Watching Paradox Interactive transition from AA into a AAA studio has been painful. They fill a niche that nobody else is really paying attention to, but they’ve become so entrenched that the games are really starting to feel like reskins of each other, and while I wouldn’t call their DLC strategy predatory, they feel just a hair below that point.

“Historical strategy simulator” is a pretty tough genre to attack as an indie dev, though.

The USA is huge. IDK what country you’re from, but I’ll use France as a point of comparison because it’s large and the capital isn’t really in the center.

Bayonne->Paris is about the farthest you can be from the capital while still living in mainland France. That’s 770 km.

This is shorter than the distance from Washington DC->Atlanta, which is in one of the original 13 colonies. It’s pretty close to the distance from DC->Indianapolis, but that’s still within the 1776 USA borders (albeit, an unorganized territory of the 13 colonies).

Add in the Louisiana purchase and various conquests westward, and a Californian visiting DC can be like visiting Paris from Kuwait.

It’s reasonably common for USians to visit their state capital at some point in our lives, but visiting DC is definitely an upper-middle class vacation unless you happen to live in a nearby state already.

I don’t think this is belittling the kid at all. Just pointing out that we’re now doing approximately the same thing at home.

FistingEnthusiast

Or if you’re Jaromir Jagr:

“I’m an unmarried athlete in my 40s, if you want to give the world proof that I’m still pulling hot 20-somethings, do it.”

Usually there’s pretty instant and severe consequences if it’s one of YOUR students, but if they’re not in your class it’s just “legal but creepy age difference”.

Sand walls can collapse suddenly, especially when water levels change (like, with the tide). If you make too deep of a hole, you can find yourself buried with little warning. Knee-deep is a good height that even if it does collapse in you, you’ll still be able too get yourself out. Hip-deep, you might end up stuck as the wet sand keeps filling up as fast as you can dig it out.

Tibet, Hong Kong, and Taiwan may not agree with that thesis.

The one thing that upset me watching the Artemis II mission broadcast was the constant use of imperial units.

NASA uses metric units internally. They had to intentionally translate than back into imperial units for the livestream. Please, folks. Use the better units.

My preferred version:

I mean, the earliest known currency is almost exactly as old as the earliest known cities. Farmers would deposit a large amount of grain at the local temple (which were effectively the tax collection sites of the time) and were given clay tokens on exchange, which could be used in place of actual goods at tax time.

This system was set up because of the nature of farming: you make a lot of product in a short time, but most of the year you’re just waiting for your crop to grow. These tokens allowed farmers to pay their tax duties up front, and then have physical proof that they’d done so when paying taxes outside of harvest season. But it was only a matter of time before people started trading those tokens amongst each other. “Give me a goat and I’ll give you these tokens so you don’t have to pay tribute next season.”

Before that, villages were pretty much just hand-to mouth communities of just a few families. Surviving, sure, but not in the kind of complex society where one needs to draw equivalence between extremely different forms of labor.

Also, lsd lasts a LONG time, and it’s easier to find a whole day to fuck off into space when you’re younger. I’ve got a kid, I can’t get 12 minutes of free time at once, let alone 12 hours.

Two outlooks, neither work?

Glad everything is normal aboard Orion!

My cubicle office job often involves going downstairs to the lab so I can take measurements with equipment far too expensive for me to have at home, and even too expensive for the company to lend out to employees’ home offices.

A lot of return-to-office work is bullshit, but making absolutist blanket statements like that just weakens the argument rather than helping anybody.

They use the same banks as us, they just have a VP’s direct cell number rather than talking to a run-of-the-mill teller during business hours.

JP Morgan didn’t get all their assets by exclusivity serving low net worth individuals.

Mint is a good choice for your first linux.

Sometimes hiring managers aren’t allowed to provide any feedback because it can create legal liability.

But usually they just don’t want to.

Yeah, it really is. A plaintext document that generates an entire OS?

It’s also the French word for rooster (though spelled “coq” in that language). If these kids are learning multiple languages at once, that could cause some confusion, given how often French and English overlap.

“Weird people are more fun to hang out with”

• Me