Please be moddable…

I’m bleeding, making me the victor!

I had quite a bit of fun with it for a few weekends with my friends, but ultimately the lack of a system for mechanical progression left it feeling a bit shallow (ha!). As a primarily PvE game with light PvP it’s in a weird place where it doesn’t have quite enough RPG-like elements to hold my interest on the PvE side, or enough player-on-player combat to make it a gripping contest of skill.

It’s still a fun game to hop into from time to time, but it’s never been appointment gaming for me

Rotovap on a flytrap.

Quite sure – and given that one game I’ve been playing lately (and the exception to the lack of shooters in my portfolio) is Selaco, so I ought to have noticed by now.

There’s a very slight difference in smoothness when I’m rapidly waving a mouse cursor waving around on one screen versus the other, but it’s hardly the night-and-day difference that going from 30fsp to 60fps was back in Ye Olden Days, and watching a small, fast-moving, high-contrast object doesn’t make up the bulk of gameplay in anything I play these days.

The old one and the new one are literally side by side on my desktop, don’t know what to tell you…

At launch the 360 was on par graphically with contemporary high-end GPUs, you’re right. By even the midpoint of its seven year lifespan, though, it was getting outclassed by midrange PC hardware. You’ve got to factor in the insanely long refresh cycles of consoles starting with the six and seventh generations of consoles when you talk about processing power. Sony and Microsoft have tried to fix this with mid-cycle refresh consoles, but I think this has honestly hurt more than helped since it breaks the basic promise of console gaming – that you buy the hardware and you’re promised a consistent experience with it for the whole lifecycle. Making multiple performance targets for developers to aim for complicates development and takes away from the consumer appeal

Eh… Consoles used to be horribly crippled compared to a dedicated gaming PC of similar era, but people were more lenient about it because TVs were low-res and the hardware was vastly cheaper. Do you remember Perfect Dark multiplayer on N64, for instance? I do, and it was a slideshow – didn’t stop the game from being lauded as the apex of console shooters at the time. I remember Xbox 360 flagship titles upscaling from sub-720p resolutions in order to maintain a consistent 30fps.

The console model has always been cheap hardware masked by lenient output resolutions and a less discerning player base. Only in the era of 4K televisions and ubiquitous crossplay with PC has that become a problem.

Might just be my middle-aged eyes, but I recently went from a 75Hz monitor to a 160Hz one and I’ll be damned if I can see the difference in motion. Granted that don’t play much in the way of twitch-style shooters anymore, but for me the threshold of visual smoothness is closer to 60Hz than whatever bonkers 240Hz+ refresh rates that current OLEDs are pushing.

I’ll agree that 30fps is pretty marginal for any sort of action gameplay, though historically console players have been more forgiving of mediocre performance in service of more eye candy.

The Wikipedia article for these little monsters describes the males aggressively fighting over females mid-mating, to the point of killing some as they attempt to tear them away from one another, and then squeezing the eggs out of their dead bodies to fertilize them… Gonna guess it’s the same one.

I’m a lab planner, and sometimes getting researchers to describe what sort of containment device they need for a given process is like pulling teeth.

• Chemical fume hood? That’s a hood.
• Class II, Type B2 BSC? Also a hood.
• Class II, Type A2 BSC? Believe it not, hood.
• Laminar flow bench? Yep, that’s a hood too.
• PCR dead air box? Somehow also a hood.

Like, surely you’re not doing BSL-2 work in a LAF? Please tell me you’re not doing that.

…and that, son, is why at some point in the distant future the universe will be an undifferentiated soup of unvarying temperature, full of depleted and inert mass slowly evaporating into photons. In the end, everything you’ve ever been, ever done, and ever seen will be nothing more than a diffuse haze of light, racing unobserved and unobservable through a dead and infinite void. Any questions?

Inland is (or was, at least) relabeled eSun filament, and they’re considered a decent brand for basic filaments. I’ve only ever used their PLA(+) but it’s always been bulletproof.

Bees are basically an introduced domesticated animal outside of Europe. Other parts of the world have their own native pollinators that are at significantly greater risk than bees, which are heavily managed and extensively studied due to their agricultural importance. For all the popular alarm over Colony Collapse Disorder, bee colony populations have been basically stable for decades and certainly haven’t seen any measurable decline in recent years.

Look, some of us old farts started on Linux back before nano was included by default, and your options for text editing on the command line were either:

1. vi/vim, a perfectly competent text editor with arcane and unintuitive key combos for commands
2. emacs, a ludicrously overcomplicated kitchen-sink program that had reasonable text-editing functionality wedged in between the universal woodchuck remote control and the birdcall translation system

Given those options, most of us chose to learn how to key-chord our way around vim, and old habits die hard.

I told my wife that from a genetic standpoint starfish are disembodied heads crawling across the seafloor on their mouth, and she was so squicked out that she left the room… Which was, in fairness, my intent, so, uh… mission accomplished?

Super disappointing, yeah. I’ve worked a bit with Dave McCarty during a previous Worldcon and this sort of ham-handed self-censorhip is not what I would have expected of him. Even if something like that was more or less a foregone conclusion from the moment Chengdu won the bid, I would have at hoped that he’d at least let the local Worldcon committee bear responsibilty, rather than being a willing and proactive partner.

That said, as the report that this article is based on points out, that the premier award in SF and fantasy literature is joined at the hip with Worldcon is a bit awkward, and even when the hosting country doesn’t have repressive and omnipresent government censorship, the local mores and tastes are going to have an impact on voting. Not that it’s bad for non-American or non-Western viewpoints and fandoms to carry weight in the voting, but maybe it’d be better to separate the administration of the Hugos from that of Worldcon, and develop a vetting and voting process that can be consistently and deliberately inclusive, rather than being at the mercy of whose hosting bid wins in a given year? Seems like it would be important to resolve this sooner rather than later, given that Egypt is in the running to host in 2026 and Saudi Arabia has made perennial bids for the convention as well.

Haven’t seen it suggested yet, so I’ll throw out Linda Nagata’s Inverted Frontier series. Without giving away too much, explorers on the periphery of a collapsed posthuman civilization launch an expedition back towards its center, and along the way find various eldritch monstrosities – of human origin and otherwise – as they try to solve the mystery of the collapse. It’s more thriller than horror in tone, but it checks your other boxes quite well.

Alas, my knowledge on the topic is limited – I work as a lab planner, and what I wrote above is most of what I’ve gleaned over the years of designing process development and scale-up labs. Past a point I just ooh and aah appreciatively at the big robotized bioreactor arrays my clients are putting in. Hopefully someone with a deeper background can point you in the right direction!

Biochem is incredibly sensitive to seemingly minor changes in conditions or procedure. A former coworker of mine had to change careers after the procedure she had to follow to run the assays for her master’s thesis gave her severe RSI. She couldn’t alter the procedure for ergonomics, though, because even something like changing the angle that she held the pipettor at could throw off the results.

In biopharma work, it’s not at all uncommon when trying to manufacture a biologic to find a process that works reliably in the lab but doesn’t give the same results when scaled up to production-size bioreactors, such that there’s often a whole stage of R&D devoted to taking a procedure from the lab and reproducing it on successively larger pieces of equipment, while working out all the tweaks and adjustments needed to make things work and optimize production.