I recently learned that the Mormons settled and resettled in several states before finally staying in Utah. It’s quite an interesting story, especially given that most religions are so ancient that it’s very hard to track their origins today.

Johnny Harris has great videos about it, this one for instance.

What’s the difference between run time program data and temporary files? Is /tmp just for system level processes but not for user space?

It’s well known that the judiciary at the time was very lenient towards right wing extremists. His time in jail was rather cozy and gave him time to develop and write down more of his ideological underpinnings. And come up with a more comprehensive plan for taking over.

That’s why I find it very worrisome when people like Donald Trump get what amounts to a slap on the wrist for staging an insurrection. Not just that but they actually put him on the ballot again 😱. And this time the people propping him up in the background came up with an elaborate plan for claiming the election and then completely restructuring the executive authoritarian style (aka Project 2025).

It’s a good overview. As a bonus I would love to see the number of people affected (in absolute numbers and share of global population) in each category for each point in time.

It’s true but for the broader picture one should add that many people don’t bother to vote if their state is predicted to be a landslide victory for either candidate.

It’s appealing but I wish the black font for mountain names had an outline or something to make it more readable.

I feel like when comparing over a such a vast time scale party affiliation becomes less useful as a metric.

Society and mores have changed so much over the last 80+ years that it’s better to ask about specific questions or habits like: Do you support a smoking ban in public spaces? or Schools should provide free meals to students: yes/no and see how the answers develop over time.

GoldenEye has terrible controls compared to modern controller and especially mouse+keyboard but in multiplayer it didn’t really matter as anyone is on even footing.

My family still has one but the image quality is terrible on modern big screen TVs because

1. It’s stretched out and native resolution of N64 is already tiny by today’s standards.
2. Unnatural aspect ratio unless you can set black bars somehow.
3. Modern displays have sharper pixel separation and colors don’t ‘bleed’ into each other as much which kinda helped the rough polygons of that era.

The result is a picture that is both sharp and blurry at the same time and gives me head aches after an hour or so.

Ok, now that you mention it: I think the difference is that (at least in my region) the PlayStation was sold with a memory card included. Standalone memory cards for it were cheap. N64 came without a memory pack and they were more expensive.

IIRC PS also had a more granular slot size (eg gran turismo takes up 1 slot while final fantasy takes up 3 slots) while on the N64 it was large and fixed (each game takes up one large slot even if that slot doesn’t use up all the data).

In hindsight that has me wondering why they didn’t go for dynamic slot size 🤔. Maybe because a save file could grow over time and they wanted to ensure that you could always overwrite/update?

Cartridges were also a very solid copy right enforcement mechanism. By contrast PlayStation games were much easier to pirate although manufacturers kept adding on new mechanisms to prevent just that as time went on.

It surely has its technical flaws but that’s not what mattered to most buyers. Most people bought it to experience fun games and on that end it delivered. remember that at the time gaming was still breaking into main stream society and 3D games were on the frontier both technically and design wise.

Games like Ocarina of Time and Mario 64 really contributed to the design patterns of how 3d games could look like. Back in the day you simply didn’t have as many choices when it came to hardware. What really hurt its game catalog was that apparently it was hard to program for. Who knows what other games we might have seen if the barrier had been lower.

Speaking of the controller: yes, it wasn’t so good and the center joystick tended to wear out too quickly. Rumble pak was a fun gadget and really added to the immersion. What was terrible on the other hand was that the console lacked internal storage and many games would require you to purchase an additional memory pack (which slotted into the controller). That wasn’t just a technical deficiency but felt very anti consumer.

There’s different ideas on how time travel “could” work and one of them is the timeline-split notion upon which you base your idea. In that vain it’s solid.

Other ideas are that time travel always results in a loop or that its perhaps only possible under very specific circumstances (ie you can’t pick an arbitrary location or time to travel to nor to travel from).

My hunch is that even if time travel were possible there’s simply no practical experiment to tell whether you are in a split timeline (and if so how it differs from others), aka it’s outside of the realm of scientific // logical inquiry.

If y’all like exploration of time travel go watch the show Travelers some time. It has some interesting premises in that regard.

love the pro wrestling style energy in the 2nd panel 🤼‍♀️

The official term for this is COPS (cost per service) and it helps you greatly in making smart economic decisions. I calculated this for many household products about a decade ago and came to the conclusion that for many products it’s barely worth worrying about the cost while for others there’s hidden cost that should really warrant closer inspection. For instance dish soap has such low COPS that it almost doesn’t matter which brand you buy. Electric gadgets like fridges, washing machines or printers definitely warrant deliberation though because in the long run energy, refill, maintenance and repair costs will approach if not outstrip the initial purchase cost.

And yeah, spending a big chunk on a good bed or chair hurts initially but you will spend literally thousands of hours in them. Something like a greeting card or fireworks on the other hand are cheaper in the moment but only yield limited utility in comparison.

Yes, this one I summon to watch over me while I sleep. That usually goes wrong and it takes over the sheets while I have to sleep on the bean bag. But ¿what can I do?, the thing is just so damn cute.

reminds me of a familiar face (here’s a quick snap from my cork board):