The sad thing about Oblivion is that there are in-game books in Morrowind and previous games that describe the empire as being in the middle of a bamboo jungle. The vibe comes off as the Roman Empire in South East Asia.

Instead we got generic high fantasy with the occasional guy wearing Roman armor.

Only as far as storyline and setting go. Other than that, it was an okay shooter.

The North Sentinel Island Sentinelese are not cannibals. They just want nothing to do with anyone not born on the island.

Which is a good policy to have, seeing as how the British genocided the rest of the Andaman Islands. They even landed on North Sentinel, kidnapped a few old people and children, and then sent the survivors back as plague bearers. (this was in 1880)

I was military before my first civilian job.

We had that lesson beat into our heads repeatedly, and yet there were still people who never quite picked up on it.

We had the consent to monitoring pop-up every single time we logged onto a government computer, and then had that consent to monitoring explicitly spelled out every three months as we had to complete a computer based training program.

For some people, it still didn’t take.

All that said, this particular thought crime detection effort is creepy as fuck.

Cutting costs and laying people off makes the books look slightly better (more cash on hand) which makes the stock price jump, which is all these ghouls want because they’re going to sell off on the high, and then bail out.

That’s not how it works. Making money today is the only thing these ghouls care about, ruining a company or brand is just dandy because they won’t be holding the bag when it bursts. They’ll have passed it to someone else. Someone else who will then work to gut the company even more before selling it to someone who will gut it and close it down.

And nothing of real value will have been made, but lots of rich asshats will be slightly richer.

Republican AGs have already said they’ll use KOSA to block anything trans related, so maybe don’t bring that up when talking to Republican senators.

Brother printers are great. If only because they don’t add all the pointless bullshit add-on “features” that everyone else does.

Brother printers, they’re just printers. Nothing more, nothing less.

They also take third party ink.

Basic used “else”.

It’s nice. “if”, “then”, and “else”. I spent a year programming a shitty roulette game on an Apple 2e back in high school. I still remember the joy of using if/then/else paired with goto to make a horrible mess of spaghetti logic.

But yeah, “else” is nice.

That’s the coin flip.

The problem is, you can’t trust ChatGPT to not lie to you.

And since generative AI is now being used all over the place, you just can’t trust anything unless you know damn well that a human entered the info, and then that’s a coin flip.

Sadly, VW has never strayed far from their roots.

They’ve always been just a little scummy on the business practices side of things. More than a little scummy during WW2…

They do sometimes have good engineering. Which means fuck all in the face of management who want to cut corners and cheat to make more money.

Yup, kbin for the win.

Just wish it had a mobile app…

Ah, another excuse to whip out my one bit of interesting temperature based trivia.

-40 is the same in Celsius and Fahrenheit, and 575 is the same in Fahrenheit and Kelvin.

I loved that series as a manga. Not watched the adaptation yet.

But it does make sense in a way. Dragon steak has been a trope for decades.

It’s just that some monsters are sentient… That raises questions when you put them on the menu.

The one thing he was at the company to do, was make good games that make good money.

Covering for rapists and threatening to kill employees is bad enough, but I can see a world where that sort of shit is, not forgiven, but swept under the rug.

That world is one where the money flows. It’s not a good world, but it’s one that’s understandable.

But fucking with the games and making shit worse? In a sane world, the Board would take a look at the company and say, no. this guy has to go for all of the above reasons.

That sane world is one where mergers and acquisitions are heavily scrutinized, and Blizzard was not allowed to merge with Activision.

Actual competition in the space means that the CEO has to actually be halfway good at the job, and maybe not a complete psycho. We don’t live in a sane world.

The only place I see liquid fuel being used is in commercial transportation, particularly in shipping and rail. Anhydrous ammonia would be perfect for shipping, and a nightmare anywhere else. That shit will fucking kill you in an instant, and those who survive just wish they were dead.

So it should only be used in highly regulated professional settings.

That said, it’s still a wonderful fuel option for those settings.

This electrolyte swaps shit? I see it as an attempt to reuse all that gas station infrastructure all over the place.

EV chargers are all over as well these days, but they’re still not anything near as ubiquitous and gas stations.

Hyperloop didn’t fail, it did exactly what Musk wanted. It killed the California high speed rail plan. At least for a few years.

Brother is the go to because their stuff is basic and functional.

All the other companies have “innovated” to the point where their shit is unusable for daily use.

I just had a flashback of trying to get cups working…

I’m sort of glad I haven’t had to use a printer in years.