While I like Bethesda games quite a bit, I do agree on the in-game lorebook stuff. I can’t see the appeal of the stuff. It’s a collection of extremely short, in my opinion not-very-impressive stories. I just can’t see someone sitting there and reading them and enjoying the things — if I’m going to read fantasy, I’d far rather spend the time on an actual novel. Yet I’ve seen people obsess online about how much they like the in-game lorebooks.

I’ve wondered before whether maybe people who are talking about how much they like them haven’t gone out and read full-length fantasy books, and so they’re getting a tiny taste of reading fantasy fiction and they like that, but it’s the only fantasy that they’ve read.

Yeah, I have a friend who develops video games and has given some good recommendations who kept trying to convince me to play the series. I’ve dipped in a couple times and just walked away unimpressed.

I can think of lots of series that I don’t like, just because I’m not into the genre. I think that everyone has genres that they don’t like.

I think a more-interesting question is about popular series that I don’t like within a genre that I do like.

I didn’t like Frostpunk, despite liking city-builders. Felt like the decisions were largely mechanical, didn’t involve a lot of analysis and tweaking levers.

I didn’t like Sudden Strike 4, despite liking lots of real time tactics games, like Close Combat. It felt really simplified.

I didn’t like Pacific Drive, despite liking survival games. It has time limits, and I often dislike time limits in games.

I didn’t like Outer Wilds, despite liking a lot of space games. Didn’t like the cartoony style, the low-tech vibe, felt like it wasn’t respectful of player time.

I didn’t like Elden Ring, though I like a number of swords and sorcery games. Just felt simple, repetitive and uninteresting.

EDIT: A couple of honorable mentions that I don’t hate, but which were disappointing:

Borderlands. The gunplay can be all right, and the flow of new guns and having to adapt to them is interesting. But every Borderlands game I play, the always-respawning enemies are a turnoff. Feels like the world is immutable. Also don’t like the mindless farming of every container with glowing green dots. And for a combat-oriented game, it doesn’t make me mix up my tactics much based on whatever I’m facing. While I finish the game, I always wind up feeling like I’m not having nearly as much fun as I should be having.

Choice of Games. I like text-based games, but a lot of games published by this company, even otherwise well-written ones, have adopted a convention of making one win by playing consistently to certain characteristics of a character, so one tries to just figure out at every choice what option will maximize that characteristic. That’s extremely uninteresting gameplay, even if the story is nice and the text well-written. I feel like the same authors would have done better just writing choose-your-own-adventure type games if they weren’t focused on the stats. I also really dislike the lack of an undo, to the point that I’ve put some work into a Choicescript-to-Sugarcube converter.

You don’t pipe salt water through the data center. You have a heat exchanger that touches the salt water.

It takes more work to avoid salt buildup, but you can evaporate saltwater as a place to dump heat, and we aren’t gonna run out of saltwater any time soon. 'Course, only so many places have saltwater access.

EDIT: You evaporate enough water for cooling, you can increase rainfall somewhat in the local area, which boosts crop growth measurably. I remember reading an article about nuclear power plants that use evaporative cooling producing that effect.

kagis

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-agricultural-and-applied-economics/article/effect-of-nuclear-power-plants-on-local-crop-yields/5CE7792374CCEF73CCBA9FC39BF131F6

The growing prevalence of clean energy raises the question of possible associated externalities. This article studies the effects of nuclear power plant development (and, as a result, the increased amount of water in the atmosphere from evaporative cooling systems) on nearby crop yields and finds that an average nuclear power plant increases local soybean yields by 2 and corn yields by 1 percent.

As @papertowels@mander.xyz said.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_noise_control

Historically, if you were in a noisy environment, you could get closed-back, circumaural headphones — headphones that fit around your ears and had a lot of sound-absorption padding — to help soak up the sound. I still use decent non-ANC circumaural headphones at home.

There are also some people who are more-willing to tolerate discomfort than I am who get in-ear buds, which block noise in their ear canal, and on top of that, fit ear protectors intended for industrial use, like 3M X5 Peltor ear protectors, which have even more passive sound absorption stuff than current circumaural headphones do, and are even larger.

That sort of thing works well on higher frequency sound, but not as well on low-frequency stuff, like engine noise, large fans, stuff like that.

ANC basically has microphones in your headphones, picks up on what sounds are showing up at your ear, and then tries to compute and play back a sound that produces destructive interference at your ear. That is, if you look at the sound waves, where the environmental sound is low pressure, it plays back high pressure signal, and when the environmental sound is high pressure, it plays back low pressure signal. It’s not perfect, or it could make environmental sound totally inaudible. But high-end ANC headphones are pretty impressive these days. I have a pair of Sennheiser Momentum 4 headphones — good, though not the best ANC out there in 2025, and I don’t personally recommend these for other reasons — and when they kick on, the headphones are designed to have the ANC fade in; same thing happens in reverse, fades out when you flip the ANC off. It sounds almost as if fans and the like around you are powering up and down when that happens, very eerie if you’ve never experienced it before. Even the sounds that it doesn’t do so well on, like people talking, it significantly reduces in volume.

And ANC does best with the other side of the spectrum, the side that passive sound absorption doesn’t — the low-frequency stuff, especially regular sounds like fans. So having both a lot of passive sound absorption and ANC on a given pair of headphones let the two work well together.

People often use cell phones in noisy environments, with a lot of people around, and ANC makes it a lot easier to hear music or whatever without background sound interfering. I think that it’s very likely that people will, long term, mostly wind up using headphones with ANC (short of moving to something more elaborate like a direct brain interface or something). It’s not really all that important if you’re in a quiet environment, and I don’t bother using ANC headphones on my desktop at home. But if you’re in random environments — waiting a grocery store line, in a restaurant with music playing over the restaurant’s speakers, on an airplane with the drone of the airplane engines, whatever — it really helps to reduce that background sound. ANC isn’t that new. I think that I remember it mostly being billed as useful for airplane engine noise back when, which they’re a good fit for. But it’s gotten considerably better over the years. For me, in 2025, good ANC is something that I really want to have for smartphone use.

The problem is that in order to do ANC, you need at least a microphone, preferably an array, and somewhere you need to have a model of the sound transmission through the headphones and be running signal processing on the input sound to generate that output sound. In theory, you could do it on an attached computer if you had a fast data interface, but in practice, ANC-capable headphones are sold as self-contained units that handle all that themselves. So you gotta power the little computer in the headphones. That means that you probably have batteries and at least for full size headphones (rather than earbuds) you might as well stick a USB interface on them to charge them, even if the user is using Bluetooth for wireless connectivity. And if you’ve done that, it isn’t much more circuitry to just let the headphones act as USB headphones, so in general, ANC headphones tend to also be USB-capable. My Momentum 4 headphones have all of Bluetooth, USB-C, and a traditional headphones interface, but…I just haven’t really wound up using the headphones interface if I have the other options available on a given device. Might be convenient if I were using some device that only had headphones output. shrugs

I mean, there were legitimate technical issues with the standard, especially on smartphones, which is where they really got pushed out. Most other devices do have headphones jacks. If I get a laptop, it’s probably got a headphones jack. Radios will have headphones jacks. Get a mixer, it’s got a headphones jack. I don’t think that the standard is going to vanish anytime soon in general.

I like headphones jacks. I have a ton of 1/8" and 1/4" devices and headphones that I happily use. But they weren’t doing it for no reason.

• From what I’ve read, the big, driving one that drove them out on smartphones was that the jack just takes up a lot more physical space in the phone than USB-C or Bluetooth. I’d rather just have a thicker phone, but a lot of people wouldn’t, and if you’re going all over the phone trying to figure out what to eject to buy more space, that’s gonna be a big target. For people who do want a jack on smartphones, which invariably have USB-C, you can get a similar effect to having a headphones jack by just leaving a small USB-C audio interface with a headphones jack on the end of your headphones (one with a passthrough USB-C port if you also want to use the USB-C port for charging).

• A second issue was that the standard didn’t have a way to provide power (there was a now-dead extension from many years back, IIRC for MD players, that let a small amount of power be provided with an extra ring). That didn’t matter for a long time, as long as your device could put out a strong enough signal to drive headphones of whatever impedance you had. But ANC has started to become popular now, and you need power for ANC. This is really the first time I think that there’s a solid reason to want to power headphones.

• The connection got shorted when plugging things in and out, which could result in loud sound on the membrane.

• USB-C is designed so that the springy tensioning stuff that’s there to keep the connection solid is on the (cheap, easy to replace) cord rather than the (expensive, hard to replace) device; I understand from past reading that this was a major reason that micro-USB replaced mini-USB. Instead of your device wearing out, the cord wears out. Not as much of an issue for headphones as mini-USB, but I think that it’s probably fair to say that it’s desirable to have the tensioning on the cord side.

• On USB-C, the right part breaks. One irritation I have with USB-C is that it is…kind of flimsy. Like, it doesn’t require that much force pushing on a plug sideways to damage a plug. However — and I don’t know if this was a design goal for USB-C, though I suspect it was — my experience has been that if that happens, it’s the plug on the (cheap, easy to replace) cord that gets damaged, not the device. I have a television with a headphones jack that I destroyed by tripping over a headphones cord once, because the headphones jack was nice and durable and let me tear components inside the television off. I’ve damaged several USB-C cables, but I’ve never damaged the device they’re connected to while doing so.

On an interesting note, the standard is extremely old, probably one of the oldest data standards in general use today; the 1/4" mono standard was from phone switchboards in the 1800s.

EDIT: Also, one other perk of using USB-C instead of a built-in headphones jack on a smartphone is that if the DAC on your phone sucks, going the USB-C-audio-interface route means that you can use a different DAC. Can’t really change the internal DAC. I don’t know about other people, but last phone I had that did have an audio jack would let through a “wub wub wub” sound when I was charging it on USB off my car’s 12V cigarette lighter adapter — dirty power, but USB power is often really dirty. Was really obnoxious when feeding my car’s stereo via its AUX port. That’s very much avoidable for the manufacturer by putting some filtering on the DAC’s power supply, maybe needs a capacitor on the thing, but the phone manufacturer didn’t do it, maybe to save space or money. That’s not something that I can go fix. I eventually worked around it by getting a battery-powered Bluetooth receiver that had a 1/8" headphones jack, cutting the phone’s DAC out of the equation. The phone’s internal DAC worked fine when the phone wasn’t charging, but I wanted to have the phone plugged in for (battery hungry) navigation stuff when I was driving.

Sony WH-1000XM4/5/6

I don’t have one of those, but they’re pretty popular as headphones with good ANC.

Jlab Epic Air Sport ANC

I do have those, though.

Sure, but I think that the type of game is a pretty big input. Existing generative AI isn’t great at portraying a consistent figure in multiple poses and from multiple angles, which is something that many games are going to want to do.

On the other hand, I’ve also played text-oriented interactive fiction where there’s a single illustration for each character. For that, it’d be a good match.

AI-based speech synth isn’t as good as human voice acting, but it’s gotten pretty decent if you don’t need to be able to put lots of emotion into things. It’s not capable of, say, doing Transistor, which relied a lot on the voice acting. But it could be a very good choice to add new material for a character in an old game where the actor may not be around or who may have had their voice change.

I’ve been very impressed with AI upscaling. I think that upscaling textures and other assets probably has a lot of potential to take advantage of higher resolution screens. Maybe one might need a bit of human intervention, but a factor of 2 increase is something that I’ve found that the software can do pretty well without much involvement.

In fairness, rural America probably didn’t entirely understand the implications of said vote.

As I’ve pointed out on here before, I feel like a lot of people in mostly-Republican-voting rural American are going to be even more disappointed when they discover agricultural subsidies ending, healthcare subsidies ending that disproportionately benefit poorer, rural areas, illegal immigrant agricultural workers that farms rely on becoming unavailable, counter-tariffs that tend to target agricultural output from rural areas, etc.

For the hell of it, I used one as my main work laptop for a while. $199 plus $20 of RAM when I got it, IIRC.

External keyboard, put the laptop on a cantilevered board so that it’s right in front of my eyeballs so that the screen size doesn’t matter, use it mostly as a thin client to a beefier machine so the CPU doesn’t matter much.

If you already have a larger Linux laptop that you’re otherwise happy with, have you considered just throwing it in a padded laptop backpack?

Why should the Pacific Ocean be named “the Pacific Ocean” when it could be “the American Ocean”?

What did you think of the new aiming system? I’ve heard mixed things, but it sounded good to me (or at least way better than a flat percentage).

I don’t know what the internal mechanics are like, haven’t read material about it. From a user standpoint, I have just a list of positive and negative factors impacting my hit chance, so less information about my hit chance. I guess I’d vaguely prefer the percentage — I generally am not a huge fan of games that have the player rely on mechanics trying to hide the details of those mechanics — but it’s nice to know what inputs are present. It hasn’t been a huge factor to me one way or the other, honestly; I mean, I feel like I’ve got a solid-enough idea of roughly what the chances are.

even if it doesn’t hit the same highs as JA2, there hasn’t really been much else that comes close and a more modern coat of polish would be welcome.

Yeah, I don’t know of other things that have the strategic aspect. For the squad-based tactical turn-based combat, there are some options that I’ve liked playing in the past.

While Wasteland 2 and Wasteland 3 aren’t quite the same thing — they’re closer to Fallout 1 and 2, as Wasteland 1 was a major inspiration for them — the squad-based, turn-based tactical combat system is somewhat similar, and if you’re hunting for games that have that, you might also enjoy that.

I also played Silent Storm and enjoyed it, though it’s now pretty long in the tooth (well, so is Jagged Alliance 2…). Even more of a combat focus. Feels lower budget, slightly unfinished.

And there’s X-Com. I didn’t like the new ones, which are glitzy, lots of time spent doing dramatic animations and stuff, but maybe I should go back and give them another chance.

All of that said, consider replacing your central ducted unit with a multi-head mini-split system in the long run.

Mini splits don’t provide ventilation, whereas ducted systems do. In general, if one can have a ducted system, I’d rather have that. The major problem with ducted systems is that ductwork takes up a lot of space, so it’s hard to stick into an existing house; much less of an issue if you can build it in during construction. A mini split is less invasive to an existing structure.

Just don’t get a portable unit. They suck and are just a waste of money most of the times.

Get a dual-hose unit if you get one. There are a lot of companies selling single-hose units. Those are a lot less efficient and aren’t much cheaper. I would guess that in a situation where they get any kind of meaningful use, a dual-hose unit pays for itself quickly.

I don’t think I’d agree that they suck, but if you can use a window unit — not all rooms and windows are amenable to this — you normally want a window unit instead of a portable unit, unless you must take down the AC unit on a regular basis. Less noise inside, more energy efficiency.

Yes.

The Threadiverse has multiple intercompatible “Reddit-alike” software packages.

• Lemmy (the biggest). Example: https://lemmy.world/ Written in the Rust programming language.

• PieFed. Example: https://piefed.social/ Written in the Python programming language.

• Mbin (the successor of the defunct Kbin project). Example: https://fedia.io/ Written in the PHP programming language.

There’s also Sublinks, written in Java, but I don’t know for sure whether that’s going to actually get the ball rolling. https://demo.sublinks.org/ Think they need more developers contributing.

EDIT: Note that while this approach is unusual for the centralized Web-oriented social media era, where typically one company controls the whole shebang and has one codebase, it is common for federated systems. There are many different NNTP server implementations for Usenet, many different XMPP server implementations for instant messaging, many different IRC server implementations for chat, many different SMTP server implementations for email, many different FidoNet implementations.

dull…fixed my washing machine

I mean, an incorrectly-operating washing machine can make things quite exciting indeed.

Not what you asked, but you might check that:

• The central AC doesn’t need to be recharged. If it has leaked coolant and is low, it will drop in effectiveness.

• Or, even more simply, that the air filters don’t need to be replaced.

• You can’t improve insulation. Doing so is a one-off cost, as opposed to the ongoing cost of throwing more air conditioning muscle at the problem. Weatherstrip leaks, replace any single-pane windows with double-pane, etc.

Webster tried to reform English, and was a reason for a number of the American English changes from British English. Some of his changes caught on, like “public” for “publick” or “jail” for “gaol”.

But others did not.

I think that some of those ones that didn’t catch on would be good candidates.

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/53723/26-noah-webster’s-spelling-changes-didn’t-catch

E.g. “Island” to “Iland”.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/noah-websters-spelling-wins-and-fails

Or “is” to “iz”.