It’s not unheard of, though. Modern Warfare 2 had only a 70MB file on its disc, basically a license, and required you to download the actual game.

Note I’m not defending this. It’s a nightmare for game preservation and pushes us ever further in the direction of never owning anything. I’m just saying Nintendo isn’t breaking new ground with this particular outrage.

For “listened to a boombox outside,” does it matter whether you did so voluntarily or just heard it because someone else was playing one too loudly for you to ignore? In other words, I’m either 0 or 1.

As kids my sister and I found a set of old 1950’s World Book Encyclopedias that a family in our neighborhood was throwing out. We brought them home on a wagon. We used them for years. They were definitely kinda dated–like, in the article about guinea pigs, it claimed they were the perfect animal for scientific research because they don’t feel pain, which is obviously bullshit and/or propaganda. But that was actually kind of eye-opening for me at the time, because I didn’t have a lot of experience of seemingly authoritative things that were also in error. It still had a lot of useful info, too.

Hubris is a kind of boastful pride–like a sense of invulnerability. It also implies a kind of dramatic irony, that this sense of invulnerability will eventually prove false. (The term comes from ancient Greek theater, where it’s often the Heroic Flaw that will eventually be the undoing of the tragic hero.)

Chutzpah is more…audacity, nerve, gall. A person with chutzpah doesn’t believe they can’t be harmed; they’re just willing to bald-face it out in the hopes you won’t actually call them on it. In English it can have a positive connotation, the way “cojones” tends to, but it can also have a negative connotation, like “cheek” or “gall.” It comes from Yiddish, where apparently it’s more uniformly negative. (Leave it to us Americans to interpret a condemnation of shameless effrontery as somehow laudatory.)

I guess I would say the key difference is that someone with hubris thinks they are invulnerable, whereas a person with chutzpah is aware they are vulnerable and absolutely refusing to act like it.

They’re definitely kind of related, but they just have really different feels to them

I never actually played Fable 2 (it never came to PC) but 1 was decent for its time, and yeah, 3 kind of fell apart. (You get to what seems like the halfway point, then the rest of the game plays out in a few minutes, entirely through menus, and is super boring.)

But mostly I’m finding it hard to imagine how a new take on this would stand out in today’s market. It’s, let’s see, a third-person action game with RPG elements tacked on. The setting is…generic western fairytale fantasy. I’m not saying the game couldn’t be good, but what would be distinctive about it? Having people call you “chicken chaser”? What is the contribution of the “Fable” pedigree here, apart from Molyneux baggage?

The one I thought was a good compromise was 14 years, with the option to file again for a single renewal for a second 14 years. That was the basic system in the US for quite a while, and it has the benefit of being a good fit for the human life span–it means that the stuff that was popular with our parents when we were kids, i.e. the cultural milieu in which we were raised, would be public domain by the time we were adults, and we’d be free to remix it and revisit it. It also covers the vast majority of the sales lifetime of a work, and makes preservation and archiving more generally feasible.

5 years may be an overcorrection, but I think very limited terms like that are closer to the right solution than our current system is.

Sean Duffy is the transportation secretary.

I should preface this by saying I don’t actually have a steam deck yet, so I haven’t tested these on there. So I’m only commenting on the games themselves. These are listed as deck “verified” in the steam store, though.

One I haven’t seen mentioned yet is Yoku’s Island Express. Breezy summer vibes, not much difficulty. It’s kind of a pinball metroidvania.

Tinykin is another game with a very cozy/low stakes feel. It’s an exploration/collectathon platformer with cute environments made up of household objects.

Littlewood is a life sim sort of game, kind of like Stardew Valley, but it’s extremely chill. There’s no time limit or anything like that.

And others have mentioned these, but Toem, Alba, and Donut County are all very good and gentle games too.

Oh, and Tchia. That one has some dark moments at times, mostly in cutscenes, but when you’re actually playing it’s mostly gentle and island-y.

Maybe also Wuppo? It’s a strange one. The story and humor and animation are pretty great in that one, but there are some boss fights that can get a little frustrating. It’s mostly a fairly chill platformer, but then it’s got kind of bullet-hell-adjacent bosses. I still really like the game, but it’s not quite as purely relaxing as some of the others here.

Pikuniku is kind of in the same position as Wuppo, but I liked it a bit less. The humor feels a little more forced or stilted, and the frustrating bits are because the controls are kinda floaty. My niece really liked it when she was 8, though, so it had that going for it.

Hope this helps! I’ve been looking for this kind of game a lot the past few years

It’s a British TV anthology series similar to The Twilight Zone, but most of the episodes are about technologic dystopias

It was in Black Mirror years ago.

I feel like there’s a buddhist lesson about impermanence here.

Thanks, Stefon.

Yeah. I thought it was important context that they had backpedalled, but I did not intend to downplay the severity of the issue.

Supposedly they’re unblocked again, but there’s been no explanation from Xitter about the issue. Definitely seems suspicious that this happened while DOGE is having trouble with whistleblowers using Signal, though.

https://gizmodo.com/x-briefly-blocked-then-unblocked-signal-links-as-federal-workers-seek-security-2000564966

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/digital_data.png

I think it’s reasonably likely. There was a research paper about how to do basically that a couple years ago. If you need a basic LLM trained on a specialized form of input and output, getting the expensive existing LLMs to generate that text for you is pretty efficient/inexpensive, so it’s a reasonable way to get a baseline model. Then you can add stuff like chain of reasoning and mixture of experts to improve the performance back up to where you need it. It’s not going to be a way to push the state of the art forward, but it’s sure a cheap way to catch up to models that have done that pushing.

I wouldn’t really say Republicans deliver what they say they’ll deliver. A week before election Trump was saying he’d have grocery prices lower on day one, and then as soon as he was elected he suddenly became aware that was complicated and the wouldn’t be anything he could do about it. Part of his campaign the first time around, too, was that he would provide a brilliant replacement for Obamacare, but after four years he’d done absolutely nothing on that front, and four years after that he still insisted he was going to do that, but admitted that he only had “concepts of a plan.”

They carry out a lot of the culture war aspects of their promises. And they carry out the promises they make to their billionaire megadonors. Everything else they hope gets forgotten about.

Yeah, that’s plausible for cooking in general, but boiling vs poaching is a pretty fine distinction.

I’m also intrigued as to why they think hard boiling vs poaching the egg has any bearing on its calorie content.

Hey, it’s not just that! It’s also decimal 88 in the ASCII table.