I’m pretty basic, but Tetris and Duck Tales come to mind.

Why not keep it simple? [email protected] or [email protected] seem like they’d be welcoming.

Top-two primary and/or ranked choice voting to start. I’d also like to see the popular vote compact come into play for the presidential election. Eventually, for Congress I’d like a hybrid system that accepts the existence of parties so it can manage their worst impulses and give representation to smaller constituencies.

For the remaining geographic regions, set a certain standard for mathematical compactness; this doesn’t have to be too aggressive, as a long thin district can be completely sensible, but we don’t need the devil’s fractals many places have now. Also/or require districting committees to try to draw districts that would roughly approximate the state’s popular vote percentages. We know they’re excellent at isolating voters by party, so let them, but force them to play around on the edges to get one seat here, or get out front of some changing demographics here, not the wholesale cracking and packing we see from both parties now.

It also all needs to be legislated at the federal level or even by constitutional amendment, but honestly we’re kind of fucked. The people who need to be reined in the most very much live in states where they are overrepresented in voting power, and I don’t see them giving it up.

As long as you know what it is, consensus as to okay-ness or better, then it’s still a decent metric. Still, “universally okay” is not always what I’m after, nor is it quite the achievement the studios will proclaim.

If you’re inclined to take reviews seriously (and it’s a whole other discussion, but I very much believe criticism and analysis are worthwhile when done well in their own right) , still better to find a few sources whose takes tend to line up with your own.

Shit, man, I dunno. I already voted. I fly my blue-team flag in a red town. I hope that most of the people voting for him are just insensitive clods who aren’t as personally hateful as the jokes they’ll laugh at, or that they’re somehow stupid enough to have been genuinely convinced that our creaky business-friendly center-left coalition is some sort of economy-dooming experiment in socialism. So yeah, I’m reduced to hoping that a large percentage of my fellow citizens are idiots and/or assholes, rather than actual fascists.

It’s too close to know who will win, so things could turn out kinda okay if the Democrats pull it off. If Trump wins, maybe they don’t manage the Senate and little of longstanding legislative harm gets passed. Sotomayor should be okay for the next four years, so for SCOTUS itself the damage is likely already done. Finally, I still mostly think that Trump will be content to line his pockets for four years and then pardon himself on the way out. He’s too old to inspire any energy to repeal the 22nd amendment, and I don’t see anyone behind him ready to slot in as an heir apparent, so maybe the less intensely awful republicans will reclaim some measure of control, or a gaggle of pretenders fragments their base and they can’t really get organized to win nationally. A second Trump term is going to fucking suck, though, and a lot of innocent people are going to get hurt all across the world, many more than in a Harris administration, IMHO.

Shit’s grim, and the Christian Nationalists see this as their time, possibly their last good chance in their current form, to really seize the reins of power.

You just get an upvote for Chris Smither. Leave the Light On, Time Stands Still, his cover of Visions of Johanna, plus a dozen others… all brilliant.

I’d like to do a proper split as a project, but I don’t properly touch-type, so there’s a pretty large learning curve that I’m not particularly interested in overcoming. Before I accepted my truth, my second handwire was a permanent split that just bundled the matrix wires into a ratchet-ass cable. It works fine, but I just never used it, even enough to want to do a refined version.

I’ve been making mechanical keyboards “from scratch” for the last year or so. I leverage a lot of pre-built parts and existing tools of course, but I tweak the standard layouts to fit what I want to do, fabricate the plates and cases with my laser engraver and 3D printer, assemble everything, wire them up to the switches and the microcontroller (usually “dead bug” hand-wiring, but I have done a very basic PCB in KiCAD as well), and configure the firmware. It leverages a lot of my other interests, provides an opportunity to improve incrementally between projects, and results in a product that is legitimately pleasant to use.

Little bastards are piling up, though.

It’s sort of inherent to scrabble-like apps, where there’s so many ways you could mess something up. I am not above taking a flyer on things, but I try not to do it any more than I assume my opponents would. Anyway, having played a lot by now, I know most of the common and medium-weird words, so there’s not a lot for me to guess at, and I’m only rarely surprised when something an opponent plays is a word.

Two things come to mind (apart from just being annoyingly defensive in Scrabble).

In high school, our friend group would play Risk. We had one friend who was the youngest of the type of family that probably played Risk for fun, and probably discussed strategies afterward. He was clearly better than any of us, but he was never better than all of us. So there was an unspoken rule that everybody just ganged up on Brian until he was crushed, then with the tall poppy gone, the rest of us weeds would figure out who would win that night. For some reason he stopped wanting to play. Some people, amiright?

Then, off and on in my 30s, I played indoor soccer. I was awful. I came to the game late in life, and anyway was WAY past my already-low peak of being a useful player in pickup touch football or Ultimate Frisbee. My most useful contribution was showing up to make sure we didn’t forfeit.

However, all the guys playing O30 rec-league indoor soccer had some hole in their game, so if I could figure them out I could make myself useful until I got too tired (at which point they simply ran around me, LOL). Mostly it was just simple stuff like always pushing attacking players to the corner on the idea that they would take a low-percentage shot out of selfishness (or that none of their teammates would make a trailing run), or else I’d press quickly on the idea that they would eventually make bad passes, and they often did. However, one I was pretty proud of. I noticed a pretty good player (for our level) liked to keep an eye on the build-up from his keeper and defenders and trap the ball with his chest to turn and dribble. I saw one of his teammates launch one of these long balls, and I saw him start backpedaling towards me so I just… stopped.

I was not moving at all, and this skinny little fucker had a pretty good head of steam for somebody moving backwards. He plowed right into me and crumpled before bouncing up frothing mad. He only got angrier when the ref called him for the foul. I smiled a fat little smile, and then got off the field cuz I was already getting tired.

I had a few others where I got away with shit because the refs could see I was awful as easily as anyone else, so they assumed I couldn’t have intentionally directed the ball with the hand I was holding against my torso, or that I must not have been able to stop before running into some dude, but the backwards jackass (he really was unpleasant) play was uniquely satisfying.

I play an ongoing ladder/tournament for a Scrabble clone (Wordfeud). I’m kinda stuck at a middling level because of certain holes in my game that I refuse to fix because it would be boring (e.g. I could know what your last 7 tiles are but I do not intend to figure it out), but I’m decent. One of the ways I power through the lower tiers was by realizing that you can play defensively, specifically by shoving ‘C’ and ‘V’ in places that fuck up your opponent’s access to high-scoring tiles (because they have no two-letter words to jump off from), or just leaving points on the rack because maximizing each turn would open things up on the board.

New players simply cannot handle this. I’m sure they don’t have much fun, but I win and go back up to the levels where the strategy helps some but you can’t rely on it. Higher level players can bust through by sheer force of pattern recognition and vocabulary, or they can build words that open up so many avenues that they can withstand my getting some points too, or them fuckers DO keep track of which tiles are left (the gall!). I’m trying to remember that I’m good enough that an open board can help me too, but my tendencies are still pretty defensive.

Seems like they don’t work exactly the same as they used to, as they now use MTP instead of USB mass storage, but while annoying, it’s generally a pretty trivial fix and your OS may already use MTP devices with no trouble. It seems there may be some other knock-on effects with fonts not sideloading right and needing a Calibre plugin to make pagination work how it used to.

So yeah, it’s getting worse, but Amazon hasn’t figured out how to bring the hammer down yet.

Calibre has always been a small price to pay, but if sideloading goes away, I’ll certainly never “upgrade” again, and I’ll trash my 11th gen Paperwhite if they somehow make it stop working. Usable e-ink ereaders are even doable as DIY projects now, and Kobo will probably stay less closed-off than Amazon for a good while.

That said, reading the comments and the article it seems like as long as your OS (or some app) supports MTP, everything should still work more or less as it has, which is to say kind of annoying and with Amazon pulling little microaggressions like deleting your cover thumbnails, but overall sideloading should still function.

Yeah, I don’t think this goes to trial and rewrites the lawbooks or anything, but there’s enough here to litigate, and I reckon Tesla will settle to avoid going to discovery.

This is a bit different, in that it’s not a trademark claim, but rather a copyright claim. They’re saying that the still isn’t meaningfully trying to be anything other than a Blade Runner still, and Musk’s use is not protected by any sort of Fair Use. There would likely be a statue of limitations or something for the specific cause of action, but you can’t lose copyright the same way you can a trademark.

One could argue it’s an uncreative derivative work not subject to a fair use exemption, and actively used in commerce to make money for Musk, while simultaneously it damages the Blade Runner brand if, as claimed, other car companies assume Tesla and BR have a relationship, or the BR brand is inextricably linked to Tesla and Musk. The fact that Tesla and WBD hurriedly sought a copyright clearance, once Tesla realized WBD didn’t have all the necessary rights, doesn’t speak well for Tesla’s position, nor does the fact that Musk referenced Blade Runner at least twice in his presentation.

LOL, I have been driving Outbacks for the last 11+ years, and I love ‘em. For brightness, the scroller to the left of the steering wheel will reduce brightness on both the screen and gauges, and the little thumb buttons will shift away from the real time fuel economy, at least on the drivers’ console. I can’t help you with the cabin, but I don’t mind it, and the cargo volume with the back seats down is generally better than the Forresters. I will say that the Outbacks already have so-so fuel economy; I’ll be surprised if anything significantly roomier does much better.

For buttons, Hyundai and Nissan seem to be fighting a rear-guard action to keep them around. Get the Santa Cruz! Get a “Ute”!!! Do it!

Honestly, this one is as good a place as any other. I think new communities make the most sense when their subject matter becomes so prevalent that it starts to annoy the people who are in a community for other reasons. We sort of tried to run before walking when APIpocalypse happened, and I think we’re still structurally cleaning up the mess.

So that being said, what are you looking for? Another truck? Something smaller?

This is it, really. Fundamentally, the people placing online orders just want to exchange money for lunch, same as OP.

In the old days though, they would show up, see the line was too long, and some percentage of them would leave. Publix needs to increase staffing, implement rate limiting (I think they call it “Order Throttling” in this space), or partially prioritize the people who want their sandwich bad enough to spend their own time waiting. I assume there’s some metric that would optimize it, and even if not, some reasonable guesswork (alternate prep of in-person versus mobile orders?) would help with the physical traffic jam and angry luddites (no offense, OP 🤣).

Part of the problem may be that Pubsubs in particular occupy a weird space where they’re a much-loved quick dining option while still having the infrastructure of a grocery store deli counter, and managers from that mindset. I’m sure everything is sort of kludgey and half-assed.

We were set to go to Fan Expo with these, but wife Pokemon-loving kiddo weren’t feeling quite 100%. This is ultimately good, because the obscure (in the US) anime that kiddo was angling for was just not going to happen for Halloween.

So, I’m going as Professor Freide, wife as an Umbreon, and kiddo as Nemona from the Violet video game. Kiddo’s oversized Pikachu pillow got a captain’s hat safety-pinned to his head, so he’ll be Cap.