Excited to give Gigabash a try - the steam reviews all day it’s like a modern Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters and I loved that back in the day

That’s part of a question from the reporter - here’s the rest, with Watson’s response:

What does systemic change look like for you within the police department to ensure that something in 2020 doesn’t happen?

MAYOR WATSON: Well, a couple of things have already happened that make a difference. One is the system no longer allows for the use of the so-called “non-lethal beanbag weapons.” In a congregate-type situation, where you have a group of people, that’s a big difference. Another systemic difference already in place is that you have these mobile field units where people move around and are responsive. Where they are moved and sent has changed. And the third thing I would say is there’s been a change with deployment in a crowd-type situation. We’re making sure the training across groups and entities that are deployed is the same.

And then the final thing that we have already started putting into place is de-escalation. We want to de-escalate situations as opposed to having to resort to something like what happened in this case. And then the last thing I’ll say about this is that we want transparency. That’s a part of a systemic approach to make sure there’s transparency. And that’s one of the reasons we are agreeing to ask the Department of Justice to come in and look at this specific event and the patterns and practices, including executive-level decisions that were made.

Aside from the DoJ portion, this looks like a nothing burger of a response 😐 Banning one type of non-lethal weaponry just means the companies that sell to police departments have to change products. It seems like it would be more fruitful to establish regulations around what non-lethal weaponry can be used in protest or non-violent situations, along with defined penalties for violating the regulations that incentivize either leadership or individual officers from resorting to them unnecessarily? Or more generally general regulations on which non-lethal weaponry the department can even buy, based on what it does to the victim?

Updating training for those deployed in a crowd situation does seem relevant though, so hopefully that helps.

I don’t really get the point about de-escalation though - is there some way they intend to deescalate a protest? The point of the protest is that people are angry enough to come out and demonstrate. If the deescaltion procedures involve working with the protestors to make them feel like their voices are being heard, that seems useful, but if the intention is just to “pacify” the crowd I don’t see that preventing another situation like the BLM protests.

Overall, I’m kinda disappointed in how short the article is and how much of its limited time it sounds on how the mayor is trying to pacify APD

“Cooking” (i.e. reheating) a city ham (i.e. fully cooked , Easter-style ham) sous vide this year. Just me and the partner this year,so a turkey doesn’t make sense, especially since I’m usually underwhelmed with turkey anyway.

Man, the wealth tax ban is mind-boggling to me. I can only imagine what marketing they must have done to convince the average voter there was any downside to the POSSIBILITY of taxing high net worth individuals, without any specifics.

When I started playing VS, I was struck by how much the chest opening animation FELT like a slot machine - it was weird to encounter what normally feels like a predatory experience and have it NOT be trying to take your money.

I’m torn on whether it’d be good for more games to do this (mimic gambling without the predatory pricing associated with it) - on the one hand, it would provide alternatives to actual predatory games, like Gacha games, that won’t leave people poor, but on the other hand it also normalizes the concept as a legitimate gaming mechanic. This not only opens the door for more publishers to utilize the mechanic maliciously, but I also worry about what it might do to our brains to be constantly exposed to slot machine equivalents (moreso than they already are with gaming).

As of right now, the button is just a toggle that will turn on the feature to hide read posts in your feed, but won’t restore hidden posts (as you found). If you want to see your hidden posts, you can go to your profile (center button on the bottom buttons) and you can unhide a given post from the post itself.

Since you’ve already got one tree, sink a 4x4 post in concrete (or just bury it if you want less permanence and like to live dangerously) to use for securing the other end of a hammock (with one end wrapped around the tree).

The post can serve double duty too - you could use it as a tetherball post (better to use a metal fence post in that case though? Or do they make dedicated tetherball posts), for either you or dogs.

Not sure if this is different depending on the backing browser, but my experience with this is that it works great to open the link, but when you hit the back button to go back to Voyager, you get kicked out to your home page instead of back to the thread you were in.

This might not be caused by opening a page in the same browser as the PWA (could be due to issues with the back button that I think we’re fixed in the latest build? Or was that about the native apps? Can’t remember) but I’ve been assuming that’s part of the issue 🤷‍♂️

Serious Tai Fu vibes

With Survivors-like games, auto-fire becomes a necessity as the screen fills with enemies and you have multiple weapons or abilities. How do you plan to balance this theme of the genre with the need to activate abilities manually?

According to the video, the original effort to get this passenger rail set up died in 2016 because Union Pacific wasn’t interested and that’s (theoretically) changed now. I wonder if it’s just a change in management decision makers or if UP’s business is down on those routes and it’d actually benefit them to get a slice of that traffic.

I do wonder what the projected cost might be to make this a reality - the rep from the rail line project said a study projected a 20% in traffic on 35 if the rail line were to be completed. I’m guessing that’s the optimistic number and it doesn’t feel like 20% would be life-changing necessarily, so it’s a real question of whether it’d be worth whatever the cost might be

At first, I found it baffling that the Lt Governor’s office thought it was a good idea to blow this up into something bigger than a single lecture and some negative comments. Then I realized that it was mainly about punishing the professor and that this won’t affect Dan Patrick’s reelection chances or future in politics at all and now I’m just sad 😕

Cautiously excited for this. I enjoyed Castlevania quite a bit, but thought the ending was a little half-baked. I’m curious to see if the IP is improved or struggles without Warren Ellis as a show runner. I’ve assumed he was the driving force behind a lot of what made the last one great, but the reason he got dropped (sexual coercion allegations) could also explain some of the weirder sections of the show, so might be nice to get some fresh blood.

Started a fresh play of Mindustry this week and forgot how much I enjoy it. I play primarily on PC now to save my hands, but the mobile apps are free if someone wants to try it out!

If you go to your profile (middle button on the bottom), there’s an option to view hidden posts there. Don’t think there’s an option to filter by community though, which can be tough if you’re looking for a hidden post from a day or two ago.

I use Voyager and have been really impressed with both the quality and the speed of development.

No, I definitely still read a ton of AU stuff in the Persona and Marvel fandoms, but I’m less interested in AUs for them where the rules of how the main characters affect the story have changed (e.g. it’s Persona but the main characters are all vampires instead of having Persona). Instead I like to see butterfly effect stuff, where canon unfolds differently from a single point of change, and how the characters respond based on that change.

For HP and Naruto, every character’s abilities or proficiencies can be so varied in canon that I’m not really bothered if one of the main characters has an ability never mentioned in canon , because a good writer can incorporate it as the character being unique instead of it being an entirely different world with similarly named characters.

I’m not sure that makes sense, reading it back, but I’m scratching around the edges of it at least 🤣

I tend to focus on media that has an ensemble cast or else media that has an entirely different set of rules for the world than our own. My top fandoms are Harry Potter, Naruto, Persona (the game series), and Marvel. For Persona and Marvel, I care about spending more time with the ensemble characters and seeing them interact outside of canon, but am not especially interested in seeing authors rework the rules of the universe. For HP and Naruto, it’s more about the flexibility of canon to allow authors to do almost anything with the world, even if it’s pre or post-canon.

The Florida Department of Education says the new standards don’t teach that slavery was beneficial.

However, one of the benchmarks (SS.68.AA.2.3) states students will be taught, “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

Anyone able to think of a good argument for explicitly requiring this? I’m having trouble thinking of why you’d call this out in the standards unless, you know, you are a fan of slavery…

The Florida Department of Education says the new standards don’t teach that slavery was beneficial.

However, one of the benchmarks (SS.68.AA.2.3) states students will be taught, “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

Anyone able to think of a good argument for explicitly requiring this? I’m having trouble thinking of why you’d call this out in the standards unless, you know, you are a fan of slavery…

Edit: This was supposed to go here, womp womp