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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • To add to the confusion: For 2 weeks/year I help out the local ballet studio with stage crew. We have this big white backdrop curtain, and colorful lights are pointed directly at the curtain to make dramatic and moody changes to the background during certain dances. When I heard the name of these, I assumed it was the “psyche curtain” and “psyche lights” because that’s how it is pronounced.

    Turns out the box is marked “Cyc.” I have to assume that the people that sold the curtain are way less amateur than I am, so I would like to add this third potential spelling.



  • I hadn’t done a bath in years, but at one point we were fixing some of the tile in our bath/shower. To minimize how much water got into the unprotected wall, we had to take baths for about a week.

    It was inefficient for time, but maaaaan was it nice. I promised myself I wouldn’t allow myself to lapse like that again. Unfortunately I don’t think I’ve done a bath since.




  • All the time. When people start talking about how the FDA and legislators are all captured by industry lobbyists. YES! And the regulations they wrote don’t actually help protect people. YES! So we should skip vaccines and drink raw milk. NOoooooooooo!

    So close but the answer I was looking for was abandon FPP elections so we can have a multi-party system that actually represents us and maybe has a chance at overturning citizens United and all that stuff. I don’t know, I’m not a poly scientist, I’m just pretty sure pasteurization isn’t the root cause here.








  • In undergrad, our engineering 101 course had a team project/final to use the Lego robotics kits to make a robot “mars rover”. There was a play field, and we got points based on the ability to touch ping pong balls, carry ping pong balls, and return ping pong balls to the collection area.

    Points were deducted from teams based on “material cost” (each Lego had a price) and “labor” (time to build your robot). Scores were doubled if your robot was autonomous, which was mostly achieved by following black lines on the white table, because the Lego kits included light sensors.

    We got to the last day , and realized that what we had was NOT going to work. We scrapped the whole thing, and made a tiny car that just ran straight out, hit a ball, and ran straight back.

    On the mission day, they moved the table out of the sub-basement and into the classroom. The change in lighting jacked up everybody’s pathfinding, so everybody’s guidance failed. We failed the cheapest and won the day.

    Still can’t figure out of the test was a catastrophe or if we learned the EXACT lesson that he was trying to teach.




  • As I understand it, something like that happened with the game, Alliance. It was a RTS where humans had to control all the units that the commander build and ordered around.

    I learned about this, probably 15 years ago, and I never played, so a lot of this might be outdated or just plain wrong.

    I think Microsoft published the game, and eventually abandoned it. It still had a thriving mod community but they were struggling due to the lack of source code and support. Apparently, years after working on the game, one of the designers happened across an Internet forum talking about the struggles they were having. The designer then went back to his bosses and said, “We abandoned this years ago, can I just give them the source code?” I guess they did and since then the mod started making HUGE fundamental changes to the game.


  • For me, I saw very little benefit to RSS until I hosted fulltextrss. Most of the feeds I subscribed to, the RSS feed just gave you the headline, and made you load up the full website and all the ads to read the article. They don’t really want you just skimming the good stuff and skipping the ads.

    Fulltextrss basically loads in the full articles, pictures and all (if you so choose). It means I can read stories from all the sources I want, without really leaving my RSS reader.