I’m taking this as an excuse to share Ian’s shoelace site (complete with step by step instructions on how that knot works and how to tie it) because it’s one of those corners of the Internet that’s handy to know about. Plus, I feel like most people don’t realize that how a shoe is laced can dramatically change the fit and comfort of said shoe.

It was absolutely Bughouse (with some house rules tacked on)! It’s been years since I’ve played, but I’d never thought to see if the variation had a formal name. Thank you!

I once played a team chess variant where each player could place pieces captured by their partner on their half of the board instead of moving. Made for some of the wackiest play lines since a piece materializing on the board could throw off your whole plan, but super fun from a strategy perspective, since board state could change dramatically between turns.

Woo hoo! Decidedly not boring! I’m usually content to make a 3D printed part that holds load and fits where it’s supposed to, I can’t imagine the amount of time and skill it’d take to knap a quartz blade that large and not shatter the whole thing, let alone have the thing hold up over 5000 years.

Any chance you know what the handle is made of? Naively, the pommel kind of makes me think of a jaw bone, but the more I think above it, the more likely I think I’d be carved ivory, which is a whole other set of crazy skills and limited tooling.

Won’t bore us with it? This is the first I’ve hearing of it and that artifact sounds cool as hell!

Also, gorgeous sketch, really clean line work!

Lego Marvel Superheroes is probably one of my favorite Lego games! It’s not without its faults (it kinda bugs me that free play just sticks you back in with pretty much the same cast of characters), but it’s just so much fun to wander around the over world map causing wanton chaos and being a general menace. Plus, I love that the characters generally voice aced by the same people that voice/ play them in live action or other shows, so when Iron Man talks it sounds like Iron Man.

Seasoning is just oil baked onto cast iron through a process called polymerization. It gives your cookware that classic black patina. Seasoning forms a natural, easy-release cooking surface and helps prevent your pan from rusting.

- Lodge (as I understand it, they’re the gold standard for cast iron cookware)

In the case of non-stick stuff, it’s less that they’re seasoned with PFAS and more that they don’t need seasoning because they have PFAS (at least in theory).

That is adorable and I love it!

I’m drawing from some pretty old memories, but from what I recall, Edgar Allen Poe is a bit overly descriptive like that sometimes, which makes me think the wordiness is part of the writing style for the time. It almost reads like the author is trying to do the “paint a picture” thing, which makes logical sense for the genre, a bit like a literary jump scare: paint a pretty picture, so that the spooky stuff is even more scary by comparison. I think my problem is that I tend to get bored with all the overly flowery writing and my brain wanders off (especially because Shelly likes to reference a bunch of geographic scenery that I don’t really have the personal context to draw up a mental picture for).

That does make me wonder if a version of the book in a more modern writing style would be more palatable.

Thank you! It’s been more than 10 years since, but 10th grade me struggled HARD to get through Frankenstein (it was a summer read for my English class), for pretty much the exact reasons you’ve listed out. The doctor is just such a whiny little bitch, I despised every moment spent with the character and was incredibly relieved when the monster finally put the little shit out of his misery (and by extension put an end to my suffering).

The part of my brain subjected to entirely too many English literature studies gets it: the notion of being so caught up in if something is possible you don’t stop to think about the repercussions is super transcendent of time. Like, I keep thinking about Oppenheimer and the other scientists of the Manhattan project, so I can absolutely see how it would be a horror story from Shelly’s time. At the same time, the rest of my brain can’t get past the doctor being incapable of learning any lessons at all.

Shit post aside, I had a friend with a background in the restaurant industry (did a bunch of time in various restaurants, went through cooking school, that kind of thing), who put on a work sponsored barbeque. When someone asked why the folks helping him got promoted to Chef, my friend explained it as “everyone in the kitchen is addressed as Chef, it doesn’t matter if they’re calling the shots, cooking food, or doing dishes. It’s a show of respect.” Grain of salt and all since cultures vary between restaurants, but it’s stuck with me because it was such a genuine moment of “this dude loves to cook and got a chance to share something he’s super passionate about”.

I imagine it more along the lines of breaking a promise. Law is more or less a social contract, so it’s less that the law no longer functions and more that the person in question is breaking the agreement.

But also yes, one who repeatedly breaks the contract with no consequences, definitely calls into question the value and validity of the contact, and that’s when things really start to, erm… Break.

I was content to let the other comments address the history since I’m not particularly well versed there (and there’s already enough confidently incorrect bullshit in the world). I mostly just wanted to interject on why there aren’t more chip companies beyond just hand waving it away as “market consolidation”, which is true, but doesn’t take into account that barrier for entry in the space is less on the scale of opening up a sandwich restaurant or boutique clothing store and more on the order of waking up tomorrow and deciding to compete with your local power/ water utility provider.

The answer also gets kind of fuzzy outside the conventional computer space and where single board/ System On a Chip designs are common, stuff like Raspberry Pi’s or smart phones, since they technically have graphics modules designed be companies like Snapdragon or MediaTek. It’s also worth noting that computers have gotten orders of magnitude more complicated compared to the era of starting a tech company in your garage.

If it helps answer your question, according to Wikipedia, most of the other GPU companies have either been acquired, gone bankrupt, or aren’t competing in the Desktop PC market segment.

The short concise answer is mostly cost. Nvidia, AMD, and Intel are all spending multiple billions of dollars per year in R&D alone. It’s just not a space where someone can invent something in their garage and disrupt the whole industry (like, even if someone were to come out of left field with a revolutionary chip design, they’d need to convince investors that they’d be a better bet than literal trillion dollar companies).

The blue/ silver is very striking, I’m excited!

Absolutely and more! We also have psychic powers, murder robots, friendly murder robots, vampires, genetic engineering, organized religion, semi-sentient plants, space ships, cannibals, space drugs, drugs in space, rabid woodland critters, eldritch horrors beyond comprehension, giant bugs, orbital bombardments, and also the looming threat of starvation as you watch all that you built burn. That’s all before we talk about things that the modding community has brought to the game.

To be clear, the RimWorld doesn’t force you into any one play style, and most of the things listed above can be disabled or avoided if that’s not your jam. At its core the game is trying to tell a story, it’s up to the player to help shape that story. It’s absolutely fantastic; quite literally the best $30 I’ve ever spent on a game (if we’re talking hours played, I’m just about to turn the corner on 2,000 hours (in the spirit of disclosure, a chunk of that is also spent making mods for the game)).

Depends on the music for me. Anything slow or super lyrical tends to break my focus, while more upbeat stuff I’ve heard dozens of times can help me hit a flow state (or at the very least drown out the goings on around me enough to focus on something). I’ve had good luck with video game soundtracks, like Bastion or FTL because they tend to be lively without demanding attention.

That sounds pretty similar to how I have my network setup:

• PiHole has conditional forwarding configured (true,192.168.0.0/24,192.168.1.1,lan note: .lan is optional here, I uss it for my internal TLD) to get device names from router
• PiHole uses Unifi as the upstream DNS and DHCP
• Unifi uses cloudflare as the upstream DNS
• Unifi hands out the PiHole as the DNS via DHCP config

That way I get stats in all the places and can use Unifi for DHCP.

That’s kind of awesome! I have a bunch of home lab stuff, but have been putting off buying a domain (I was a broke college student when I started my lab and half the point was avoiding recurring costs- plus I already run the DNS, as far as the WAN is concerned, I have whatever domain I want). My loose plan was to stand up a certificate authority and push the root public key out with active directory, but being able to certify things against Let’s Encrypt might make things significantly easier.

I’m a fan of Martin Fowler, I’ve used his blog post on Tech Debt to explain to managers why you can’t just give a 15-year team-killer of an app to a bunch of newbies and expect smooth sailing. His refactoring book is also pretty great. Not necessarily philosophy, or a gripping cover to cover read, but skimming though it as part of a grad school class got me thinking about how I’d refactor my own code and changed my approach to coding (most notably in favoring a series of linq queries/ streams/ es6 array ops, over ugly loops with a tangle of branching logic inside).