That’s because, to my understanding, the prerequisite to be able to launch one is “handle the raw, unfiltered firehose of all the traffic on the entire platform”. A relay has to be a mirror of the entire company’s hosting infastructure, and you’d have to essentially do it for free. It’s no puzzle to me why no one’s done it yet.

I’d buy controlling share of all three companies that own Pokemon and change absolutely nothing except fund Game Freak to hire more software talent and give them enough time for an actual development cycle worth a damn.

Sure, but then the wait staff expects you to tip at least 20% for simply being given one, and if you don’t you’re an asshole.

This actually explains some of the formulas in research papers I’ve read.

One can more or less envision the President as the CEO of Federal Government, Inc. and executive orders as internal memos to the employees.

If you don’t work there, following the memo is not your problem.

But if you do any kind of business with someone who does work there, you can be hit by the secondhand effects.

In the specific case the “boss” happens to be a timer, this is a more or less accurate description of speedrunning.

Security questions don’t care what you put in there. It’s not an exam. It’s basically just an alt password.

I just generate a string of alphanumeric text from my password generator and stuff those in there. If I lose my password vault somehow I’m cooked anyway, so.

Worse still, the pattern does not continue like one would expect.

• Nominal: 2x4 – Actual: 1.5" x 3.5"
• Nominal: 2x6 – Actual: 1.5" x 5.5"
• Nominal: 2x8 – Actual: 1.5" x 7.25"
• Nominal: 2x10 – Actual: 1.5" x 9.25"
• Nominal: 2x12 – Actual: 1.5" x 11.25"

There’s just an arbitrary point where they decided to take an extra 1/4" bite out of it. I’m not sure whether that’s more of an effect of shrinkage from kiln drying being proportional to the original length or an effect of industry practice to mill smaller boards to eke out more cuts per tree.

And for the record, yes, I am aware the discrepancy is not entirely explained by shrinkage. They do a planing step after drying. But the shrinkage is a not insignificant part of it. They have to round down to the nearest convenient dimension from wherever the shrinkage stops.

If longer boards shrink more, the finished boards would necessarily have to be smaller. I question whether that’s the effect at play, though, because I believe there was a phase in the industry where that extra quarter inch wasn’t taken off, and they changed their minds about it later.

I’ve yet to see any open lemm.ee prejudice anywhere. AFAIK it’s the largest completely inoffensive instance and that’s exactly what I was looking for.

I started on .ml and had the same experience.

The only reason I quit is because the 0.19 update finally made TOTP not suck ass, I decided to activate it on my account, I had a skill issue with my digital keyring that caused me to lose my secret, and my session cookie in my Lemmy app eventually expired. Didn’t sign up with an email either so no account recovery was in the cards.

Generally, I don’t think most people bother to read the instance suffixes on usernames at all unless the comment is somehow inflammatory. I sure don’t.

Of the people who say anything about it, there seems to be two mutually exclusive camps of people on Lemmy in regards to how it should be structured.

There’s those who want it to be a drop-in replacement for whatever platform they migrated from (Reddit, ususally), with everything cultured in one simple, easy-to-browse place where there’s enough activity to support diversity, just without the enshittification, even though the centralization they crave is exactly what invites the enshittification…

…and then there’s those who specifically want the site to stay fragmented, because that’s the whole point of federation, it keeps out all the riff raff, and prevents the platform from losing what makes it so great. But many of them complain about why it isn’t growing as fast as they’d like it to, despite the fact that the fragmentation of community is by far the single greatest barrier preventing the mass adoption they yearn for.

Each one seems to want a piece of what the other has.

I got a 1U rack server for free from a local business that was upgrading their entire fleet. Would’ve been e-waste otherwise, so they were happy to dump it off on me. I was excited to experiment with it.

Until I got it home and found out it was as loud as a vacuum cleaner with all those fans. Oh, god no…

I was living with my parents at the time, and they had a basement I could stick it in where its noise pollution was minimal. I mounted it up to a LackRack.

Since moving out to a 1 bedroom apartment, I haven’t booted it. It’s just a 70 pound coffee table now. :/

can you burn a Luigi board?

I think my purest moment of gaming bliss was experiencing completely blind the last handful of worlds in Super Mario Odyssey while buzzed with a few whiskeys. God, my soul was in orbit with that experience. Pure, unfettered joy and whimsy through and through and cinematically epic when it wanted to be. I wouldn’t call it the best game ever or even my favorite game ever, but god damn it, it struck me just right way at just the right time. It was something truly special.

More games I will cherish will certainly follow, and have followed. But for that specific set of vibes and circumstances, I don’t know if I’ll ever top that peak from playing a video game ever again.

Ah, a gellow Ghost Trick enjoyer!

perhaps they should just lay square eggs

I only actively seek games I want to play. I have negative desire to hoard games I know I will never open. I probably wouldn’t take the clutter even if they paid me to take it. Steam or Epic.

My Steam library is caked up with a bunch of decade old Humble Bundle packing peanuts and frankly I kind of wish it wasn’t.

On the rare chance a game I’ve been wanting to play is the free givaway, I might take it if it’s on Steam just because I’m already invested in that platform. If Epic was the one giving it away I probably wouldn’t bother. I don’t need my games library splintered across multiple launchers. I’m already annoyed at having the one. I’d prefer no launcher at all.

For your unhinged pleasure, if you haven’t yet experienced.

I love The Polar Express.

The most widely hated thing about it is the mocap. Not much to say here, I’m just straight-up not bothered by it. I think it looks fine. It’s not incredibly expressive like a stylized animated film could be, but it doesn’t look actively bad to me in any way.

The way the titular express inexplicably gains and loses rolling stock scene by scene and behaves in absurd ways like bending around the mountain are a common punchline. “BuT iT’s A mAgIc TrAiN!!!” doesn’t really solve it for me either. But on a casual viewing it’s mostly inoffensive. A silly curiosity.

Some say the plot of the film spends too much time aimlessly noodling around and throwing in needless filler scenes. Meh. If you ask me that’s where all the meat of the film is. The actual plot of the film has nothing interesting to say. “Kid doesn’t believe in Santa. Magic Christmas hijinks ensue. Kid believes in Santa now. The end.” Riveting. Nah, the so-called “filler” is absolutely the meal here.

The fact that the film literally has five named characters, and the main character isn’t one of them is hilarious. To even get to that number you have to count both the Scrooge puppet and the kid who the elves were monitoring in a single scene as characters, and after that, one of the remaining three is Santa Claus. Just more weight to my point that the story doesn’t matter, lmao.

Say what you will about the animation, but the cinematography is incredible. So many dynamic long-track camera shots from interesting angles. Especially whenever the steam locomotive is on screen. God, steam locomotives are so fucking cool. I don’t even care that it’s full of inaccuracies if you actually look up close. They put a lot of effort into it and that effort shows. It’s quite the treat.

The set design of the North Pole is fantastic. It’s admittedly kinda fucked that it’s modeled after a real world Pullman company town, but I guess it’s appropriate as a joke about the whole Santa’s workshop thing while also incorporating a neat little nod to real life railroad lore. Beyond that, it’s blindingly radiant of all that Victorian-era charm that most of the modern secular Christmas tradition is born from. The serene night snow amidst the rustic red brickwork illuminated by glowing amber gaslamps… augh, it’s so aggressively cozy!

All the pneumatic and other steampunk-adjacent elf tech is a treat as well. The film is certainly no slouch in breathing its own unique spin of whimsy into Santa’s toy factory. It’s not the most whimsical out there, but it’s definitely putting in work.

Alan Silvestri’s score is phenomenal. It’s all delightfully extra. Every single song in the film that’s an original composition is a banger and every song that isn’t an original composition for the film is part of that time-tested canon of hits from the 50s and 60s. I think a lot of people are fed up sick of the latter but, I dunno, I grew up listening to them on my Now That’s What I Call Christmas CD, and to me their sound is synonymous with that warm, nostalgic holiday cheer I get from the season. Even if I don’t get around to actually watching the movie, you know damn well I’m putting The Polar Express’s soundtrack in my December shuffle.

Genuine S tier Christmas film. Well worth every single fault.

I think the phrasing they wanted was “The person with the least disincentive to do the ethical thing”.

These people aren’t inherently more ethical. They simply have the fewest barriers standing in the way of turning it into action.