Settings is the bloat. Control Panel reigns supreme.

Walz and AOC did a stream together during campaign season, so there’s probably a good chance they’re staying in relatively close communication.

The elected Republicans are largely doing what they said they’d do to get elected, whether or not they’re good people or support good policy, they’re representing what their constituents voted for.

It doesn’t matter if every R is worse, an R wouldn’t have Chucklefuck’s seat, which is why he needs to be primaried out next time, and we hope whoever does that can faithfully represent the will of the people who elected them.

The 10 Dems that supported this fiasco are not representing their constituents and those constituents have no recourse under the law to fix that other than just waiting to hopefully not get tricked next time. Traitors deserve all the ire they get.

The only 100% effective method I’ve found is pulling the plug.

Idk about anyone else, but my struggles to even just execute the command to shut off a timer/alarm…

It’s near Greenland?

Contracts are no where near that standardized, it might just come down to the specific language/clause that was used, either done deliberately or just some lawyer group’s normalized process.

If I know anything about financial systems, I expect that some super critical process in Treasury is coded in like assembly via punch cards in some yellow aged plastic box using an Intel 4004 with like 640 bits of RAM supported by like a single centenarian on an as needed support contract because that’s literally the last person on earth who knows how it works and why.

Ok, if you are against hard feelings, cross off anything that is directly competitive, that would be any game where players directly and willfully interact with each other in a way where one gains while another loses as part of the core gameplay. To varying degrees things like blood rage, root, monopoly/solarquest, everdell, 7 wonders, clank, carcassonne, ticket to ride, dominion, etc.

If your group must have competition, you’ll need to stick to independent competitive games, this is anything where players are primarily taking actions in their own space and are progressing largely independent from each other. Example recommendations include things like Quacks of Quedlinburg, Shifting Stones, most roll and writes (welcome to series, cartographer with a minor exception), cascadia, verdant, etc

If you can do without competing with each other, cooperative games are definitely the way to go to minimize hard feelings (it’d only come up then if someone thought another player did something suboptimal causing a loss). The variety here is actually pretty large: simple trick taking games like The Crew series Information sharing games, like Mysterium “Combat” games of all complexities (generally ascending: Lord of the rings storybook, marvel united, D&D board games, Heroquest, Stuffed fables, Atlantis Rising, legends of andor, horrified, Arkham horror, marvel champions, mansions of madness 2nd edition, spirit island, Gloomhaven) Mystery/puzzle games (Adventure Games series, Exit The Game series, Animals of Baker Street)

I’d also like to call out 2 other games specifically: Stella, while it is a 1 winner competitive game where your score depends largely on other players, the push your luck and prisoner’s dilemma aspect of how you earn points I think largely removes the feel bad aspect of competition. Kitchen Rush: pure cooperative, but it’s also a real-time game where everyone is taking simultaneous actions to run a restaurant in 4 real time minutes stretches.

Just wanted to add, for the fully cooperative Heroquest experience, they came out with an app for the new edition (but it’s compatible with the original base game) that fully takes over the Zargon/DM role.

There’s actually a specifically cooperative expansion for Carcassonne, called Mists Over Carcassonne. It adds an element of managing a ghost population while trying to cooperatively reach a target score based on certain scenarios.

Some human ones are also just actively really bad at it. As both a manager and applicant, I’ve seen they can hinder hiring good candidates.

It probably has to do with the inability/expense of the facility to be able to properly secure outside food against other more serious kinds of contraband.

The Kickstarter wasn’t just selling “the book”, it sold four things (we’ll get back to this) and wasn’t trying to “get back at Amazon”. I believe the Kickstarter was an appropriate option, even without considering his inability to independently bankroll the final scope of the project.

The four things:

1. A Premium Hardcover of the novels. This is the first time that the initial print version of one of his novels was released as a Premium Hardcover (albeit they did glue the binding), demand was very much not predictable and using KS helped to ensure everyone who wanted the limited print hardcover could get one (over 90k of each were needed).

2. DRM-free ebook of the novels. This was entirely risk-free for the consumer, they already essentially existed. This was essentially a pre-order, it is really only justified on KS because of #1.

3. Audiobook of the novel. Similar to #2, however I guess there was some minor consumer risk in that the audio needed to be recorded still, but Brandon does have reliable narrators and though he tried and failed at getting special narrators, that wasn’t part of the pitch.

4. Swag Boxes. This is the biggest item type to justify KS usage, they needed tools like they get from KS to be able to properly manage the monthly subscription box fulfillment. This did have some consumer risk, because it isn’t what they normally do, Sanderson couldn’t bank roll it himself (even after the $40M Kickstarter, he’s only got a 6M$ net worth) and it was largely an unknown in the book publishing space.

Back to the Amazon bit, it wasn’t a selling point to the KS, Amazon isn’t mentioned at all. He did decide to support competition in the Audiobook space as part of his fulfillment. In fact, all 4 of the novels are available on Amazon as print and ebooks, published through deals with his traditional publishers.

The way in which he decided to sell these novels (bundled content types and subscriptions) wasn’t something his traditional publishers were agreeable to and the KS was used as a proof of concept for that.

The KS raised $41M dollars, it’s the largest KS campaign ever by double. There’s a 0% chance the project would have been any where near remotely successful (and enjoyed by fans) if he’d tried to deliver it in a more traditional way. He didn’t have support of his publishers for that, he couldn’t afford it himself and the only other option would be a business loan, which we don’t know if he could have received a large enough one. Regardless of funding, the demand smashed expectations, less people would have got what they wanted in a traditional purchase method.

Yeah, there are bad board game companies on KS, take your complaints up with them. Which reminds me, I need to see when my physical edition pledge of Z from 2013 is due…