I did my Masters at Lamar University a few miles north of Port Arthur in Beaumont and the two cities look absolutely devastated at the best of times. The downtown areas are actual ghost towns and all the engineers and managers of the chemical plants apparently live hours away and commute.

Finally moving into my first apartment in the US next week. It’s in downtown Houston and just barely affordable under my PhD salary. Fairly excited either way! Hopefully it’s haunted!

This was yet another Stephen King book with a perfect central conceit, scenes of actual terror (like when the Officer slowly goes into the barn even when he does not want to) and a great depiction of a normal family getting utterly destroyed by evil and by grief, let down by a completely shite ending.

I ain’t letting no pesky reality and good storytelling get in the way of my ships, no sir

I love well done creepy portal stories! Stephen King’s Jaunt short story, SCP-093, The City on the Edge of Forever were all excellent!

And we were all worried about Joker while this actual menace has been befowling our society!

SCP-1733 and it’s related work, SCP-2614 (the one with the Sopranos DVD) are both absolutely fantastic! The idea of the red glow/static being the ideological boundaries of the universe is a fascinating concept. I just wish the author wasn’t such a shithead.

Wait what happened to New Mutants? I thought that seemed to be nice little horroe-adjacent superhero movie

Yeah reading the book reports were fascinating! Everyone read the same book, but everyone describes a completely different plot!

Oh heck it’s the Dahaka from Warrior Within! Run towards your closest showers!

Wait I might be dumb but how can it be a turing machine without tape/unbounded memory? If you can create a universal turing machine (as opposed to a linear bounded automata) with only NAND gates doesn’t it mean you’ve solved P=NP? Or am I confusing CS 101 concepts yet again?

“It is worth noting that the reaction between titanium and NTO at high pressure was not expected” is a frightening sentence; titanium is well known to have poor oxidizer compatibility and be easy to set on fire

The two games that comes to mind where I actually stopped playing to listen to the music would be (the first) Mirror’s Edge and Transistor. Honestly, the hum button alone in Transistor made the game well worth the price!

Well now the most important question becomes who’ll play Thom and al’Lan Mandragoran, cause she’s one of the coolest women in fantasy and she needs the best supporting characters.

Mirror’s Edge, more than most video games, was about moments, incredibly iconic bursts of gameplay that made the whole game worthwhile. The crane jump sequence, for example, is one of my favourite gaming moments!

Honestly the Insight Terminus nightfall to unlock the 3rd forge is a wee bit daunting the first time you try it. I solo-ed it pretty easily on my second after I realized what the restrictions were. I was a light level 650 geomag chaos reach warlock.

Dude I speak 4 languages and am somewhat conversant with a couple more. The only European language I know is English. Not having subtitles for the Spanish sections is reinforcing that this movie is not for the rest of the world outside your tiny bubble. Which feels fantastic for you, I’m sure, but not so great for the…

Aurash, Savathûn and Xivu Arath are some of my favourite video game antagonists ever and we haven’t even met two of them!

How does the James Webb boondoggle compare in cost to other massive NASA projects? Like Hubble/Chandra or the Space Shuttle or the ISS? Not the current expenditure, but the planning, development and pre-launch price.

Huh Lloyd’s Bucket Brigade work reminds me quite a bit of Fishburn’s fail-soft alpha-beta (or Falphabeta, which is a stupid name that nobody should use) pruning.