To add on, at my work we started getting yubikeys for the people who didnt want Microsoft's authenticator on their phone and found they still need to download the mfa to set up the yubikey in the first place. So its not a perfect solution if you dont want the authenticator to touch your phone at all.

I can also confirm that the help desk members who are not enlightened about Microsoft will ridicule you for not wanting the MFA even if its reasonable to not want Microsoft on your phone. As much as we think all techs are Linux nerds, I have the opposite at my work. Some of the higher up techs are constantly trying to get people to switch to windows 11...

Good ol Billy Shepherd

I think his suit jacket says Boeing lol

Am I crazy or does that screenshot have Japan in it? Why would a Japanese company ban a game about Japan in Japan?

Alright I'm gonna be the dude who replies to myself but I did some research and these prices are probably real. What's crazy is they appear to be significantly lower than last years prices. Another important thing is that the formal menus mention the dishes being sized to serve 4 people. That makes it slightly more okay but also still ridiculous. This has to be inside the paddock or VIP areas though as I dont think they would even offer caviar to the peasants in the general admission.

Lol if you zoom in there is clearly something weird going on with the numbers. I would believe 0s were added to the prices. Even without the 0 at the end the prices would still be absurd but this is way too expensive to be believable. If it is real just burn the whole place down

Oh ive seen this before. This is one of those "manufacturing consent" type articles right? Seems like very weird timing for human rights watch to bring this up now, right after Iran and Israel have started facing off...

Hopefully its just a case of trying to use the general buzz to get eyes on a specific issue but the timing is bad for optics considering they have been accused of being a propaganda tool in the past. At least the HRW has been covering Palestine in a largely positive light and not pulling punches. Now would probably be a good time for HRW to publish an article about how conflict in general is used to hide human rights violations.

Probably just general entropy. Life is energy organized and put to purpose which is basically the opposite of entropy. So if, entropy is the antithesis to life, wouldn't all life's ultimate goal be to overcome entropy?

R/ambien used to have some of my favorite posts of all time. There is one where a guy recorded himself staying up on his (legally prescribed) ambien with a go pro. Nothing too crazy happens but seeing his cognition decline and him just become a top tier lol so random bot was hilarious. He kept getting angry at all the statutes and cardboard cutouts in his house because he thought they were moving haha

Ngl this article hit a lot of sore spots for me. I feel that it is kind of silly to claim that all music is trending in this direction when the article only considers the top 100. Additionally repeated lyrics and a song being repetitive are not the same thing. Using lyrics as the sole metric completely ignores the timbre, rhythm, dynamic, and expression of each repetition. Also where does instrumental music fall into this? Surely its the most repetitive because there's no words at all right!? Same problem with the part about melodic diversity where it only looks at the macro structure of a song rather than that in addition to the content in the actual melodies of the music.

The biggest issue though is that the whole conclusion of the article breaks down if you look below the absolute surface level. Modern music has become so spread and diverse that the only expectation left to be subverted is the expectation of subversion itself. The top 100 has trended in a way that indicates commodifcation as the music industry tries to squeeze out pennies, but because of that the target demographic of popular music has been reduced to young people that haven't had a musical awakening yet, or people who dont actually really like music as more than set dressing. So of course everything is being homogenized, their target audience has become more narrow and they have more data than ever in how to target their slice. Anyone who seeks novelty jumped ship years ago and is now listening to some niche genre musician who makes exactly the brand of music they want or is drinking deep of the craziness that modern music can hold.

I think people still expect the top 100 to represent the most innovative or best songs at any given time, but anyone who understands music knows that the top 100 is where new ideas in music become old by way of being made commercially viable. Because of this popular music actually experiences a lot of flux over time but more on a macro level than a micro one. While songs might sound similar to each other while on the chart together, how different do they sound to their contemporaries from 5-10 years ago? IMO pretty different.

Also I would love it if tech bros would stop trying to boil the content of art into data points with algorithms. I have a bachelors in math so I love me a good algorithm, but the cumulative effect of a piece of art often creates something greater than the individual parts. Isolating individual parts of a song and comparing that to the isolated parts of other songs only serves to further commodify music and incentivize the very behavior this article seems to be against. Not everything can meaningfully be turned into data to extrapolate trends from, especially when you need to set the kind of arbitrary restrictions that are necessary to try and apply math to analyze the content of music.

The most interesting part of this article is the paragraph on ticket sales. But this also suffers from the fact that big artists perform more often and at bigger and more expensive venues, so of course they sell more tickets. I would expand on this personally. If i wanted a truer mapping of the homogeneity of music, I would analyze the diversity of genres represented at performing venues over time. I suspect that at dedicated music venues and festivals, the genres being performed have diversified over time as the internet has allowed niche genres to gain enough traction that venues will actually open their doors to them. Anecdotally I have been to an ambient show, a middle eastern chamber jazz show, a punk show, an rnb show, and a jazz mixed with drum and bass clown show in the last six months. All of them were packed and all of them sounded wildly different.

This article almost has a point to it, but fails to actually justify the point to people who have a clue about modern music. It also makes no attempt to explore the opposite position to its own point and plainly assumes its hypothesis is true. As it is this article reads as nothing more than another drop of fuel in the narrative that our culture is homogenizing and degenerating rather than being reified by the internet allowing niches to thrive in ways that aren't visible to surface level analysis.

Saw them live in Boston! They're fantastic musicians and if you have the opportunity to see them do their shit live I would highly recommend.

I'm proud to be wrong. The beef dudes or the imperfect dwarf are my favorite

I think America is really good at getting attention so everything good and bad is magnified by how much exposure it gets. So our dumbasses are some of the loudest and best at being noticed for their dumbassery in the whole world.

This is so cool!

NGL I didn't read the title at first and thought these were all jack o lanterns

They're just trained to approach you pretty much no matter what. Leaving people alone means youre missing out on opportunities for good business I guess. Just annoying to me, especially when I was working at one.

While animals can hear different frequencies, the researchers talked about editing the audio for volume and such. I would assume these scientists, who are already concerned about the audio content/volume, would think about that. All they would need to do is take the clips, put them a spectral analyzer and eliminate any frequencies outside of the range of frequencies the animal making the sound could make. So it would be rather trivial for them to do. Youre also assuming the speakers could reproduce that static but if they're tuned for human hearing ranges and not really cheap speakers then the chance of some elephant scaring static is low.

Wow you definitely aren't american as I'm scratching my head to even figure out what you mean by some of these. The average grill in america is a standalone outdoor cooking station with a metal grate used as the cooking surface. They are also found in restaurants but usually they are in a bit of a different form that what the average American thinks of as a grill. the grates give the characteristic lines of grilled food that many seek. A griddle is a grill where the grate has been replaced by a flat piece of metal, often used for small or runny foods that would fall between the grates of a regular grill.

We also dont typically have standalone broilers. Most american ovens have a broil option where the top heating element becomes very hot and can be used to brown the food.

The main difference between grilling and broiling, in my american eyes, is how they are used. Grilling is a technique for cooking food from start to finish. Broiling is a technique used at the end of cooking something to brown it or something to that effect. I wouldn't use the broiler in my oven to cook a whole meal, and I wouldn't turn on the grill or griddle just to brown something.

In my eyes saute is when you use only enough oil to keep something from sticking or burning, while frying is when you use enough oil that it starts to really add to the flavor of what you're cooking.

I think the worst thing Americans have done is the air fryer though. Its just a fucking tiny convection oven, there's no frying going on at all. They just know us fat Americans are conditioned to salivate when we hear the word fry and cower in terror from big science words like 'convection' lol

It is what you think it is haha

All of these maps were made with Stars without Number revised edition, or dark heresy first edition in mind. They aren't super intentionally designed to cater to either of those systems though.

I can certainly try. If I still have the dungeon draft files still I can load the original projects and make both clean and hex versions without much issue

Its not surprising. I used to work at one of these places and they would laugh at any viable alternative acting like it would never have a chance. They also were well aware of the fact that some of their distributors illegally kill the returned horshoe crabs and turn them into fertilizer. So any claims that they're not hurting the horshoe crabs are bullshit. They've just offloaded the hurt to contractors who are 50/50 on actually trying to protect the crabs and just using them as bait. Even if they didn't do that, I've always been suspect that the crabs do great in the wild after losing 60% of their blood.

Don't really know what it is but I like it. I've lived kinda near the beach my whole life, so its interesting to see a depiction of the beach that makes it feel alien without being downright unfamiliar.

Just saw this in person for the first time the other day. Its amazing and much larger than I thought. Its very striking.

They are talking about giving to charities, not directly to the homeless. Even if they were talking about giving directly, the drug argument is very silly. If they're hungry they're gonna buy food first. Maybe they'll try to buy less than they need so they can use the leftover for drugs, but that's their prerogative.

I work with the homeless and the vast majority are just worried about meeting their basic needs and being treated like a human.

Yeah exactly! I especially find this true for sci-fi. There are some great battlemaps for sci-fi out there, but they tend to depict very similar places in similar settings, as another commenter mentioned, or just be a recreation of something from star wars for the umpteenth time. There's a place for maps of wildly different locales in sci-fi games. Alien planets have backwater towns too! Not every map needs to be a space station, a hangar, or a cyberpunk city.

Hopefully I've helped make a teeny tiny dent in the sci fi map variety issue.

Hey thanks!

This Dropbox account was solely made for this purpose so I can probably fix that. I'm not very online so I'm not too worried anyways, but I apprediate your concern and help!

Sad that it will be gone or that it won't be taboo?

SCP already seems like a great source. Its always fun to catch a glimpse of monsters as a teaser for that sort of game. I think some amount of sci fi can definitely enhance paranormal settings, but I understand not wanting to lean too much into that.

The Simon stalenhag books that the Tales from the Loop setting originated in may be very good inspiration for hooks. They have beautiful art with vignettes and stories from one or a few characters perspectives. Anything that is too sci fi can be swapped out for an equivalent paranormal phenomenon, or completely rewritten. The best part about them is that the stories are very minimal as to not distract too much from the art, this adds a lot of empty space for things to be added, which kinda makes it perfect for plot hooks. Also they art itself is gorgeous.

If you are looking for works functionally very similar to SCP, their sister site the Wanderer's library is much more fantastical/paranormal. It may be a step too fantastical, but adapting single elements from high fantasy stories is a good way to tease a deeper weirder world.

In podcasts you can checkout the Magnus Archives. It is a podcast about a fiction organization that is like a much less powerful and scientific version of the SCP foundation. Not much else to say than the stories are pretty good and might inspire good hooks.

My final moonshot recommendation would be... Take a stand ability from a weird random Jojo's bizarre adventure character, slap it on a hybrid of two cryptids, and you have a grade A paranormal creature escaped from a government lab. For example, a moth winged giant ape that can turn dead animals into other animals it can control, or maybe an alien loch ness monster that is appearing in multiple completely disconnected bodies of water by traveling through the reflections of a giant tower at the center of town.

Don't know if this is helpful or just rambling. Personally I think the tales from the loop setting is at its best when its a near 50/50 SciFi/paranormal so I wouldn't shy away from using tech to make things even spookier. Ghosts and machines don't mix well, but in a good way.

Interesting, I was just wondering if I missed some deeper connection. I am unironically that guy who has only really played sci-fi RPGs, not shadowrun though. I don't inherently associate European tolkien-esque fantasy with RPGs but I can see why others do.

What does this have to do with RPGs?

Lean/six sigma. Its kinda hard to describe, but its basically a way of doing business that is 'more efficient'. Its principles are having as little inventory on hand as possible and trying to make sure there is no process waste by making sure everything happens "just in time". For everyone but workers it works pretty well to generate more profit and produce more goods, or at least it did until the supply chain got completely fucked.

Kind of a pedestrian use case, which might be good for flavoring, but you could make a sweet "air" hockey table out of them. I imagine there being a future version of air hockey that actually magnets in a vacuum. You could basically flavor it as truly frictionsless air hockey, with the games having the puck fly around at incredible speeds.

Assuming that cars, or the preferred method of transportation uses the magnets to get around, you could also have new kinds of Rollerblades and skateboards that use the magnets to travel the infrastructure. Maybe its something that only punk kids do by slapping stolen magnets on planks of wood. They can cause problems as they constantly get in the way of the car users.

You could also flavor the skateboards/ as a corporation backed cost cutting measure. The only people with magnet cars are the elite/ultra rich and everyone else can only afford a magnet scooter or whatever. If you want a really cynical world you could even give right of way to the magnet cars, so common folk would have to dodge them traveling at incredible speeds.

I think there are a ton more examples, but I bet, assuming the super conductor is reliably reproducible, that we will have crazier use cases within a decade IRL than we could dream up here. Probably some weird way to make sprinklers work better or something

Obviously they mean 5 times bigger than unmodded. Map looks similar in size to a full 81 tile map in the current game. Even if it was smaller, its still more than enough space.

I don't see how anyone could be anything but hyped at this point. They've done a great job of incorporating many of the improvements from the modding community, while also iterating and improving on things I didn't even expect them to touch.

The only thing that would keep my from buying it at this point is the performance. I built my computer around when the first game came out, and I would be surprised if it can handle this.

Nobody seems to be mentioning that they are also taking and demolishing an urgent care clinic as well as a public parking lot as stated in the article. The loss of health resources for potentially private parking is way worse than some IHOP. I live not far from Quincy and I would be pissed if this happened in my neighborhood. I'm pissed about it anyways tbh

Underground cables are pretty hype. I hit a point in CS1 where I used mods that just ran the power under the roads, and I was dreading having to make above ground connections for the new one.

I do worry that power might require too much micromanagement for certain styles of play. If you're playing the game in a city manager style it seems like a fun challenge, but in an unlimited money city that functions more like a model, it could get tedious. Mods will probably fix it if that is the case but it could still be something to think about.

I finished a 3+ year long weekly Stars without Number campaign this week. An amazing experience as I have never experienced a campaign from start to completion on either side of the table. It's almost left a hole in me as I started this campaign with the goal of running to completion and now I've done it and am not sure where to go.

Wasn't the most climactic or dramatic ending but the game was run as a sandbox with this being the ending to a goal they have been working towards for a long time. Felt rewarding regardless.

I also co-dm a 40k dark heresy 1e campaign and play in a torchbearer campaign but neither of those had particularly notable sessions compared to my game that ended.

Finally it's not playing, but I have been thoroughly reading Lancer to prep for my next long term campaign.