Nah. Long-tailed owl, is that. Get a lot of them in our garden.

It’s the Zelda that Nintendo “rushed out the door” - in order to get it to market in 15 months, they reused the engine and mostly reused the assets from Ocarina of Time. That’s quite well-attested.

My theory is that the short development time meant that they had to just go with it. The design team knew the tools, so all the content is pretty polished. They didn’t have time to refine it all, so there’s loads of stuff that is just plain weird. No other Zelda game has a UFO abduction section, but someone spent ages on it and it takes up about a tenth of the map, so fuck it, it stays in. That all gives it quite a “daylight horror” vibe, which is unusual in gaming - seems quite normal until you scratch the surface. The “groundhog day” conceit also allows for quite a few “bad endings”; most games wouldn’t allow things to go so wrong, but since you can put it right, it’s okay.

Less time for focus groups also means that there’s less time for Aonuma and Koizuma’s original vision to be changed. I don’t think it’s the game that Nintendo would have wanted to put out the door, but since it was the only game available, then out it went. Which I appreciate, because it’s my favourite game out the whole franchise. It’s unusual for Nintendo to put out something so dark, doubly-so at the time.

Obviously, fuck the down-the-well bit; that just wastes your time.

Android has a massive built-in library of supporting functions that abstracts away most of the differences between devices, including support libraries for older versions of Android, and Flappy Bird is almost the “hello world” of gamws writing.

Super Mario Bros on the NES came in at 31 kB, and it was a bit more of a game. 100 kB for Flappy Bird isn’t all that impressive.

“Register bit twiddling.” Setting all the modes that all their various cards can operate in, with the associated code for sending the bit updates over the connection bus. Tedious stuff that’s very prone to copy-paste errors if written by hand.

At some point you have to take AMDs word for it that these codes = this functionality, but if the right graphics come out then it can’t be so wrong.

Might just be one girl, but she is very cute. Quality, not quantity.

Fake mews, surely? And yeah, this looks better than my Monday.

September 16 is a relatively common day for birthdays; 7% more common than the annual average. So I make the expected value about 3.1. Happy birthday to you, and fuck them.

The one with Timothy Olyphant and Olga Kurylenko in it? It was fine, had a few good action sequences in it. Managed to both not be much of an adaptation of the game, but also trying to be enough of an adaptation that it frequently makes very little sense. Probably have been better if they’d cut loose a little more, had some more fun with it. Gets a completely OK / 10 from me.

It has the finest atmosphere and world-building of almost any game. It does however have a whole slew of issues that are fixed in DS2, improved in DS3, and perfected more-or-less in Elden Ring.

• levelling up: there’s a nearly-worthless stat, the endgame is either very easy or very hard depending on your character build and you won’t know what you’re doing the first time you play, and you can’t respec. The other games have respec items and a better choice of weapons for any given stat spread.

• getting lost: you can go the “wrong way” from the start of the game, and leave yourself very badly screwed over. (In fact, the “right way” is kind of the least obvious.) The other games let you warp between rest points from the very start, which spoils the atmosphere a bit, but respects your time a lot better.

• useless weapons: some of the weapons are a trap - they have really bad scaling or some other misfeature that means it would be a mistake to build your character around them. One of DS2’s best features is that nearly every weapon is viable for the right build.

• weapon upgrades: the weapon upgrade path is the fever dream of a madman; I’ve completed Dark Souls several times and I’d still need to look at a graph of how you actually do it. You need specific blacksmiths for some upgrade paths, and a couple of them are a real bastard to get to. The “back of an envelope” system is present in all other games, and they’ve a warpable bonfire near their blacksmith(s).

Dark Souls has a bit of a paradoxical position as one of the best games ever to play for the second time - bit like Morrowind in that it’ll happily let you screw yourself over, but that makes it great to replay. I might be tempted to look up a “my first hour in Dark Souls” video or something like that to get you off on the right foot; doesn’t need to be full of spoilers, just not set yourself up for a headache.

Because if you disable browser autocomplete, what’s obviously going to happen is that everyone will have a text file open with every single one of their passwords in so that they can copy-paste them in. So prevent that. But what happens if you prevent that is that everyone will choose terrible, weak passwords instead. Something like September2025! probably meets the ‘complexity’ requirement…

A bit like when we renamed all the master/slave terminology using different phrasing that’s frankly more useful a lot of the time, I think it’s about time we got rid of this “child” task nonsense. I suggest “subtask”. Then we can reword these books into something that no-one can make stupid jokes about any more, like “how to keep your subs in line” and “how to punish your subs when they’ve misbehaved”.

Well now. When we’ve been enforcing password requirements at work, we’ve had to enforce a bizarre combination of “you must have a certain level of complexity”, but also, “you must be slightly vague about what the requirements actually are, because otherwise it lets an attacker tune a dictionary attack against you”. Which just strikes me as a way to piss off our users, but security team say it’s a requirement, therefore, it’s a requirement, no arguing.

“One” special character is crazy; I’d have guessed that was a catch-all for the other strange password requirements:

• can’t have the same character more than twice in a row
• can’t be one of the ten-thousand most popular passwords (which is mostly a big list of swears in russian)
• all whitespace must be condensed into a single character before checking against the other rules

We’ve had customers’ own security teams asking us if we can enforce “no right click” / “no autocomplete” to stop their users in-house doing such things; I’ve been trying to push back on that as a security misfeature, but you can’t question the cult thinking.

You joke, but that thing is invaluable on an SL1 run - gives some small but essential stat boosts. Had either that thing or the work hook in my off-hand straight the way through Scholar; the worthwhile stat-boosting shields come very late in the DLC.

We’ve found it to be the “least bad option” for DnD. Have a Discord window open for everyone to video chat in, have a browser window open with Owlbear Rodeo or Foundry / Forge for your tokens and character sheets, all works smoothly enough. The text chat is sufficient for sending the DM a private message; for group chat to share art of the things you’ve just run into or organise the next session.

Completely agree that for anything “less transient”, then the UX is beyond awful and trying to find anything historical is a massive PITA.

I’ve a few “learn the violin” CDs like that. Solo instrument on one channel, band/orchestra on the other. As you get better at playing it, change the balance.

Not so essential for classical music, since music notation pretty much marks exactly what you should play, but great for folk or jazz when there’s a lot of “unwritten” style knowledge that you need to learn.

If there’s one thing that we’ve learned from boiling the oceans and committing copyright infringement on an unimaginable scale, it’s that a finger has an 80% chance of being followed by another finger.

Yeah, I’m with you there - worked for twenty years in water treatment myself. Water before it’s been chlorinated / chloraminated for supply? Makes the best cups of tea and coffee ever - you need to boil it, of course. RO water? Vile.

The joke about adding well water back in again at the end is “correct”. Reverse osmosis removes 100% of the solids from the water, but drinking water usually contains small quantities of solids - you can see a breakdown on the label of some bottled water. Completely pure water would leach all of the solids that have built up on the insides of water pipes over the decades, and leaches away the protective oxide layer from metal pipework, causing it to corrode surprisingly rapidly. It also tastes pretty shitty - kind of “dead”. So a small amount of high-solids water is mixed back in after RO to bring the water back to normal levels.

All that other shit in the diagram? No. Purification and treatment takes place after the mixing step, it would be crazy not to.

Should have used Vim instead, that’s a real text editor. No-one who starts using it ever moves on to something else.