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Progenitor of the Weird Knife Wednesday feature column. Is “column” the right word? Anyway, apparently I also coined the Very Specific Object nomenclature now sporadically used in the 3D printing community. Yeah, that was me. This must be how Cory Doctorow feels all the time these days.

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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • Getting the full experience from Chrono Trigger specifically, unlike most other similar games, is getting all of the endings. The New Game+ mode will help there.

    Chrono Trigger has 18 endings, if I recall correctly, including various permutations. Plus one additional one in the rereleases from the DS version forward. Some of them are only very subtly different from each other depending on which combination of character side quests you fully completed, and they all vary depending at which point your manage to defeat the final boss in the main story sequence. Several of them are significantly different interpretations of the future (or the past) post the defeat of the final boss with various for-want-of-a-nail factors causing huge changes to the outcome.

    You have quite a few opportunities to fight the final boss up to and including immediately after discovering the first time gate all the way back at the beginning of the game. (Do that in New Game+ with an overpowered Crono, though, unless you want to get steamrolled instantly…)




  • If you went that low, coffee snobs would probably riot. I don’t know the correct number, though. I’ll leave you with an anecdote, which is this:

    I once spilled a cup of coffee water directly on my crotch at camp, via the expedient of not realizing my collapsible silicone camp cup was not fully deployed. I had just taken the pot off of my camp stove where it was at a rolling boil, poured it straight into the cup, which collapsed, and then onto myself. Total time from taking the boiling pot off the fire to dousing myself was about four seconds. That’s basically as hot as water can get unenclosed, under normal terrestrial conditions.

    That hurt like a bastard for about 30 seconds, and my thighs were red for the rest of the day. I obviously didn’t require any skin grafts. (I was also able to stand up right away and fan off, and wasn’t trapped in a car.)

    If the plaintiff was burned to the point that skin grafts were necessary then there was definitely something wrong with that cup of coffee.

    Edit: Actually, for science. I just poured a cup straight out of my home coffee maker and bunged a thermometer in it. 170° F, or 76.66° C. I drank it and didn’t feel even a little bit like rioting, so that temperature is probably decent for serving. (Not necessarily brewing, which is 90-something C.) In fact, I would be immensely surprised if Starbucks did not have some kind of corporate guideline or policy about this, especially in the post-McDonald’s case world.






  • The issue with this is not likely to be the fault of whoever dropped the cup, but rather like the prior McDonald’s case that the restaurant was maintaining the drink at far too high a temperature to be safe. Therefore guaranteeing injury if it is spilled on someone – regardless of how it is spilled.

    Expecting that drinks will never get spilled on anyone is completely unrealistic. Maintaining drink temperature at a reasonably non-injurious level for when (not if) one will be spilled is therefore mandatory.

    This dude required skin grafts. That’s not a case of, “Oops, it spilled and now your shirt’s wet.”



  • Oh yes, on an open battlefield against declared combatants, absolutely. However, that’s not how it’s going to go down in the US. This is where we get to dredge up that old quote about a rifle behind every blade of grass.

    Take a look at any “anti-insurgency” operation in the last ~80 years or any situation that devolved into door-to-door warfare in a city full of both nongovernment combatants and also where basically every single civilian also hates you and your army. Except in our case about a third (32%) of those civilians are armed.

    Even if only half of those civilians are on our side, we’d outnumber the entirety of the US police and military forces combined by a little over 13 to 1. Nobody wants to fight a war of attrition and I’m not recommending one, but the fascists would have to achieve an unrealistically ludicrous k/d ratio to succeed. There’s no way around it other than this would outright require indiscriminately blowing up large sections of their own cities and infrastructure to get us, surely killing a handful of combatants each time but also taking out at least double their number in uninvolved civilians.

    That sort of thing does not tend to go any way towards making the rest of those civilians left get less involved.





  • Artwork

    Yes they can, via images embedded in their ID3 tags. This is supported by a huge array of players in terms of both physical hardware and software.

    Keep your place

    Yes they can, via many players (including both VLC which is what I use, and also my car stereo).

    Sync across devices

    This much is true, at least in the players I use. There’s probably a solution with some specific player somewhere.

    But specifically for audiobooks, I don’t… need… to play across multiple devices. I listen via only two methods: My headphones (which are driven by my phone) and in my car (which works with my phone). I only actually use one player. It goes with me everywhere. Ours go with most of us everywhere; we’re naked without 'em.

    If your use case requires a networked solution, you do you. I’m just saying, don’t automatically get blinded by how the Streaming Era has kind of fucked up everyone’s brain.

    Edit: Downvoting me doesn’t change the fact that what you said was false.


  • Yes, I am aware of where this is posted and am prepared for my inevitable crucifixion as a result of this observation. But, like… is this really a problem that requires a self hosting solution? That seems like quite the overcomplication to me unless you absolutely require access to your entire selection on multiple devices that will have 24/7 network connections for some reason. I imagine most people actually don’t. And if you do, a simple file share is probably a less convoluted solution, and surely already exists on the server you already have.

    MP3’s take up negligible amounts of storage space on modern devices and can be played on anything, and can be easily taken with you anywhere including out of network range.

    I guess teaching people how to drag-and-drop audio files onto their phone and open them with VLC would be a much shorter article.

    (Ed: Punctuation.)


  • It is one of the many harebrained postulates with which fascist apologists and holocaust deniers throughout the years have attempted to use to retroactively weasel parts of the Reich out of responsibility for the murder of several million people, or usually just Hitler in particular.

    The logic is obviously completely spurious, but the argument generally goes along the lines of, “Hitler told his subordinates to ‘get rid of’ the Jews and he probably just meant deporting them or something, but instead his underlings decided to murder everybody instead. Besides, even if he said ‘kill em all,’ Hitler has no blood on his hands since everyone else did all the dirty work for him!!!”

    And he did say kill 'em all, repeatedly. I’ll leave you with a quote from the asshole himself, spoken to journalist Joseph Hell (what a name) in 1922 (i.e. well before the war):

    Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews. As soon as I have the power to do so, I will have gallows built in rows — at the Marienplatz in Munich, for example — as many as traffic allows. Then the Jews will be hanged indiscriminately, and they will remain hanging until they stink; they will hang there as long as the principles of hygiene permit. As soon as they have been untied, the next batch will be strung up, and so on down the line, until the last Jew in Munich has been exterminated. Other cities will follow suit, precisely in this fashion, until all Germany has been completely cleansed of Jews.

    I mean, with how explicit that is, it’s pretty damn tough to dodge responsibility.

    Furthermore, there is a sliding scale of increasingly insane claims from holocaust deniers ranging from, “Hitler only meant to deport the Jews and his subordinates decided to kill them all instead,” to, “The Final Solution was dreamed up by Goebbels/Himmler/Eichmann/whoever without Hitler’s explicit approval and he had no knowledge of the true scope and nature of it,” all the way down to, “He was whacked out of his gourd on amphetamines by the end of the war and gibbering nonsense, so it was actually the responsibility of his generals and staff to ignore all of it, but they didn’t.” All of which is all quite demonstrably bullshit (see above).