tal

Clickbait title. She's joking.

Yeah, this doesn't look to be Halloween-themed or anything. I have cans of pumpkin and pumpkin extract that last for years. They can do pumpkin stuff whenever.

I don't really see why regulation on this has to happen at the national level. Bees don't move around much. Farms don't move around. Could just let regions of France decide whether they want to permit or prohibit something.

In general, if you have to find least-common-denominator policies, they tend to result in more people being unhappy than if you can decide on policy at a more-granular level.

I didn't dislike it, but it didn't live up to my hopes after all I'd heard about it.

I don't regret having bought and played the game, but I never bothered to go back and fully finish all the side missions.

I do think that the edginess is kinda part of the cyberpunk genre. I can't beat up on them for that.

• It has high production values, a lot of modeling and texturing and such

I'm amazed how much money they have to have sunk into assets only to use them briefly

but the actual core gameplay didn't grab me the way, oh, Halo did when it first came out and I played it. Night City is painstakingly created in tremendous detail, but end of the day, the point is to create the backdrop for gameplay, and I feel like they spent a disproportionate making of resources on that.

• The combat is pretty, but for all of the work that went into various systems, I didn't play it much differently from the way I would another shooter.

• I also had been expecting something more like a Bethesda RPG, and got something more Grand Theft Auto-ish with a beefed up skill tree.

• I wasn't that impressed with the braindance stuff from a pure gameplay standpoint

it's kinda "hunt for the hidden object" stuff

but I do think that it was original and it served as a useful justification to show "flashbacks" to earlier events.

• Obtaining and managing clothing is a significant chunk of game and content, but I almost never actually see the main character, so the clothing doesn't have much impact. Maybe if there were a third person camera mode or frequent reflections or frequent looking through a camera or something.

• Having played some games like Saboteur and Grand Theft Auto, I kind of expected the differences between autos to matter more, given how much work went into creating them and all, but from a mission standpoint, they're surprisingly interchangeable. A couple missions are easier with some, but a lot of the vehicles don't really have that much gameplay point.

• Johnny Silverhand is a major part of the game, but wasn't really a character that I found very plausible or super interesting. I dunno, maybe if I had been into the punk music scene, it'd be different. I felt like they really were trying to shoehorn a punk band leader into the role. That being said, I did think that most characters were pretty solid.

The entrance march at the summer National High School Baseball Championship began during the third edition in 1917, held at Naruo Stadium in Nishinomiya, Hyogo Prefecture. According to tournament history, the march was inspired by the Olympics and the third Far Eastern Championship Games' opening ceremony in Tokyo in May 1917. Records show that high school players "marched to the music played by the 4th Division's military band and lined up."

A link to World War I culture, I guess.

Microsoft has just signed a deal with Vaulted Deep, paying it to remove 4.9 million metric tons of waste over 12 years sourced from manure, sewage, and agricultural byproducts for injection deep underground.

https://investigatemidwest.org/2023/12/07/us-push-to-produce-methane-from-manure-raises-concerns/

“It can provide a substantial portion of global energy needs,” Rudi Roeslein , CEO of Roeslein Alternative Energy, told the attendees. His company has built farm-based methane systems around the country that produce enough fuel to displace 6 million gallons of diesel fuel and 80,000 cars. “If we do this on a large scale in the U.S. we could generate $63.6 billion worth of revenue for farmers around the country.”

Roeslein’s company promises on its website to “restore a balance” to farmland “by using the sustainably harvested biomass to create renewable natural gas.”

A million BTUs (MMBTu) of methane digested from manure is currently worth $3 in the value of the gas

I know where to find a valuable source of methane in 12 years.

https://www.themainewire.com/2025/07/junkie-on-the-roof-takes-getting-high-to-new-level/

At one point, the Bangor Fire Department sent a basket of a ladder truck up the roof

Sounds like they just sent their standard fire truck ladder thing up, along with the standard gear. Maybe time to amend that protocol.

Going back three years:

https://www.bangordailynews.com/2022/01/31/bangor/man-arrested-following-orrington-standoff/

An Orrington man with a history of causing standoffs was arrested Sunday night following an all-day standoff with local police.

Around 9:30 a.m. Sunday, a Penobscot County Sheriff’s deputy was driving on Johnson Mill Road when he came across a van off the road occupied by Stephen Nason, 36. Nason had two active felony warrants for domestic assault and locked himself inside the van, according to the Penobscot County Sheriff’s Office.

After a supervisor and family member attempted to assist the deputy in getting Nason to leave the vehicle and surrender, he exited the vehicle with a knife against his throat, officials said. He later got into the family member’s vehicle, drove to their home and barricaded himself in a room.

Maine State Police responded with its tactical and crisis negotiation teams, Maine Department of Public Safety spokesperson Shannon Moss said, following failed negotiations with Nason for him to surrender.

He was eventually arrested around 8:20 p.m., taken to Northern Light Eastern Maine Medical Center with minor injuries and taken to Penobscot County Jail, officials said.

Nason is charged with creating a standoff, obstructing government administration, refusing to submit to arrest and violating a condition of release, all misdemeanor crimes, according to the Penobscot County District Attorney’s office.

He was on bail for a felony domestic violence assault charge filed in October 2020.

Nason has a history of causing standoffs with law enforcement in Orrington. He was arrested following incidents in Orrington in 2011, 2012, 2017 and 2019, according to the Bangor Daily News archives. His long criminal history also includes convictions for domestic violence assault, theft, criminal trespass and bail violations.

Superior Court Justice William Anderson set Nason’s bail Monday at $10,000. Nason was not asked to enter pleas to the charges. He is expected to be held without bail until a hearing can be scheduled on the motion to revoke his bail on the domestic violence assault charge.

Nason is next due in court April 12 for the charges stemming from the standoff.

Johnson Mill Road, between Clark Falls Road and 691 Johnson Mill Road, was closed during the standoff, according to Orrington Fire & Rescue.

It apparently wasn't actually his last words, as is often incorrectly reported to be the case, but something that Oscar Wilde apparently most-likely did say on his deathbed and near the end of his life:

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/10/22/wallpaper/

There is a duel to the death between me and my wallpaper. One or the other of us has to go. It will be my wallpaper or me.

I'd also add that the Threadverse brought some really new and interesting things to the table.

• By default with all current Threadiverse software packages, instances are public, and there are many public instances. This means that while an instance might have downtime, it is very, very likely that I can continue to browse content, and if I'm willing to set up an account on a second home instance, even post. Early Reddit had a lot of downtime issues, and when it went down, it was down.

• There's a lot more technical advancement on the Threadiverse than was happening on late Reddit.

• The third-party software ecosystem is very strong. It's not just the PieFed, Lemmy, and Mbin guys writing all the software. There are a ton of clients, monitoring systems, status dashboards, you name it. Reddit had third party software too, but I feel like people are a lot more willing to commit effort to an open system.

• I think that having competing instance policy is important. I don't know yet whether, in the long run, this is going to wind up with largely- or entirely-decoupled Threadiverse "networks" of federated hosts split along defederation fissures, kind of like happened with IRC. I hope that it can remain mostly-connected. But I don't want to have some party somewhere deciding content policy for all of the Threadiverse. With Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, whatever, there's some single central controlling authority with monopoly access over the entire system. That doesn't exist on the Threadiverse, and I am a lot happier for that. There will probably be people out there saying things that I don't agree with or like, but that's okay; I don't have to look at it. The same is true of the Web. I really take issue with someone whose positions I don't agree with acting as a systemwide censor (I'd also add that while I'm not really enthusiastic about the Lemmy devs admin decisions on lemmy.ml, I have not seen them attempt to do this even Lemmy-wide, much less Threadiverse-wide). That's a real difference from Reddit. If your instance admin says that tomorrow, all content needs to be posted in all caps, you can migrate your community or home instance or community usage to another instance, and other users who feel the same way can do the same. With any disagreement with Reddit site-wide policy, your option is only to leave Reddit entirely. It's Spez's way or the highway. I don't think that that's reasonable for a system that aspires to be a system for the whole world.

Reddit ended support for their API which killed off 3rd party apps and the official one sucked.

Same, though with the modification that I wasn't going to run the official app regardless of whether it sucked or not.

There were also some longer-run issues that weren't enough to make me leave the site, but made it less-preferable than it had been at one point. They just hadn't broken the camel's back. I didn't like the shift to the new Web UI, and there were some minor compatibility breakages between the new and old Web UI. I wasn't enthusiastic about some of the policy changes that had happened over the years. I thought that the change to how blocking worked was a really bad idea, caused people to severely abuse the thing in conversation threads to prevent people from responding to their points. I was more-interested in the stuff that the earlier userbase had been interested in, though I'll concede that one could mitigate that by limiting what subreddits one subscribed to.

I'd also always preferred the federated structure of Usenet to Reddit

but Usenet had crashed into crippling spam problems and hadn't resolved them. I also think that some decisions that Reddit made were the right ones, like permitting editing of comments. There are some problems with editable comments, and someone could always have grabbed an earlier copy

but people correcting errors and cooling down flamewars where they fired off a kneejerk insult or something and then went back and toned it down wound up being a net positive of Reddit relative to Usenet, Slashdot, and so forth. On the Threadiverse, I could enjoy Usenet-like federation and still have Reddit-like editable comments.

So when Reddit killed the third-party API stuff off, it was really a "straw that breaks the camel's back" moment. It wasn't that my sole concern was killing the third-party API stuff, though I certainly was unhappy about that. I'd expected some eventual changes for monetization, but hadn't expected it to include trying to mass-shovel users onto the official app. But it was that the sum total of changes combined with the Threadiverse becoming available meant that I'd rather be on the Threadiverse.

Do you think the risk can be adequately and feasibly underwritten?

I mean, I suppose that technically a lone satellite with solar panels in orbit around the Sun is probably an extremely limited form of a Dyson sphere

it's not as if there's some firm lower bound on what percentage of energy output from the star that needs to be captured. One could presumably scale up incrementally.

So, in that technical sense, sure.

Could humanity in 2025 aspire to build enough infrastructure to capture something like 1% of the Sun's output? No, that's just way beyond our capabilities now.