Fair, and maybe I’m stepping in it a bit, but thought a post about a 4-switch Vader 2600 might attract a lively crowd.

I wouldn’t presume to have even 20% of the 2600 games that bring something different and good to the table, it’s just (to misquote Samuel Johnson), for so many of them the good parts are not different and the different parts are not good.

And again, that’s completely apart from a personal nostalgia (god knows I indulge in that) or to propose that they’re simply not fun in a binary sense. If I’m 12 and I get 2600 Venture I enjoy the hell out of it, but if I’m a middle aged man in 2024, at the bare minimum I’m going for this.

So, real talk? Most 2600 games are rough, and barring personal nostalgia, there’s little reason to play most of them in the age of emulation, especially arcade conversions, which sometimes nail the gameplay (but often don’t), and generally have to perform acts of violence on the visuals to make them work with the system and the business realities around their development (i.e. staffing, timeline, budget for ROM chips, etc.).

Some worthwhile ones that come to mind:

• Combat (multiplayer only)
• Warlords (multiplayer only)
• Pitfall
• River Raid
• Pitfall II
• Space Invaders
• The Empire Strikes Back

It’s not that so many more weren’t fun, or even still aren’t in isolation, but it’s like we’re all the rich fat kid from Pee-Wee’s big adventure and have access to every single game on every single system, at least up until the end of the 90s. There’s no reason to play the nice port of Berzerk that looks like it does, or play the flickery Pac-Man mess, or even (I’ll say it) fight with the groundbreaking but still primitive and abstracted gameplay of Adventure.

Also, pretty much everyone I’ve known into model railroads is into HO scale, so who is even going to buy this?

Sounds like some of them nerds need to go big or fuckin’ go home!

Looks like it’s built to model railroading “O” scale.

EDIT: Oh, duh. It says so right in your picture. I guess if you want the sweet authenticity that only product placement can buy, this is your set.

At this point, the only way you get anything made for theaters is to find a nostalgic brand to tie it to. This will probably suck, because Speck and Gordon peaked with Blades of Glory, but conceptually I have no problem with a pioneer-themed action comedy, and it barely matters that they dusted off Oregon Trail to do it.

Recent experience has shown that you should be careful if the property you’re working on has extensive lore and loud fans, but I’m somewhat sympathetic to creatives who just want to get a project funded and are willing to glom onto to an existing property to do it.

Even Nintendo starts with a cease and desist. Get that rom out there, and nobody will give a shit how shady the site or discord they download it from is. :-)

Neat little pair of packages. Seems a bit pricy to me, but I don’t think I’m the intended market. I wonder what the Pi Pico on the JAMMA module is for.

Counterpoint: They already know you can’t “do” the job-specific tasks because you don’t work there yet. If you know the tools, that’s extremely helpful as they teach you what to do with them. If there’s pile A and pile B and they’re mostly the same except B already knows JIRA or Visual Studio or whatever, then that’s a legitimate differentiator.

When the existing team is forced to get new software, there’s a presumption that they already know what tasks the tools are supposed to help them do. There’s no “other pile,” so might as well suck it up and kill your productivity by ten percent for a year. It’s okay though; you can improve it by 1% from the original baseline for nine years after, because the McKinsey and Accenture people totally promised us that makes sense. Rinse and repeat.

Wouldn’t that only apply if the Orions were pre-warp? Probably still a violation of 100 different Federation laws and Starfleet regulations, though.

Seems like they don’t work exactly the same as they used to, as they now use MTP instead of USB mass storage, but while annoying, it’s generally a pretty trivial fix and your OS may already use MTP devices with no trouble. It seems there may be some other knock-on effects with fonts not sideloading right and needing a Calibre plugin to make pagination work how it used to.

So yeah, it’s getting worse, but Amazon hasn’t figured out how to bring the hammer down yet.

Calibre has always been a small price to pay, but if sideloading goes away, I’ll certainly never “upgrade” again, and I’ll trash my 11th gen Paperwhite if they somehow make it stop working. Usable e-ink ereaders are even doable as DIY projects now, and Kobo will probably stay less closed-off than Amazon for a good while.

That said, reading the comments and the article it seems like as long as your OS (or some app) supports MTP, everything should still work more or less as it has, which is to say kind of annoying and with Amazon pulling little microaggressions like deleting your cover thumbnails, but overall sideloading should still function.

So he didn’t abandon family, and I don’t know that he planned never to return to a life of luxury, and one can certainly criticize American adventurism in the Muslim world, even early 2000s Afghanistan, but Pat Tillman would fit this broader idea, and he paid for it. His parents were a lawyer and a teacher in San Jose, California. He was an unheralded college (American) football player who improved enough in his first few years in the NFL that he went from barely making the pro ranks to being thought of as a valuable contributor who’d have a long and (by any normal human standards) very lucrative career. In early 2002, his team offered him a contract extension worth several million dollars, but he turned it down to enlist as a soldier the US Army after 9/11.

He was known to be outspoken, thoughtful, well-read, and assertively non-religious. While he thought there was a moral case to be made for fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda, he is reported to have called the Iraq War “fucking illegal.” Still, for better or worse he did remain loyal to his commitments and deployed to Iraq. After, he finally went to Afghanistan. He was killed in a friendly fire incident that was covered up at every level, from his platoon-mates burning his uniform, body-armor, and personal journal, to the Pentagon claiming he was killed by enemy fire and coming up with an entire alternative scenario for how he died.

Even once the friendly fire was known, his legacy was being whitewashed to protect the legitimacy of the war and military recruiting, and his family had to fight not to have him remembered as a generic rah-rah “Patriot,” but as a complicated man who thought about bigger issues and had a personal moral code not tied to generic notions of 'Murica, Jesus, and Apple Pie.

The dabbling in Nazism makes him a lot less fun.

Yeah, I don’t think this goes to trial and rewrites the lawbooks or anything, but there’s enough here to litigate, and I reckon Tesla will settle to avoid going to discovery.

This is a bit different, in that it’s not a trademark claim, but rather a copyright claim. They’re saying that the still isn’t meaningfully trying to be anything other than a Blade Runner still, and Musk’s use is not protected by any sort of Fair Use. There would likely be a statue of limitations or something for the specific cause of action, but you can’t lose copyright the same way you can a trademark.

One could argue it’s an uncreative derivative work not subject to a fair use exemption, and actively used in commerce to make money for Musk, while simultaneously it damages the Blade Runner brand if, as claimed, other car companies assume Tesla and BR have a relationship, or the BR brand is inextricably linked to Tesla and Musk. The fact that Tesla and WBD hurriedly sought a copyright clearance, once Tesla realized WBD didn’t have all the necessary rights, doesn’t speak well for Tesla’s position, nor does the fact that Musk referenced Blade Runner at least twice in his presentation.

This is it, really. Fundamentally, the people placing online orders just want to exchange money for lunch, same as OP.

In the old days though, they would show up, see the line was too long, and some percentage of them would leave. Publix needs to increase staffing, implement rate limiting (I think they call it “Order Throttling” in this space), or partially prioritize the people who want their sandwich bad enough to spend their own time waiting. I assume there’s some metric that would optimize it, and even if not, some reasonable guesswork (alternate prep of in-person versus mobile orders?) would help with the physical traffic jam and angry luddites (no offense, OP 🤣).

Part of the problem may be that Pubsubs in particular occupy a weird space where they’re a much-loved quick dining option while still having the infrastructure of a grocery store deli counter, and managers from that mindset. I’m sure everything is sort of kludgey and half-assed.

As somebody else mentioned, historically 99% of voting was done on election day. Opening the polling places earlier than that was the exception, and the terminology has simply stuck as the practice has expanded. Additionally, many jurisdictions have something materially different about voting early, whether different hours, looser location rules (I used to be able to early vote at any polling place in my county, but not now… thanks, Texas), etc., so it’s useful to refer to distinguish them somehow.

I would like one industrial replicator, please.