It’s a language essential! Dick, willy, cock, penis, shaft, manhood, todger, pole, …

I feel that ‘gender’ is probably a misleading term for the languages that have ‘grammatical gender’, it rarely has anything to do with genitalia. ‘Noun class’, where adjectives have to decline to agree with the class would fit better in most cases.

English essentially does not have decline adjectives, except for historical outliers like blond/e where no-one much cares if you don’t bother, and uses his / hers / its / erc using a very predictable rule. So no ‘grammatical gender’.

Annoys me that “less” is always correct, which makes “fewer” completely redundant, and yet it’s a short word that could be valuable in conversation if opened up and reused for something everyday that has a long name.

“Before I leave the house, I always check that I’ve got my keys, phone, and fure in my pockets.”

For the love of God, Montresor!

Have they thought about what were doing when they saw them last, retraced their steps? I find that helps when I lose my keys. Always in the last place you look.

Yeah, but from the two billion tonnes a year of steel that’s produced, about five percent is carbon added to iron, and about half of that remains in the final product, so that’s about fifty million tonnes released to atmosphere. Whereas about three and a half billion tonnes of coal was burned for power, and that all ends up in the air. A seventy-fold reduction is quite significant; means we can selectively close the higher-sulfur-content mines for an even better improvement in air quality.

Ironic, since 2B doesn’t have ass on any platform. My anaconda don’t want none of that.

Super Mario Bros on the NES came in at 31 kB, and it was a bit more of a game. 100 kB for Flappy Bird isn’t all that impressive.

“Register bit twiddling.” Setting all the modes that all their various cards can operate in, with the associated code for sending the bit updates over the connection bus. Tedious stuff that’s very prone to copy-paste errors if written by hand.

At some point you have to take AMDs word for it that these codes = this functionality, but if the right graphics come out then it can’t be so wrong.

Fake mews, surely? And yeah, this looks better than my Monday.

September 16 is a relatively common day for birthdays; 7% more common than the annual average. So I make the expected value about 3.1. Happy birthday to you, and fuck them.

We’ve found it to be the “least bad option” for DnD. Have a Discord window open for everyone to video chat in, have a browser window open with Owlbear Rodeo or Foundry / Forge for your tokens and character sheets, all works smoothly enough. The text chat is sufficient for sending the DM a private message; for group chat to share art of the things you’ve just run into or organise the next session.

Completely agree that for anything “less transient”, then the UX is beyond awful and trying to find anything historical is a massive PITA.

Should have used Vim instead, that’s a real text editor. No-one who starts using it ever moves on to something else.

Presumably Kecessa is alluding to the fact that, unlike GOG, Steam games open however the developers / publishers want them to. Which is sometimes just a plain exe, sometimes it’s an exe that starts Steam so that it can use its API / DRM, sometimes it opens the publisher’s launcher, and so on. Bit irritating on Linux when you want to pass some options in to the command, and a bit irritating generally when you never want to see the launcher again, but it’s no disaster.

It’s in Unity, isn’t it? So rather than multiplying the speeds by Time.deltaTime when you’re doing frame updates, you just don’t do that. Easy peasy. They’ve got that real “Japanese game devs from twenty years ago” vibe going.

It’s been a perpetual source of surprise to me that curry houses are so ‘non-specific’. Pakistan and India together make about 1.7 billion people, about a third of the planet’s population, and I’d have thought an easy way to distinguish a restaurant would be to offer something more region-specific, but it’s fairly rare.

Here in the UK, the majority of curry houses are Bangladeshi - used to be the vast majority, now it’s more like 2/3rds. We’ve a couple of ‘more specific’ chains - both Bundobust and Dishoom do Mumbai-style, and they’re both fantastic - and there’s a few places that do well with the ‘naturally vegan’ cuisines, but mostly you can go in to a restaurant and expect the usual suspects will be on the menu.

Same goes for Chinese restaurants - I don’t believe that a billion people all eat the same food, it’s too big a place for the same ingredients to be in season all the time. Why are they not more specific, more often?

Indeed. Here in the UK, people can request that their water company should add it in if their water supply is low-fluoride, for instance from a reservoir, and the water company must add it in.

Back when I used to work in water, that was always the stuff that gave me nightmares. Concentrated hexafluorosilicic acid is what we’d use for dosing. We’d test all the equipment in the chemical room on plain water, drain it out and then literally brick up the doorway. Site would be evacuated during delivery - delivery guy would connect everything up in a space suit, hop in the shower afterwards. Lasted for ages and ages, since you only need the tiniest drip in the water supply to get what you need, but the tiniest drip on your skin would be enough to kill you as well; its lethal dosage is horrifically small.

Made working with all the other halides much less of a concern - we use shed loads of chlorine, but that stuff is much much less nasty in comparison.

Yeah, it’s always had really strong art direction - still holds up, and you don’t notice missing shadows so much in the middle of a frenetic sequence anyway.

Good to see ray tracing coming along. You could get the same shadows and lighting in a modern rasterising engine now as demonstrated in the RTX version, but at the cost of much more development time. Graphics like that being available to smaller studios and larger games being feasible for bigger studios would be great. HL2 is massive compared to modern shooters, and not having to spend forever tweaking each scene helps with that.

When I was still dual-booting Windows and Linux, I found that “raw disk” mode virtual machines worked wonders. I used VirtualBox, so you’d want a guide somewhat like this: https://superuser.com/questions/495025/use-physical-harddisk-in-virtual-box - other VM solutions are available, which don’t require you to accept an agreement with Oracle.

Essentially, rather than setting aside a file on disk as your VM’s disk, you can set aside a whole existing disk. That can be a disk that already has Windows installed on it, it doesn’t erase what you have. Then you can start Windows in a VM and let it do its updates - since it can’t see the bootloader from within the VM, it can’t fuck it up. You can run any software that doesn’t have particularly high graphics requirement, too.

I was also able to just “restart in Windows” if I wanted full performance for a game or something like that, but since Linux has gotten very good indeed at running games, that became less and less necessary until one day I just erased my Windows partition to recover the space.

Disappointing that there’s no “bridges” count on there, am invested in it now. Hopefully something big to come, once they’ve stopped the ruzzians from being able to supply reinforcements.