Ugh, this sounds similar to a slapp suit. I don’t know if there’s a term for companies that sue just to put someone out of business (as opposed to a patent troll, who’s goal is not to put someone out of business but instead milk them for as long as possible), but that’s probably what’s going on here. Between it being a patent suit and not a copyright suit, and Nintendo from what it sounds like is basically saying “we think you’re infringing, though we don’t know what”, it sounds like Nintendo is going for distance, not effectiveness.

Holy shit you are absolutely relentless. I dunno how I feel about it, but damn.

Stop, stop! He’s already dead!

I love evil Sims. They are so much fun to play, especially with mods. Nice Sims are too… real? Like, in order to have a nice or otherwise relatively normal sim, you kinda have to play them like a real person which can get too real. But evil sims can be played like a cartoon supervillain. My current crackhead is a hideously deformed twig named Shpingle Bab

Edit: also, in Sims 4 specifically I now have a tradition where Johnny Zest gets immediately marked as immortal whenever I start a new save because he becomes the neighborhood punching bag (thanks Vargskelethor for making this disproportionately amusing), his yard becomes the graveyard for that save, and the ghosts all get autonomous violence turned on. It’s fun to sometimes just watch the ghosts fruitlessly trying to kill each other with the occasional passerby getting recruited to their ranks.

My understanding is that’s usually how it works. It’s just that most people usually settle for like, transformation art or VRChat and don’t need to make an entire blockbuster movie trilogy to come to terms with being trans lmao

It is. I’ve kinda been meaning to get into it as a low-effort artistic hobby. However you’re more likely to find matching puzzles made the same year by the same company than if you try to use puzzles from different years or different manufacturers (yes, some manufacturers share stencils).

Yeah, no doubt it’s a significant upgrade, the old vehicle’s silhouette is just really iconic to me.

Do it at night when people are going to bed. Send out a message to get people to check their pagers, then detonate them. There’s still a chance of collateral, but it’d be significantly lower than detonating them when people will be out in public at the cost of what I imagine would be a slightly lower chance of hitting targets.

I’m gonna miss the old design. The new one looks like someone smashed it with a looney tunes hammer.

Hezbollah uses pagers for communication. Israel intercepted shipments of pagers and rigged them with bombs. Then, an unspecified amount of time later, Israel detonated them during the day, yanno, when people would be out and about in public places. Thousands of bombs went off across Lebanon and killed and injured children, elderly people, and adults.

Of course, mainstream media is trying to pretend that Israel didn’t potentially commit what should be considered a warcrime while assholes on social media are spinning this as a masterfully precise and accurate strike that didn’t have a considerable amount of collateral (I’ve literally seen someone say “only people with something to hide would be around a pager in this day and age” verbatim), and that anyone injured or killed was a member of Hezbollah.

Like, what if one of those had been on a plane when it went off?

When ISIS plants bombs on people and detonates them in public places then it’s a bad thing. Israel does it and everyone stands, claps and tips everyone with $100% bills.

Edit: I honestly wonder if it’s only a matter of time before some IDF or Mossad shithead hijacks a plane and flies it into the Burj Khalifa.

I’m more enbyace and like computer bits and books, but basically the same. My ideal living space is either a hobbit hole in a temperate rainforest, a renovated convenience store well above the arctic circle within a Finnish forest, or a forgotten Sinclair gas station (with the dinosaur and everything) in the middle of the New Mexican desert.

I’m sure the patent made sense at the time, but it seems pretty generic now. Additionally, shouldn’t the patent have expired at this point? Why is it still being enforced?

I feel like this should unironically be a war crime. The potential for collateral is ridiculously high.

Edit: I’m amazed at how successfully this is being spun as a highly-targeted, high-precision attack with no collateral when it’s pretty much the opposite. You can’t control what they do with the pagers after they get them. Ffs there were kids killed.

Humans being the goofy, weird, but kind-hearted cro-magnons of the galaxy/universe is one of my favorite tropes.

Edit: if you want the exact opposite, try They Are Smol. It’s an sci-fi, hfy-parody shitpost. Humans have just as much of a instinct for ultra-violence as the other sapient species of the galaxy, if not moreso. However, humans are about half the size and possess about a quarter of the agility, speed and strength of their Dorarizin (big space wolves), Karnakian (big space raptors) and Jornissian (big XCOM vipers) counterparts.

This means humans are utterly adorable and basically seen as cats if cats were intelligent apes.

It also makes everyone else very concerned that humanity’s first response is to fuck things, and our second response is to fuck things. They’re concerned about our lack of counterbalace (aka a tail) and think we look very wobbly and clumsy. Finally, they’re very concerned about the fact that the entirety of the human race falls into the margin of error for the galactic census, which means that, like cats, they baby humans as much as they can without offending people.

They’re also very amused (and sometimes very disturbed) by the fact that humans have a significantly higher penis-to-body ratio (still smaller than the aliens, but an alien-sized human would have a ridiculously large penis in comparison) and have a desire to fuck anything that moves (and yes, there is official interspecies smut on the author’s patreon lmao).

I love this series so much.

There’s also a more serious companion detective series by Frank Leroux (rip :c) called The Smol Detective (he also wrote some other, shorter Smolverse series as well as a standalone series called The Adventures of Iron Hu-man). It’s absolutely phenomenal.

Extroverts don’t seem to understand that not showing interest in their sexual lives doesn’t mean disrespect, but simply that I don’t care about it.

I was on the fence until this. This is extremely unprofessional and, if I understand correctly, could even get the company sued. Here’s how I’d personally handle it; but take this with a grain of salt because I’ve never actually had to deal with something like this before:

First, talk to a lawyer. Tell them what’s going on an get their thoughts and suggestions. The suggestions following may be way off-base.

Then, start keeping track of every time she brings something like that up, and log how you responded, how it made you feel, how she reacted to you response. You’re collecting evidence for a lawsuit on the basis of a toxic and highly unprofessional work environment that’ll hopefully never actually happen.

Once you have enough info that you could potentially launch said lawsuit, double-check with your lawyer and then you go to HR.

YOUR LAWYER WILL LIKELY TELL YOU THIS: DO NOT THREATEN A LAWSUIT. DO NOT EVEN HINT AT A LAWSUIT. DO NOT MENTION ANYTHING ABOUT A LAWSUIT, PERIOD. IF YOU MAKE ANY MENTION OF LEGAL ACTION THEN YOU WILL DESTROY YOUR CHANCES OF HAVING A POSITIVE OUTCOME FROM THIS MEETING. THEY ARE ALMOST GUARANTEED TO FIRE YOU AND THEN IMMEDIATELY LAWYER UP. THEY MAY EVEN ATTEMPT TO DESTROY EVIDENCE IF THEY THINK IT’S PREFERABLE TO A SUCCESSFUL LAWSUIT.

Make sure you log your interaction with HR as well; what you discussed, if you felt your concerns were heard during the meeting, and then make a follow-up log a week or two later to note if there was any change as a result of your meeting.

If there was no change, talk to your lawyer and consider trying again (and log everything again), and again, do not threaten, mention or even hint at any kind of legal action whatsoever. You’re trying to give the company ample chance to respond to your concerns.

If there was still no change, go talk to your lawyer about the possibility of pursuing legal action. It could be legitimately worth it, especially if they decide to fire you after your first or second meeting with HR.

Your goal is to have a paper trail so long and thorough that you can hang them with it (figuratively, in court) if necessary.

I’ve always wondered what the modern equivalent of the NeoGeo or 3DO would look like, capability-wise.

Would it abandon traditional polygon rendering for gaussian splatting?

Would it be able to do movie-quality path tracing?

Would it have multi-level hardware-based procedural generation (each level getting more precise in terms of scale)?

Would it be a SoC the size of someone’s head?

Would it have a CPU that isn’t measured in normal cycles but instead has sub-PUs coordinated by the CPU which run at their own speeds (with PUs for simpler instructions running faster than PUs that incorporate instructions that’d traditionally take multiple steps)?

Would it have an AI processor on par with an Nvidia A10 (or whatever the current top-of-the-line AI chip is)?

OH SHIT LARSON IS CARTOONING AGAIN!?

Edit: misunderstood the post title, I thought it was saying the strip was published today. That said, apparently he has indeed been cartooning again.

Not surprised about the NeoGeo considering it was literally a home arcade machine. For people who aren’t aware, arcade machines historically tended to use a lot of bleeding edge technology. For an example, iirc Sega’s Daytona USA had custom boards and chips based on tech used for US milsims and couldn’t be played on a home console without downgrades until I thiiiink the PS3/Xbox 360? This was a game that came out in fucking 1994 by the way. I mean, compare NeoGeo games to SNES games and tell me which ones looked nicer, and then realize the SNES came out after the NeoGeo.

Oh yeah, also NeoGeo carts were chip compatible with their arcade counterparts. The PCB was different, but you could desolder the chips from an arcade cart and solder them onto a console cart or vice versa.

As for the 3DO… The 3DO was licensed tech; so the 3DO company didn’t actually make consoles, they licensed the hardware to companies like Panasonic. As such, the companies had to charge a much higher price than usual, as normally console manufacturers make their profit from licensing fees for dev kits and game sales, but the manufacturers couldn’t do that because they weren’t the ones collecting the licensing fees. However that also meant that some versions of the 3DO sold for well below their MSRP.

Also the 3DO was a disc-based system capable of 3D graphics that includes features other consoles couldn’t match like proper perspective correction and non-dithered shadows, along with planned (vaporware) online functionality; all a year or two before the N64, PlayStation and Saturn came about. In fact, what I’ve read is that developers who started out developing for the 3DO hated trying to port their games to other consoles because the 3DO’s architecture included a lot of shortcuts that devs could take that other consoles didn’t have.

In other words, there was a reason the NeoGeo and 3DO were so expensive lol.

I do too. It’s a comfort series for me and I’ve never seen someone who can make the Sims so funny. CallMeKevin and Jerma come close, but Joel’s series was a non-stop trainwreck.

Sadly I think too much has changed since Joel last did it for him to revive it without starting from scratch (I think he talked about it recently, but I can’t remember). His Sims 2 streams are a good spiritual continuation of it though.

Edit: Jerma woohooing the CBT wizard, Jill Valentine getting married to Nemesis at Johnny Zest’s house and Thanksgiving with Albert Wesker were 10/10 moments.

You’re not laying plumbing and electric through an old growth forest. The roots of those trees won’t allow it. You’ve got to clear the whole lot and then replant.

Okay, but… What if… You didn’t bury the pipes and wires and put them overground (you have good points, I’m just shit-posting NCD-style now)? Snake them between the trees. You don’t have to have houses all in a row. Sure, they’re less efficient space-wise, but then you can have your yard and your white picket fence without disturbing the surrounding environment!

That would require a local nursery specializing in the cultivation of native plants at the scale the developer requires. At the industrial level, its easier to just ship in some stock variants, whether they work locally or not.

Just uproot the trees and replant them later, EZ.

From an ecological level, it is easier to simply not break things than it is to fix them afterwards. Stripping the soil and resodding it, tearing up all the old plants and replanting, and kicking out the native wildlife for years at a time isn’t in any way conducive to ecological preservation.

Yeah, well, we’re gonna have to learn how to do it eventually.

From a semi-serious standpoint, if our population keeps growing, we’re either going to have to learn how to tear up ground and then replace it in an ecologically-friendly manner, or we’re going to have to push off into space. We’re currently scheduled to have a population collapse due to climate change, but let’s be honest here, that’s going to come with significant ecological destruction which will require significant ecological reconstruction if we ever want to try to return earth to its pre-change state.

Cough I mean: nature put it there, just have nature put it back. Simple as.

Counterpoint: they didn’t need to clear all the trees, or at the very least, they could have replaced them with more native trees once they were done building. I’m not gonna pretend that houses don’t cause a ton of environmental destruction, but imo they really don’t have to continue to be destructive long-term; they do it because people usually go with the lowest bidder.