I had in some ways the opposite 23&Me experience and goals. My parents told me growing up that I had some small native ancestry. This is actually a common myth many Americans have either been told or somehow deluded themselves into believing.

So I did the DNA testing (which I now regret from all the obvious enshittification and privacy reasons) to prove that my ancestry was boring and predictable. Which it was, no indigenous ancestry, just the expected European countries that my great grandparents came from.

They also do a lot of nice health screening things and I think that’s probably the much more valuable aspect of it. It really is very American that people are so much more concerned with what DNA says about one’s race or ethnicity than about their health and wellbeing.

Every 5 minutes, at max volume:

YOUR CALL IS IMPORTANT TO US. ALL AVAILABLE OPERATORS ARE HELPING OTHER CUSTOMERS. PLEASE STAY ON THE LINE.

2 minutes later:

DID YOU KNOW <COMPANY> IS WORKING TO SAVE CUSTOMERS LIKE YOU MONEY? UPGRADE YOUR PLAN TO ULTIMATE TODAY AND SAVE! YOU CAN ADD BASIC CABLE TO YOUR INTERNET PLAN FOR FREE FOR 3 MONTHS. MAKE ANY SOUND AT ALL TO LEAVE THE SUPPORT QUEUE AND SPEAK WITH A NEW ACCOUNT SPECIALIST RIGHT AWAY.

returns to playing compressed elevator music through an old can

Ah, the WSJ, bastion of level-headed reporting. Since I clicked through to the article and read the one paragraph us free-tier losers get (one more than the rest of you read) I know that it was Huawei trying to recruit semi-conductor manufacturing engineers from Germany.

So settle down, China isn’t trying to pay you $240K a year to make wordpress sites for them, it’s just another front in the ongoing microchip wars.

The book is very good! I happened to catch wind of it right after it came out. Its a great mix of Visitor’s personal experiences in TV, and her research and interviews with many women who’ve worked in Trek over the years. She writes well and the stories are both personal and educational about the history of the show and the medium.

He likens Arkane’s approach to studios like Larian and FromSoftware: “Those are people that have been doing, over and over, the thing they know exactly how to do, until it hits super hard. So to me, that’s what Arkane had to do.”

Damn, what a concept: doing the same kind of game multiple times, iterating on the design to perfect it. Obviously Bethesda gets releasing the same game over and over again, but this idea of “improving” the design is so alien to them. Wouldn’t adding thousands of microtransactions be an improvement?

Blame Camus

I’m not posting a Snopes link or whatever, but it was Mussolini who allegedly got the trains running on time, and he didn’t anyway. Improvements to the Italian rail system were begun under the previous government, and actually the trains weren’t particularly punctual under his regime anyway.

Ah, the open-mouth reverse blow! But will it be enough to save your palette and tongue from the burn?

I was wondering why HW3 was “controversial” and apparently I didn’t realize:

1. It’s been released.
2. It’s worse than the first 2
3. Because Gearbox is publishing it!

Thanks Randy! Fucking grease weasel ruins another great franchise.

Because it got 7/10 average review scores and didn’t sell as well as GTA. Then GTA3 (and its immediate spin-offs and eventual sequels) came out and started breaking all time sales records. So retroactively, GTA 2 was “a mistake” for not being GTA 3 two years early.

But like the guy says, the point of the article even, is that you don’t create run away successes without experimenting on the formula to find what’s good, without “failures” like GTA 2 to learn from.

Ah, a classic! For today’s lucky 10,000: http://www.longestjokeintheworld.com/

IBM provided business machines (internationally, even) to Nazi Germany, probably a big help in bureaucratically processing those millions of murders they were doing. I can’t (or perhaps, “won’t” is truer) imagine how much cloud compute a modern genocide requires.

Random eyes on things is just a Yooka-Laylee theme. One of the enemies in the first game is a pair of cartoon eyes that can take over inanimate objects. A lot of characters are just a random object with a pair of cartoon eyes.

¿Por que no los dos?

N-O-T-C-H-M-A-N

Stephanie Stirling has been beating the drum on fake “quality” modes that give you RT at the expense of everything else. Think it was this one but it might also have been this one.

I don’t know exactly how much code reuse Sawyer had going back then, but if you’ve ever played Transport Tycoon (or more likely the open source version around today, OpenTTD) then you know that the interface and graphics are extremely similar. So it’s not like he started from scratch each game with nothing but a hot spinning disc and a magnetized needle.

But yeah, the main reason to put up with all the modern framework bloat is the ever-ephemeral promise of being able to write your thing once and have it ported to run anywhere with minimal to no further effort.

Feels like there will be an Analyzer in the future to finish this trilogy (until someone thinks of more probing puns).

“Yeah man, I’m fluent, says so on my CV!”

“But it just says ‘Fluent’. Fluent in what?”

“What do you got?”

Who’s that supposed to be? Must not get up to the Cloud District very often!