Same with The Mysterious Benedict Society. I did find a site that would sell it to me on a disc, but once I received it, it became clear to me they didn’t actually have a license to do so and just sold me a bootleg. Oh well. I dunno why Disney just didn’t want my money in the first place.

It’s the “with which we are okay” that sounds a little stilted. Most speakers would probably phrase that part of the sentence as “which we’re okay with.” It’s just because “okay with” is so common that it almost feels like a transitive form of the verb “to be okay,” so splitting apart sounds odd.

Note that there’s already a different transitive verb “okay” which means “approve” or “authorize,” as in “the boss okayed your plan to use the forklift,” implying that the person doing this has authority or control over whether the thing happens. “I’m okay with it” by contrast typically means something like “I have no control over it but it also doesn’t trouble me.” “Unfazed by” (spelled in this way, not related to “phase”) would be a similar expression.

Capitalism is already a superintelligence, and its goals are misaligned with those of humanity.

Kinda feels like moving out of America ought to be covered by my health insurance, really

Sound doesn’t travel as far through warm humid air, so the world feels a little more muted and calm. (Contrast this with the dry, dense air of a frigid winter day, when the sound of cars carries for miles as a dull growl.) The light is almost entirely diffuse thanks to clouds, rather than the sharp glare of a sunny day; your skin isn’t dried out and burned in the same way either. Public spaces aren’t as crowded. Indoor rooms are often lighted more gently as well without sharp sunbeams drawing lines. Add the sound of rain itself and the faint smell of petrichor, and the improvement in the air quality as the rain washes particulate and pollen into the gutters, and you get a perfect day to curl up with a book, a cup of tea, and a cat on your lap.

“No, I am not going with you to a concert in the park! There’s a zombie horde out there! We’ll get bitten!”

“Hey, even the WHO says it’s not an apocalypse anymore. The zombies are endemic now. You can’t live your life in fear.”

“Your mom was eaten by zombies literally last week.”

“Yeah but she had diabetes. There’s always gonna be people with preexisting conditions who are gonna be more vulnerable.”

“At least wear your denim jacket to make it harder for them to bite you!”

“There was a study in the Lancet that said heavy clothes don’t work.”

“You know full well that what they found was that requiring heavy clothes didn’t work because people just got bitten at the times when they weren’t wearing them.”

“The author himself said jackets don’t work.”

“He said that after he was bitten and just before demanding our brains!”

“Okay, sheeple. Oh, hey Mom. We’re just heading out to the concert.”

“Wait, your mom is here? I thought she was…”

“BRAAAAIINSSS…”

“You LET HER BACK IN after she died and came back as a zombie!?”

“Dude, she’s not infectious anymore. She caught it like four days ago.”

“That is NOT how this works! What… DON’T HUG HER!”

“Bye Mom, love you…ow!”

“She just bit you, didn’t she.”

“Nah, I’m fine. Let’s go to the concert.”

The code name of the first Steam Box, before it was released, was Piston, which fits the theme pretty well. e.g. https://www.polygon.com/2013/1/7/3849284/piston-valve-steam-box-xi3

Maybe they should patent it, to protect their TCP IP.

Switching my phone screen to black and white actually does help, but the temptation to switch back is powerful.

I don’t think it’s most yet, but it’s improving fast thanks to the Valve Steam Deck. Bazzite is probably the distro to look at for a machine that’s primarily for gaming; it’s based on the Steam Deck OS, but works on more machines. There are some high-profile games like Fortnite that won’t run on it, but a lot of stuff will, especially if it doesn’t rely on any fancy anti-cheat stuff.

Definite “Friday was the name of his horse!” energy here.

Wasn’t the phrase supposed to be “Primus sucks”? I seem to remember that being a self-identification thing for fans back in the day.

Yeah, I’ve thought about this, but I think you need more than one degree of freedom for the chair to help with motion sickness. Like, if your character is in a car and accelerates, you need to tilt (pitch) backwards a bit, to emulate the way the acceleration pushes you back into your seat on the car (well, really it’s the corresponding motion in the inner ear we need to worry about, but a tilt is the correct solution for both). When you go around a corner, it needs to tilt (roll) sideways a bit, to match the feeling of being pulled to the outside of the turn by centrifugal force. Etc. Those are the forces our inner ears are expecting, and without those, there’s still a mismatch. And even with the hardware to do those movements, you need software to calculate the right motions ahead of time so you can reach the right positions in time to match the visuals, which is also quite difficult, and makes it pretty hard to picture doing this as a peripheral rather than as an integrated system. And the cost would be prohibitive.

Honestly I think we may not get this until we can fake it all with electrical signals to the brain, which is quite a long way off.

If I’m remembering correctly, this phrase was immortalized in a Primus track at one point. There’s a weird, short track (or maybe an intro to a longer song?) on “Sailing the Seas of Cheese” that’s just one guy singing along with running water, and as I remember them, the lyrics are: “As I stand here in the shower, singing opera and such/pondering the possibility that I pull the pud too much/there’s a scent that fills the air; is it flatus? just a touch/and it makes me think of you.”

Which apparently is still in my brain, even though I didn’t think I’ve listened to that album since the 90’s. My brain is weirdly prone to storing old audio, though.

I believe they were already required to use reflectors. Back in the 80’s when I was sometimes in Ohio with my parents we used to pass Amish buggies sometimes, and they always had an orange triangle retroreflector thing on the back.

Honestly it just reminds me of the moral panic over “cock ring Ken.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earring_Magic_Ken

(also amusing in this context to note that his earring is in his left ear, so I’m not sure even the homophobes were consistent about this)

I’m kind of reluctant to buy a headset with Google’s new VR OS on it. Cardboard was kind of fun until they cancelled it. Daydream wasn’t very good because they gave it a 2dof controller, but then they finally added 6dof head tracking–but then they cancelled the project before the headset actually came out (the one with 6dof tracking, I know the 3dof daydream headset exists, I have one. I think the 6dof one did come out [Lenovo Mirage] but the project was already dead at that point). So that was a bust. They also had project Tango for AR, but then they cancelled that right around the time an actually decent phone with support for it came out. And there was the VR180 video format, where they teamed up a bunch of hardware manufacturers, but then most of those never actually made it to market either and they dropped all the language about the project from their website. They also had that lightfield video project that allowed you to move around within a small volume, but they cancelled that project too.

Google’s attention span with VR projects just seems to average about a year, and I don’t want to shell out high-end headset money for something that might get bricked in an year.

One issue is that it can be leveraged to maintain a monopoly. Microsoft famously made a bunch of small modifications to the HTML standard, so that web sites that wanted to work with MS Internet Explorer had to write custom versions to be compatible. But because so many people just used IE because it was bundled with Windows, those “extensions” started to become their own standard, so that then other browsers had to adopt MS’s idiosyncrasies in order to be compatible with the sites, which in turn harmed standardization itself. They even had a term for this technique: “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.” It nearly worked for them until Google pushed them out with Chrome. Microsoft tried to do the same thing again with Java until the government got involved.

It’s complicated, certainly, but there are legitimate cases where “just a little tweak” can be quite a big problem for a standard.

Oh, cool! I didn’t know about that. I might actually check it out once that’s released.