i was prepared to laugh but this is actually pretty good filmmaking. Even the 80s-ness feels authentic to itself.

The giant-handheld-TV jump scare is funny though.

there are those of us who have had to work through a backlog of custom SQL queries for a living, and those who have not

there are those who sneer at the spreadsheets that keep entire businesses afloat, and those who patiently maintain those spreadsheets

i bet that molded plastic is prone to shrink in nonuniform ways as it solidifies and gets popped out of the mold, so molding alignment marks into the plastic might be less reliable than just machining it in place in the upper tool

a guess based on some machining experience: precision. the holes have to be in a precise location relative to the clamp that holds the piece for the lower machine to insert the bristles with tight tolerance. trying to clamp a molded part precisely is probably really tricky

i was skeptical that this story would work in film form with actors, but, indeed, it just adds layers of meaning and texture to
the original

Someday I might compose the essay, sweating blood as i write, to explain to myself why I never post anymore. Then perhaps I’ll either publish that and keep publishing, or I’ll quietly set fire to it and start publishing something else.

Banned small high powered magnets recalled following ACCC surveillance The ACCC is concerned about reports of injuries, especially among children, relating to small high powered magnets. The ACCC recently conducted a surveillance program to inspect the presence of banned...

small magnetic toys. the USA has had quite a few recalls but i’m not sure there’s a federal ban, but looks like e.g. Australia has a ban: www.productsafety.gov.au/about-us/pro...

The Music Man is not bad, but I agree Guys and Dolls is better.

Why does so much good American literature feature grifters as the stars? I wish it were hard to say.

A photo of the screen of the first arcade video game, Computer Space from 1971, showing two spaceship-shaped groups of pixels on a background of pixel stars.

oh it gets dustier: though technically i am a few months older than Computer Space, I am from the correct year.

oh no now my brain is trying to sing “bribe me for a blurb” to the tune of “fly me to the moon”

i do not know why

do note that, as warned in the thread, these antihistamines in these doses will tend to make one very sleepy if one isn’t habituated to them. But i prefer sleepy to the post-vaccine blahs

you are probably looking for this, and links in the thread: bsky.app/profile/raha...

we were listening on the other day, in the early 90s, when the station did the same thing to mark their initial format change *to* alt-rock

I’m that colleague that people ping. Being the domain expert in SQL, regex, Docker, or CSS browser bugs at your company is a recipe for burnout. Slack overflow. You can be nibbled to death even by “easy” questions.

I want to spend my time talking strategy with a team, not syntax.

the funny thing about this is that i can recommend a pastry place that is easy picnic distance from Mount Auburn Cemetery.

(It’s Sofra, it’s amazing, this is what the upper-middle-class Cambridge set takes to the cemetery, their morning buns relegate Dunkins to the junior leagues)

wow this is the info i am on bluesky for, thanks

yeah, I was just looking that one up in John McPhee’s _In Suspect Terrain_ —geologist Anita Epstein told him the story of what it was like to be standing near the epicenter. “That earthquake made a catastrophist of me”

the genre does feel thin, i wish there were more turn-based games. even games like my beloved Portal, which very rarely have combat, have a lot of puzzles based on timed jumps and clicks

yeah, i hear that, which is why i didn’t suggest a card game or a Civ-style strategy game or whatnot

not sure I’d call Tactical Breach Wizards a “universe”, it isn’t an open-world thing and it isn’t huge, but it has funny writing and a plot as well as a puzzle-ish combat model

There are pure puzzle games out there, but also recently i’ve been playing Tactical Breach Wizards which is entirely turn-based and has undos. you can plot
moves at any pace you like

you’re the perfect one to ask: should I watch the famous Patton movie? and should i read a proper history book first, or afterwards?

a late relative of mine drove a recon tank in Patton’s army, so I’d like to learn true things about the Patton experience, not just the “300”-esque version

I don't need to have the entirety of humanity's collective trauma beamed directly into my eyes every day - I just need a moderately sized timeline of diverse voices who will alert me to danger and an audience that likes pictures of little robots and tolerates my rambling opinions.

My cohort was incredibly lucky. College was cheaper in the early 1990s and the debts easier to pay off. As the Boomers moved out of homes, my peers could afford to move in. I spent two weeks worrying about being drafted into Gulf War One, but then it ended. By 9/11, I was nearly past military age.

oh is _that_ how pros deal with digital consoles? as a volunteer amateur i dread them. the iPad controls are fun until you press the wrong button and are trapped in some submenu

i like analog consoles, i’m not practiced enough to read one at a glance but at least that’s theoretically possible

The main lesson I’ve learned is that the streaming era needs social objects to structure navigating endless choices and make it fun (your podcast is a particularly successful one!) and that the streaming platforms have less than zero interest in providing them

i was also a kid in the 80s, but it is telling that we invoke the Cold War by naming movies and songs — fiction — because I never smelled the bombed-out streets of my grandparents’ empires, as Vonnegut and Tezuka did. Without that context the fiction is bound to read differently

but one thing i noticed about _Slaughterhouse-Five_, on last reread, is that it’s as much a book about the terrible difficulty of healing from the war, and its lingering but unspoken effect on the narrator’s postwar life and marriage, as it is about the war itself.

one challenge with dissecting out the role of WWII in 20c culture is that it rolled right into the Cold War. A lot of post-WWII horror is buried in, and/or reprised by, Cold War horror, but also the Cold War was a real thing with horror of its own

i was thrilled to collect my blank bonus banner! I knew exactly what it meant, so it counts as a triumph of minimalist design