Alan

Happy birthday!

Oof. I know when I want to find bugs in MY computer programs, I often think to myself "boy, sure would be nice if I could turn this over to a hallucination-prone algorithm that probabilistically generates what answers might look like."

There has never been a more urgent need to have a society internalize the sentiment “The cemeteries are full of irreplaceable men.”

As a DM I'd allow it until the polymorph ran out, as a player, out of an abundance of caution, I'd try to get the hole first. One of the few times the sentence "Throw me your hole!" becomes tactically relevant.

I will let you know if I find out.

Me with a loaf of bread fresh out of the oven: cutting it with oven mitts on, then juggling the buttered slice from hand to hand until I can hold onto it long enough to convey it to my mouth. I am 48.

Thread, and also a useful video demonstration: the Paul R Tregurtha is 1013 feet long, and on December 1 2017 had to do a donut in Lake Superior when the Aerial Lift Bridge suddenly stopped, well, lifting. The emergency maneuver took about fifteen minutes. www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2I7...

"Can I move?"

Scrolling through my own profile because I was literally about to write exactly this again but thought "I bet I've said this before." I will undoubtedly at least think it again; Slow Cooker Roast Beef Smell In A Tiny Apartment is an eternal mood.

Yeah, I forgot to transfer my UI settings over when I moved computers and I still haven't fixed them all.

Love when there's a thunderstorm out over @lakesuperior.bsky.social.

Listen, hand color-matching might as well be magic as far as I'm concerned. You're some kind of paint wizard, those people are nuts.

You wouldn't think "you feel like that because you haven't eaten in eighteen hours, have some food" would be a lesson you'd need to learn more than once, and yet.

A lot of people don't believe me when I tell them that one of my best winter camping experiences was caused by like a thirty-degree overnight temperature DROP. We went from slogging through slush (on top of lake ice) to cruising across solid glass (and iceboating with sleds.)

He was actually fairly careful not to, IIRC--if he crossed Federation ethics standards too hard, he'd get kicked off the ship, which means he'd have to pay for his own science, which means smaller profits down the line. He was that rare Ferengi who understood long-term planning.

In my Star Trek Adventures tabletop game our ship's bartender was a Ferengi biochemist who in his spare time used the holodeck for the kind of research you're not allowed to do on real people. I'm not sure if that's an argument for or against, but he was an excellent bartender.

Nice! Congratulations!

I'm now thinking of this as "Not Gone in Twenty Minutes." So glad your garage is stepping up, though--knowing you can depend on people when this kind of thing happens makes everything so much easier.

Wow. These thieves should maybe rethink their life of crime, because they are not good at it.

Ugh, that sucks. I'm glad they didn't get away with the car, though.

This might be more of a "goes good on" thing but yesterday my mom made focaccia topped with rosemary and sea salt and the only reason we didn't go through the entire loaf like a pack of ravening wolves was it was in the oven a little too long and had some scorched bits. All the other bits got eaten.

Those are some ridiculously catchy songs, it has to be said.

Serving takeout, naturally.

I gotta give props to Scott Wegener: every time Zebos appears on-panel with that detached smirk like he's too rich to be in any real danger, I want to dribble his bald skull off the nearest bulkhead, and I feel like that's the intended reaction to the character.

Maintenance workers, secretaries, mailroom staff, waitstaff. Basic human decency costs nothing, is honestly way easier than being unpleasant, and it is amazing how much smoother your life can run.

I'm not going to say I know how anything works, but I've listened to enough people in the industry talk about their jobs that I think I understand one thing: every game on the shelf had a lot of people fighting to make it the best it could be. Even if it's not what you wanted, don't be a jerk.

Like goddamn, sit through the entire credits scroll for a major game and tell me with a straight face you know anything about how that sausage got made. Hundreds of people working thousands of hours for years, but sure, one person ruined it for you, specifically, on purpose.

This kind of thing makes me so frustrated. Like, isn't game development already hard enough? You're gonna decide which one person is to blame for you not liking it as much as you wanted to, and go after them in public?

Cerberus engineer turrets my beloathed.

Sort into groups, yes, but I do rainbow order (with brown standing in for both indigo/violet, at least until they come back to their senses and reintroduce light brown.) One at a time, skipping less numerous groups until all numbers are even. It's annoying when a handful doesn't have all the colors.