Bold of you to think that the microplastic is going to go away after one generation…

I dunno, dwarf fortress seems to be doing alright for itself so far. Tarn and Zach really needed some more help and some graphic design backup. I don’t agree with the total abandonment of the keybindings system in favor of mouse clicks, but I understand that it was necessary to make the game’s learning curve less precipitous.

Oh, no, the only ones I haven’t read yet are ghostwritten and number9dream.

And I agree with the order notes. My very out-of-order sequence was Cloud Atlas (the movie introduced me to the book), then Slade House, Black Swan Green, Bone Clocks, Thousand Autumns, Utopia Avenue.

And I agree that reading the bone clocks before thousand autumns didn’t actually make Marinus and the Anchorites make less sense without Enomoto and Dejima for context.

However, if I had read Utopia Avenue without any of the others (except Slade House and Black Swan Green), I think I would have had no idea what was going on. As it stands, the main reason I want to read ghostwritten is because I feel like I’m missing out on the context of “the Mongolian” from Utopia Avenue. I think that, in the same way that Cloud Atlas acted as a bridge into his world, Utopia Avenue was almost a culmination of his works thus far. I think that, without them, Jasper de Zoet’s character and, for that matter, the whole story, would have been nigh-incomprehensible to me.

Absolutely. Since I’m not really into the music scene, I thought I wouldn’t enjoy Utopia avenue, but I honestly think it’s my second-favorite of his works. I am about to start Ghostwritten, though will probably stop there, because I really don’t think number9dream is for me. I’m really not a fan of unsatisfying stories or bildungsroman, and I’ve read that n9d is both. What’s your take?

I enjoyed Black Swan Green, in spite of its bildungsroman plot, but It wasn’t my favourite (though it wasn’t my least-favourite, because that dubious honour has to go to Slade House, which I read before the Bone Clocks, and which I expected to have a MUCH better puzzlebox feel. I felt betrayed when I realized that the alchemical symbology and map of the house on the inside cover of my first-edition copy was all meaningless, especially when the climax was just a deus-ex-horologia before I knew who Marinus was)

• A Canticle for Leibowitz
• Cloud Atlas
• 1984

Especially after he explicitly tells Job that he is the progenitor of all evil and is proud of that fact.

Same, and I only use discord for d&d, though I don’t do Reddit at all.

Perhaps. The issue I perceive is that, for corporations, evil deeds are only illegal if you get caught and the government actually pursues you. Then, the most the corpos face is a fine, and remember: if the penalty for doing something illegal is a flat fine, then it isn’t a punishment, it’s a price.

Thus, this corporation has indicated its clear intent to sell me to the highest bidder. I would not give them a chance to do so. A “do not agree” button is just that: a “do not agree button”.

My time has come. As someone who almost exclusively listens to instrumental soundtrack from movies and games, including from games I have never played, these are the ones that most often get stuck in my head (in no particular order). A plus “+” indicates a song that got stuck in my head regularly before I ever played the game, while an asterisk “*” indicates a song that still gets stuck in my head, despite being from a game I have never played at all.

1. Baba Yetu - Civ IV (+)

2. Hyrule Castle - Breath Of The Wild (+)

3. Lorule Castle - Link Between Worlds (*)

4. One Final Effort - Halo 3 (*)

5. Golem King - Moonlighter

6. Song of the Ancients - Nier Series (*)

7. Dragonborn - Skyrim

8. Far Horizons - Skyrim (+)

9. Dragon Roost Island - Wind Waker (*)

10. Nate’s Theme - Uncharted (*)

11. Gusty Garden Galaxy - Super Mario Galaxy (*)

12. Korobeiniki - Tetris (+)

13. Gerudo Valley - Ocarina of Time (+)

14. Colgera Battle - Tears of the Kingdom

15. This Song - The Witcher 3 (It’s the song Aen Seidhe, but without vocals)

16. Bloody Tears - Castlevania (*)

But finally, the song that I credit with making me obsessed with instrumental soundtrack, because I fell asleep with it playing on repeat for a whole night at the age of 5, and then lost the game cartridge, so I forgot what it was from, and which I would get stuck in my head roughly once a month throughout my entire childhood until I finally found the song THIRTEEN YEARS LATER:

Ω) Town Theme - Final Fantasy II

Yeah, there were a couple of tiny decisions, any of which failed you out if you got them wrong, and several of them had deceptive descriptions during the QTE.

I was under the impression that it wasn’t Victorian London, but The Plague Year. IIRC she, canonically, brings a blanket infested with plague lice from here to there, and ends up dropping it next to the ship Catriona, which is how the Catriona plague actually gets started. It was one of those “oh shit, yes, that explains everything” moments for me when I first read the books.

I think that the thing that let them down was that they didn’t actually get to participate in any discussion or consensus-building. I think that the ideal scenario to solve this issue is a quick chatroom amongst simultaneous players, in which topics for discussion are briefly discussed for a few minutes, then voted on, like a real jury. It could include deliberation, but the question writer would only see the verdict. I will tell you that I would personally play this if it followed this method:

Make it fewer players per question (like 5 or 7), so that it doesn’t take an hour. Each submits a question. Make it so that, while your question is being considered, you are in another jury room deliberating on another question. Make deliberations timed (say, 3-5 minutes per question), so that no one is in a lobby waiting to serve on a jury for too long. Then, after serving on a number of juries equal to the number of jurors (5-7), they can view their verdict. This would allow for the deliberation these people are suggesting.

Totally the wrong place in the thread, but I think just going to the Library, proving that you are from the future with some basic knowledge of chemistry, and telling them that they need a backup in the caves of the Sinai Desert would probably be my go-to. Give them some pointers on multi-millennium document storage.

That was less for you than for the people who come after, still ignorant of the crimes of Edison. A just world would not even remember Edison’s name.

and was inarguably the better inventor and thinker, since Edison was a plagiarist and marketer who made incremental changes to the designs of other people, and nothing more

FTFY

80% certain that’s Quentin Tarantino, or were you talking about Brad Pitt? Actually, I now see that they are all wearing black shirts, so maybe you’re talking about Leonardo DiCaprio?

It also clearly cites it at the bottom. Its not like this is plagiarism. Its clearly making the point that this is the new, awful truth of the world before us, and maybe we need a few avengers, like little Billy Ignore Instructions and his vindictive mom.

Thank you! I didn’t feel like checking with the difference in masses, and based my assumption on Stephen Hawking’s statement that an earth-mass black hole (with an event horizon the size of a pea) would glow from Into The Universe: The Story of Everything. It seems he exaggerated, assuming this calculator is accurate and my understanding of its values is fair. Such an exaggeration is disappointing, if not entirely surprising.

It is worthwhile to note that the above is highly reductive. A “black hole” is the sort of “hole” in spacetime you’re thinking of. It is caused, however, by gravitational dilation of spacetime by an incredibly high energy density. If you stuff enough matter and energy into a tiny enough space, the gravitational force will be strong enough that no other force in the universe can keep it from getting closer, and closer. Even the forces which keep neutrons and protons from combining with each other will be surmounted, as the energy density increases asymptotically toward infinity. This tiny point of effectively infinite density is the black hole’s “singularity”. Surrounding this singularity is a region where anything (matter, light, space itself) that gets within that range cannot escape. This is because objects have escape velocities based on their masses. If you’re going fast enough, you’ll fly away from the earth never to return. If you’re not going that fast, eventually you’ll fall back down. The further you are from the earth, the easier it is to escape it. The “black” part of the black hole, called the “event horizon”, is the distance from the singularity at which the black hole’s escape velocity is equal to the speed of light, meaning that, closer than that, nothing can escape it. Hence why it’s “black”, because no light is escaping from it. Technically, a black hole is not perfectly black due to hawking radiation, and a black hole with a 0.5 meter schwarzchild radius would probably be small enough to visibly glow (just a bit). (probably not, see below)

Whoo boy. The Proton CEO posted a deeply troubling remark praising trump and republicans as the champions of the little guy, and lambasted democrats for being in the pocket of big tech. This, understandably, seemed rather… icky to a great many people, who dislike the idea of the service they trust for privacy kissing the ring of the Fascist in Chief/Putin’s Towelboy/Elon’s Hamberder Carrier. This might have been more palatable if it was made clear that Proton itself does NOT endorse the policies of Melon Husk’s puppet administration and the MAGAt Horde, and that the original post was made by the CEO in his capacity as a private citizen, and not as the CEO of Proton.

So when, in the face of backlash from the federated community, Proton decided to just leave the fediverse, rather than clarify its position, but stay on Reddit & the Xitter, using the half-baked excuse of “it’s too expensive for us to cross-post on this completely free system”, people, understandably, took this to indicate that Proton, previously one of the most trusted privacy companies, may not be as independent as its swiss headquarters leads one to believe.