IMO Bethesda games are perfectly positioned to get a lot of initial interest because they look great and seem like they are full of depth, especially when in the midst of the opening quest chain, but the longer I look around, the more disappointed I end up with it all and then lose interest.

It’s this weird mix of deep and shallow. Like in starfield, I walk up to a building and see a rich interaction between an NPC that wants to go in to talk with someone but the guard won’t let her in because he’s busy and no one can see him but then doesn’t bat an eye as I just waltz right past him and talk to whoever I want in there.

Or I watch a confrontation between other NPCs and then try to interact with them after and it’s just generic responses, not a word about the heated argument that just ended.

It’s like it’s in the uncanny valley, where it looks good enough to think you can RP at a certain level, but when you try to do so, it turns out to be all a facade unless there’s a quest.

And in Skyrim, the NPCs were completely unable to handle stealth characters. You’d figure someone would have a magic spell or think to use a torch or raise an alarm when they get shot with an arrow. Nope, must have been the wind or my imagination that killed my buddy over there. I didn’t try stealth in starfield to see if they had improved on that at all.

Each of their games feels like the same game with a new skin. It was fun for a while, but I’m over it now. I tried starfield on xbox game pass but have since cancelled. It’s on my steam wishlist but I won’t be grabbing it without a heavy sale, and even then I’m not really sure I want to allocate the disk space it wants to it.

You can also consume them in non-emergency situations.

When trying to find a copy of Forza 4 (or one of them) after being disappointed with the cut down version they had on gamepass, I discovered it couldn’t be sold anymore because of a deal MS made with Porsche that eventually ran out.

Also set up a standardized licensing process that breaks the mini-monopolies of exclusive content.

Personally, I’d also limit copyright to specific works and not the characters, setting, etc. Then protect trademarks and use those to establish canon. Like in the MCU and DC universes, Spiderman and Batman don’t exist together, but in the Superhero Fan Universe, they are roommates and play genius billionaire vs superhuman with a sixth sense prank wars on each other.

Maybe it includes a copy of the treasure map from the back of the Constitution and it’s inside the white house because he procrastinated on grabbing it while he was there and he wants to keep it quiet so that Biden doesn’t get it before Trump can.

Though if I had to guess for real, maybe it’s communications that refer to his cult in not so friendly terms? Like maybe he said some things about what he really thought about them, which probably don’t reflect well on their intelligence or value.

Though, as the other commenter said, there’s no real value in this speculation other than for entertainment.

Why do I keep talking to myself and contradicting every other thing I say?

(Taking this to its logical conclusion, in case I forget why I wrote this when I read it later and feel like arguing with myself about it)

Happy birthday!

Oh yeah, not just for others who want it but also to cause max pain to scalpers when others can get what they want to sell for cheaper than the scalpers paid for it in the first place. If the price stays the same, there’s a good chance the scalpers will be able to at least cut their losses by selling at a slight discount (or even at par if they find the right location for a “you could have this in your hands right now instead of having to go to the store” kinda deal).

Just wait.

This is why I like seeing new tech with a high launch price. Even if I want one, I’m patient, and it would be worth seeing a bunch of scalpers get fucked from just assuming that initial demand will set the price even higher.

I hope they thought they had to wait in an uncomfortable line to grab the ones they got and that the store only offers exchanges and no refunds.

Needs Microsoft added to the list.

Assuming that “concern” was in good faith in the first place. I believe it was a bad faith pretext for not venting the gas because it’s a well known fact that nitrogen makes up a significant portion of the atmosphere. If they were really worried about the nitrogen displacing enough oxygen to be dangerous, I can think of several ways to eliminate that risk even if I play along and accept that it’s possible.

1. Vent the room. Or use a large room and a fan.
2. Place oxygen meters in the room that sound an alarm if oxygen drops below 20%.
3. Give oxygen masks to anyone who needs to be in the room.

With the hash one, it doesn’t look like that could be exploited by an attacker doing the bad hashing themselves, since any collisions they do find will only be relevant to the extra hashing they do on their end.

But that encryption one still sounds like it could be exploited by an attacker applying more encryption themselves. Though I’m assuming there’s a public key the attacker has access to and if more layers of encryption make it easier to determine the associated private key, then just do that?

Though when you say they share the same secret, my assumption is that a public key for one algorithm doesn’t map to the same private key as another algorithm, so wouldn’t cracking one layer still be uncorrelated with cracking the other layers? Assuming it’s not reusing a one time pad or something like that, so I guess context matters here.

I tried that without a password manager for a little while. But then my answers were too abstract to remember, so now I also use a password manager for that.

In the case of the first nitrogen execution, they did dick all to vent away the carbon dioxide he was exhaling, so it eventually saturated the gas he was able to breathe and his lungs wouldn’t have been able to get rid of any more. When you hold your breath, the discomfort and urge to breathe again comes from the CO2 buildup rather than the lack of oxygen.

If the exhaled gas gets vented properly, then there’s no discomfort. That they didn’t get this part right for the execution suggests malice, or at the very least extreme negligence because it doesn’t take expertise to understand this, just a little bit of depth in knowing how suffocation works. Which you’d figure people designing and carrying out an execution would seek.

And cannibalism!

Q: What do you often see when you look out your back window?

A: Vladimir Putin riding a horse shirtless.

Hey maybe the GOP got connected with Putin because he was often at Palin’s backyard BBQs when he would ride over to say hi when he saw the gathering.

Though I also just noticed there’s only two letters different between Putin and Palin… Maybe it was just Putin in a wig the whole time.

The weird part is that they are somehow connected. For some reason, Alex Jones accepted a posthumous award to Bill Hicks, which I think was the whole springboard for the conspiracy theory (which I mostly like because it’s funny to see it turned back on him). It doesn’t help his case that Alex Jones’ public persona is a character he does with a fake voice and all that.

It was also more plausible before Jones took that hard turn to the right. He used to be more apolitical (in a “both parties are fake and corrupt” and “here’s a list of issues but I’m not going to offer any concrete solutions other than ‘stay tuned for more’” kind of way), so it was once more believable that he was an extreme version of Hicks.

Though even back then, a part of the conspiracy theory was that he was compromised by the elites, so it wasn’t a “Bill Hicks is trying to save us as Alex Jones” but more of a, “they got to Bill Hicks and made him fake his death and come back as a liar who leads people who start to see the truth down some stupid lizard people or aliens path so they don’t hurt the status quo”.

Why would you even need a doctor? All you’d need is access to something like fentanyl and general knowledge of how to calculate a lethal dose, then just pick a dose higher than that and have a second one prepared. Other than that, they’d just need training to insert an IV or needle into a vein.

It’s a separate question from whether they should be executing anyone, but it just seems ridiculous that reliably killing someone is a hard problem. I personally think it’s based on a desire to walk a line where they are cruel to those they kill but don’t seem that way unless you look closely. Like with the first nitrogen execution, it sounded fool proof, but then they didn’t do anything to vent the CO2 and it became cruel.

I remember hearing to not layer encryptions or hashes on top of themselves. It didn’t make any sense to me at the time. It was presented as if that weakened the encryption somehow, though wasn’t elaborated on (it was a security focused class, not encryption focused, so didn’t go heavy into the math).

Like my thought was, if doing more encryption weakened the encryption that was already there, couldn’t an attacker just do more encryption themselves to reduce entropy?

The class was overall good, but this was still a university level CS course and I really wish I had pressed on that bit of “advice” more. Best guess at this point is that I misunderstood what was really being said because it just never made any sense at all to me.