Me: You ever think about how amazing
consciousness is? Like, how everything beautiful in the world
exists not just in itself but also in the reflection in the
minds and hearts of every single person who appreciates it?
Zandra: Except for Jim the Philosophical
Zombie.
Jim the Philosophical Zombie: I deeply
appreciate beauty! ...as far as you can tell 😉
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posted on www.tumblr.com 
So instead I replaced my marrow with ten thousand jittering bells (2023) -
speaking of Windows my computer has developed a delightful little quirk where it hisses and pops over headphones but only if there is not a Windows settings window open. I discovered this by opening up the sound settings to try to fix the hissing and popping and succeeding but not in the way I had intended
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posted on azhdarchid.com Microsoft is basically discontinuing Windows. What will happen, then?
First, it just won't run on the majority of hardware that currently runs Windows 10. This isn't just, like, ancient hardware; I have a desktop gaming PC that is perfectly fine to play current-gen AAA games on; it's what I played Cyberpunk 2077 on and that was totally okay. But somehow it doesn't meet Win11 requirements because of the CPU; it has a Ryzen 5 1600X in it, a CPU from 2017 that is apparently still actively being manufactured.
[...]
Second, win11 is unsecurable, because they implemented a feature (recall) that is just constantly screen recording everything you do on the computer, creating a sort of one-stop-shop for compromising literally anything. It functionally means that you can't be sure your computer hasn't, say, saved a password in plaintext (effectively) just because you had the 'show password' switch flipped once.
Those two things make win11 untenable for probably the majority of its users. Hardware compatibility will stop a ton of people on older or lower end personal machines. Individuals, small businesses, the public school in your town that hasn't had money for new computers in five or ten years. Recall being a major security flaw will, I fucking hope, give pause to a ton of institutional users. Is a computer with Win11 even legal to use in some restrictive settings like government offices, militaries, or hospitals?
posted on shelraphen.com We have really been struggling with this at work. The advantage of Windows over Macs used to be that it was highly customizable and excellent for Enterprise systems with a lot of users. It also used to have cheap and free licenses for "learning institutions" which is a category Microsoft has slowly been shrinking to include fewer and fewer institutions causing already under-funded public institutions to have to spend exorbitant amounts of money on windows licenses that they can't even use because the Recall feature is a violation of federal laws regarding computer security for certain public institutions. It's totally a disaster. We've had brand new windows 11 machines for our patrons to use just sitting in the back for nearly a year now because our IT department can't figure out how to essentially hack windows to comply with federal security regulations and every time they get it usable, a new update reverts everything because in Windows 11 you can't customize which updates you accept it's all just a bundle. Our IT guys are also just complaining that the ability to make the computers locked down enough to be for public use really does not exist in windows 11 in the way it used to in older versions of windows.
I've been worrying about this as well. I consider myself at least moderately a Linux sicko—I've had at least one daily driver Linux desktop consistently since before college, although most of that time it's been my work device—and…
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posted on 8pxl.tumblr.com 
more pixel art stamp concepts (:
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gonna run an rpg with two guards one of whom always lies and one of whom always tells the truth. whatever the players ask one will say "sorry, I'll be right with you" and the other will say "I don't have to answer your fuckin questions"
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posted on entangled.one many reasons it would be nice to have comments here but one reason in particular right here right now is because i want to know: what is the highest floor of a building that you have ever been on? if it is the top floor of a skyscraper and... then what is the second highest floor. or, alternatively, the highest floor of a building you have been on for a reason that is not "going to a high floor in a building".
i am not entirely sure of my answer but i am pretty sure it's less that 20.
I have spent too much time in Manhattan to have a hope in hell of answering this question accurately. Sometimes a random hotel room or whatever is on the 80th floor and you barely notice
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Having played only two Silent Hill games, I've already formed my opinion that this is what Silent Hill should be. Although the original marshaled an incredible ambiance, it didn't quite manage to coalesce it into cogent themes. It lives in my memory largely as a collection of horror vignettes which, while strikingly effective given the limited palette of the PS1, are little more than the sum of their parts.
Silent Hill 2 learns that lesson well, and strides forth confidently with a degree of narrative focus and aptitude that's rare to see in games before or since. Everything in this town of Silent Hill curls meticulously around its true function, even long before the player begins to suspect that it has a function at all. Where the first game just asks the player to experience it, the second asks the player to understand it, and is consistent enough to truly reward that understanding. In doing so, it manages to be effective not just as a game or as a mood poem but as a horror story—something I've never seen another game fully succeed at.
The craftsmanship is also outstanding even beyond the purely narrative realm. When I first played Resident Evil (2002) I was shocked by how much mileage it got out of its much-derided "tank controls" as a means of giving the game itself detailed control over the camera angles without bewildering the player's movement. Silent Hill 2 takes this to the next level, allowing the movement of the player itself to guide the camera along paths that echo those of horror cinematography. My breath was stolen when, in the opening sequence as James walks down a long dirt path through the woods, the camera began trailing him with trees interspersed, using filmic techniques to convey a sense of being watched and stalked.
It's just not possible to do that sort of things with the now-standard two-stick full-motion camera controls, and I became even more thoroughly convinced playing this game that we let ourselves throw away a gem of design in tank controls. They do feel awkward, this I won't deny—but must games always feel smooth? What is life without a little variation in the texture? I dearly hope that one day fixed cameras and relative controls are added back to the toolbox of game design, as I long to see what a game could do if it truly iterated on the way Silent Hill 2 wields the camera as a piece of the artistry during the game itself.
The only place this doesn't rise above its predecessor are the combat and resource management mechanics, which still feel by-the-book relative to Resident Evil's brilliance. The combat is perhaps slightly better here, but only by virtue of being easier to avoid. But if the niche this series is carving for itself is tremendous atmosphere, narrative, and visual artistry, you won't hear a single complaint from me. -
Happy Hour Manhattan
1oz pretty good well whisky (Evan Williams 100 Proof), 1oz pretty bad well whisky (Four Roses Yellow Label), 1oz totally decent vermouth (Dolin), 3ds Angostura bitters, one brandied cherry
I take pride in my cocktail mixing. I've put in a lot of work into honing my judgment of flavor combinations, learning how to construct an effective cocktail recipe, and building a stable of excellent ingredients. Whenever anyone comes to visit my house, I do my best to give them a beverage experience that's perfectly tailored to their desires, whether it's sweet or bitter, punchy or mild, alcoholic or not. Although sometimes experimentalism takes me in a direction that is not worth repeating, by and large I believe the drinks I make are excellent.
But excellent is not always what's called for.
Liz and I used to love going out to bars. Our signature move was to take off work early of an afternoon, show up just as the doors opened around 4pm or so, and just shoot the breeze with the bartender during the easiest hours of their shift. Bartenders are great conversation because they're always up to something else in their lives, and the best ones also care a lot about the craft of serving people just what they want. We'd stick around for a few hours, get some snacks, maybe order dinner if the bar served it or head out for pizza, and end up home by 8pm feeling like we'd had a full night out.
All that ended, of course, in 2020. Other than a few mostly-outdoor visits during the vaccine honeymoon[1], we haven't been back to a bar since, and every day I miss that experience of lazily sipping on the latest Negroni variant while merrily chatting with someone who an hour ago was a total stranger to me.
For Liz, that experience was wrapped up inseparably with the particular flavors of happy hour, during which bars served cheaper drinks off a special menu to draw customers. Happy hour drinks are usually well-known classics such as a Manhattan, and they're usually substantially less fancy than a cocktail bar's primary menu. They'll often use only "well" ingredients, the inexpensive stuff that the bar buys in bulk to form the backbone of cocktails that are then made more flavorful with higher-shelf ingredients.
So when that's where Liz's mood takes her, I put away my high-end vermouth and adulterate my usual mixing whisky. Sometimes an excellent experience calls for mediocre flavor, and I try never to let my pride get in the way of mixing the right drink for the moment.
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Our cheeky term for summer/fall 2021, in the all-to-brief gap between getting vaccinated and vaccine-resistant COVID variants taking over the world, when people at large were still taking common-sense precautions despite COVID numbers being lower than they've ever been since. In some sense I miss those days even more than I miss the era before the pandemic, because in those days I really believed that people…
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