This is my F1 shitposting account, 'cause Beehaw defederated with LW.
Had to do that with our 68k Mac with an external drive, yeah! 700MB CDs were amazing compared to the piddling 80MB internal hard disc. Being able to put so much stuff on one piece of removable media relative to what would fit in onboard storage had a big impact on how developers approached the platform.
If optical disc tech had kept up that differential until today we’d have 100-terabyte BluRays. Funny to think how that sort of capacity might change the way we use computers…
Not OP, but if I had to hazard a guess, it started as a rudimentary issue tracker and grew into a formalized system over time, maybe? I’ve worked with many a project manager who “knew Excel” and liked to use it for things it should never be used for, and sometimes PMs get promoted and take their dumb little systems up the org chart with them.
I’m a bit squeamish, so I arranged myself so as to be seated basically next to my wife’s head, facing the wall, and was laser focused on holding her hand and maintaining eye contact with her.
Meanwhile, the delivering doctor was narrating a play by play as our kid went from just barely crowning to head fully out in three contractions, and then she just had to maneuver his shoulder free and he popped out on the fourth push. Three random things I will never forget from that night:
Overall, 10/10, never doing it ever again.
Pad thai? Panang curry? Larb? Lumpia? Adobong manok?
I remember some of these discussions around the time of the Twitter and Reddit exodii and the mindset of many of these folks was essentially that they’d used this social media protocol to create a nice, quiet safe space for like-minded tech-savvy queer leftists, and felt that the explosion in interest threatened to expose their posts to people outside of the community that they had come to know and trust – which is a point of view I can understand, but as a counterargument, you’re on a public social media platform, and specifically one that is designed to spread content broadly and indiscriminately to servers outside of your control. If you wanted to keep things out of the view of the larger Internet there were other, better solutions for a community platform that you probably should have picked instead.
Ukraine claims north of 400k, which is undoubtedly optimistic, but allied intelligence agencies have previously floated numbers around 1/2 to 2/3rds of Ukraine’s public claims, which is still an utterly appalling number of dead Russian men. Russia’s tactical approach from the start has been more or less to treat their mobilized conscripts as expendable. For politically-important objectives their commanders have been perfectly happy to dump fresh meat into the metaphorical meat grinder until the gears jam, and then claim victory.
Banned from Lemmygrad Lite? What a terrible loss!
Super disappointing, yeah. I’ve worked a bit with Dave McCarty during a previous Worldcon and this sort of ham-handed self-censorhip is not what I would have expected of him. Even if something like that was more or less a foregone conclusion from the moment Chengdu won the bid, I would have at hoped that he’d at least let the local Worldcon committee bear responsibilty, rather than being a willing and proactive partner.
That said, as the report that this article is based on points out, that the premier award in SF and fantasy literature is joined at the hip with Worldcon is a bit awkward, and even when the hosting country doesn’t have repressive and omnipresent government censorship, the local mores and tastes are going to have an impact on voting. Not that it’s bad for non-American or non-Western viewpoints and fandoms to carry weight in the voting, but maybe it’d be better to separate the administration of the Hugos from that of Worldcon, and develop a vetting and voting process that can be consistently and deliberately inclusive, rather than being at the mercy of whose hosting bid wins in a given year? Seems like it would be important to resolve this sooner rather than later, given that Egypt is in the running to host in 2026 and Saudi Arabia has made perennial bids for the convention as well.
Haven’t seen it suggested yet, so I’ll throw out Linda Nagata’s Inverted Frontier series. Without giving away too much, explorers on the periphery of a collapsed posthuman civilization launch an expedition back towards its center, and along the way find various eldritch monstrosities – of human origin and otherwise – as they try to solve the mystery of the collapse. It’s more thriller than horror in tone, but it checks your other boxes quite well.
Problem being, because big tech money has so distorted the economies of the cities it’s clustered in, many of these people can only choose between finding another tech job ASAP, moving away from their industry to a lower cost metro with limited job opportunities, or imminent homelessness. Driving a forklift won’t pay the rent, and commercial real estate is so absurdly priced that there may not even be a restaurant to wait tables at.
But it did give us a damn fine concert movie from Muse, and that’s indisputable.
I mean, neither was he, and given that the Saudis bankrolled his purchase and he’s apparently reduced the value of their investment by half, you have to wonder what he’s giving them that has saved from from a one-way trip to a Saudi consulate.
I mean, you don’t really have to wonder that hard. But still, somebody loses you multiple billions in a ketamine-fueled rampage, you start to wonder if you should make an example of them…
Joke’s on you, creep, I have a toddler. All my algorithm serves up now is Blippi videos, steam locomotives, and construction equipment!
There is a certain sort of ennui that comes with the realization that the heat death of the universe is inevitable, and no matter what you do, no matter how much you manage to make your mark on the world/solar system/galaxy/universe or how successful and prosperous your descendants may be, it will all eventually be lost to eternal entropic stasis.
He’s really circling back on this one, I gotta say.
I’ll second that… I always found PS1 3D games to be pure eye-cancer even when played on a CRT TV back in the day. N64 was good-but-not-great by comparison.
The first time I thought I was seeing real life on the screen was NFS3 on PC, which… well, looking back, I was clearly wrong, but it’s decent-looking at least. The next time was when I briefly mistook my cousins playing NFL2K on Dreamcast for a Christmas day football game back in '99, and I feel like that generation of console (Dreamcast/PS2/Gamecube/OG XBox) is about where 3D games are, graphically at least, still palatable.
I’m Commander Shepard, and this is my favorite issue of Fornax on the Citadel!
The trick is that many of the factors that make wood more or less structurally desirable are environmental rather than genetic, and there’s always a tension between things that are good for productivity (I e., rapid tree growth) and performance (tight growth rings and dense fibers).
Engineered wood is already giving us better wood. LVLs, LSLs, and PSLs are stronger, straighter, and more stable than solid sawn lumber, for a price. In commercial construction cross-laminated timber is giving us the performance and fire safety benefits of mass timber construction without requiring the destruction of old-growth forests. You just gotta pay the premium associated with those products, rather than budgeting for utility-grade scotch-pine-fir and expecting every board to be so straight that it scores a 0 in the Kinsey scale.
We actually found out when my wife was over visiting, and he came in through the cat door, locked eyes with her, froze, and slowly backed out of the house. 😅
Similarly, my grandma had a set of electric carving knives that would wash out the game on TV every time she started cutting the Thanksgiving turkey.