Earth

I feel like Beholders are the product of some nightmare fueled fever dream. They fascinate me endlessly.

Infinite Jest - just the part about video conferencing is wild and is even mire wild when you realize it was written in the 90’s before video conferencing really existed:

“Good old traditional audio-only phone conversations allowed you to presume that the person on the other end was paying complete attention to you while also permitting you not to have to pay anything even close to complete attention to her. A traditional aural-only conversation […] let you enter a kind of highway-hypnotic semi-attentive fugue: while conversing, you could look around the room, doodle, fine-groom, peel tiny bits of dead skin away from your cuticles, compose phone-pad haiku, stir things on the stove; you could even carry on a whole separate additional sign-language-and-exaggerated-facial-expression type of conversation with people right there in the room with you, all while seeming to be right there attending closely to the voice on the phone. And yet — and this was the retrospectively marvelous part — even as you were dividing your attention between the phone call and all sorts of other idle little fuguelike activities, you were somehow never haunted by the suspicion that the person on the other end’s attention might be similarly divided.”

I pledge to be fair, stay curious and stand up for those who cannot stand up for themselves. To never forget we are a people dedicated to a just and free society for all. To be welcoming and inclusive of all peoples, rich or poor and the regardless if the color of their skin or their faith or gender or sexual orientation. Except Donald Trump. That guy is a jerk.

This seems to me to be a weak substitute for good privacy regulation.

You likely can’t do equity investing but you might be able to buy their bonds:

https://www.ndb.int/news/ndb-launches-new-usd-1-25bn-3-year-green-bond/

Seems like a bad idea to me. If you want to diversify buy index funds and ETFs.

The classic arcade game Venture. Go ahead, make my day:

https://archive.org/details/arcade_venture#

Venture is a 1981 arcade game by Exidy. The goal of Venture is to collect treasure from a dungeon. The player, named Winky, is equipped with a bow and arrow and explores a dungeon with rooms and hallways. The hallways are patrolled by large, tentacled monsters (the “Hallmonsters”, according to Exidy) who cannot be injured, killed, or stopped in any way. Once in a room, the player may kill monsters, avoid traps and gather treasures. If they stay in any room too long, a Hallmonster will enter the room, chase and kill them. In this way, the Hallmonsters serve the same role as “Evil Otto” in the arcade game Berzerk. The more quickly the player finishes each level, the higher their score. The goal of each room is only to steal the room’s treasure. In most rooms, it is possible (though difficult) to steal the treasure without defeating the monsters within. Some rooms have traps that are only sprung when the player picks up the treasure. For instance, in “The Two-Headed Room”, two 2-headed ettins appears the moment the player picks up the prize. Players die if they touch a monster or the corpse of a monster. Dead monsters decay over time and their corpses may block room exits, delaying the player and possibly allowing the Hallmonster to enter. Shooting a corpse causes it to regress back to its initial death phase. The monsters themselves move in specific patterns but may deviate to chase the player, and the game’s AI allows them to dodge the player’s shots with varying degrees of “intelligence” (for example, the snakes of “The Serpent Room” are relatively slow to dodge arrows, the trolls of “The Troll Room” are quite adept at evasion). The game consists of three different dungeon levels with different rooms. After clearing all the rooms in a level the player advances to the next. After three levels the room pattern and monsters repeat, but at a higher speed and a different set of treasures.
\

Released
1981

The Cake Song

Haunting

Sucks to suck I guess.

Except for tha time with Windows 8 where they tried to get rid of them.

I just want my privacy back.

It is a good Cyber-thriller.

It’s a discipline.

They got got -> https://archive.org/details/weareanonymousin0000olso_l5h7

I remember when SFC was first introduced, I excitedly wrote a script to invoke it remotely so I could use it on a user’s pc when they called to fix their problem. To this day I have never run that script. This was in 1998.

Roll for pedantry

“> driving out rivals, diminishing competition, inflating advertising costs, reducing revenues for news publishers and content creators, snuffing out innovation, and harming the exchange of information and ideas in the public sphere.”

I feel like it is going to be hard to prove that Google’s anti-competitive actions have inflated advertising costs. Also, did news publishers lose revenue because of Google or was it Craigslist and jobs sites that killed their classified business?

Google is definitely a monopoly and has acted badly, but proving the harm in this way is going to be tricky. The government should go after them for privacy, the place where they have clearly abused their relationship with the public. Google normalizing spying on users has created the data economy that has resulted in us being spied upon us all the time and having all of our personal data being leaked over and over again.

As someone who has administered networks and written policies like this the concern here is that you will run an open network that may be used for piracy, hacking, DDOS or to send bomb threats. Tracing down this type of behavior is required by law and allowing students to run open networks makes this near impossible.

Champions of Midgard - Because Vikings! Its a resource management based game where you go on journeys to fight magical monsters. Its pretty tight and you can play a complete game in one-two hours.

Pandemic - I mostly enjoy this because it is a co-op game. You all fight the disease! That said the game mechanic is pretty fun and can be challenging.