pixelscript

One can more or less envision the President as the CEO of Federal Government, Inc. and executive orders as internal memos to the employees.

If you don't work there, following the memo is not your problem.

But if you do any kind of business with someone who does work there, you can be hit by the secondhand effects.

and they're expensive as fuck.

like not even including the tractor itself, just the self-driving attachments alone, plus the subscription fee to use them...

In the specific case the "boss" happens to be a timer, this is a more or less accurate description of speedrunning.

Security questions don't care what you put in there. It's not an exam. It's basically just an alt password.

I just generate a string of alphanumeric text from my password generator and stuff those in there. If I lose my password vault somehow I'm cooked anyway, so.

Worse still, the pattern does not continue like one would expect.

• Nominal: 2x4 -- Actual: 1.5" x 3.5"
• Nominal: 2x6 -- Actual: 1.5" x 5.5"
• Nominal: 2x8 -- Actual: 1.5" x 7.25"
• Nominal: 2x10 -- Actual: 1.5" x 9.25"
• Nominal: 2x12 -- Actual: 1.5" x 11.25"

There's just an arbitrary point where they decided to take an extra 1/4" bite out of it. I'm not sure whether that's more of an effect of shrinkage from kiln drying being proportional to the original length or an effect of industry practice to mill smaller boards to eke out more cuts per tree.

And for the record, yes, I am aware the discrepancy is not entirely explained by shrinkage. They do a planing step after drying. But the shrinkage is a not insignificant part of it. They have to round down to the nearest convenient dimension from wherever the shrinkage stops.

If longer boards shrink more, the finished boards would necessarily have to be smaller. I question whether that's the effect at play, though, because I believe there was a phase in the industry where that extra quarter inch wasn't taken off, and they changed their minds about it later.

I wonder if it may well have gone down with the combination of boom in population and rapid urbanization around coasts.

This is somewhat a "people live in cities" graph, but not as stark of one I expected. Not all big cities are so educated, plus there are a lot of rural places that draw in a surprising number of people with advanced degrees.

Still, I'm amused that Interstate 29 in specific lights up like a string of Christmas lights.

Why bother reading a curated set of interest-focused articles written by professionals when you can drink straight from the firehose of relentless negativity that is social media, right?

It's bad for me, but not for that reason.

It's bad for me because I piss a whole hour or two of my morning away doomscrolling. That makes me late to work. So I end up staying later to make up lost time, I get home late, and then I wonder why I have no time at the end of the day to do anything...

I'm doing it right now, in fact. I will stop.

I've yet to see any open lemm.ee prejudice anywhere. AFAIK it's the largest completely inoffensive instance and that's exactly what I was looking for.

What?

This is a discussion about televisions.

It depends.

The root comment specified "hyper-realistic cinematic" games. Yeah, I would describe Breath of the Wild to be a complex, immersive, good-looking game. But hyper-realistic? No way. It's hyper-stylized. The graphics have lots of leeway to heavily cater to gameplay clarity. The cartoonish aesthetic also allows it to get away with more uncluttered level design that emphasizes interactibles without the world feeling empty or hollow. Objects and setpieces are more readily permitted to be chunky, brightly colored, and spaced far apart without looking out of place.

But if you want a game where hyper-realism with all the little, cluttered details, objects, and general disorder are part of the desired aesthetic, it's challenging to draw focus to important things in a natural way. The real world doesn't work like this. So in making a game setting that approximates the real world as convincingly as possible, the game itself often can't either without some kind of uncanny intervention. Painting interactibles bright yellow is one particularly egregious method. Intentional level design that draws focus to interactibles is usually more subtle, but is also not cost-free, as things that are unnaturally arranged can be its own kind of immersion breaking.

Subtlety and clarity are diametrically opposed. You must sacrifice one for the other. So if subtlety of detail in your art direction is treated as virtue, you either compensate for that clarity drop somehow, or cope with having a cryptic game that feels awful to play.

Of course, this leads to a question about whether hyper-realistic games are worth it in the first place. We could choose to value only stylized games that are less bothered by this trap. Personally, that's my preference. But that's a question of taste. It's a discussion worth having, but isn't really in-scope of this one.