vaguerant

Or Windex.

This was so funny I had to double-check the linked article: yes, this part is also real.

If you don’t mind revealing (hi ninjas), how were you playing this on PC? Only, there’s a lot of options these days. There’s the time-tested N64 emulators, but more recently we’ve got two new methods:

The PC port of the source code decompilation:

• https://github.com/HarbourMasters/SpaghettiKart

And the recompilation of the binary:

• https://github.com/sonicdcer/MarioKart64Recomp

For anybody who’s unfamiliar with decomps ports and recomps, they have outwardly similar results but are achieved using very different methods.

Using the old “source code == recipe” analogy, a decompilation is where you purchase a meal and take it back to the lab where a team of scientists painstakingly analyze it to uncover the original recipe that made it, both in terms of ingredients and the cooking method. Once you have that, you can either make an exact copy of the meal or change it to suit your preferences. Dropping the analogy for a minute, you can modify the game any way you like and even go as far as building it for completely different platforms, across as many CPU architectures as you like.

Recompilation is a bit harder to describe using the recipe analogy, because at no point do you actually uncover what the original recipe was. Let’s say you have a fancy Klingon delicacy prepared which is utterly inedible to humans. Unfortunately, you are human. Without knowing how it was made, you feed the dish into the back end of a replicator, which puts it back together in a form which offers the same flavor profile but is edible by humans. In this analogy, the Klingon meal is a game built for the Nintendo 64’s MIPS CPU, while your human anatomy requires food for an x86-64 CPU. However, you can’t feed the output to a Vulcan for the same reason you couldn’t eat the Klingon meal.

As an end-user, the result doesn’t change that much if your goal is just to play Mario Kart 64 on PC. Decompilation is the more labor-intensive process which eventually results in a more flexible “recipe” you can mix around as you like, while recompilation gets you a meal without necessarily helping you understand what went into it or how to make it yourself or change its composition to your preference. Both of these analogies undersell the amount of work that goes into either approach, so I do apologize for making it sound as easy as the sci-fi technology suggests.

The for-profit childcare system in Australia is profoundly broken. They’re chronically understaffed and the pay is awful to boot, so there’s tons of burnout and staff turnaround as people move around trying to get hours at different locations, etc. I don’t know that 27 different gigs over a decade is actually that unusual in the sector.

If you’re interested, ABC News Australia did an article on it:

• In Australia’s childcare centres profit comes before safety - ABC News

Fair warning, there are some pretty unpleasant descriptions in the article of things that have been done to kids in the system.

Occasionally they take the “investigation bungled by police” angle, but that’s the exception rather than the rule.

In fairness, space is as far away from the subway as anybody’s ever been.

♫ I still dream of QAnon ♫

(To the tune of Kate Bush’s “Cloudbusting”.)

Yeah, he was reportedly conceived in a casual encounter. His parents weren’t in an ongoing relationship and the father didn’t remain very involved in either of their lives.

That is not how a bastard works. To be clear, all of this is archaic, I’m not actually calling anybody a bastard, but the definition of bastard is “a child born to parents who are not married to each other.” He matches that definition because his parents were never married.

Affairs don’t come into it, it’s just some old bullshit cultural and religious ideals about which types of relationships (just the one: heterosexual marriages) children are “supposed” to be born into.

I don’t think he’s anywhere in the line of succession regardless. He’s the son of the Crown Princess (by marriage) but not of the Crown Prince. i.e. His mother had him as a result of a prior relationship, then married the Crown Prince, making him the stepson of the man who will one day be king, but not really anything on his own account. Besides a rapist.

“It really tied the room together.”

There’s already several comments saying “depends on the beliefs and how important they are,” and obviously there’s that.

I’ll add that there are beliefs people don’t immediately think of when talking about religion. There’s religious humanism, which is a secular religion based around behaving ethically which also has a bunch of traditions similar to spiritually-based religions, minus the spirituality. Adherents (can) attend church and hear sermons on ways to be a better person, etc.

I’m not a religious humanist but they sound like they’re probably decent enough people. They’re quite different to my generic fediverse atheist/irreligious views, in the sense that I don’t have any desire to attend congregations of people who identify as religiously ethical, but I don’t harbor any strong objections to their beliefs.

Personally, I understand it more as something that might be nice for people who have left spiritual religion but still want the trappings of a place to go and be with a community of like-minded people, but that’s not my experience. Ultimately, that’s probably about as far as I’d be comfortable, where we have roughly equivalent spiritual views but highly divergent religious views.

This is a tough question because it’s like asking “What’s the most forgettable game you’ve ever played?” I can remember some of the best and worst games I’ve ever played, but mediocre games are explicitly not interesting.

That said, the first one that came to mind for me was Starshot: Space Circus Fever for N64. It’s just a very generic late-'90s collectathon platformer. It’s hard to be mad at it, because it’s not terrible or anything, there’s just no reason to play it. If you’ve got an N64, there’s Mario, Banjo, Rayman, even B- and C-tier stuff like Gex and Chameleon Twist. There’s hidden gems like Space Station Silicon Valley or Rocket: Robot on Wheels.

That last one is the only reason I played Starshot, I saw it clearanced at a used game store and was like “Oh yeah, I remember hearing this game was good,” but it turned out I was thinking of Rocket. That game actually is good, while Starshot is just fine.

Walmart frantically distancing themselves from her is another decent indicator that the company at least doesn’t think this is good for their bottom line, especially when a large segment of customers are already boycotting them for caving to the current administration. If the other side starts boycotting them for not caving to the current administration, that’s a) bad for business and b) very funny.

A bastard.

tfw boston thinks you’re being racist

They were conceived on an adult film shoot.

His Tenacious D bandmate, Kyle Gass, made a joke about assassinating Donald Trump. Black put out a statement criticizing and distancing himself from Gass while also placing the band on hiatus, cancelling a then-ongoing world tour. People feel he threw a longtime friend under the bus in order to protect his public image.

I think of it as, if you got shot halfway through telling me the date of something, “December” on its own is more useful information than “12”. Technically, “12” narrows it down to fewer possible dates, but it could be at any time of year, while December only happens once a year, in March or whatever.

Perhaps the most relevant of all: time of day. 9:30. Hours first, then minutes. I’m not from a location that does month-day ordering, but I think largest to smallest works excellently for time measurement, hence ISO 8601.