That allows the people to get their hate out, and resets the playing field for the next election cycle when people realize the Conservatives haven’t done shit all to make life more affordable.

Traditionally this hasn’t been how Canadian politics has played out. We tend to have long running federal governments over single term governments except in cases of extremely disastrous political results (ie. forcing an early election by a vote of non-confidence, etc…)

Canadian voters seem to be very very patient. It won’t matter how shitty PP and the Cons are as a government, voters will keep on electing them in for a decade or more before finally having enough. Same as we did with the Liberals, and same as we did with Harper before that.

Yeah, not a high-end business.

You are incredibly naive.

Jinkies!..I wonder what it could be…What a mystery, Scoob!

One of my favourite games for the Genesis. It was my introduction to Shadowrun and to this day, I can’t begin to describe how it moulded my conception of cyberpunk and my own writing as a result. It’s one of three games that, in history, has legitimately changed my view of video games (Shadowrun for Genesis, Fallout 3, and XCom Enemy Unknown/Within)

Now, for your questions:

• You’re not imagining the difficulty. I too recently tried playing it on an emulator and found it more difficult than I remember. I think it’s because the slight lag on emulators between firing your pistol and it actually firing it is enough on the emulator that you simply can’t win a fight. This (I’m guessing) is because of modern displays rather than old CRTs that it was designed for, kind of like jumping with Mario feels just a little bit different.
• It’s pretty grindy in some respect. But that’s kind of the reason that it felt so different to me back then. You’re a Shadowrunner. You’re doing jobs. Yes there’s a quest, but it’s one of the first games I remember where you could just ignore it for a while and punch a clock to go hack some corporation if you wanted to.
• Killing innocents is entirely up to you, Chummer.
• Samurai class is the all around’er. But I think Decker is the “canonical” way to play because decking is a fundamental part of the gameplay aesthetic.

I don’t know enough to know if my ideas are achievable, or if I’d just be bashing my head against the wall.

Achievable is subjective, and even if you progress a ways and learn something that makes you realize that that particular project can’t be achieved how you envisioned it, you still have the knowledge to either a) figure out new ways to achieve the same effect, or b) take to a new project.

Knowledge builds on knowledge builds on knowledge. If factor in not starting a project is not knowing enough to know if it’s achievable or not, you’ll never actually get the necessary knowledge to figure that out. You can’t know how to do something until you try to do it…fundamentally.

I’m 48. Last year, during a period of unemployment, I decided that to kill time I wanted to create a 3D aircraft model for my flight simulator (X-Plane). I had dabbled in Blender in the past, but nothing too in depth. So I sat down and just did it.

Some of the features I wanted to implement required plugins that had to made with Lua (a programming language) so again…I just did it.

Age and learning have nothing to do with each other. Regardless of the topic. I feel like maybe the only valid reason that such ideas took hold is because the older we get, the less time we have to focus on learning new things, and so it can seem as though we can’t learn, when in reality we just don’t have the time to. That’s certainly what I found to be the case personally. It wasn’t until I had literally nothing else to do that I could focus on really learning 3D Modelling and basic programming.

The solution to that, that I found, was to be project based. I wouldn’t have made as much progress if I didn’t specifically have some thing I wanted to make, whether that’s an app, a 3D model, or whatever.

Do conservative voters just need a daily dose of misplaced resentment and rage to keep them going?

Yes. Conservative politics is (and always has been) the strategy of giving your followers someone to either fear, hate, look down on, or increasingly all three and then telling them repeatedly that they are the only party who can “fix” it. It’s not about governing, it’s about stoking anger and fear so that donors keep giving them money.

Pre-civil rights it was African Americans in the US and Indigenous people in Canada. Then it became homosexuals, then Mexicans, then migrants in general, then so-called “illegals” and refugees. Then 9-11 happened and it became Muslims. Then brown people in general. And now it’s circled back around to LGBTQ+ and trans folk.

Pick your marginalized society of choice and insert it into the very same playbook that’s always been used.

Little Pierre Poppinfresh isn’t doing or saying anything that hasn’t been Conservative policy from the very beginning. It’s just that thanks to the Trump effect, he no longer has to be subtle about it like his predecessors did.

Nice try, Voldemort. But that fake nose doesn’t make you look any less like yourself…

On today’s episode of “beaurocratic horse-shit”…

Holy crap this is ridiculous. I feel terrible for her. As a child born only a couple of years after my own parents immigrated from Portugal to Canada, I can’t imagine.

Closest thing we’ll ever get to Firefly: The Game.

Enjoyed the atmosphere, the dialogue, the music and the feel of the weapons when they are being fired.

Loved Ellie and Parvati as companions. Parvati’s story is so goddamned sweet and is the emotional heart of the game in my opinion.

Ellie is a redhead, so she’s automatically awesome.

I liked the kid, bit don’t remember his name. Kind of generic and forgettable.

Nyoka has great dialogue during fight scenes, but again, kind of forgettable and her side quest was boring. But the voice actor did a great job with her.

The priest is a twat and I’ve literally never picked him up again on any new play through.

In conclusion, hella’ fun, but not open enough for more than two or three playthroughs. Once you’ve explored all the options, there’s not much to do anymore.

I wonder what kind of lens they use to make the horizon curve like that…

/s obviously

I used Crucial brand in both my desktop and my laptop upgrades a few years ago (I don’t remember the exact model…mx500 maybe?) And I haven’t had a single issue.

Absolutely rock-solid.

This makes me suddenly want to re-watch Half and Catch Fire

In every Fallout game, (and now Starfield) as well, I immediately choose to use guns from only one or two ammo types, and collect the rest as just trading currency.

I can’t remember the last time I had to actually pay caps/credits for something since the transaction always comes to zero. I take your stack of med-kits and you get 476 bits of .45 caliber ammunition. Oh…you’re a medic and have no use for it. Too bad.

You’re not wrong, by any means. But it was also a pretty fun popcorn flick.

Yes, they could have come up with a better title, but in the modern world, the number of people who know where the title came from is likely a lot less than it used to be as TikTok and YouTube slowly leach away brain cells from each new generation, so why would they bother?

And for the record, I enjoyed it. It was silly sci-fi schlock. I don’t need everything to be 2001.

I hope you’re right. But my trust level for corporations is somewhere between 0 and 0.1

TypeScript is the new DOC format.

Create a language/format. Spend all of your effort making it ubiquitous until it becomes the default “standard” in the workplace. Then charge a metric fuck-tonne for the “official” software that makes use of it.

It’s how Office became their cash cow. They create the proprietary doc format, get everyone using it, and once it’s embedded in the workplace, charge exorbitantly for the software that uses it.

Once they get everyone using TS as a new industry standard, they’ll find a way to make people have to pay for it. Mark my words.

Silent Hunter III

Sink some tonnage.

I’ve said for years that the very last power we have as consumers is the ability to turn off our internet and still be able to use our devices. That is my minimum expectation of any company.

Fridge needs an internet connection, fuck you. TV won’t work unless it’s connected to the internet, fuck you.

But most especially (and this is why I moved to Linux originally), computer needs to always be connected to the internet even if all I’m doing is opening an office program that has nothing to do online? Go fuck yourself.

The ability to unplug my ethernet cable and still be able to use 99% of my computer with the exception of email and a web browser is the absolutely most basic human right left to us.