Slant’s one of my favorites too, I also play a lot of Loopy, Dominosa and Bridges.

I’ve heard of them, I might consider trying one someday, but the research and effort to set it up is an obstacle. Plus I don’t run Windows any more, and I don’t even know what Linux support for it is like.

I’m sorry but… 20 years behind? What new features has, say, Word even offered in the past 20 years beside that damn ribbon?

I haven’t checked to see if someone’s mentioned it yet (it’s a long thread!) but I want to put in a word for a piece of software I’m always touting: Simon Tatham’s Puzzle Collection!

It’s a wonder! 40 different kinds of randomly-generated puzzles, all free, all open source, and available for practically every platform. You can play it on Windows, Mac (if you compile it), Linux, iOS, Android, Java and Javascript in a web browser. It should rightfully be high up on the iOS and Android stores, but it’s completely free, has no ads, doesn’t track you and has no one paying to promote it. No one has a financial incentive to show it to you, so they don’t. But you should know about it.

I think you’re overstating things a bit, but it’s true that I keep getting caught up by weird behaviors.

I paste image data into a layer. I drag the layer a bit to get it where I want it. I try drawing on that layer: nothing happens. Turns out, when I pasted the image, it created a layer the size of the current image with all the extra space filled with transparent pixels. When I dragged it, the transparent part of the layer that had been off the image’s borders was actually dead space, and it won’t accept drawing into it until I go under layers and choose to expand the layer to the dimensions of the image. Once you realize what’s happening it’s not so bad, but until that point it’s the software working how you don’t expect it, and some people are going to drive themselves batty trying to figure it out.

And just now in 3.0 I’ve discovered, if I copy a rectangular part of an image using the Rectangle Select tool, then paste that data into another program, what gets pasted is a transparent box the size of the original image full of transparent pixels, with the copied part opaque in the middle of it in its former position inside the image.

It seems like it’s purposely trying to come up with an unintuitive way to implement my actions. I don’t remember it being like this in the past. What happened?

City of Heroes, everything by Atari Games, the Wizardry series, the Ultima series, many others. I’m old, and I remember some of the games, and developers, we’ve lost.

What will probably happen is a one or two term slump. What’s different between then and now is the internet and social media, which fills most people’s brains with a deluge of noise. In addition to the effects of misinformation daily telling people that the moon is the sun, most algorithms prioritize novelty, and nothing’s more novel than the most stupidly wrong-headed take. We constantly hear the opinions of people who should be laughed out of the room! We sit and chuckle, but there’s tens of millions of people who have poor media skills who it can actually influence.

Something I’ve seen far less reaction to than I expected? While the Switch 2 looks like it takes standard MicroSD cards, it DOESN’T. It takes the fairly obscure MicroSD Express standard! I can’t even BUY an SD Express card locally right now! It seems likely, at launch, that Nintendo’s branded cards will be the only ones people can get that will work with it!

The Switch 2 has 256GB of onboard storage, much more than the Switch, it is true. But it’s also backwards compatible with the Switch, and lets users bring their old digital library over with them. I have a 256GB card in my Switch, it’s nearly full, and it doesn’t have my whole library on it! If I got a Switch 2, I’d have it filled up on day 1!

And the MicroSD card issue won’t be obvious to most buyers. Parents will get their kids Switch 2s, and wonder why their old card won’t work with it. It’ll look to them like the Switch 2 or the card is broken, unless they implement a physical lock against incompatible cards, and I don’t know if SD cards even support those. Also, SD Express cards are more expensive than standard ones.

This could end up being a debacle almost on the scale of the price (which, as others have noted, isn’t even Nintendo’s fault entirely).

Alex Hirsch is awesome. I could see Grunkle Stan trying to work AI into one of his scams, Ford would have to talk him out of it.

I know FlyingSquid from another community, and sent them a private message just a few days ago saying hello. (I didn’t know they had been missing at the time.) FS is awesome, and I really hope they’re okay.

Both were great, but both also took me a week to get through, a piece at a time.

G’bye! So long! Bon voyage! Don’t forget to not write!

The Vice President can’t do that without “a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide” on their side. That can’t happen without either the aid of people that Trump would have to select (and he’s notorious for picking toadies) or Congress passing a bill to create a body to evict him.

Doom is overstating things, especially with the fucking electoral college in the US and election shenanigans afoot in Georgia. Don’t lose focus!

So you see, a good reason to go to the polls (if you’re a US citizen of course) is to make it so Musk and other billionaires will have wasted all that money.

I love it when foodstuffs get put in scarequotes.

An actual ally character from Shiren the Wanderer 4, which never made it to the US: https://archive.rpgamer.com/games/mystdungeon/shiren4/art/shiren41.jpg

(Why did it never make it to the US? It has some, uh, unfortunate NPC designs.)

I understand this impulse. It is popular to demonize people on the other side, and truthfully, their voting for Trump in the past is a severe issue. They once in a while ask me for computer help, but this whole matter has made me reluctant to do it.

I’m not going to call them good people because voting for Trump has identified them as not being among those. But in some ways they’re decent? They don’t think they’re evil. They don’t stab people in the back personally. They work hard. They’re honest face-to-face. it’s mostly on the national stage that their odious beliefs are brought out.

There are lots of people like that here. I feel like, if they can be brought to see, viscerally, what the effects of their political decisions are, that could be the breaking point that changes their political beliefs. January 6th might have been one such event.

Not voting for the opponent in a two-party race is like a half vote for the other guy, but wouldn’t it be nice if they came around and gave Biden a full vote each?

And yet, that is what those models claim to do. If the possibility of late-breaking events is not included in the model then the model is flawed.