Hi, I drove a LLV for a couple years! It’s actually so, when they stop at a mailbox, they don’t have to leave or lean across the vehicle to reach out to a mailbox on the right side of the road. It is also easier to hop out for packages, as you said, but if I recall the volume of packages was much lower when the vehicles were designed, so they were more focused on delivering letters from one mailbox to the left.

Another fun fact, LLVs are one of the only street legal vehicles in the US with a shorter front wheel axle than the back! This makes turning much tighter so the driver can pull a full U-turn on any standard road without needing a Y-turn, since visibility is pretty awful behind the vehicle when backing up. This also makes them pretty fun to drive.

I hear to find the best BBQ in Texas you need to find a restaurant attached to a rinky-dink gas station.

With Blomkamp working on it, I’m interested. I wonder if he will try to recreate the satire of the Verhoeven movie, follow the book more closely, or try to compare/reconcile the two. I hope it’s the last one, or at least not just a retread of the Verhoeven movie since that still holds up on its own.

Edit: I wish I’d read the article before posting (:/) because it sounds like they’re going for a more faithful rendition of the book! As someone whose ideals were influenced by the book’s themes of political responsibility, I am cautiously optimistic.

One of the most important things I heard in middle school was from a friend of a friend: “It’s normal to be weird and it’s weird to be normal. Have you ever met someone who was truly ‘normal?’”

I don’t remember the source, but I’ve read that, while getting a good night sleep for a couple days feels much better, it takes 9 days of good sleep in a row to recover as much as you can from sleep deprivation. If I recall sleep flushes out chemicals that build up in your brain, they can only build up so much before it’s saturated, and it takes the 9 days to fully catch up on flushing them out.

It sounds like the biggest thing that would help you is managing your caffeine consumption. I went through caffeine withdrawal a few times before deciding I didn’t like it and setting the following boundaries that have helped. First, no coffee/energy drinks after 12 hours before I want to sleep. So I go to bed at 10pm, I have all my coffee drank before 10am. This gives your body a chance to process most of the caffeine so it affects your sleep less. Second (and the hardest if you’re already used to daily caffeine) I try not to drink caffeine two days in a row. This keeps it from building up in your system, which keeps your tolerance low, which also means it feels like a super power when you do drink caffeine.

Are you talking celsius?

I’m guessing it’s 20~25 degrees there?

It’s an argument on the internet, there are never really winners. It seemed like backtracking because saying that a dissenting response is “actually the type of thing I’m talking about” carries an implication that the person responding misunderstood you, rather than acknowledging the possibility that you did not clearly/fully communicate your thoughts. As far as I and I assume the person you responded to could tell, that wasn’t “actually the type of thing” you were talking about. Backtracking may have been the wrong term, but there was a level of condescension in your comment that was so close to being sincere that it rubbed me the wrong way. Combine that with me half-disagreeing with you and that made for a response with some snark at the front. I am a little sorry for that. Also, why would you write “because of your own life experiences and emotions?” Unless the discussion is focused on something related to how people become the way they are, that statement has about as much meaning as “this is an aspen. You can tell it’s an aspen because of the way it is.” All it says is that you assume there is something wrong with the person rather than actually say anything about what that person has said or done. At worst it’s empty words and at best it’s an empty ad hominem.

Nice backtracking on “some other event,” that’s better than what 90% of the internet would do!

I still think it’s fine to use external dates for self improvement. I’m not very religious, but I love lent specifically because it’s a socially encouraged time to change a habit that lasts nearly the two months it takes to make a new habit or break an old one.

One year it was soda because I drank a few cans a week, since then I very rarely have any in the house. Last year I gave up meat, which is something I would never have pushed myself to do on my own.

It’s just a lot easier to test a change when it’s not permanent. There’s certainly an argument to be made that a full year of change at new years is too long to successfully commit to, but that doesn’t mean the whole thing should be discounted.

Even if Google stopped paying Mozilla, the organization has enough in savings to operate for several years. That’s plenty of time to cut back on spending and find other revenue sources. My only concern would be that they cut back on Firefox development rather than what I would consider a side project.

Oh nice, I just replayed The Last Autumn since the trees are changing color, just waiting on the first snowfall to play the main game. Let me know if there’s anything especially challenging you want advice on!

I couldn’t figure out the spoiler tags or I’d have left it up. I played it out on my DS so I got the full experience. If I remember correctly even if there wasn’t dialogue you’d still get a short cutscene of the gang eating ice cream after a long day of fighting stuff, which (for a middle schooler at least) really built up a connection by the end of the game.

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Man, I loathe this guy. There’s a sign of him at my work lunch area with some rhyme about “something something, avoid a slip up” and I’m just thinking “yeah yeah, whatever Glasses Office Man! Why are you targeting my demographic specifically?”

It’s a myth so widely pushed and accepted over the decades that just calling it a myth won’t be accepted as an argument against it at this point.

What I think is interesting is that this sense of fiduciary duty can be used by a company to do whatever they want. Mass layoffs are part of a fiduciary duty to cut costs. Mass hirings are part of a fiduciary duty to expand operations for growth. At this point it’s less a myth and more an excuse for doing whatever.

Maybe some mental mixup with Snowpiercer, which does take place on a train surrounded by snow?

I think it’s worth playing the first because it’s a much smaller scale and sets up the world. This one is set 30 years later so the society from the first game has significantly grown and expanded, with a lot of the evolutions in gameplay stemming from that. You probably could jump right into the second, but you may feel like you’re missing something at the start.

Yes, instead of building individual houses and mines for a few hundred people, you build districts for thousands of people. Instead of heat levels per district, there are five “bad things” that have levels, food, sickness, cold, squalor, and crime. If you don’t produce enough of something like heat from coal/oil the cold level will start to rise to different levels depending on the percentage of the need met (if you make 1/4 the heat demanded, it gets really high). Each level affects other problems, so high levels of cold leads to higher sickness, high levels of sickness reduce the number of available workers, which makes it harder to keep housing districts running, which you need to keep enough shelter or else cold levels rise more.

There are also multiple ways to solve the issues this causes. If you can’t find or exploit a new source of heat yet, you could build hospitals in housing districts to counteract the increase in sickness and keep that level low, preventing sickness, or you could pass a law like family apprenticeship that increases the percentage of your population that can be used as workers (kids helping their parents) so you can afford more people being sick. You could also shut down some material or food production to save heat demand or workers, but then you need to have big enough stockpiles to survive the deficit, or you might be dealing with hunger from food shortages (which increases sickness by the way) or crime from material goods shortages.

And the worse things get, the blacker the edges of the screen get as tensions rise, trust falls, and your own hope outside the game wavers, which get’s really intense. But that only makes it all the sweeter when that one district, building, or law you needed finishes and you see that beautiful word while hovering over the problem killing you; “diminishing.”

I think I went on a bit of a tangent there, but I have really been enjoying my time with the game so far. The one issue I have is the game chugs right now. On an RTX 2080S I have the resolution down to 1080p and framerates still hover around 40. Maybe it’s my CPU, but by the end of my last game building one mega metropolis even the music was skipping repeatedly as the game tried to keep up. I do really hope they make it run better going forward.

It’s a “survival city builder,” so it’s easier to lose than most. It has some serious style and in the first game has some tough decisions between doing what’s humane or doing what benefits you mechanically. As an example, for dealing with the dead you can create a cemetery where the dead can be remembered, reducing the malus to the hope of your people when someone dies. Alternatively you can create a snow pit out in the cold to preserve the bodies for organ harvesting, healing the sick faster and preventing some deaths but reducing hope overall.

I’m biased because I’ve played the first game for over 200 hours, but if it’s on sale definitely give it a try if you think the art looks cool or like city builders. It’s best played in winter when it’s already cold outside. I first played it during the polar vortex a few years back and it was awesome feeling the cold creep into my room as I tried to keep the cold from taking my people.

I’ve also played two playthroughs of Frostpunk 2 the last week and it feels like a larger scale escalation of the first game. If you play the first game enough you learn build orders and what to research first which can become rigid, the sequel feels a lot more fluid in deciding what to build toward next. A law or building has a smaller impact overall but there are enough of them that it feels like building a house of cards that you hope can weather the literal storms that hit you.