Huh.

If you’re taking a poll, I for one absolutely would read a series on upgrading the Changli. Start with beefing up the build quality a bit, swap in a bigger motor, maybe do something about the brakes. Maybe it wouldn’t be very Changli anymore, but it would probably be a better vehicle, and the journey would probably be…

Specifically, it is a Woolly Rhinoceros, commonly depicted in Paleolithic cave art, and believed to have gone extinct along with other megafauna, towards the end of the last ice age.

I don’t know if I’d let that driver continue to be a friend.

I don’t know if it actually affects its ranking, but...

Yeah, this sounds like the kind of thing that slips through when you’re testing against a server in your own office, or even testing against a server located in a datacenter in the same city. Under those sort of conditions, it would add probably only a few frames of extra loading time - and if it’s done in parallel…

The real question is: will this outfit also include a music track, the way a few others have? Because all I want is an Isabelle vs. Doom Slayer match, on Smashville, while BFG Division plays.

The pollution of a Space Shuttle launch was the equivalent of millions of annual car emissions and there’s no way his Dr. Evil dick rocket vanity project can improve on those numbers in any way appreciable enough to offer any benefit.

I mean, I’d recommend basically the entire blog. The stuff of “how plausible were the battles in The Lord of the Rings?”, contrasting book and film, were very interesting. His tirade about the “Fremen Mirage” made me finally read Dune. I think the only thing that I haven’t been fascinated by were the “why we should…

I would highly recommend this scholarly blog by Dr. Devereaux, analyzing Victoria II’s treatment of various historical issues, including slavery (there are preceding posts going more in-depth into some bigger design elements, but the slavery blurb is in the linked one). I don’t even play Paradox games, but I found…

From what I know of mRNA vaccines, this does not seem viable. (I am far from an expert and will defer to any professionals in the audience, but I know enough to think that something’s not right here.)

Interestingly, so does ULA’s upcoming Vulcan rocket, due to replace Atlas V. (Assuming Blue Origin can actually deliver the engines they sold them, but that’s a separate issue.)

Actually, the solid rocket boosters that Atlas V typically requires to launch heavier payloads, are significantly worse than kerolox in terms of air pollution. The main liquid motor is not too bad, basically like a big jet engine in terms of emissions, exhaust is most CO2 and H2O, but the solid rockets add some nasty…

Ooh, Bottled Cloister. I used to run a playset of them in casual Modern, to counter 8-rack. Good way to dodge sorc-speed discard. Too slow for competitive play but just fine for kitchen table Magic, and few of my decks need to play things off-turn.

Magic has tons of tokens, but the rules very specifically allow tokens only on the battlefield. If a token dies, the card doesn’t stay in the graveyard; if it gets bounced back to your hand or shuffled into your library, it disappears.

Some games have visual artifacts that are minimized at higher resolutions. Without motion blur, fast-moving objects (or static objects with a fast-moving camera) can seem to “jump” between positions, if they move by multiple pixels per frame. I don’t find it to be that big a deal, and most games have motion blur these…

Unfortunately, catching a spaceship with a truck is not likely to succeed. The capsule was drifting in the wind - even the people tracking it were three minutes away by ground, any operation large enough to actually catch it would have to be too large to remain unnoticed. Consider how little success SpaceX has had,…

They’re claiming to have more or less perfected Windows emulation on Linux (which is what SteamOS runs on top of). I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve massively improved it - I’ve long felt that Windows emulation could be significantly improved with a serious, well-funded push - but we’ll have to see how well it runs…

There’s actually zero mention of streaming on their site, as far as I could see. I expect it will have it, but that’s not the stated purpose. The hardware is overpowered for streaming - it’s basically ~25% the power of current-gen consoles. I also don’t think it has any cellular internet, which you’d need to stream…

Virgin Galactic’s tech is of dubious value. It’s pretty much tailor-made for short suborbital tourist hops, and has no good path towards anything actually productive.