@blek If we're crashing back down, it's not much of a peak; just about triple the last trough.
Posts made by PotatoEngineer
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RE: A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted
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RE: The Cat Status Thread
@DogsB said in The Cat Status Thread:
I was listening to a podcast about what kind of animals think they could beat in a fistfight. A shocking number of people think they could beat a bear but it reminded me of this.
That's always the fun part about how predators react to aggression: it's not about whether the bear could take the cat, but how much damage the cat is doing to do on the way down. And it's why wolverines are still around: sure, they're edible, but do you really want to mess with 30 pounds of batshit insanity?
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RE: Drug prohibition
@boomzilla about fucking time! Almost every state had some flavor of pot-permission laws, and it's a crying shame that marijuana remained on the "there is no possible medical benefit" list in the DEA. I'd be interested in watching a documentary of why it remained Schedule I for so long. Was some specific leader an anti-pot person? Was it bureaucratic inertia? DEA putting pressure on the FDA so it could keep doing civil forfeiture?
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RE: Economics of technical debt
@Arantor said in Economics of technical debt:
I've long thought that adding code is like running up a credit card, adding a library is getting another credit card, and at some point you max your credit limit and have to start paying that off.
No, you see, there's a new framework that already includes most of your libraries, so you just refinance it all onto the new framework!
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RE: Stardock, Star Control, I'm in space?
On a tangent, I did play Stardock's Star Control: Origins, and it was all right; it kept the space combat pretty much as-is, I enjoyed learning the new ships, and they didn't have that godawful Ethics Committee from Star Control 3 to limit my choices. (Granted, I usually play a good guy, but there was a moment in SC3 where you had to not shoot an actively hostile alien, because it was possible to talk them down.) There was a good variety of aliens, too: the final enemies-from-another-dimension, and the enslaved-by-software guys you eventually ally with were creative.
I didn't like the planet exploration; I get that doing a 3d exploration of a planet is what you've got to do in a modern game, but the limited view meant that it would take a while to finish getting the loot from a planet. SC2's exploration, while slightly dull, was at least quick and didn't overstay its welcome.
I also didn't like the fetch-quests in Origins; there were thankfully few in the base game, but the idea of "gather X resource which you may or may not have harvested and sold already" doesn't work well in Star Control.
And I didn't end up getting the DLC; the base game was all right, but I was ready to be done with it when I finished the game. (And honestly, I don't remember it that well anymore; I played it a few years ago.) I expect Free Stars to be a much better game, but at least I'm not expecting it to be Best Of All Time or anything.
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RE: Stardock, Star Control, I'm in space?
@Parody said in Stardock, Star Control, I'm in space?:
@PotatoEngineer said in Stardock, Star Control, I'm in space?:
The Thraddash Torch was my most fun ship (wheeeee!), but I usually was better at the Utwig Jugger or the Chmmr Avatar.
The Thraddash were fun. I liked the Pkunk Fury due to its great maneuverability, potential for free lives, and that you were insulting your opponent for the entire battle.
I did play a friend in Super Melee who picked 12 Pkunk Furies as his fleet at one point. I got good and tired of Haaaaaallelujah!, but since I was wiping the walls with him, I didn't get that tired of it. And, of course, we had our conspiracy theories of which buttons you had to hold down at what moment to get the resurrection, and of course we were all wrong and it was just random.
The Pkunk's maneuverability is fantastic against slow ships, but it wasn't exactly precise, so it was easy to screw up a strafing run by over- or under- turning.
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RE: Stardock, Star Control, I'm in space?
@Parody said in Stardock, Star Control, I'm in space?:
@PotatoEngineer said in Stardock, Star Control, I'm in space?:
I've backed it at the "I just want the game" level, because, well, I just want the game. And this is one of the few games that I'm willing to pay the full preorder price for.
I've backed it as well. I'd like a Yehat pin (my favorite ship in the first game) but it's a pretty big jump from "I just want the game".
Looks like they hate shipping physical things (and I don't blame them for it), so the first physical thing starts at $60+. (The option to have physical add-ons.) I suppose that's not too terrible, but still over twice the price of "just the game."
And for the record, my favorite ship was the Precursor Flagship with gobs of upgrades, but that's practically cheating. The Thraddash Torch was my most fun ship (wheeeee!), but I usually was better at the Utwig Jugger or the Chmmr Avatar. My brother, on the other hand, loved sheer annoyance as his strategy, with the Arilou Skiff or the Spathi Eluder. (The Spathi is a great ship, it just takes forever to win with!)
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RE: Stardock, Star Control, I'm in space?
Fred and Paul have finally gotten serious on the Star Control Sequel! It even has a Kickstarter with laughable funding numbers! (As is traditional with Kickstarter; most of the projects have some kind of external funding, and Kickstarter is half about preorders and half about marketing. In particular, this project claims to already have enough funding to make the game -- or at least most of the game; "We currently have enough funds to finish the essentials of the game – starship combat, planet exploration, and alien dialog.")
I've backed it at the "I just want the game" level, because, well, I just want the game. And this is one of the few games that I'm willing to pay the full preorder price for.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pistolshrimp/free-stars-children-of-infinity
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RE: A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted
@LaoC I'm trying to think about what I would do if I was at a flooded con. On the one hand, the con is ruined, might as well go home. On the other hand, I paid good money for this, and it's not happening again until next year, so clearly I should try to get something out of it.
I have walked out of a con after a quick tour when I was in a miserable mood, but that was a local con and so I was only out the ticket price and parking. A trip to Dubai costs quite a bit more.
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RE: In other news today...
@DogsB I've heard of Vanced/Revanced for YouTube. Haven't gotten around to installing any, since I'm not a huge video consumer, but it looks like I won't get the chance.
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RE: The Fox Ideas Thread
@accalia That reminds me of Lackadaisy Cats, which is about cats rather than foxes, but is definitely about illegal activity during Prohibition.
(Mind you, progress on that comic has come to a screeching halt now that the creator is working on an animated series for the comic.)
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RE: The Cat Status Thread
@PleegWat Not only am I sorry for your loss, I'm sorry that cats aren't immortal and can't outlive me to eat my corpse.
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RE: In other news today...
@Applied-Mediocrity said in In other news today...:
@Dragoon said in In other news today...:
Cool dice tray! Where can I buy one?
Three of the sides will allow the dice to roll off. This is a terrible dice tray.
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RE: Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space
@Arantor said in Disk too full to delete files; Delete files to free up space:
How do we stop the enshittification??
It's easy! You start up a rival service, which is exactly like the other service before it started going to shit! And then you fight off the design patent wars, and the original company will probably be a bit miffed that you're calling yourselves by their name, so there might be a few more lawsuits.
Once you've
settled the lawsuits murdered their lawyers and leadershipgotten past that trouble, you'll clearly be rolling in cash, because the original form of that service was perfectly profitable before it tried to squeeze out more mone... oh, I'm sorry, I can't keep a straight face anymore. It seems a lot like if you make a good service, then either a bunch of competitors, a market hiccup, the fundamental unprofitability of your service, or getting acquired by assholes is going to force you to enshittificate. -
RE: :baby_symbol: Parenting advice - you're gonna get hit
@acrow This is why a typical American interior door can be unlocked from either side. On one side, you get the user-friendly lock, and on the other side, there's a tiny hole with a recessed button to unlock it from the outside. It means that you've never really locked the door, which helps when there are kids involved.
And training kids on them involves two parts: teaching them how to unlock them in an emergency, and then teaching them to only unlock them in an emergency.
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RE: Watching the ending in YouTube
@Tsaukpaetra What, you don't even get recordings of the stories' high points? Crushing a boss, freeing the maiden, throwing a really bitchin' party, etc?
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Watching the ending in YouTube
When I don't want to play a video game to its end, I go and watch the ending on YouTube, because I still want to know how the story turns out. This works flawlessly for any popular game, of course. But there's a few cases where it doesn't work all that well:
- Hollow Knight's story is told in bits and bobs throughout the game, and the ending cinematic is a tiny handful of short vignettes in the places that you're supposed to already be familiar with. I ended up reading some wiki pages that explained the ending (in its various permutations).
- They Bleed Pixels has such a bare story that the ending hardly matters, but at least you get the "the hero killed the people who tried to summon a demon through her, and escaped" explanation.
- The Final Station's story, like Hollow Knight, is explained as you go. The final cinematic only makes sense if a) you've watched all the cinematics as you played the game, and b) you put two and two together -- like many indie games, the story is threadbare in places and wants you to figure things out. On the plus side, I found several forums where people were discussing the implications of the story, so it was easy enough to understand.
- Spirittea is apparently unpopular enough that nobody has recorded the ending. The game is grindy enough that I really don't want to play through three more seasons to get the final items to unlock the grand explanation. I found videos of people recruiting the few spirits I haven't found yet, but that's about it. Even the forum and wiki explanations of it just say "Wonyan remembers what happens," rather than actually spelling it out, because there's not a single person who's seen the ending and wants to spoil it, apparently. We must all suffer if we want to see that ending.
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RE: D&D thread
@Zerosquare I would absolutely love to play at a table like that, but there's no way in hell that I'd set up a table like that. (That said, I prefer playing over running, so I'm not about to pull out all the stops when running a game.)
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RE: When your actions influence the outcome in a videogame it's always meh. And when there are multiple endings they are all meh too
@Arantor said in When your actions influence the outcome in a videogame it's always meh. And when there are multiple endings they are all meh too:
@PotatoEngineer It's the sort of game that lists one of your inventory items as "no tea" because "you have... no tea". And to completely win the game you have to persuade Marvin to make you a cup.
Oh, it's worse than that: you have to have "tea" and "no tea" in your inventory at the same time. Doing so requires removing your common sense, which you can do when one of the weirder doors takes you inside your mind.
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RE: When your actions influence the outcome in a videogame it's always meh. And when there are multiple endings they are all meh too
@sockpuppet7 H2G2 is hideously, hideously difficult, with huge amounts of moon logic puzzles, as well as invisible actions. There's no indication of what you're even supposed to do in the game; once you escape the Vogons, there's very little direction, so you just fuck around for a while until you've finally put two and two together to get past... whatever the next obstacle is. There's an item that will re-enter your inventory if you drop it, without any indication that it has done so. The general weirdness of your inventory is key to solving the final puzzle.
I'm pretty sure you can beat it in under 15 minutes once you know what you're doing.
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RE: When your actions influence the outcome in a videogame it's always meh. And when there are multiple endings they are all meh too
@DogsB said in When your actions influence the outcome in a videogame it's always meh. And when there are multiple endings they are all meh too:
Games with lots of sidequests suffer from this too. The arcs usually get flattened into a single thread and that thread is usually lobotised. You can end up doing radically off character things but then you get back to the main thread and it may not have existed.
There are some games that do the "sidequests are relevant" bit as part of setting up one ending or another, and it usually ends up in Guide Dang It territory: you have to bop the freezit before you kill the whammo, or else you can't save the forsaken child anymore.
The "you need to beat new game plus seven to get the real ending crown" are really getting on my nerve too.
That's what YouTube is for! I'm usually happy to move onto the next game once I've beaten it once, and I'm perfectly happy to watch the Final_Real_Ultimate_Total_Final_V8_Final ending online rather than play through that many times.
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RE: When your actions influence the outcome in a videogame it's always meh. And when there are multiple endings they are all meh too
@sockpuppet7 said in When your actions influence the outcome in a videogame it's always meh. And when there are multiple endings they are all meh too:
@Arantor I loved the Indiana Jones and monkey island ones. I used to get stuck for days in some part until I figure what object I missed or something. I don't have that much patience with any game today as an old tired adult
These days, when I play adventure games, I play them with my wife watching. If we can't come up with a solution within about 15 minutes, I go read a walkthrough for the next step. (Sometimes, it's more like 5 minutes. Occasionally, after getting repeatedly stumped and checking the walkthrough several times in a row, it's more like 30 seconds.)
Yes, I am completely missing out on the "I finally figured it out!" aspect of adventure games, but I'm still having fun and enjoying the story.
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RE: Programming Confessions Thread
I'm using TypeScript, where the enums are just a combined object of name-to-number and number-to-name. The implementation looks vaguely like this:
ServerEnum = { 0: "FirstServer", 1: "SecondServer", "FirstServer": 0, "SecondServer": 1 }
And I'm using an enum as the key in an object. And it's really convenient a lot of the time, because I have one of those enum values hanging around most of the time.
{ [ServerEnum.FirstServer]: {...}, [ServerEnum.SecondServer]: {...} }
It's great, except in two cases:
- Object.keys(), Object.values(), and Object.entries() will all return a string key, so my enum value of 1 gets coerced into "1".
- I also end up sticking that enum into the URL, where it should be the string-value rather than the number-value.
So for 1), I'm using
parseInt(enumThing) as ServerEnum
in my iterators.And for 2), I'm doing a lot of
ServerEnum[enumAsNumber]
andServerEnum[enumAsString]
. I should probably switch from Object to Map, but , and Map's iteration API is a bit uglier. -
RE: A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted
@boomzilla One down, fifty to go!
Though if they get Tether, that's the whole shooting match.
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RE: D&D thread
@Gurth I suspect that's partly because so many characters don't have much of a personality. I know I've certainly made shallow characters. So when the personality is just one thing (or just a couple of simple things), going against it is going against all that character stands for... because they hardly stand for anything.
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RE: D&D thread
I heard a great story about a guy who created a tavern keeper for an adventure. The character was reluctant to go on the adventure, so of course the rest of the party tried to persuade him.
Unfortunately, the player bought into the characterization way too hard, and refused to go on the adventure at all. So the rest of the party just left the tavern keeper behind. IIRC, the player made a character for the tavern keeper's daughter, or something, and actually played. The rest of the party were flabbergasted that a player made a character that was completely opposed to participating in the adventure.
(I faintly recall this from the Fear The Boot RPG podcast.)
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RE: The Cat Status Thread
@HardwareGeek What's up with posts getting ten thousand hashtags? Are all of those tags active things?
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RE: D&D thread
@Zerosquare That's called the "lone wolf" character. Refuses to get involved in the group's stuff because it doesn't involve their character's backstory, and then is upset that nothing interesting is happening with their character. More amusing when the entire party is made up of lone wolves.
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RE: Programming Confessions Thread
@Tsaukpaetra said in Programming Confessions Thread:
@Zecc said in Programming Confessions Thread:
@Zecc said in Programming Confessions Thread:
@topspin said in Programming Confessions Thread:
@boomzilla not sure how @zecc meant it, but it sounds quite obvious to me that not mixing markup and code is the good thing, not the reverse.
(That is, I agree with you, but it’s not obvious to me if he didn’t agree too.)What I meant was "not mixing code and markup" is not necessarily a good thing. I think it depends. For simpler components I think it's fine.
Edit: plus, you can split code and markup but still have it all in the same file; though that's entering splitting hairs territory.
I have some code that's nominally internally split, but indeed has code in the markup and some markup in the code...
You can split the code and the markup, but there's always going to be a little bleed-through, because "how things look" is also (somewhat) business logic.
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RE: A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted
@izzion said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Guess SBF’s kickback has finally arrived…
The really fun part about this: after the ETF was approved, a whole bunch of retail investors bought in.
...and the price dropped, because it was the opportunity that so many Bitcoin-holders were waiting for so they could get out of the market. The market is so shallow that nobody with any real holdings can exit the market unless there's a giant inflow of cash.
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RE: D&D thread
@HardwareGeek said in D&D thread:
@PotatoEngineer said in D&D thread:
ready to be displayed on a shelf.
Some collectors don't even remove them from their boxes.
My rule of thumb is "if it's marketed as 'collectible', it isn't." I didn't collect comics in the 90s, but I was adjacent to a few people who did. And I remember Beanie Babies.
Anyone keeping the thing in its box thinks these things are collectible. They are sold in far too much volume to actually be collectible.
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RE: D&D thread
@Mason_Wheeler said in D&D thread:
@PotatoEngineer said in D&D thread:
rigid doll
And that's the thing I don't get. They don't do anything! How can they be this ridiculously popular when they don't do anything at all? They don't even have the bare-minimum articulated joints that stuff like Barbie dolls have had for decades.
They seem to be aimed at the adult/collector/I-need-a-thing-that-identifies-my-fandom market, rather than the toy market. Their purpose is to be looked at, not played with. I'm sure the lack of joints was a deliberate nonfeature, to make it so they are ready to be displayed on a shelf.
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RE: A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted
@topspin I've vaguely heard of a few tracking projects that use a private blockchain. So there's probably one thing it does better than a DB, but it does so many things so much worse that it almost certainly doesn't make up for using a blockchain.
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RE: D&D thread
@Gurth They're a chibi-style rigid doll, and they've been made for every imaginable IP.
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RE: Florida Man goes to...
@boomzilla I can totally see the construction business being a hotbed of scamming. There's a lot of work done on credit, for various pieces of construction. Occasionally you hear about contractors that got a bunch of materials on credit based on no approval at all from the client, and then it goes into lawsuits and the only question is how much money everyone is going to lose. Though I'd definitely expect a lot more up-front payments on house-scale work.
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RE: D&D thread
@Zerosquare I find them cute in small doses. I am, apparently, not the majority, who presumably find them cute in overwhelmingly huge doses.
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RE: D&D thread
@Gurth said in D&D thread:
bought by some other webshop and sometime after, transformed into just another a branch of that.
Hence, "FunkoPop vending machine." It seems like that brand has an absurdly large share of the shelf space in geek stores these days.
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RE: D&D thread
@Mason_Wheeler It was a birthday present.
After some quick research... turns out it came from ThinkGeek. Which is now out of business, or got transformed into another FunkoPop vending machine, or something, and no longer sells the weird stuff.
Edit: damn, it's not even on Etsy, the last bastion of niche geeky things.
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RE: Programming Confessions Thread
I've been a lazy, lazy dev. I'm trying to dirty-check something the user is editing, and so I dragged out Lodash's _.isEqual to do it. But that function is pretty picky about null vs undefined vs property-doesn't-exist, so I tack on a home-grown removeNil function before trying the isEqual().
And then it turns out that isEqual cares about the order of things in arrays (but I don't), so I sort the arrays before passing them to isEqual.
And then it turns out that when the server-side object has a null thing in a property, the client-side code is filling in a default value.
And now I just learned that my RichText editor thing is trimming whitespace (but only when it's showing!), so when the server side string ends in a space, switching to the tab with the RichText will immediately fail the dirty-check, even if the user hasn't changed anything.
Really, the more I chase this equality-check-but-some-things-don't-matter, the more I think I need to write an explicit property-by-property equality function rather than half-assing it with isEqual and nil-removal and generated-property-removal and other nonsense.
But surely, I just need to do this one last thing and I'll be done....
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RE: In other news today...
@Bulb said in In other news today...:
TBF Edge is exactly the same browser except it stores shit in a Microsoft account instead of Google account, so if you already have a corporate Microsoft account that you use to log into Windows, it makes way more sense to keep shit in the same Microsoft account rather than creating a Google one—unless you want to use personal Google account where you keep personal Google shit, but I'd strongly suggest Mozilla account for that instead. Not that they are always honest, but still a lot more so than Google.
If the choice comes down to Microsoft or Google, I go with Microsoft... mostly because once Google has your data, it uses it everywhere, while Microsoft is (slightly) better about siloing your data to the service you're using. I get the impression that's been slipping a bit over the last few years (since "Office" seems to keep expanding), but it's still not as bad as Google.
So there you have it: when given the choice between freezing to death or burning to death, I do have a preference.
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RE: Programming Confessions Thread
@Arantor Right, but you can't hold software in your hand, you can only hold a storage medium that happens to contain the software.
Apparently, I dropped this:
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RE: Programming Confessions Thread
@Arantor said in Programming Confessions Thread:
@jinpa said in Programming Confessions Thread:
Does it truly exist?
But as software, it's more of a concept than a thing. ∴ it doesn't exist.
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RE: The official unpopular opinions thread
@izzion said in The official unpopular opinions thread:
It is ${CURRENT_YEAR}... said kid could be the milk man's
Whether the kid is actually mine or not is irrelevant. If I have a kid, and I'm still married to my wife, then the kid is at least plausibly mine, which implies the presence of fucking, regardless of the actual genes in my child. (It's not a hard guarantee, of course, because maybe I'm a literal dickless liberal cuck, but it's more likely that fucking is happening than not.)
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RE: The official unpopular opinions thread
@Tsaukpaetra You may assume that, at some point in the relationship, there was fucking. I mean, I have a kid. Whether fucking continues may be speculated upon.
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RE: The Cat Status Thread
@error said in The Cat Status Thread:
Two important things:
- If you're trying to get the milk bottle back, filming will not help.
- If you need to manhandle the cat, commit. Half-assed manhandling does not work.
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RE: The official unpopular opinions thread
@Tsaukpaetra said in The official unpopular opinions thread:
@HardwareGeek said in The official unpopular opinions thread:
Damn, you're right, the number could very well be zero.
I'm married, so there's one data point.
But every probability curve has a far end, so maybe I'm just an outlier.
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RE: The official unpopular opinions thread
@DogsB said in The official unpopular opinions thread:
@PotatoEngineer said in The official unpopular opinions thread:
practice macrame with
I had to google that. That actually looks pretty cool.
My a-bit-of-everything art class in junior high had it. We did simple designs, of course, but I was in Boy Scouts by then, so I was a dab hand at tying square knots.
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RE: The official unpopular opinions thread
@Arantor said in The official unpopular opinions thread:
Question from the peanut gallery: what about cartoons that, as a kid, I didn’t realise were technically anime?
I’m specifically thinking of Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds.
Or Star Blazers, for that matter. I didn't learn the word "anime" until high school.