Good to know, since I have both peppermint and red peppers in my garden. And I actually use both together often, with either ground meat or aubergines. (Plus cumin. Lots of. It goes great with both.)

Abo-meow-nya-tion.

Funny (but not surprising) that Gilbert immediately caught what Stanley was up to: Stanley is trying to give Pride the freedom to marry whoever she wants.

Also, Pride, come on… you know you ain’t your game counterpart. You’re just some Earthling baka. Chill, no need to blame yourself for what you didn’t.

I’m not a biologist either, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

But it still points the no life / life transition being extremely easy? Doesn’t it?

Perhaps so, provided the conditions are suitable for that.

In special, going from free-floating to contained self-replicating junk seems to be a damn big leap, since the containment (aka membrane) needs to be selective: it needs to let some material to go in/out to allow replication and get rid of leftovers, but not enough to threat the integrity of the structure.

It was still most likely a hellscape for our standards, though. Just not a barren one.

300 million years is still a lot of time, even evolutionarily speaking. For reference, it’s ~twice the time between us and our last common ancestor with platypuses (160mya). Plus I kind of expect this sort of barely celular… being? structure? that gave origin to the LUCA to evolve way faster.

And more importantly, it means the LUCA wasn’t the only one around those times. It was part of some sort of ecosystem already. Alongside a bunch of less lucky siblings.

To be clear: the LUCA is the last universal common ancestor. There was earlier life, before the LUCA; it’s just that all its surviving descendants are also LUCA descendants.

This is important to know while reading the text, because it explains why the LUCA was so surprisingly complex.

With 32 GB system RAM, Microsoft believes that the games can have more “breathing room”.

There’s no such thing as “breathing room”, dammit. Once you set up 32 GB as standard, shitty / assumptive developers are going to say “well, we assooooome users have 32 GB. It would be a waste to design the game to use less than that lol lmao”. Specially devs doing the same as Microslop, and using AI shitty code to pump out code faster than humans can desloppify.

System monitor says I’m running 12GB, but there’s a lot of unnecessary stuff open, and last time I restarted this machine is 4 days ago. Plus at this rate my computer is basically a server, and since I already have 32 GB I don’t care too much about memory management any more.

I found the recipe! Might try my hand at it, it’s Autumn here and the recipe looks good. (I might end using butternut squash instead though.)

Giving free access to a tool you can’t rely on, over a system you must rely on. What could go wrong? /s

Plus come on, even my personal files get a monthly backup, and I’m damn sloppy*.

Ah, and like others said: Claude didn’t “confess” anything. A confession is an acknowledgement of something you’ve done but you’d rather avoid others knowing, good luck claiming a bot has a mental model of people like we do.

*currently using a single off-site backup, a USB stick. This will change in a few days, as my new hard disk pops up; the old one will be used for, among other things, backup of important files. Then I’ll get a bona fide 3-2-1.

Ah, it’s tin pest? (I’m watching the video right now.)

Same “basic” idea, of a vicious cycle. Except you don’t need reaction with an external substance, like oxygen; the catalyst for tin pest is even more tin. (That means the blob over the cube of metal is likely a piece of grey tin. You could use germanium instead but eh, it’s more expensive.)

EDIT: check luciole’s comment, the cover is likely tin undergoing tin pest, not aluminium.

The cover picture is likely gallium over aluminium, unrelated to medication. Metallic aluminium is surprisingly reactive, but usually you don’t notice it because it’s covered with a layer of oxide; so in the presence of certain other metals you get a vicious cycle, like:

• gallium leaks past the oxide layer, and forms an alloy with the aluminium
• aluminium in the alloy gets exposed to the air, so it becomes oxide
• the alloy kicks the oxide out, because it stopped being a metal
• now gallium is free to form an alloy with even more metallic aluminium

It also works with mercury. The metal, not this one.

Now I’m going to watch the video. Sorry. I just had to babble about metals, plus aluminium fuckery brings me childhood memories (not even joking).

RIP, apparently 😔

…wow. I wasn’t aware of that at all. But the forums confirm it, and Battosay wouldn’t joke about it. :-/

May he rest in peace.

Anyway. Now thinking, most of his takes were spot on, and proved true later on: Minecraft wasting huge amounts of dev time on pathfinding for pets and then testificates, Forge becoming a drama-generating machine, and, more on-topic, Molyneux.

Epic is evil while Ubisoft is just incompetent

Incompetence is a form of evil. Put them both in the same square.

Lemme quote a Minecraft forums post:

Now, I’m going to take an educated guess here and say that Peter Molyneux is probably the developer in question that suggested these things [that Notch should add pets to Minecraft]. It’s right up his ally [SIC - alley].

A couple of things to keep in mind with Molyneux: he has great ideas, but his ideas are often way overly ambitious. This is why his games are constantly very late and way over budget. While he’s brilliant, he also has a tendency to go way off on design tangents that keep his development teams spinning in circles.

This is from 2011. Fifteen years ago, at least professional game designers (like the OP from that quote, FlowerChild) were already aware Molyneux is an “ideas guy”. He pictures huuuuuge, world-changing games that are unfeasible. Couple this with anything related to RL money and guess what, you’ll get people losing money.

In-App Purchases
Requires 3rd-Party Account
Uses Kernel Level Anti-Cheat
Requires agreement to a 3rd-party EULA

Smells like gacha from a distance. Hard pass.

Remember Electronic Arts defending lootboxes because it claimed they brought “a sense of pride and accomplishment” to players? So. That’s the sort of corporation we’re talking about. So it’s no surprise its marketing team tried to boss the creator around, to make something less true to their vision of the game but more marketable. Sex and gore sell; but if they fit that’s another can of worms, you know?

Dev team might want to find another publisher for its future games, though. Even if this one sells like ice cream in the desert, odds are EA will try to find ways to punish disobedience.

If the adventurers knew they were bullied by a true dragon and three demon lords, they’d be screaming bloody murder.

Silica scolding Bertia was hilarious. Yeah, Bertia went a bit overboard. (Poor Charles, by the way.)

And the heroine lurking from the shadows…

For a long time I wondered why I like this series so much. The premise is a bit cliché (the villainess is reincarnated, and actually a decent person), the MC has Mary Sue vibes, and the animation is subpar.

But this episode shows it for me, in all its glory: regardless of all I said above, this series is damn great at pulling you into all that emotional baggage of the characters, so you root for them: Stanley and his mother, Arthur and his father, Val and his kids, and now Leon and the people of his kingdom.

And the contrast between how things went in the game, versus how things developed because of the reincarnated Pride, only adds even more impact.

Leon and Pride’s engagement is probably over. He loves Anemone too much to leave it, and Pride is certainly not ditching Freesia. And yet their relationship is way better than it would be in the game, and so are the ties between both countries.