Fair enough. I know that style can be polarizing, it’s why I put that caveat in there.

I really enjoyed Ys VIII (“Lacromosa of Dana”), if you can tolerate the kind of anime-ish story. It’s an action RPG. It’s not especially immersive (very game-y), but it’s got pretty good level design, and the combat is pretty fun, if not particularly challenging (a little button-mashy).

They can’t really keep them in stock, though. I was checking on them shortly before the sale started and the refurbished 64GB LCD models were all out. Now all the refurbished models are sold out.

It’s just as well, though. Between the Switch 2 and the Deckard, I’ve got some other stuff I might want to waste money on this year.

The one I thought was a good compromise was 14 years, with the option to file again for a single renewal for a second 14 years. That was the basic system in the US for quite a while, and it has the benefit of being a good fit for the human life span–it means that the stuff that was popular with our parents when we were kids, i.e. the cultural milieu in which we were raised, would be public domain by the time we were adults, and we’d be free to remix it and revisit it. It also covers the vast majority of the sales lifetime of a work, and makes preservation and archiving more generally feasible.

5 years may be an overcorrection, but I think very limited terms like that are closer to the right solution than our current system is.

Sean Duffy is the transportation secretary.

I should preface this by saying I don’t actually have a steam deck yet, so I haven’t tested these on there. So I’m only commenting on the games themselves. These are listed as deck “verified” in the steam store, though.

One I haven’t seen mentioned yet is Yoku’s Island Express. Breezy summer vibes, not much difficulty. It’s kind of a pinball metroidvania.

Tinykin is another game with a very cozy/low stakes feel. It’s an exploration/collectathon platformer with cute environments made up of household objects.

Littlewood is a life sim sort of game, kind of like Stardew Valley, but it’s extremely chill. There’s no time limit or anything like that.

And others have mentioned these, but Toem, Alba, and Donut County are all very good and gentle games too.

Oh, and Tchia. That one has some dark moments at times, mostly in cutscenes, but when you’re actually playing it’s mostly gentle and island-y.

Maybe also Wuppo? It’s a strange one. The story and humor and animation are pretty great in that one, but there are some boss fights that can get a little frustrating. It’s mostly a fairly chill platformer, but then it’s got kind of bullet-hell-adjacent bosses. I still really like the game, but it’s not quite as purely relaxing as some of the others here.

Pikuniku is kind of in the same position as Wuppo, but I liked it a bit less. The humor feels a little more forced or stilted, and the frustrating bits are because the controls are kinda floaty. My niece really liked it when she was 8, though, so it had that going for it.

Hope this helps! I’ve been looking for this kind of game a lot the past few years

It’s a British TV anthology series similar to The Twilight Zone, but most of the episodes are about technologic dystopias

It was in Black Mirror years ago.

I assumed the stunning part was this:

We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.

It’s just pretty blatant.

I feel like there’s a buddhist lesson about impermanence here.

Thanks, Stefon.

I think so? It’s section 3.2 of the paper: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17452759.2024.2404157#d1e604

They don’t talk that much about current in particular; figure 5 only shows the resistance in the regulated output path as a function of the voltage on the control path, which isn’t enough to actually say whether there’s specifically current amplification. (Also, the gain would be negative; does that matter?) But they do discuss the fact that the output channel is much wider, which strongly suggests it’s able to pass more current (since they mention the resistivity drops as the cross-sectional area of the trace increases). The wider trace is one that wouldn’t have the fuse behavior on its own, because the resistivity is too low for it to heat up enough to trigger that at the voltages they’re using, but the close proximity of the very thin fusing wire of the control signal is enough to cause a nonlinear resistivity change in the output path as well. I think that means they’re using a single voltage for both kinds of path, and that the control current is thus lower than the output current because the resistance on the control path is higher, but I’m not certain. I am not an electrical engineer, just an enthusiastic amateur.

They did do the thing that HewlettHackard is describing. Check out the AND gate in the linked article. The input paths are short and use small wires, but also cross the larger paths that normally link the output to ground. If both are active, the paths to ground are interrupted, and the resistor to VCC pulls up the output. So they did make logic gates. In the paper they also demonstrate NOT and OR.

I gather there’s a technical sense of “active” that’s used in electrical engineering that might not apply here, but to someone like me, with only a tinkerer’s knowledge of components, logic gates seem like enough to justify the term in the headline.

According to Wikipedia at least, there are no members of Congress who even have a net worth over $500 million: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_members_of_the_United_States_Congress_by_wealth let alone an annual income that high.

So I think it’s that they’re beholden to their donors, as usual.

Thanks!

Yeah. I thought it was important context that they had backpedalled, but I did not intend to downplay the severity of the issue.

A minor grammar point: in this context, the word is actually “disbursing,” from the same root as “bursar,” a job title you may have encountered in school administrations. “Disbursing” means “paying out from a fund.” “Dispersing” means “scattering” or “causing to dissipate.” So the old system was disbursing funds. The new system will be dispersing funds.

Citizens United would be a decent candidate. Once it was established that donations were protected political speech, it effectively legalized bribery, and made oligarchy essentially inevitable. Most of the missteps since then have been motivated by folks trying to simultaneously play to populist talking points but also placate billionaire donors. The left needed an actual positive message, like the kind Bernie Sanders was pushing, that would energize folks and unite the overeducated with the working class, but that was never going to be acceptable to the donor class, and so candidates like him always had to be shoved aside for someone who would clearly cater to corporate needs. And someone who would clearly cater to corporate needs was always going to be a really tough sell and not really a solution to the needs of the moment.

That doesn’t really account for the rise of the tech bro fascist accelerationists like Mencius Moldbug and the Dark Enlightenment, which is a big part of the current moment and accounts for how the far right was able to hoodwink some billionaires into voting for a social collapse that seems very likely to hurt them also. But Citizens United still seems like a fair candidate for a point at which some of the last paths away from this outcome were foreclosed.

My guess is that the reason they bothered with this, rather than leaving it with the courts, is that this version would allow Trump to abruptly reverse the things that were previously decided under Chevron deference.

Supposedly they’re unblocked again, but there’s been no explanation from Xitter about the issue. Definitely seems suspicious that this happened while DOGE is having trouble with whistleblowers using Signal, though.

https://gizmodo.com/x-briefly-blocked-then-unblocked-signal-links-as-federal-workers-seek-security-2000564966