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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • neuracnu@lemmy.blahaj.zonetomemes@lemmy.worldI still give it a flick
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    1 month ago

    Ranking the bead track options of the Anatex Enterprise’s Classic Bead Maze

    https://i0.wp.com/deiequipment.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/CBM1310.jpg

    • Yellow: A fine tutorial track for bead maze novices. If you have no idea where to start, this functions as a passable introduction and training option. There’s not much elevation to be found here, though you do get one brief vertical drop and a 180-degree direction change midway through the track, but this is undercut by the track not ending with this drop, forcing the player to trudge the bead along to its final destination. This track isn’t completely devoid of thrills, but they’re meager at best.
      • C Tier
    • Orange: Less-refined maze fans may be excused for considering this their personal favorite. It does boast the most vertically pronounced track, both track routes end with satisfying vertical drops (including the single largest drop of all options provided) and the bead options, which we rarely discuss, are all the satisfying heavy spherical variety. But, despite all these superlatives, the fatal flaw of the orange track lies in the middle; the TWO vertical hairpin turns diving into the center of the maze field are buckets of cold water that ruin an otherwise terrific experience. Beads are hijacked from their high-flying dreams and drop coldly into this prison where fun goes to die. We all know this to be true as beads will inevitably stack up here, like so many dirty dishes in a lazy person’s kitchen sink, until all other options have been spent and you unwillingly are forced into the drudgery of pushing them through the pair of hairpins to their destinations. But, once again, the final drops do provide the user with genuine satisfaction; perhaps an early lesson in cold adult maturity for toddlers that life will be filled with grand ups and downs but they may not be had without hard-earned repetitive effort. These good times are served with a side of morality. You can’t ask for much more.
      • A Tier
    • Red & Blue : These tracks are neither complex or satisfying enough to warrant separate ranking descriptions. They exist merely to fill space, offering all the fun and delight of a sliding puzzle piece CAPTCHA. With short track heights, it’s not uncommon for these tracks to be left untouched entirely during gaming sessions. I will give the red track slightly more credit for both it’s height and the choice to be routed through the Orange track’s hairpin vertical; a morsel of drama in an otherwise bland, uninspired endeavor.
      • C Tier and D Tier (respectfully)
    • Green: When people remember their childhood bead maze experiences, this is what comes to mind. Undoubtedly sacrifices had to be made at the expense of other tracks for this one to shine as it does. Swooping playfully among the highest heights of the field, beads can often complete their full track circuit without the need to retract and re-extend one’s hand, this is the experience that designers envisioned, with each track rider capable of completing its journey to either end from the apex with a single flick of the finger. The green track is the pinnacle, a grand achievement in track design, both in form and function.
      • S Tier






  • FYI, Sesame Street went public-private in 2016 when they signed a deal with HBO to fund new episodes which then were permitted to air on PBS several months later.

    In Dec 2024, HBO/Max called the deal off and effectively cancelled the show. Now they’re shopping for a new home and, with the threats of PBS funding cuts, the notion of returning to PBS is in question.

    So basically the showrunners of Sesame Street are at least partially responsible for the corner they painted themselves into here.



  • This is an issue to take up with individual website operators.

    Almost every large website is going to be protected by both a CDN and an application firewall, either of which can be configured to slow down, gatekeep or outright block traffic coming from an IP that is suspected to be a VPN. And there are many reasons why they could be doing this:

    • websites that rely on advertising to operate get less value from VPN users. A lot of users using the same IP address means advertisers have a more difficult time showing them relevant ads, thus paying the website less for them. So there is a financial incentive for a website to convince its users to stop using their VPN voluntarily.
    • a security-minded site could be concerned with malicious actors using VPNs to shield their identities and locations during attack/breech attempts.
    • a site seeking to protect its content from automated scraping by various bots (search crawlers, LLM data harvesting or competitors) may believe that those actors are using VPNs to hide their identities.

    The only solution I can see is to reach out to the site operators themselves and explain your valid use case. I’ve done this a few times myself. I’ve never received a response, but some of the websites that I visit which used to block my VPN traffic eventually stopped blocking it.

    If you don’t like something, make some noise.

    Alternatively, you could use a cloud provider to spin up a micro instance running your own OpenVPN server that you re-roll IPs on occasionally, but this takes more effort and doesn’t really address the root cause.


  • neuracnu@lemmy.blahaj.zonetomemes@lemmy.worldA Curious Fact
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    3 months ago

    Not just a tool for monitoring, but a tool for propaganda delivery and indoctrination for anyone with a message and cash to burn.

    Proper journalism costs money and requires focused attention to consume and metabolize. Propaganda is shiny, sweet, goes down easy and it’s always free.