.
Different rules and restrictions for AI in a space combat game are necessary for the meatbags to be able to compete. The computer can maneuver perfectly, have perfect power management, have perfect SA, never messes up input timing, never misses a hitscan shot, is not affected by joystick deadzones, jitter and drift.
Oh, the hubris of some mod authors. Most of the Bethesda mod community is quite fed up with shit like that after Arthmoor shenanigans. I believe there is already an agreement that the unofficial patch for Starfield will be open source and not a monopoly of one mod author. Cathedral vs. parlor.
It's only a time when an alternative, open mod that does the same thing better will be released.
In the big picture, more conflict, more human rights violations, more fascism. While crisis brings people together locally, when the going gets real tough for everyone, tribalism and us vs. them will inevitably rear its ugly head.
Tens of millions of people needing to migrate because the areas they live now will become literally uninhabitable (as in not "it'll be a little uncomfortable and hot" but "you will die if you stay there") will be an absolute horrorshow. Genocide, really—I'm fully expecting criminalization of all rescue orgs, "sink on sight" orders for migrant boats and absolute ban on saving any migrant castaway on the Mediterranean.
...unless you play Il-2 or DCS. Put simply, all fighter aircraft have an optimal maneuvering speed, below or above that your turn rate will suffer. Managing your speed is the key when you're rate fighting. Same mechanics is used in Elite.
Is there anyway I can remove or make this bar less ugly as I dont use google apps that often so I removed google go search but it resulted in that dull bar.Google original app is not supported for my device and I cant change launcher as I am on Android 11 go and third party launcher work really poor. Advice?
Shouldn't you be able to just long press on any widget and then delete it? That's how I removed the google search bar on my phone (shipped with Android 11).
At least Oblivion, unlike Skyrim, had actual classes (let's not talk about the leveling system, shall we?) and spell making. Plus some really, really good questlines (including the main quest, and the whole Shivering Isles expansion was rad AF). The cities also felt larger than in Skyrim and the Arcane University was an actual university, not a random village school with 3 students. Role-play wise Skyrim was the weakest of the three modern ES games.
No. Social democracy is what nordic countries practice—a capitalist system with relatively strong social and welfare programs. It does not do away with private property and owner class, just tries to reform and regulate it.
Democratic socialism is a socialist system (means of production collectively owned) which is ruled by democratic principles. Instead of reforms and regulations to try and reign in the owner class, it completely does away with private property. You can also have socialist systems ruled non-democratically, by a dictator.
Have you seen Renault Master, one of the most popular work vans in Europe? Shit's huuuge inside😉 You can fit a 3-seat coach, 2 armchairs, coffee table and a floor lamp inside, along with a 100" TV.
Due to how TV, monitor, laptop, phone and loudspeaker manufacturers specify things, most europeans operate quite freely with inches. 15" laptops are still marketed as 15" laptops here, not 38cm laptops. We just got used to it.
Just dont start speaking to europeans about fluid ounces, bushels of wheat and other such weird things🙃
I think Ridley Scott did it best in his Alien. The bugger is quite vulnerable to bullets and blades, but you really, really don't want to put a hole in it if you're either close range or trapped in a spaceship with one. And all the arsenal in the world still doesn't guarantee success if they're swarming you and using the environment to their advantage.
Making something invulnerable to weapons is an easy way out, making something so that you don't want to use weapons on it is much harder, but much more rewarding.
The only game that scratches the space exploration itch Elite doesn't quite scratch (I mean, Elite is very good, but has it's shortcomings when it comes to on-foot stuff). Ship interiors, base building and having actual life on planets, not just some fungoida and bacterium patches, alone are a reason to be excited about Starfield. Also, jetpack combat.
Funny how Elder Scrolls veterans are enjoying the game for what it is while bitter Playstation diehards, wishful thinkers with gigabyte-sized dreams.txt and bandwagon-o'-hate jumpers are complaining about things that never were to be so loud you can clearly hear the "Reeeeeeeeeee...." from Alpha Centauri😏
Are dilettantes always a bad thing?
I feel like this describes me a lot but I also feel like it gives me a broad and eclectic knowledgebase that my employment has nothing to do with and has no mutual relevance to
What's a cool website you’ve visited that no one seems to know of?
What is a horror tension scare / visual scare movie is actually scary?
Lesbian couple flees Italy as government strips them of parental rights (www.lgbtqnation.com)
What is your system uptime?
;-)
Tank vs Artillery lore (sh.itjust.works)
What super power would be impractical in real life?
Which is the best part of winter: the sun setting at 5pm every day, or it literally hurting when you go outside?
What is a fun gadget you have purchased that has added value to your life?
People have been cleaning their ears with cotton swabs for years. What other tools are being inadvertently used wrong?
Todd Howard says it took 7 years to make Starfield fun to play: "I thought we would find the answers faster" (www.gamesradar.com)
Chinese propagandists are the best American patriots I swear (lemmy.world)
‘Reddit can survive without search’: company reportedly threatens to block Google (www.theverge.com)
Did youtube give in already?
I use youtube across different devices with the same account. sometimes, i even use it in multiple browser profiles or apps on the same device (with the account logged in)....
Can anyone recommend terrible horror films?
I love horror movies especially the cheesey type of horror movies that are so stupid that they are great. I do prefer the ones that would always appear on SyFy, but any other type (that is not like the ones on SyFy and look a lot better) is fine too.
Google will now make passkeys the default for personal accounts (arstechnica.com)
Passkey is some sort of specific unique key to a device allowing to use a pin on a device instead of the password. But which won’t work on another device....
Anyone knows a fix for AMD Adrenalin 23.9.2 overclock crash? (kbin.social)
After updating my drivers to get screen recording working again (last version was 22.something and ReLive mysteriously decided to stop working) I find that whenever I try to overclock my old RX570, the whole system crashes, no matter what settings I use (even if I increase the GPU frequency just 1 MHz). Used to be rock solid for...
More people died by the spear than the sword, and if you don't like my opinion, I'll shove it up your ass with sharp stick! (slrpnk.net)
Sci-fi books are rare in school even though they help kids better understand science (theconversation.com)
I got interested in SF because the librarian in my elementary was a SF lover. There were racks of paperbacks that I gobbled up and it’s stuck with me for decades since. It makes me sad to think that kids don’t have the same chance I did to get interested at an early age in the most imaginative genre of fiction. We all need...
Effect of a gravity assist on person, or whatever, in spaceship
OK, this is dumb, but it’s gone through my head a couple times. I’ve seen a few science fiction movies and shows where the people in the spaceship use a gravity assist and lean into the turns like they’re driving NASCAR or riding a roller coaster....
Do cosmologists know for sure that the Big Bang is propelling all matter away?
Is it at all possible that instead of being pushed away, we are instead getting pulled toward something huuuuuge via gravity? As if we are falling into something way greater than ourselves? I thought this was a wild idea but after I Googled it I found out that there is such a thing as a “Great Attractor”. Something 150...
Sci-fi books are rare in school even though they help kids better understand science (theconversation.com)
Starfield Is Bethesda's Lowest-Rated Game On Steam (sh.itjust.works)
By Claire Lewis on September 27, 2023 at 3:28PM PDT...
Authors Are Furious After Finding Their Works on List of Books Used To Train AI (www.themarysue.com)
Authors using a new tool to search a list of 183,000 books used to train AI are furious to find their works on the list.
privatization of water.... (feddit.de)
Capcom President Says ‘Game Prices Are Too Low’ (kotaku.com)
lol. lmao.
Todd Howard says that Starfield's ship AI sucks on purpose so players can actually hit stuff: 'You have to make the AI really stupid' (www.pcgamer.com)
Todd Howard agrees that it was a bit of a pain to get right, as he said in a recent interview with the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences. "[Space combat] was way harder than we thought … We see a lot of space games where you're gonna have like, derelict ships or other things to fly around, just to get a sense of motion,...
Creator of Cracked Paid Starfield DLSS 3 Frame Generation Mod Will Place "Hidden Mines" in Future Mods (wccftech.com)
The creator of the paid Starfield DLSS 3 Frame Generation mod, PureDark, has said that he will be placing "hidden mines" in his future mods....
Game prices are too low, says Capcom exec (www.eurogamer.net)
Capcom's president and chief operating officer has said he thinks game prices should go up.Haruhiro Tsujimoto made the …
How might climate change affect global politics and relations between nations in the coming decades?
Will it lead to more conflict or cooperation? If so, how will it develop and culminate?
15 Secret Features That Starfield Never Tells You About...(Plus Bonus Tips and Tricks) - Ep. 1 (youtu.be)
How to remove google bar (programming.dev)
Is there anyway I can remove or make this bar less ugly as I dont use google apps that often so I removed google go search but it resulted in that dull bar.Google original app is not supported for my device and I cant change launcher as I am on Android 11 go and third party launcher work really poor. Advice?
Modder Behind Oblivion Fan Remake Vows to See It Through Whether Bethesda Releases a Remaster or Not (www.ign.com)
Recommendations for p2p messaging apps which don’t collect any of your data?
Does anyone have recommendations for p2p messaging apps which don’t collect any of your data and sell to advertisers?...
Capitalism (lemmy.world)
It's time to replace urban delivery vans (www.youtube.com)
It’s nice to see larger outlets talking about urbanism topics and Vox has made a few videos in this area recently.
[spoilers] A Quiet Place (Rant)
I finally just got around to watching this, and I have a couple things on my mind…...
Bethesda: Thank you to more than 10 million Starfield explorers for creating the biggest launch in Bethesda history (twitter.com)