https://youtu.be/URwZv_aB940?t=43

No, that's beta.

'Butter' is hitting something a lot.

this tendency in the past decade to base entire shows on tense anxiety.

Yup. I call it the "drama of paranoia," and it's exhausting after a while. It also gives you a veneer of "prestige" without having to make characters I give a shit about or plots that fit together at all. As a good example of a show that realized this, Mad Men always struggled with a certain early-season plotline until they finally just ripped off the band-aid and said,

What worked about that show had nothing to do with "ONE BIG SECRET."

Also, an auteur (or the estate of an auteur) that owns a bunch of their own IP is effectively just a small studio. they have leverage to raise money for new projects, revenue streams from licensing the old ones, and the potential to enter into contracts surrounding them in all kinds of ways. Shit, a Megalopolis or two, and the auteurs will be selling their rights back to the legacy studios anyway.

FreeCAD still crashes for me a lot, across versions and distros and different PCs. I just don't know what the deal is; maybe bad luck.

Then, its kernel, being the only truly viable open source one, is understandable but also has some limitations commercial tools don't, and I'm just talking about super basic stuff like giving up on a fillet or chamfer as soon as two vertices touch.

The workflow is much improved, as are the heuristics for user intention (yes, yes, the "crutches") and to mitigate toponaming, but I still get frustrated trying to use it for my stupid keyboard and other 3D printing projects. I have Alibre Design on my Windows partition, and with the improvements in Linux gaming (seriously OP, it's WAY better these days), CAD is the main reason I even bothered to keep my old SSD with Windows.

There are probably things I do at work in MS Office that Libre would have a hard time with, but frankly I just don't care. :-)

Well, I wonder if that title means we've finally shut the door on Patty Campbell's Rogue Squadron movie.

If you raise the tariffs to a billion percent then the US will get a billion dollars revenue for every $100 TV that comes from China! There will be so many millions of billions!!!!!! Why wasn't anyone smart enough to do this before?!?!?

Same. I was adopted as an infant, and I actually used all the DNA sites to triangulate my birth family (some nice folks, some asses). I did it over ten years ago, but it would have been a lot easier today. I think it hits a lot of people, especially on a platform like Lemmy, in their Sci-Fi dystopia feels in an inchoate kind of way that makes them recoil, and it's not that there isn't any potential for abuse, just that this is a genie that's very much out of the bottle. Frankly, if anything truly awful is going to be done with autosomal DNA, the people who want to do it will simply mandate it.

Records-wise, it's a large universe and impressively interconnected. I've learned a lot about all of my families (birth, adopted, marriage), and I was able to track down the documentation necessary to support a successful application get an EU passport for my wife (her company paid for it once she told them it was plausible), and therefore our daughter. I gather that I'll be eligible for one myself in the near future, as she was legally always a citizen, and therefore she will soon have been married for twenty years.

If my paternal side were more forthcoming, I might have been able to work something out with them for a couple of other countries, as my great-grandfather was an illegal immigrant from Germany who jumped ship from a freighter in the 1920s and married a girl whose family fled the collapsing Austro-Hungarian Empire after WWI. Then their kid married a Canadian nurse who was actually born in the "Dominion of Newfoundland" before confederation. Somehow this ended up creating Floridians... 🤷

Also, there's a good chance your goony-ass yearbook photos are on Ancestry (among other places).

But, you see, he looks like a secretary of defense, so therefore he must be an excellent one!

Austen herself doesn’t exactly need more royalties at this point.

And neither she nor her estate will be getting any, which is at least part of the point.

This is where I landed on it. Better than Big Bang Theory, worse than Silicon Valley. I found it to be a pretty watchable workplace comedy, and if it didn't capture game dev well, it did capture a certain funhouse reflection of what people think game dev might be, and that's what it needed to set the characters into motion, letting the actors cook. I know people giving it shit for its two best episodes not starring anyone from the main cast, and while true, they were two really good episodes and the floor of the main show is adequately high.

Now, in fairness, I'm not in love with IASIP and sort of checked out a long time ago, after they "died" on the cruise ship, so Rob and David Hornsby acting "similar but different" was no problem for me. I do think we were just about at the point where ending MQ makes sense, though. The show didn't really have the bones for the characters to withstand a lot of growth, and the comedic situations for them as-is had sort of played themselves out. Obviously, for a sitcom, that's the time to bow out. Going forward, I would love to see Charlotte Nicdao in something produced by Tina Fey and Robert Carlock.

Boiled Peanuts. I love 'em, but they're salty and sodden and messy, and they can range from a disconcerting pop texture to a disconcerting slimy texture, all in the same batch.

I mean, we don't really notice the BMW drivers who are acting sensibly, and it's probably the vast majority. But that being said, outside Germany they attract a certain enthusiast demographic that will include a statistically relevant minority who think every trip outside the neighborhood is Gran Turismo.

I don't drive a BMW, so yes, I do use my blinker.

Do you have any idea how disappointed I am that you're not posting from a slrpnk.net account?!?!

The natural resources, a tacit admission that Global Warming is real, continued control over a strategic area even after completely fucking over the perfectly good allies the US has now, and even though it's under the second largest ice sheet in the world, the island is just a tiny bit larger than the Louisiana Purchase, so I'm sure there's a huge ego factor.

I suppose it's a relief they're not talking about invading (for now), but Jesus what beatdown this all is.

I do sometimes think there is a bit of hand-wringing that happens where people glom onto the most visible sign of changing times and blame it for things that probably aren't as different as the adults think, but by the same token most schools in richer countries have screens everywhere with school-related interconnectivity and even tools that are not unlike social media.

I see very little downside here, even if it may not result in some magic rebirth of older forms of social interaction. It seems like the major benefit from the French pilot programs was "improved atmosphere," in which case it's still better than nothing. Having a period when kids are learning to deal with small-group dynamics is not a bad thing, and neither is taking "dealing with phone bullshit" off the teachers' plates.

I mean... fine? France always does things kind of top-down and there's certainly no reason you have to have your phone readily available, and plenty of evidence it's good to be away from it.

It's not like they need to get to their phones to tell their parents there's an active shooter on campus. 😐

Ahh, the rare and prized Ancho Banana.