Carl

Interesting take with Dread, because it’s one of my favorites. The only section I legitimately dislike is

The Sims will be a great case study for some future game design student, in how to take a massively popular IP and ride it straight into the fucking ground. It’s like EA intentionally makes the wrong choice at every single turn. You’d think that eventually they would stumble across the right thing to do, but somehow they seem determined to keep making bad decisions.

My complaints with the game weren’t based on the difficulty. Elden Ring was just a lifeless world that used “open world exploration” to pad the playtime. In contrast, I loved Sekiro because it was a tight concise game with solid progression and a sense of exploration without needing to cross vast swaths of nothing in between each area.

Plus I tend to dislike games that use animation locks as an artificial form of difficulty. In Sekiro, you’re consistently the fastest character in the game. The game feels responsive. If you fail to parry an attack, it’s because you as the player failed. But with most FromSoft games, they use slow animations as a way of artificially introducing difficulty.

Yeah, I always ended up doing custom bases for each resource, and then tying it all together with trains. It kept things fresh, because main bus designs absolutely suck the fun out of it. A properly organized and optimized train network is truly a marvel to behold. I always avoided going full grid with my trains, simply because I wanted to avoid the exact “micro factory inside of each square” problem you touched on.

I used a grid for my trains, but only to make blueprinting easier. Nothing worse than bringing two tracks from different parts of your base together, only to realize they can’t actually mate because the damned tracks are off by one square (one started on an odd square, another started on an even) and the tracks literally won’t let you bend them into place to meet in the middle. The grid was simply a standardized track length, so I knew my intersections would always meet up cleanly. Basically, I wanted to avoid this problem:

But I also haven’t touched Space Age at all, so maybe trains are an old meta by now.

In a statement, Murphy cited the recovery amount, personal payments by former executives, a commitment for $7 million to go to nonprofits and the absence of a confidentiality provision in a system where “wrongdoers too often hide their misdeeds by dangling compensation in front of those they victimized and trading that compensation for confidentiality or an NDA.”

Glad they stuck to their guns. I’ve been following this case for a few years now. This all began as an attempt by eBay’s C-level executives to bully a few reporters into silence. It makes perfect sense that those reporters would refuse to accept an NDA as part of the settlement, because reporting on things like this is exactly what landed them on eBay’s radar in the first place.

Not-for-profit is still a corporation, and the distinction simply means that they need to reinvest profits back into the company. A for-profit company can sit on massive amounts of stockpiled wealth, while a not-for-profit needs to find ways to reinvest that back into the company. To be clear, they can still sit on a lot of money. But all of their money needs to be earmarked for something, instead of just being a rainy day fund.

Honestly, the most surprising part about this is that NetHack is still getting active releases. Looks like 5.0.0 landed just a few months ago?

Also worth noting that each congressperson only gets a few minutes to ask their questions, otherwise hearings could stretch pretty much indefinitely. So a hostile witness can run the clock out by rambling, while avoiding answering the questions they don’t want to answer.

That’s why “reclaiming my time” is such a common thing to hear in these hearings: the congressperson is saying “they’re rambling instead of answering the question I asked, so I’m pausing my timer and reclaiming the wasted time they spent rambling.”

And here’s a reminder that ERs in some states are required by law to ask about your immigration/citizenship status. The cruelty is always the point.

Also, they’re not even requesting it be shared directly with the government. That apparently isn’t enough. They’re requiring that the personally identifiable information (names, addresses, diagnoses, etc) also be shared with an independent contractor. An independent contractor that these hospitals have no confidentiality agreements with, no privacy guarantees from, and no security audits to review. They’re being required to send all of their patents’ PII to this shadowy contractor, so that contractor can do throws hands up in the air and gestures around wildly with it.

You may be dealing with vaginismus, which is a condition where the vaginal muscles involuntarily tense up in anticipation of insertion. It can make sex (or any other kinds of insertion, like tampons or pelvic exams) extremely painful, because you’re stretching the tensed muscles the same way a muscle cramp would.

It’s largely considered a psychological condition, because it is typically based on anxiety surrounding the insertion. And that anxiety can quickly become self-perpetuating, as pain from insertion will likely cause future anxiety. Therapy (and practice) can help alleviate that anxiety, which can alleviate the tensed muscles, which alleviates the pain.

I obviously don’t want to try to diagnose you over a simple Reddit comment. But it may be worth looking into, because that much pain during insertion isn’t normal. And it’s possible that previous doctors have simply brushed you off, because many doctors don’t tend to take women’s pain seriously.

Literally Poe’s Law in action, but applied to real life where the sarcasm is extremely apparent.