• 4 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 18th, 2023

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  • Given his unpopularity, even among his own party, and his recent fumbling of the Freeland and Carney situation causing his cabinet to implode, this isn’t exactly a surprise.

    Unfortunately it’s probably going to turn out similar to the Biden/Harris situation where the next Liberal leader won’t have the time to sell themselves to Canadians nor will they be likely to separate themselves from Trudeau’s policies in any real way. Which, since Singh has by and large failed to sell himself to Canadians, seems to be pointing us to Pollievre as PM. Ugh.



  • I tried to read The Nightingale and had to drop it because Hannah seemed to simultaneously want to insist on how french everything was (ooo, they’re drinking café noir, not black coffee) but also didn’t seem to understand how a language works.

    Like, the main character was reflecting on her mom calling them her little nightingales because their last name is Rossignol, the french word for nightingale, and I’m like… She called you nightingales because your name is literally nightingale, why does this warrant multiple paragraphs of internal monologuing?

    The plot and characters were fine if uninspired, but she put so little effort into the setting that the whole thing felt poorly slapped together. Which I guess tracks well enough with this article, too.




  • I finished the main story last night and I basically agree with you. It’s got plenty of issues, but overall it’s fun. It is neither the 9/10 game of most reviews I saw nor the 4/10 game that people want it to be.

    I think my main issue is that it wants to have a story about the underworld and how you can’t trust anyone and you’re a huge underdog just trying to survive but it doesn’t want to commit to it. It feels thematically janky in places and ways that feel design-by-committee. It fills the shoes of Shadows of the Empire decently enough, but it feels like it was trying to be 1313 and failed.


  • If you can see a polar bear it’s a threat.

    They really aren’t like other bear species. They are an apex predator in an area where basically nothing other than another polar bear can even harm them. They see most things as food, including humans.

    As a bonus, Iceland has a pretty wonky ecosystem that needs protecting as is and polar bears aren’t native to the island. They have to swim extreme distances to get there, making relocation extremely difficult and expensive, plus if they leave it be it will entirely disrupt other wildlife in the area, to say nothing of the human population.

    As others have said, it sucks that it got shot, but Iceland especially has very limited options on how else to deal with it. Shoot on sight is, unfortunately, a very reasonable policy for them.








  • It is genuinely ridiculous how much content there is in this game for the price. Like, a lot of it looks like an excuse to play the same levels a dozen times with minor variations, but then there are tons of levels, lots of events, ongoing updates with new content of all types, so many different towers and upgrades to play with, community maps to add even more variety… It looks like I’ve played over 200 games and I have so much of the game that I haven’t even touched yet.


  • Just to throw a few other options on the pile:

    • Valheim is more combat oriented, but is probably my favourite survival crafting game after Subnautica. You’re playing vikings trying to earn their way into Valhalla. I die a lot. Very fun.
    • Planet Crafter is more chill, more jank, and more linear, but it’s a survival crafting game that is clearly heavily inspired by Subnautica. You are sent to a mars-like planet to terraform it as part of your prison sentence. It’s a great podcast game, just build and explore and watch numbers go up.
    • Less on the survival crafting side of things, the environmental storytelling is also really good in Outer Wilds and Return of the Obra Dinn. Very different games, but they were actually what I went to after Subnautica to scratch that itch and it worked weirdly well.

  • I wouldn’t call it a bug, just that a naive ranked ballot naturally favours the centrist voices. I don’t even mean this in an extreme way: in Canada we basically have three centrist, neoliberal parties running parliament, and this would mean that the Liberals just win a majority almost every time. NDP voters generally won’t vote Conservative, Conservative voters won’t vote NDP.

    This can turn into a bug because it ends up pushing other voices out: if the popular vote suggests equal support between left, right, and center candidates, you would typically hope the make-up of the government reflects that, but more likely it would look like a center majority. There are ways to mitigate this (large number of parties, electing multiple candidates on a ballot, proportional components of the vote, etc) but ranked choice on its own tends to be a centralizing force, not a way to get a more representative democracy.

    Again, not a bug, and I definitely wouldn’t call it worse than FPTP, just making it clear that it has its own biases that are worth taking into account.



  • There are a lot of ethical concerns around Chinese worker treatment, economic concerns around Chinese subsidies driving the price down, privacy concerns around Chinese tech’s tendency to phone home, geopolitical concerns around giving China even more power in our nation…

    But honestly, same. Nowadays I can’t get a car at a decent price in a decent time frame, even worse if I want an EV, so what’s the expectation? The auto industry has dropped the ball so hard that China would trivially dominate the EV industry if they were allowed to compete. That’s bad, but it’s so bad because the local industry isn’t even in the ballpark of good enough.


  • Nenshi was a good mayor with a meh council and his frustration with dumb political issues came forth in ways that felt like actual human emotions, even if some people thought he was arrogant.

    He was pretty obviously the right choice here. Everyone’s platforms were basically the same. Ganley and Stonehouse are basically unknown, and Hoffman is more known for being the overweight health minister than anything else, unfair though that may be. He is the most recognizable of the leadership candidates by a mile, he has actual demonstrated leadership abilities we hardly see from anyone nowadays, and Calgarians generally like him. The only major downside is that he’s not a currently sitting MLA, but he would probably win any riding in Calgary handily.

    Calgary is pretty much a swing city at this point, since Edmonton goes mostly NDP and the smaller regions mostly go UCP, so someone Calgary can get behind is automatically a huge bonus. There’s a better chance of seeing another NDP government under him than basically anyone else in the province.


  • Honestly? Bash. I tried a bunch a few years back and eventually settled back on bash.

    Fish was really nice in a lot of ways, but the incompatibilities with normal POSIX workflows threw me off regularly. The tradeoff ended up with me moving off of it.

    I liked the extensibility of zsh, except that I found it would get slow with only a few bits from ohmyzsh installed. My terminal did cool things but too slowly for me to find it acceptable.

    Dash was the opposite, too feature light for me to be able to use efficiently. It didn’t even have tab completion. I suffered that week.

    Bash sits in a middle ground of usability, performance, and extensibility that just works for me. It has enough features to work well out of the box, I can add enough in my bashrc to ease some workflows for myself, and it’s basically instantaneous when I open a terminal or run simple commands.