Ian

I’m loving the companions. Marisol and Tristan are the current standouts for me, but I love how each of them has been written/voiced.

There is no way to win this game. There is no behavior that will satisfy them.

You are either failing to live within your means, i.e., swearing off all frivolities like some sort of financial anchorite, or you are ruining the economy by not buying things.

It’s incredible that having to wear a bit of cloth over your nose and mouth and not being able to go to TGIFriday’s for 6 weeks drove a not insignificant percentage of the electorate completely insane

Aw man I used to love isometric games, that sounds like a blast.

My game pass ultimate subscription expired last night so I reinstalled civilization revolution (from my original disc) and had a blast playing that.

This rules, great work.

I'm not sure you can get more marie antoinette than taking away food stamps before thanksgiving while you build a gold and marble dance hall so the other crooks can bring bribe you over a badly-cooked (argentinian) steak

Today marks 15 years since the release of Fallout: New Vegas.

Since 2010, players have explored the Mojave Wasteland where countless Couriers have walked the same road—each carving their own story. Thank you for keeping the spirit of the game alive all these years.

Viva New Vegas. 🎲

$30 a month for game pass ultimate is unconscionable. $360/year?? Absolutely not. No more game pass for me.

Screenshot of Bluesky feed where the first post is a product recall notice and the immediate next post is talking about the product in question (Anker chargers)

It was foretold in a prophecy

Photo of myself sitting on a closed toilet at an angle leaning against the wall while holding paper towel on a cut on my hand. The bathroom lights have been angled to illuminate the room in an aesthetically pleasing way.

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My cat Sam(wise) sitting on the same closed toilet from a different camera angle. The lighting is also favorable.

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Immaculate lighting in the bathroom today. Photo taken by my wife who is not on bsky

We can and should produce a good deal of our energy from rooftop solar panels and solar canopies over parking lots—but there aren’t enough of them to produce everything we need, and it’s considerably cheaper to use cleared land. Like, for example, some of the fields where we currently grow corn, the most widespread crop in America. And here—as someone who lives in a corn-growing county—is where I want to make an argument that may seem at first blush unlikely: Converting some of these fields to solar panels makes enormous ecological sense.

That’s because one way to look at a field of corn (or any other crop) is that it’s already an array of solar panels. A plant is a way to convert sunshine into energy through photosynthesis, which is an enormous miracle—the chlorophyll in the leaves absorbs energy from the red and blue parts of the spectrum, which energizes electrons, moving them to a higher energy state. A miracle—but not a very efficient one. Somewhere between 1 and 3 percent of the sunlight falling on a leaf actually becomes energy. The photovoltaic panel works considerably better: As we’ve seen, the average panel is about 20 percent efficient, and we’re on a course that might someday soon get us to 40 percent efficient. Which means that, say, if you want to use corn to power a car, it takes a lot of it. About 40 percent of America’s corn crop is turned to ethanol—in Iowa, on the richest topsoil in the world, that number is over 60 percent. If you spent a day driving past Midwestern corn fields, mostly you’d be seeing gasoline plants. But, again, inefficient ones: A few years ago, 200 scientists at 31 colleges and universities across Iowa signed a statement noting that a “one-acre solar farm produces as much energy as 100 acres of ethanol.” Or, to do the math in reverse, an acre of corn will produce enough ethanol every year to drive a Ford F-150 pickup about 25,000 miles. But cover that same acre in solar panels and you will produce enough juice to drive the electric version of the same truck—the F-150 Lightning—about 750,000 miles. Or to do the math one more way, you could supply all the energy the US currently uses by covering 30

One truth is, we actually don’t need very much land to provide the energy we need. At the moment, according to Stanford’s Mark Jacobson, fossil fuel infrastructure takes up about 1.3 percent of America’s land area—this includes active and abandoned oil and gas wells and coal mines (since, unlike the sun, these play out, you need new ones every year) and deforested strips for pipelines, power plants, and tank farms. By his calculation, converting entirely to clean energy would use less of the landscape. It depends on how you count it, of course—when Jacobson looks at the acreage of a wind farm, for instance, he includes just the pads for mounting the turbines and the paved roads between them, since everything else can still be farmed. His numbers, across 145 countries: “The total new land area for footprint required . . . is about 0.17 percent” of their territory. By contrast, at the moment the US devotes about 41 percent of its land—both pasture and cropland—to feeding cows. We devote two million acres to golf courses and three million to airports.

doubt it convinces anyone but i like the pro-solar framing that it's better at converting energy than corn. fuck corn, we're kicking corn's ass now

Black cherry tomatoes! They’re kind of tangy-er than normal cherry tomatoes. Great in a caprese.

Roma tomatoes

Black cherry tomatoes

Abundance! We just had to roast a ton of ours too. We’re still getting some.

It Only Tuesday

It Only Tuesday https://theonion.com/it-only-tuesday-1819569397/

Spotted cow

Every person who says "of course there are some uses for LLMs" should be forced to immediately list what those uses are, taking into account that:

a) they cannot be accurate and there is no way to make them accurate

b) they have been repeatedly shown to make users dumber and worse at their jobs

Finally

Billy Corgan came out for the final song and they played Bullet with Butterfly Wings

MCR was fucking incredible. Buddy and I had pit tickets at Soldier Field.

Every tech update now is like: "Great news, the word processor you've relied on for twenty years has learned to juggle! Is it good at it? No! Does it help in any way? Of course not! Has it made it insufferable to use? Oh, absolutely."

This and the following images depict a Dark Angels Deathwing Terminator Captain by Games Workshop painted by me. It is a work in progress.

More progress on my Dark Angels Deathwing Terminator Captain

#warhammer40k
#darkangels40k
#warhammer40kpainting

May your temperature be right, may your angle be good, and may you always have enough paint in the can to finish priming your last mini

Report: It's Not Okay To Just Start Talking To People You Don’t Know

Report: It's Not Okay To Just Start Talking To People You Don’t Know theonion.com/report-...

It's incredible that all of the people who would shit on Wikipedia as a source because "lol anyone can edit that" are now 100% reliant on asking questions to the lying robot machine that no human has any oversight over

there's an episode of The Simpsons where Marge tries to get a violent cartoon pulled from the airwaves, only to discover that the people backing her aren't going to stop at just the art that *she* doesn't like, and that supporting artistic freedom means accepting discomfort.

It aired in 1990.

[quoting a tweet by fractalcounty that reads, “today I learned that there are actual people irl who get genuinely upset if they catch you using chatgpt. like they view it as a serious moral failing in certain circles”]

If you're using AI to write essays, eulogies, a text to your wife, I do think less of you as a person. Ceding your mental and creative abilities to a machine is an embarrassing thing and people should be ashamed to admit doing it in public.

the argument that AI in the context of art is “just a tool” completely elides the fact that the point of art is to participate in the fucking process of making it

No money to Rowling