Thank you for reminding me about Children of Morta… I wonder which shiny new game i got that made me forget to finish it…

It’s funny. I thought I would just play through my SO’s gargantuan library for a long while, but I’m pretty sure I’ve spent more on new games than I did on the Steam Deck itself at this point. So, yeah. They made the right call.

One of my favorite steam deck features is being able to use gyro controls for any game. It’s not always as smooth as the Switch, but it works pretty well to add a bit of additional fine-grained control to the course-grained control of the R-stick.

I don't know how. I also have to just reinstall it, but i'm gonna leave this here in case you find out!

COVID really killed my faith in humanity, and it blindsided me. I truly believed people in general would come together in such a situation, but it just… didn't happen. Giving people shit for wearing a mask? Or, heaven forbid, having the audacity to request someone wear a mask around you? Let's not forget the people hoarding toilet paper like that's an appropriate response. I know it sounds small in the grand scheme of things, but it requires a certain level of "fuck you, i got mine" to buy three-dozen rolls of TP when the shelves are already bare.

There's a light next to where i used to live that, like you suggested, used the flashing to indicate when right turns were allowed. I liked it especially since there was a lot of pedestrian traffic during the day but basically none at night (and was thus able to handle the different needs of the road depending on time of day), and it was a really intuitive way to let drivers know what the pedestrian signals were doing. Best part was it was for a right-turn-only lane, and had flashing-yellow (no green at all) to remind you to check for pedestrians and bikes.

Exactly. The plastic we want them to eat is already degraded to some degree by the elements or usage, and is thus the low-hanging fruit. I'd assume it's much easier to digest, since it's partially broken down already and has plenty of convenient micro-fissures to exploit.

Except it doesn't hold up in the elements all that well, though (at least in a form that is still usable, the plastic is still there, just in little pieces and/or without the desired structural integrity). Plastics degrade when exposed to sunlight and oxygen (photo-oxidation). Combine that with mechanical action of waves, and now you have a bunch of little plastic bits floating in the ocean that are even harder to clean up (but easier for the bacteria to eat!). A glass or metal bottle will hold up much better than a plastic one, over a long enough time period.

But they even break down when exposed to temperature cycling and mechanical stress over long periods of time. I'm sure you've also noticed old plastic food containers, get harder and harder to clean and start getting cloudy: that's the plastic breaking down and micro-fissures appearing on the surface, thanks to repeated exposure to dishwashers, freezers, and still-hot leftovers. Once again, a glass dish is gonna hold up much better.

They have to use special additives for plastics intended for long-term outdoor use (the additives are like sunscreen for plastic, they absorb the UV so that the plastic doesn't) to combat these reaction pathways. And I'd bet money that if plastic-eating bacteria end up becoming a problem, there will be additives we can use to discourage them for appropriate applications.

But you'll notice that in the case of plastic in landfills, there's no UV light from the sun, basically no oxygen, and any mechanical stress or temperature cycling isn't enough for fast breakdown of the plastic polymers. These conditions are also very different from, say, your kitchen counter or hospital storage rooms. If the plastic-eating bacteria prefers the landfill habitat (or literally cannot thrive in any other environment – which is not an uncommon phenomenon; in the article, they mention difficulties culturing bacteria for study in a lab environment), then we have a perfect tool for breaking down landfill plastics that won't impact in the slightest the plastics things we want to keep. Similarly, the kind of bacteria that could be useful for ridding us of fishing lines and nets floating around in the ocean would most likely not be well suited for non-aquatic environments.

Firefox has a setting to disable autoplaying of videos (default setting is to autoplay muted for some reason). It’s in Settings > Site Permissions > Autoplay.

One number to track them all,

One number to find them,

One number to sell for spam,

And in the metadata bind them.

I used to hold it in the pencil position, but now i use the knife position example photo here. The pencil position requires you to use more thumb/wrist muscles, but the knife position helps me keep my wrist straight and use my forearm muscles more.

Sleeping with wrist guards really does make a world of difference. And maybe there is some way to do the repetitive tasks in a more ergonomoc way? For example, I crocheted a couple of pieces for friends’ weddings in quick succession out of very tiny yarn, and it destroyed my wrists for several weeks after. Turns out, I’d been holding my crochet hook in a really stress-inducing way; I had just never had a reason to question my form until it started causing a repetitive stress injury. By just changing the way I held the hook, I started to see improvement almost immediately.

I’ve seen US publications use it, too. But knowing it’s a UK thing makes me feel better about it for some reason…

Is anyone else super annoyed by the use of the word “jab” in news articles/headlines? It just sounds so unprofessional.

I really enjoyed playing Hades, but I just didn’t have the skills or patience to progress at the pace I wanted. So (after realizing that being prideful about difficulty settings in my hobbies that i do to have fun is a dumb way to live), I turned on God Mode. You get extra stacks of damage resistance every time you die, capping at like 80% or something, and you can turn it on and off as needed. After that, I was having so much more fun, and the rate of progression was much better for me. I felt like I was finally playing the game that everyone else was loving so much.

I think it worked really well for TotK. Unlike with BotW, I was actually kinda excited when my weapons broke because by that time, I had some new, better monster part I wanted to fuse to make a new, better weapon. It made it more fun having the weapons break so that I would be more likely to try new combinations.

I think it’s because they want to appeal to a younger audience, too. They want a 10 or 12 yo to be able to play Pokemon and Mario, and it’s hard to get parents to buy a $500 console for a pre-teen. So they need to hit a lower price-point than PS or xbox

As an American, I would just like to say that “aluminium” is better than “aluminum” because it matches the -ium suffix of most other elements.

But I am gonna have to disagree with you on the sulfur/sulphur debate. We already got shit like naphthalene and phenolphthalein to worry about spelling, i don’t need any more spurrious "ph"s when a nice simple “f” will do just fine.