Question is, who is this a deterrent against? Only other nuclear powers.

Russia? We can just blow the shit out of them with conventional weapons, don’t need this.

China? We’d fucking lose, a hundred-fold. Only deterrent against China is a very strong Europe, so let’s get back to the table.

USA? These submarines carry their missiles, and they’ll just remote-disable the fucking things.

France? They’ve got more nukes than we do, and honestly I can’t see us ever being at war with them again.

Israel? Can’t see any global power actually taking them to task for their genocide.

Conclusion: useless. On the basis that they’re a stupidly expensive left-over from the cold war, might as well cancel it, invest half of the money into conventional boom, and pocket the rest.

He’s a patent clerk, which is alluded to in a couple of comics. Watterson thought it would be funnier when the joke is specific, and gave him the same job as his own father. Write what you know.

Pretty sure that they just do that spontaneously in russia. They should be used to it by now, anyway.

If JetBrains could spend more time fixing all their broken shit and less time on this, that would be amazing.

Had my copy of IntelliJ spontaneously deactivate itself yesterday, presumably a network glitch contacting my company’s auth servers. Second attempt successful, and enabled every fucking ‘premium’ plugin while it was at it. Took half a day to turn all that shit back off again and find every setting that was changed before I could do local builds again. Aargh.

Main selling point of IDEA over eg. Eclipse is that it’s “faster”. Getting slower all the time, and I’ve never had Eclipse spontaneously shit itself in quite such fashion.

I do miss the two-player mode of Lemmings on the Amiga. Amiga could support a mouse in every port, so you could both use a mouse while battling each other. One player needing to use a joystick on ‘every other platform’ (which for Lemmings, was every other platform in existence at the time) was vastly inferior.

Basically every other computer either only supported one mouse, or all mice moved the same pointer.

Not saying that this is a generally useful feature, and networking has improved to the point where split-screen games are rare, and in an era where most games have console ports then mouse-control multiplayer games are unusual, but you know. Niche usages.

If you’ve unlocked the “rare achievements showcase” on your profile, presumably using the desktop app, then it appears on your profile on the mobile app, too.

Behold! Not even getting all that far in They Bleed Pixels is my finest achievement, with only 1.1% of other players managing the same. What you need to do is focus on games that are old and unreasonably bastard hard, and rare medals can be yours.

They all challenge you on different ways.

DS3 is actually quite interesting to finish on SL1. You can cast one basic spell, lots of weapons are available to you, but you need to think carefully about your loadout so you’ve got a good set of resistance and buffs for each area.

DS1 limits you to terrible weapons with boring movesets, and by the time you’ve heard the pyromancy noise for the ten thousandth time, you’ll be ready to chuck your monitor out the window.

DS2 is hellish. Your dodge is tied to your agility, which only a few items boost, and for the first 3/4 of the game, you’ll only get that from a crap armour set. Only a couple of weapons are available to you. You’ll need to know basically every boss inside out; some of the ones that were comedic before are no longer so funny.

Scholar is like DS2, but you can’t run into the DLC early on any more to get some of the powerful rings that are in there. I almost cried when I finally got the ring of the embedded.

Wouldn’t know about finishing ER on RL1/no summons. Cleared out the four demigods easily enough, but Morgott was a run ender. RL1 does not leave you a lot of room for mistakes, put it like that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliant_Robin

The three wheels and the fibreglass construction meant that it was light enough to count as a tricycle, so that you could drive one on a motorcycle license rather than a full driving license. Plus they sip quite gently at the petrol by the standards of the 1970s. You still saw a few on the roads when I was growing up in the 80s, but it’s been a long time.

The thought of doing 85 mph in one of them is enough to make me fill my trousers, though. Couldn’t pay me enough.

Well, the universe is expanding, and we don’t know why. Dark energy has come to dominate the energy balance of universe, and we don’t know what that is. We’ve a theory that’s great for describing small things, and a different theory that’s great for describing large or fast things, but they don’t line up, so we can’t have them quite right.

If the universe did have a period of greatly increased expansion shortly after the big bang, it doesn’t seem too crazy to suggest that you could do it again, at least in theory. Might require some absurd energy density. That much energy in one place is likely to collapse into a black hole, which would sort out contacting the universe again.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_of_the_universe

And that very unusual lowercase ‘g’. https://www.emigre.com/Fonts/Matrix-II lets you compare them all.

Joke is, that he’s counted six toes on her foot. Normally TLP stops at the one that went home.

Some high-end professional monitors have really sophisticated colour calibration tools, and perhaps a gaming monitor might allow you to automatically configure HDR or refresh rate on a per-app basis. I don’t think it’s unreasonable that a monitor might have some software. The problem is automatic installation of shitware that you can’t get rid of again. Fuck LG, fuck Windows for allowing it.

Suspends disbelief a little that the food is still rotting in centuries-old dungeons. Maybe should have some completely dried-out fungus in the vague shape of the food, that collapses into dust when your presence moves the air that’s sat motionless for decades.

Not that the DnD economy makes any sense anyway, of course. Bret Devereaux, in amongst his other excellent writings, did an excellent explanation of why “gold currency” wasn’t a thing in historical times; he’s written specifically about BG3’s armour problems as well.

Really traditional vampires are super OCD; one of the ways to get rid of them is to spill a big bag of eg. rice in front of them, and they’ll spend so long counting every grain that they’ll get caught by the rising sun. Salt ought to work as well?

One grain of salt, two grains of salt. Ah ha ha ha. Three grains of salt…

Was in the Steam sale recently - bought it, completed it. It’s pretty good - revisits a lot of MI1 and 2 with the hindsight that comes with age. There’s a lot to like, but it’s also fairly blatantly unfinished, some of the puzzles seem like placeholders for the much bigger puzzles that ought to be there, if you see what I mean?

It’s not quite as good as any of the original trilogy, but it’s not far off. Massively better than 4, obviously. I quite enjoyed the Telltale ones, tho - the episodic structure forced them to keep the puzzles tight, and they had some really good moments.

Oh, cool. Great game, really fun to play.

I’d like to nominate “several different versions of Dredmor” as the update required; maybe have some cryptic clues as to which version he is as you progress down the dungeon. You either know what he’s like and have planned your build around it, in which case you’ll whip him like a red-headed stepchild with implausibly big eyebrows; or you’ll get a complete kicking because he will one-shot your otherwise end-game character as soon as he gets close.

A rogue-like where most of the options aren’t good isn’t a great one. Everything should be useful in some kind of character build.

Problem being, of course, that you can add more certificates, but you can’t revoke the original M$ one. And since it’s vulnerable and you can’t get rid, then these exploits still work and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.

BBC food, English muffins are indeed called English muffins here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/english_muffins_56640

Where I am (oop north), if you just said “muffin”, people would assume you meant the small round bit of bread that you put fillings into; a barm, a roll, …

Get some Hendo’s relish on it as well - meal for for a king.

That pieathalon link is something else! Cheers Tal, will dig through more of it later. And yeah, chilli con carne with a big tortilla on top sounds like a winner.

My “classic pie that went horribly wrong”, and my mates still take the piss out of me now for how bad it was, was an attempt at “fidget pie”. How bad can a pork-and-apple pie be? It can be a soggy undercooked bowl of slop, that’s how.