One of my favorite steam deck features is being able to use gyro controls for any game. It’s not always as smooth as the Switch, but it works pretty well to add a bit of additional fine-grained control to the course-grained control of the R-stick.

Somewhere around 20:1

Firefox has a setting to disable autoplaying of videos (default setting is to autoplay muted for some reason). It’s in Settings > Site Permissions > Autoplay.

There are two main types of smoke detectors, and one works better for smoldering fires (photoelectric), while the other works better for rapidly growing fires (ionization). IDK how different the two food-burning incidents are, but there is a Technology Connections video on youtube that goes into more detail on the subject. Fun fact: smoke alarms with photoelectric detectors have been growing in popularity, as has making everything in our homes out of plastic and other synthetic materials, which burn much more quickly than older materials, thus lessening the chance of house fires smoldering long enough for the smoke alarm to react before everything is engulfed in flames. Hurray for progress! Although, ionization-type detectors are much more likely to give false positives, which increases the likelihood that they will get disabled by the homeowner/tenant, and you definitely don’t want that.

Maybe if they didn’t spend so much money on those horrible TV ads they’d have enough for R&D. And evergreening isn’t innovation anyways, so idk what they’re on about.

Absolutely. I did not mean to imply that small daily-life changes are all that is necessary, just that we shouldn’t count them as useless just because they are small impact. At the very least, it is a tool i use to keep climate-change-induced depression and anxiety at bay enough to make “real action” something i’m mentally capable of.

Yes, but making changes in my own life (as small as they may be in the grand scheme of things) helps me feel a little less depressed about the whole thing. So many of the most impactful changes are outside of my control. Yes, i can, to some extent, make my voice heard and push for policy changes, and I can refuse, to some extent, to purchase from or invest in companies that are the biggest polluters and carbon-users. But I’m not a CEO of a multinational oil and gas conglomerate, nor am I in charge of making policy decisions for the country (hell, I live in a very red state, so my vote essentially doesn’t count, outside of local elections).

But I do have the power to set an example. It is always good to make changes that you can, even if it’s comparitively negligible. I think if everyone made the effort to live more sustainably, the people that actually have the power to make big changes may feel more pressure to do something (people asking “if i can do it, why can’t they” when voting or making purchases or investments could have a big effect if we all did it together). It would also help show the greenwashing that a lot of companies engage in as a facade (people that actually know what it takes to reduce their carbon footprint would be more aware of what does and doesn’t have an impact). Possibly… Maybe we’re all screwed and there’s nothing we can do about it and civilization as we know it will come crashing down around us. But I think hope is a good thing to hold on to in the meantime, and doing what I can in my own life gives me hope.

Instead of answering your question, I’m going to share a fan theory that I found quite amusing: The Jetsons and The Flintstones actually happen contemporaneously. When nuclear war caused civilization as we know it to collapse, wealthy individuals moved to space, while everyone else was left to scrape by as they could in the irradiated leavings of our old society.

The Jetsons are decendants of those wealthy people that made it out. Society is relatively the same, just in space with robots. Their technology has progressed in a reasonable fashion from the 1960s tech they took off Earth with them. The Flintstones are decendants of the people left behind. That’s why all their “stone age” technology is so reminiscent of everyday 1960s tech. As they attempted to rebuild, they took inspiration from the pre-nuke past. The radiation caused genetic mutations, leading some animals to express dinosaur-like traits.

South-eastern US checking in. I think “oppressive” is the most apt word. It feels very still outside; amazed I haven’t drowned from the humidity. Even the birds sound exhausted.

I’ve seen US publications use it, too. But knowing it’s a UK thing makes me feel better about it for some reason…

Is anyone else super annoyed by the use of the word “jab” in news articles/headlines? It just sounds so unprofessional.

I really enjoyed playing Hades, but I just didn’t have the skills or patience to progress at the pace I wanted. So (after realizing that being prideful about difficulty settings in my hobbies that i do to have fun is a dumb way to live), I turned on God Mode. You get extra stacks of damage resistance every time you die, capping at like 80% or something, and you can turn it on and off as needed. After that, I was having so much more fun, and the rate of progression was much better for me. I felt like I was finally playing the game that everyone else was loving so much.

The first time i tried to talk to my parents about climate change, specifically sea level rise, my dad had us do an experiment where we filled a cup with some ice up to the very tippy top with water. Then, when the cup didn’t overflow when all the ice melted, he noted that there’s still the same amount of water whether it’s liquid or solid (technically true, but obviously ignores some key details, like the fact that not all the ice on Earth is found in the ocean, and that there are impacts of melting ice other than just sea level rise). He concluded that we didn’t have to worry about sea level rise, and it’s all a hoax. I told my science teacher about it, and he simply asked me, “What about all the ice on land? Like Antarctica? That ice isn’t already in the cup.” This was the early '00s.

The only time I uber/lyft is when i’m travelling and won’t be able to take my car ($ uber < $ rental car), or when i’m gonna be drinking ($ uber <<< $ DUI). And even then I can often get a ride from a friend and/or DD…

I think it worked really well for TotK. Unlike with BotW, I was actually kinda excited when my weapons broke because by that time, I had some new, better monster part I wanted to fuse to make a new, better weapon. It made it more fun having the weapons break so that I would be more likely to try new combinations.

I think it’s because they want to appeal to a younger audience, too. They want a 10 or 12 yo to be able to play Pokemon and Mario, and it’s hard to get parents to buy a $500 console for a pre-teen. So they need to hit a lower price-point than PS or xbox