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> The website also has a great team of admins and moderators, with one year’s April Fools’ joke resulting in converting all prices in deal titles to its worth in Eneloops (very popular but very expensive rechargeable batteries).

I think of them as money too. Or ammo. Get these ones:

• New battery day! 24 AA Eneloop NiMH batteries in 16 and 8 cell packs. : r/AAMasterRace

Get this package first to get the highest quality charger on the market:

• AmazonSmile: Panasonic K-KJ17MCA4BA Advanced Individual Cell Battery Charger Pack with 4 AA eneloop 2100 Cycle Rechargeable Batteries: PANASONIC: Electronics

You need that charger to get the full life out of Eneloops. If you take care of them, Eneloops will last at least a decade, maybe longer.

I've recently reduced my drinking and have been managing my anxiety better so now I have all this happy me-time to spend on hobbies and starting new hobbies! My list yesterday looked like this:

• Wood carving
• Blade-handle making (which sounded great until the best kit I could find was "For MEN ONLY" and labeled "MAN CRATE" and it turned me off so much I gave up)
• Lockpicking
• Ritual Tea
• Pen Making

I actually had a hard time picking and everything seemed really expensive, so I decided since I'm going on my first post-COVID, fully vaccinated vacation soon I'd go back to an old hobby - memory terrariums! I don't know if this is a thing or if anyone else does them, but if you do, please link because I'd love inspiration.

I just bought this terrarium. I'll add some floral foam to the base, snake some moss around, then dot with some half-pearls, add some palm trees (the place we're going has tons of palm trees), maybe an alligator. Once we come back, I'll hang some small pictures from the trip from the top of the terrarium, arrange miniature trinkets in the moss, and collage some tickets/postcards in the background. I'll also add a little vial of sand and water from our vacation somewhere. I'm excited to get back to the things I like!

Yes, they hold much better than the rubber ones do so you’re less likely to lose them. I don’t do Disney pins but I do collect pins and have a jacket that’s practically covered. Since I switched to the locking backs I haven’t lost a pin.

Here an example on amazon

So this is pretty tangentially related but I'll share anyway. If you're interested in Sumo you might be interested in an anime that came out pretty recently called Hinomaru Sumo. It's about highschool sumo wrestlers, specifically Hinomaru who is smaller than everyone else but still wants to become a Yokozuna. I mention it because until recently I'd been pretty ignorant of sumo and thought it was just big guys in diapers hugging each other but the show gave me a better understanding and a far deeper respect if the sport. If you wanna check it out its here

I'm sorry, I don't want to be that guy, but I will anyway because the terminology matters here: Rizon is an IRC network, consisting of IRC servers that users can connect to. Those servers are then connected to one another and share all info between one another to form a network, but most of the time, what server someone is on doesn't matter at all - usually networks just provide one address to connect to, from which you get automatically forwarded to a server. Freenode is a separate and unrelated network, using its own servers. Libera is also a separate network.

Aside from that, using IRC as an example of the pinnacle of decentralised FOSS communication is laughable - it's an old as shit, slowly dying platform that has always had its limitations, as much as I love it and hate to admit this. Matrix is a much better example of what modern technology is capable of. Fully decentralised to the point where anyone can spin up their own instance and connect to the global network, and there is a large variety of clients, most with modern GUIs comparable to Discord, Slack or what have you.

The "behind the scenes" aspect is a common pain point for all volunteer organisations, and can be avoided with clever planning ahead - this wasn't a thing people concerned themselves back in the '90s when the internet was still mostly a hangout for nerds and there was no need for official bodies for... pretty much anything. Libera has set itself up as a registered organisation with a full set of bylaws in Sweden, with all staff being required to join as a member (and hence be bound by the bylaws). This makes any kind of hostile takeover much more difficult to organise than in the case of Freenode, with a LLC created under uncertain circumstances and no clear established rules on what the LLC owns exactly.

It's Monday morning and I'm already tired and I don't feel like doing a write-up on this so I'll let Kotaku do it. Basically the developers of the WW2-era naval battle free-to-play game World of Warships have been gradually making worse and worse decisions (from a player's perspective) to the point where starting two weeks ago, a majority of the most prominent community contributors publicly quit the program. The community contributors are a group of players/streamers/content creators who work with the WoWS developers to provide them with feedback, playtest new game changes, and advocate for and represent the player base to the developers. While the widespread coverage on this (which has even reached Yahoo Finance and other non-gaming outlets) mostly focuses on lootboxes, the other main reason stated by the CCs for leaving the program was being talked down and condescended to by the developers in their private discord, and just in general being treated terribly despite the actual work put in by the CCs (particularly littlewhitemouse).

Oh, and to add to the fun, during the same week, another popular CC (who didn't leave during the exodus) was kicked from the program basically for being a gibbering racist, going ham on the hard-r in discord, and being salty that youtube made him tone down the hitler memes in his latest video.

Needless to say, r/WorldOfWarships has been a lot of fun recently. Meanwhile, r/worldoftanks (from the same developer) is sitting there like first time?

It's true, love is real

Like most folktales, they have a lot of incarnations, but they're pretty trackable; they're African American versions of African tales that also turn up in other countries with diaspora populations. If Disney used something like the Julius Lester versions and hired a Black team to run it I could see it.

Conflict is Not Abuse.

Great book. It would do you a lot of good if you’d ever bother to read it. But let’s be real here, you were never here to have your mind changed.

i can’t find the first thread covering their security issues at launch (which was both hilarious and hilariously terrifying), but here’s the follow-up regarding the issues still present at relaunch.

from what i remember of the launch issues, you could change your username to a certain phrase that would automatically logout anyone else who looked at it. or it could hack their account, i can’t quite recall. it was also super easy to break the code and just…look at everything. the site was a bloody nightmare of a mess, honestly.

they also had an issue pre-launch when attempting to figure out their stance on NSFW of underage characters. this was their response to the questions being asked, but it was phrased…a little awkwardly. normal people asked them to clarify what they meant, and the sorts of people who wanted to draw CP flooded in demanding they change it under the guise that pillowfort had promised to never censor NSFW content/be like tumblr. i heard somewhere that they caved to the people requesting no censorship of underage NSFW, but i’ve been unable to find any record of that (even though i do recall that change is why everyone i know dropped pillowfort prior to the launch disaster).

(note: please do not reply to this regarding ‘proship/anti’ discourse; i’m not going to entertain it. thanks)

I'm almost certain chess has not been solved. What are your sources? Also chess can literally run on a computer (see lichess.org). Are you telling me if chess was invented today on a PC instead of as a board game, it'd be solves by definition? Since if it hadn't it couldn't run on a computer

Proton has a free tier you can try first, and their app is pretty good even on Linux. Your payment basically goes to subsidizing the free users and development of their privacy technologies.

I don't think they have a WireGuard option yet, though, which was the main reason why I went with Surfshark around 2-years ago.

The main issue was that they're being pushed by the Swiss govt. and for the most part I do respect how they fought tooth-and-nail, but it doesn't change the fact that there is now a spot in their track record.

Mullvad, on the other hand, just doesn't seem to have any scandal at all, so far. Very little marketing though, no big discount, and they aren't developing any new technologies beyond implenting new standards well.

It looks pretty good for me, but I haven't really tested it.

So it depends on what you want, your standard for privacy, and how much money you want to spend.

Mullvad is just a solid choice for VPN, with the only thing that privacy-consious technies have to complain being that they are still VPN and now Tor.

Proton meanwhile is both a visionary but also have to fight their government. They're trying to make a privacy respecting alternative to Google Workspace, and they're succeeding even if there are some compromises being made (look up the exact details of the French activist's issue).

Heh. Yeah, they claimed on their whitelist that nudity was okay if it was art. But that didn't stop the algorithm from flagging Greek statues or classical paintings.

And when they blacklisted "females presenting nipples"? I predicted that they'd flag a depiction of Saint Agatha; it took less than 48 hours.

There looks to be some weird delay in that video. Random google result that looks more like what I remember from playing. (I was a super casual player for not very long, and not near whatever difficulty they're playing on.) Osu! is free fwiw, you can try it out yourself.

It's a combination of memorization and reflexes, like most rhythm games. DDR, Beat Saber, etc.

I’m not OP but I’ve had a lot of success with this physical timer:

https://www.amazon.com/Feilifan-Exercise-Management-Countdown-15-20-30-60/dp/B08PB9W3GT/ref=mp_s_a_1_4

Because the countdown isn’t easily visible, you can really focus on what you’re working on and not just watch the clock.

Alpha Zero is actually capable of beating Stockfish! In one typical 1,000-game series, it won 155, lost 6, and drew 839. There is some debate about the fairness, because Zero was running on far superior hardware, but still.

Analyzing the games where it beat Stockfish is wild, it plays chess like an alien.

Edit: actually it turns out that AZ also uses a better search algorithm. I had been under the impression that we couldn't know how neural net programs "thought"

I use Windscribe, it's not a bad service. There's nothing wrong with them, in my opinion. They're transparent about their fuck ups (look at the recent server seizure and their response to it (improving security)). Windscribe's also transparent about the implementation of their policies, they have an entire blog post on how their no logging policy works. This is better than ProtonVPN at least, who has conflicting policies about their logging when you read their support articles and their privacy policy.

Disclaimer: I pay for Windscribe Pro. I don't work for them.

Oh, and here's a little tidbit you guys might like to know, while all this was happening, Chris was apparently getting ready to publish book about the Miss Bimbo character and her adventures in Bimboland. "Miss Bimbo and the Beautiful Republic of Bimboland: The story of the worlds most beautiful nation" was published on March 10, 2020. There was no news on this on the site -- someone just found it on Amazon.

The synopsis of the book reads:

>Challenges and obstacles stand in her way however in the form of the evil Bianca Firezza and her Meaniehead minions who will stop at nothing to steal Sindy’s rightful crown. Will Sindy have the Bimbo balls to fight for her destiny and her ultimate dream of founding Bimboland?

"The Meanies" were a name given to a group of users were critical of the changes Chris was making to Miss Bimbo. Another user gave them that name and it stuck. They and all their friends were banned from the game. Chris is still holding grudges from forum drama from around a decade ago.

I think a lot of this is down to recent enormous improvements in online chess software.

Until a few years ago the software used to play chess online was clunky and buggy - apart from anything else, gigantic Windows installations and no mobile app were par for the course - and very much targeted, if there was any conscious targeting, at strong players. Then lichess.org and, especially, chess.com took it to another level, using modern Web programming techniques, and the old sites, such as chessbase.com, are becoming marginalised.

I was trying out chess.com yesterday - a bit late, but previous poor experiences had rather tainted online chess for me - and was just astounded. It computer analysed one of the games I had just played and the analysis was actually comprehensible to a patzer like me, which I have never come across before.

The Web interface was really well designed, the whole package was slick and I am considering taking out a subscription - £25 a year is nothing given the quality of what I have seen. I believe that the Online Olympiad was actually run on chess.com's platform - if true, kudos to them and also to FIDE for not reinventing the wheel.

Big player found to be cheating on the online geography/streetview game Geoguessr.

I recently discovered the online game Geoguessr after getting the GeoWizard channel on YouTube pop up on my front page. Since I only just started playing, I don't think I'd be any good doing a write-up on this, but I thought it would still be interesting to share.

Apparently, in the last couple of weeks or so, the popular and very high-scoring player Nightey was accused of cheating by a group of other big players of the game, and has since admitted to have done it "only for the past 2.5 months," and has also been banned from the game.

The way he was doing it was by playing the first 4/5 rounds of tournaments on an alt account in order to find out the answers and then not finishing the fifth so as to not leave the attempt on the alt account on record.

An interesting video explanation can be found here.

>The only way I see this becoming an issue for furries is if the AI generator could be tweaked to create fursonas with specific species, color, gender, and possibly style.

As a matter of fact it can, at least in theory. Check out artbreeder.com for an example of what that would look like. It's not nearly as intuitive as you'd want it to be but it's there. There also exist other networks (i.e. not stylegan, which is what 90% of "thisXdoesntexist" projects use) that allow you more control at the cost of being more reliant on specific source material. That's today's tech but most of the biggest breakthroughs have happened within the past few years. It's an emerging and rapidly accelerating field. Machine learning really is coming for the masses of essentially interchangeable contract artists and it's a fascinating thing to watch.

Slippi has a pretty good getting started guide!

If you just want to test the waters, a usb xbox controller or a keyboard can work. However if you want to play a little more seriously, a Gamecube to USB adapter is what you want (the official Nintendo one will also work if you happen to already have one!)

Humans make mistakes, and computers don't, but top level cheaters know to make some mistakes as well. GM PIPI did make many small mistakes in this game as well.

https://www.chess.com/analysis/game/live/5506140473?tab=analysis

The biggest indication may simply be that he won most of his games against player well above his level. It also may be that when he did look down he played the computer move, and when he didn't, he made mistakes.

Consumer chess engines are incredibly strong, stronger than humans, especially at fast time controls like blitz and bullet.

Also Chess.com agreed with Wesley So, and Petrosyan has been given a lifetime ban: https://www.chess.com/news/view/saint-louis-arch-bishops-2020-pro-chess-champions

Because, for some reason, there seems to be a propensity to cheat.

chess.com publishes a lot about cheating because it does a lot of work, with some very high-powered mathematical and statistical support, to catch online chess players who use a computer for some or all of their moves.

Its latest report notes that over 500 accounts a day are closed for cheating (the closures will reach 1,000,000 by 2023 at current rates) and:

>Of the cheaters we have detected to date, 46 (12.6%) are grandmasters, of these eight (17.4%) were rated 2600+. 80 (22%) are international masters, and 118 (32.4%) are FIDE Masters.

They don't name and shame but I predict that, one day, they will. 244 titled players! (Page containing confessions).

Try a rotary cutter? Also, pay attention to your breathing while cutting, you want to keep it smooth and even. You can also work on improving your core strength, which helps a lot but takes longer.

I just found out that there are collectors editions and goodies for Witch Hat in France and Mexico, and some are on amazon.

I can already see myself buying them all up, they are so gosh darn pretty

I have a soft spot for traditional Lutheran Christmas hymns sung in German since my mom was the church organist growing up.

However, the true Christmas album of my childhood was this John Denver and the Muppets Christmas soundtrack that we listened to ever Christmas as a kid. The duality of musical influences: My mom is a classically trained organist and piano teacher and my dad fucking loves the Muppets.

I watch mostly Minecraft and it's been wall-to-wall ExpressVPN for the last month. I wonder if there's some kind of turf war going on between the VPN companies for different segments of the YouTube market.

Really? I've only gotten NordVPN and Hello Fresh sponsors in my vids for months. Sometimes Curiosity Stream. Never have I gotten a Lordship sponsored segment.

If I may ask, what kind of content do you watch? I usually go for tech, video game and comedy vids.

It seems as scammy as a bunch of other YouTube sponsors. Tbh I'd like to see them gone, purely because they're the only sponsors I've been seeing for a month now. I watched a video with a NordVPN sponsorship yesterday and sat through the whole thing just because it was a breath of fresh air.

All That the Rain Promises and More is an excellent guide for the area. It isn’t specific to the redwood coast, but the author is from the area. It has a bit of an edibles focus, but is a good general purpose pocket guide with good photos.

The same author published Mushrooms Demystified, which is the classic field guide to west coast fungi, but it’s very much a comprehensive field guide, it’s a giant brick of a book with dense text and dichotomous keys and not a lot of photos.

It's a commercial kit sorta like this one, basically punch it out and click it together with some gluing. I followed the instructions this time to get a feel for it, but now I think the next one I get I will be taking liberties with. Because some paint and trimming could make these things look a lot better IMO.

If you can afford it, a yoke or HOTAS is the way to go, but a controller works pretty well too. Keyboard and mouse is probably the worst way to play flight sim. I would know, I did it for about a decade.

There's a lovely picturebook called Lakshmi's Mooch, about a little Indian-American girl who's self-conscious about having body hair, especially her lip hair. Her family's reaction is basically "Fuck yeah, you do, and it's awesome."

> In all probability, it was just a band that formed, fell apart after failing to find success, and left no evidence of their existence besides this one song that a guy recorded off the radio forty years ago.

Reminds me of a novel I heard about on the radio long ago, “Time Won’t Let Me” by Bill Scheft, about a bunch of guys in their 50s who suddenly become famous when their album from high school gets sold at auction for $10k to a German album collector.

Does anyone have any T on the drama going down with the Ruff romance anthology (clean Amazon link, no affiliate shenanigans)? There was a great post about the RWA meltdown here the other day and I figured we had some Romancelandia-savvy redditors in the house.

What I'm getting so far re: Ruff is that it was doing decently on release until the organizer suddenly dropped the price to 99c without consulting or informing the other authors, at which point threats of lawsuits and C&Ds started flying all over the place. At least one has demanded to pull their contribution to the collection.

But this I'm just putting this together from scraps because everyone seems to be tiptoeing around the issue. Any deets?

Some of the books in this ebook bundle on Humble Bundle about video game history might fit, particularly "Game Wizards" in the $18 tier. The bundle otherwise has a sociology focus, so most of the others seem less focused on the particulars of personal drama. I haven't actually read any of these so I can't speak to their quality unfortunately. If you end up interested in the Game Wizards book it also looks like it's available in physical form if you'd prefer that. Amazon link

Sounds like Patrick Ness's The Rest of Us Just Live Here.

Wow, it's really wild seeing his art evolve from those Spider-Man pages (2002) to the early chapters of that webcomic (2006) to the later CG stuff (2013)

Stefan Fatsis's book Word Freak was a really interesting look into that world. That's from 2002, though, so I wouldn't be surprised if smart phones etc. have wrought some changes.

A commenter here speculated that one of the several things Jemas was trying to do was parody a Peter David comic.

He seems to hold an interest in religion. After leaving comic books, he worked on a new translation of the Bible. According to the one Amazon review, it's very good. I found this Jemas quote about Genesis Rejuvenated:

"I saw a beautiful vision of God, a way to reconcile Creationism and Evolutionism, and a blueprint for how the human race can transform the earth into a place that's very good for all of us, for our children and for our fellow creatures."

So he was completely serious about (some parts of) Marville.

I'm not sure if by "quality control" you mean the plagiarism itself or writing quality. But no publisher can really control for plagiarism--people only have so much time to read books, and even if they do that doesn't guarantee the wording will leap out to them, and there's no plagiarism checker the way there is with student papers. It's telling that Tanuja Desai Hidier herself was the one who noticed the ripping off of her book, despite the fact that Born Confused was a big deal and a lot of people in and out of the industry read it.

A pre-social media moment that might be interesting here. A publisher published a picture book, a posthumous text from Louise Fitzhugh they'd commissioned illustrations for, and then on Friday afternoon we got a fax saying it wasn't going to be published and we should destroy the book. It turns out the manuscript was in Fitzhugh's papers because she was asked about illustrating it. The actual author was Charlotte Zolotow, legendary editor and author; she had also left for the great publisher in the sky, but the editor who'd worked on Zolotow's book was the one who noticed the new "Fitzhugh" book was actually a previously published book by somebody else. And these were high-profile people and it wasn't a low profile manuscript, but nobody noticed the issue until it hit somebody who'd worked hands-on on the thing. There's just too much writing going through their brains to catch this stuff.

There is a lot of great recent YA, though "great YA" isn't the same thing as "great YA for adults." Especially if you like realism, I think adults are going to find more satisfaction in adult literature.

Yeah that just was ugh when I heard it from my friend, like ok the idea of being Thor is fine but why do they have to be super stereotypical.

Though he has also written books like Sci-Fu (no idea how its well liked) from looking at the sample yeah it makes more sense as to why its more like that, its still dumb that he thought it was ok but it starts to make some sense.

David Elliott's Bull is fucking awesome.

I think it's a bit of a trope to claim your revision is more accessible than an older original, so I don't give Underwood too much hate for "impenetrable," but it does sound like she didn't really like it. And there are ways to frame that, especially if you are, you know, a writer. "I love the story of the Odyssey, it's an amazing fantastical journey, but I know I wasn't the only young person who struggled with the format and language. I hope to bring the tale to a new generation of people, especially those who want some hot lady lovin'."

I'll be honest, I actually thought this was going to be a satire piece until I read it based off of the name alone and the eternal discourse surrounding the anti-grimdark name.

Now personally, I'm inventing a genre called "Trumpcore," which is going to encompass whatever the fuck this is.

So I wrote a previous write up about a case of academic fraud within political science. The post had it's issues in terms of what I found to be important overall versus what a reader needed to enjoy it, but I think in general it worked well and was a good post. In the end though, nothing in that post had anything in the realm of real world political consequences. My question is whether or not a post that was fundamentally about political science but had real world political implications for lesser known but controversial current politicians be unacceptable? It's a very funny story, but it is a bit political.

Final thing and entirely unrelated: the sidebar says:

>Campaigning for political causes is not a hobby, because you don't campaign for personal enjoyment.

I don't think that's an accurate statement and here's a recent book by a very well respected political scientist about how many Americans engage with politics as a hobby (it's in the title!).

In today's episode of Weird Shit at Wal-Mart: An adult coloring book... based on the legendary Junji Ito series Uzumaki. (Link goes to its Amazon page to prove that it exists.)

I've never read Heartstopper, but I just looked up the Japanese localization out of curiosity and yup- it's incredibly unsurprisingly categorized under Boy's Love (BL). Almost as though BL is just a genre label that originated in Japan...

God, I love FiO. Such a compelling story about an unFriendly AI! Such interesting philosophical questions about the Ship of Theseus, and all that!

fimfiction dot net/group/1857/folder/4096/canon-compatible-optimalverse?order=rating

I use that as my favored link to that fic... and the fanfic of fanfic that people write of it.

Did you know? At least one published author has tried to take the core of the FiO 'concept', scrubbed all the MLP details off of it, and made a concerted effort to make the AI less powerful, less evil, and the story less of a warning, as a reinterpretation of some of the core concepts. This is Kris Schnee's Thousand Tales series, see here:

amazon dot com/dp/B074C3ZBNV

There was also the rumor that Gary Oak's voice actor was openly bragging about taking over the role of James on one of the biggest Pokemon boards and flaming anyone who disagreed.

I've heard they're not so much allegations as pretty much true, myself, given a lot of the TPCi VAs were unknowns then. Throw in TPCi not licensing the Japanese music (which is drama in itself - there's a dude infamous in Pokemon fandom for flaming anyone who thinks the Japanese soundtrack is inferior) and that Cartoon Network was moving Pokemon to death slots...

This even signaled that Pokemon was thought to be dropping off in 2004. Oh, how times change!

I was reading this book and the author, an Oxford history professor, highlights the difference though of how we should view history: should we view history through the eyes/values of those who were present as it happened, or through our modern eyes/values? Neither is explicitly "correct", and as society progresses, the "modern" interpretation of the same historical events also changes. Who's to say that, 200 years from now, the equivalent of Twitter posters won't be saying the same things about us that we say about "old" historians?

Thanks for the write-up, your comic history posts are always fantastic. I love 52, but I've only absorbed the story through Graphic Audio's audio-play, based on a novelization (https://www.amazon.com/52-Part-1-DC-Comics/dp/1599503689). While I enjoy it, and they do great work (though that particular story is currently not available for purchase due to licensing issues) I only now discovered that Ralph Dibny's story arc is removed entirely! Presumably they had enough on their hands with Booster, Kate, Renee, and Adam. Now I clearly must go read the original.

Thanks for the write-up, your comic history posts are always fantastic. I love 52, but I've only absorbed the story through Graphic Audio's audio-play, based on a novelization (https://www.amazon.com/52-Part-1-DC-Comics/dp/1599503689). While I enjoy it, and they do great work (though that particular story is currently not available for purchase due to licensing issues) I only now discovered that Ralph Dibny's story arc is removed entirely! Presumably they had enough on their hands with Booster, Kate, Renee, and Adam. Now I clearly must go read the original.

This little project demonstrates just HOW unlikely his distribution is.
Basically every trade you do has a chance of 4.73% to give you an Enderpearl. He did 263 trades. This program just simulates 263 trades, counts the amount of Enderpearls gotten and tracks what your maximum is. It is amazing.

I'm at 150.000 simulated runs and the highest I've gotten is 29. I let it run far longer yesterday and got up to 32 at one point, after hundres of thousands of iterations.

In his run he got 41.

It's not just one run he got lucky on, he was consistently having this crazy luck throughout at least six of his livestreams. Some people (read: Dream fans) are defending him and saying 'just because it's unlikely doesn't mean its impossible' - but it is so incredibly unlikely to happen, the odds are in the trillions that any speedrunner would ever get luck comparable this.

Someone even made a scratch program to demonstrate how unlikely it is. It repeatedly simulates the in-game trading odds over 263 trades and counts how many returned an ender pearl (4.73% chance in each trade). Dream got 41 ender pearls over 263 trades during his livestream, and in 1 million simulations the highest I got is 31. The funny part is, he got even better luck on his blaze rod drops, and that isn't even being simulated here.

There's a book I read decades ago, by Diane Johnson, that was then called Lesser Lives and is now called The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives. And it blew me away then as a musing historiography of the way women get characterized and written in and out of famous men's stories. It's based on Mary Ellen Peacock, the wife of the Victorian writer George Meredith, who gets featured in his writing after their marriage crashes and burns. It might seem old hat to me now, I don't know, but Johnson is a very effective stylist so I might go back to it and see.

I love that there's a Marcia Lucas project. I wonder if somewhere there's a page collecting all these "reinscribing women overshadowed by famous men" projects.

Great post, thanks! I totally missed that, just found out as I restarted my browser and it told me the extension was blocked and flagged malicious.

Here's alternatives, from a popular reputable source I trust:

The Great Suspender Alternatives and Similar Apps | AlternativeTo

I have read way more nonfiction this year than I usually do - researching for a story I'm trying to write. My favorite, I think, was "The Lost Spy: An American in Stalin's Secret Service," by Andrew Meier. I picked it up at a library sale for like nothing, and it was fascinating - the way Meier pieced together the puzzle of this man's life, the detail, the melancholy of this idealist who hitched his hopes to the wrong revolution and paid for it with his life.

Graystipe's Vow is parallel/before what I talked about here. It gives a good summary of his life/the series up to this point since Graystripe is an OG. I kinda spoiled what happens afterwards but it's a mostly standalone novel. Some real haunting scenes involving a human too.

https://www.amazon.com/Warriors-Super-Graystripes-Vow-13/dp/006296304X/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

There's other entry points or standalones, just an idea.

This is entirely separate topic but holy shit. Im a Data Science major and just recently got introduced to Bayesian reasoning. In fact I just ordered a book, Reasoning with Data: An Introduction to Traditional and Bayesian Statistics Using R to begin learning about it more in depth.

Just thought it was kinda neat to see someone mention it haha.

My Midwestern American brother is a huge Monty Don fan, and he would be firmly on the side of Monty in most of these. It’s funny that despite America’s obsession with lawns the striped lawn isn’t a national standard here (it’s pretty uncommon in my area) and that we manage to grow things without using peat compost.

My favorite book on British garden snobbery is Yew and Non-Yew, sadly now out of print and out of date. But it’s hilarious at identifying elements that make other people think, “Ah, you’re that kind of gardener.”

https://www.totalwar.com/blog/development-update-blog-02/

>So we have more WH2 DLC on the way and, of course, the third part of our trilogy is deep into production with the largest of our TW project teams revved up.

Doing some reading, found a real vintage of would-be Hobby Drama from an old favorite book series.

I've been reading Pioneer Girl: the Annotated Autobiography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, which is the original text Wilder wrote well before the Little House series was planned to be a series, and well before it was planned to be aimed at children- there's a ton of things she cut out.

One incident described was when a fan wrote the publisher regarding a bit of text in Little House on the Prairie, that essentially read "but no people were up that direction, only Indians lived there" - of course, with the implication that Indians were not considered people. The publisher- agreed, remarked surprise that this reader was the first person to notice this, and took it to Wilder, who agreed that that was not her intention, and they changed the text to something closer to "But no settlers farmed that land, only Indians lived there." This occurred in 1952. I'm trying to imagine if this happened today, there would be an entire contingent of internet trolls insisting that it was her first amendment right to keep the original text that way.

(There's some interesting historical context in the book discussing the larger topic of how Wilder wrote about the Osage people- both the various treaties that the Ingalls family was violating, Wilder having attempted to contact several historical societies trying to find out the name of the man who would have been Chief when her family lived in Kansas. There's also some REALLLY interesting context regarding the impact of Wilder's daughter Rose, an old-school journalist and staunch, influential Libertarian, may have had on the books in her role as editor and marketing).

Because it's awful. It's been a security nightmare forever, and in top of that it's an inefficient power & memory hog so it's not really suitable for mobile devices. Its death has been a long time coming.

There is a pretty cool project to archive flash games and animations and keep them playable, though.

It’s not quite the same but if you’re interested there is a multiplayer version of Morrowind. Specifically it’s a multiplayer mod for OpenMW, which is an engine that runs Morrowind because legal reasons, but the upshot is that it seems to be coded by actual competent programmers, rather than Bethesda. I messed around with it and it wasn’t too difficult to get up and running.

I love the irony of him saying hereA note on cancel culture
I have also received hundreds of reports from project leads on freenode that they are being harassed and are at risk of being canceled if they do not leave, to Libera. "

And then "Andrew, however, in his infinite wisdow, decided that any channels that even mentionedAnd then "Andrew, however, in his infinite wisdow, decided that any channels that even mentioned libera.chat in their channel topics would have their channels taken over."

Really credible dude

They're all available on the CTV website in Canada, so it's no big loss. You been watching the animated series at all?

(NordVPN is pretty solid, if you're actually looking. Great customer service. Kind of a hassle watching BBC though.)

ha, all the books start like that. Some of the earlier ones aren't so detailed but fans like that stuff.

If you want just the current arc (Arc 7) start here: https://www.amazon.com/Warriors-Broken-Code-Lost-Stars/dp/0062823515

If you want some of the Ashfur backstory I recommend at least Long Shadows and Sunrise. 5th and 6th books of the 3rd arc. Possibly Squirrelflight's Hope as well which is a bigger standalone book shortly before Arc 7 starts.

Graystripe's Vow is another bigger standalone probably better for new readers but takes place paralell to the current Ashfur story, he leaves just before they confirm it's Ashfur and returns in Book 5 of the arc. Graystripe is an older cat from Arc 1 so it gives a good recap of his life story, general strides of the series. Ashfur is also a slight annoyance in the flashback story of the novel set between Arcs 1 and 2.

If you have any general questions from the preview I can try to answer them. Leafpool is Squirrel's sister that she took it the kits for that Ashfur tried to kill in Arc 3 for instance.

As a veteran, former RSO, competitive shooter, and a tree hugging hippie, I've got a 1911 that I'm building with a peace sign spring plug, grateful Dead grips, and getting a cerakote job on the barrel to make it tie dye. I think personalization of firearms is great fun. And I stand firm on my belief that a gun shouldn't be viewed as a toy, even by those who know responsible practice. My response to that phrasing is always "they're fun as hell, but not toys." But humor on a gun is a nice touch. I have an AK mag painted like a vaporware cup and a He Man dust cover. There's a lot of things you can add that are great. Making a gun look like a toy really pushes that envelope.

My take through the whole Block 19 saga was that there's nothing inherently wrong with it. Assuming you secure it appropriately and still treat it with respect as you would any other firearm. If someone did it on their own, I'd think it was hilarious, if not in poor taste. But a company making it, that's a bad idea no matter which way you cut it.

It's a noir-inspired murder mystery set on an alien planet where the government (a shaky alliance of three very different alien races) suppress the emotions of their citizens for the sake of peace. It would seem to tie into certain real-world events in 2020, but it was actually written at least a year before that. The trade comes out in October.

4chan's Doctor Who wiki once had a picture of the FP book "This Town Will Never Let Us Go" captioned "Neither the Doctor, nor anyone he's ever met, nor anyone they've ever met, nore the titular faction appear in this book. It's still canon, though"

Do the Gods Wear Capes? is a great book if you're interested in a fairly accessible academic treatment of that exact subject.

The light novels are actually officially translated into English by Yen Press if you're interested. I actually own physical copies of all 3 volumes because I was entranced by how absurd the premise was.

I think it'd be awesome done as a longer-form version of documentaries like The Barkley Marathons which is about ultramarathoners attempting an event so grueling that only 15 people have completed it since 1986 (it's awesome, go watch it). GAME_JAM could have been a "teams against the challenge" deal with the clock as the antagonist and I think that would have been really engaging.

How do you organize yourselves? How do you budget your time? How compartmentalized vs collaborative do you work? How much do you plan vs how much do you decide to work out as you go? How do you pivot away from something that isn't working and how do you make the decision to do so? How do you resolve creative differences and get everyone on the same page quickly? What unique skills/vision does everyone bring to the table? What kind of itch can a challenge like this scratch, and what do you take away from it?

I actually think these questions are more interesting even than who makes the "best" game at the end. They're CERTAINLY more interesting than, "do you think having a penis helps you to code?" Such a waste of a concept.

If you like this stuff, empires of eve is a great book to read. Imagine a hobbydrama post crossed with a published book.

It's the cross stitch app Pattern Keeper! When you import a pattern, it reads the color key and can then give you a mockup of the whole thing.

It's specifically the JoyCon Droid app,only available on devices running Android 9.0 or higher. Furthermore, spoofing amiibos currently only works on Samsung devices running A9 or higher. The app itself works really, really well as a standard Bluetooth controller for the switch.

app link if desired

Fsolis I wanna say?

https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B07TXYWNC6/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o07_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

She had a very pretty box and I have much regret losing it because it was so beautiful. I wanna say she came naked as I bought a dress alongside her, and she has hinge joints instead of ball

But oh man her hair is so brightly pink and lovely!!

Jessica Simpson flats are super comfy, and affordable enough that if she doesn't like them it's not a big deal (<100$).

https://www.amazon.ca/Jessica-Simpson-Womens-Mandalaye-Ballet/dp/B00HD9QRHQ

Sorry for the Canadian link; last time I was in the States they had them at Macy's.

(I've had children ask me if I was a ballerina, because of the square toe. Really cheers up a day.)

Sorry, I don't agree with you that the fundamentals of art like this wouldn't be taught similarly by multiple different people, because they have been, personally, to me, over years of instruction. The similar images you linked are boxes around a light source. I have done this exercise many, many times. Drawing rectangles and spheres to demonstrate perspective and value/lighting is just so basic that I have seen it in almost every art book I own and many of the pen-and-ink books I've been browsing on Amazon trying to figure this out in the last hour.

This 1997 book (also edited into my first post) presents its Table of Contents in the order tools, pen handling, tone, value, light and shade, then further and more comprehensive rendering techniques. The tools page has a very similar layout and the same inclusions, including a dusting brush, which I remember being mentioned specifically in Dunn's video.

It may be this is not a legal case for plagiarism and it gets thrown out. It's my personal feeling that if there isn't a legal case, why make a 1-hour call-out video? Is he trying to stir a public shitstorm because he doesn't have a legal case?

I enjoy Inktober but have zero feelings good or bad about Parker. I didn't know he was the pioneering artist behind it, hadn't heard about the (apparently mistaken) C+D orders from his team. I don't care personally about him or Dunn. This drama just feels like it's blowing up and relying on emotion and ignorance to do so. This is not directed at you in any way specifically. Some of the Twitter comments seem a bit unhinged and people are jumping down Parker's throat.