Sure you can have a unique identifier. That’s not the issue. The issue is that anyone can contact you via your phone number! This is not a problem with chat apps where people need permission to add you to their contact list. Why not have a system like that?

Same goes for credit cards. They should need to ask for permission to charge your credit card. Merely knowing your credit card info should not be enough.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they had guards armed with SMGs and full body armour guarding the shipments as they leave the factory.

Since Apple shrunk the packaging they could probably fit a million iPhones in one shipping container. Think how much that’d be worth!

This video is fantastic! Alec went all out with it!

You a can also buy common university textbooks from India at a fraction of the price they sell for in the US. I say take your deals where you can get them!

I believe it’s a UK name for arugula. They frequently express the same bafflement for cilantro.

Where indica simply refers to the plant’s first collection (by Lamarck) in India and sativa means cultivated in Latin. Loads of plants have some conjugation of this species name:

Allium sativum (garlic)

Coriandrum sativum (coriander / cilantro)

Crocus sativus (saffron crocus)

Cucumis sativus (cucumber)

Eruca sativa (rocket / arugula)

Oh I know all about that. The printer we have at work seems to have a technician coming in to fix it every week!

That bit about Marc Priestly should be familiar to anyone who has studied or worked in any job remotely related to computer science. “Oh you’re a computer scientist? Can you fix my printer?”

Here’s the key thing to realize with deck builders: every card you take reduces the number of times you’ll see every other card in your deck by a small amount. It’s so easy to fall into the trap of “this looks useful, I’ll take it” over and over again.

The best decks in Slay the Spire have 5 or fewer cards and they go infinite in on turn 1. Of course in most runs you don’t have the opportunity to create a deck like that. Instead, you want to think about what the core of your deck is right now. Think “if I could remove as many cards as I want right now, what sort of broken thing could I do with the rest?” If your deck can’t do anything broken even after all those removals, then see if adding a card would change that.

If your deck can do something broken after removing all those other cards, and none of the reward cards on offer would change that, why take them?

There are many opportunities to remove cards throughout a run. Take them as much as you can. Try to get rid of as many filler cards as possible. Strikes and defends, for example, have no business being in your deck at the end of the game.

Ironclad, being the first character you can play in StS, is meant to teach you this concept (he also teaches you other concepts, such as health being a resource). He has a number of cards that exhaust other cards and he can frequently build into a deck that’s capable of exhausting down to a winning core. Try playing an exhaust based ironclad and see what you can do with an eye towards creating a broken core.

3 master’s degrees is a red flag. It tells the employer you don’t really know what you want to do with life.

Try just putting only one of the degrees on your resume when you apply (the one most pertinent to the job). Same goes for past experience: don’t list everything, only list what is relevant.

Employers these days can get hundreds or even thousands of applications to a job posting. They filter these down to a manageable number with AI looking for keywords. Then they look through the remaining pile by hand to try to get down to just a few they can interview.

It’s easy to mess up a resume in a way that kills your chances of getting a job. One of the sure fire ways to do that is to clutter up your resume with irrelevant (to the job) experience or education.

I played some of Human Revolution but I didn’t like the grind-factor (nor did I like the weird forced boss fights).

The original Deus Ex was so beautiful for the way you gained exploration and progress experience for finding secrets and accomplishing goals. Replacing that with a more “RPG-like” system that rewards hacking every single computer and doing non-lethal takedowns on every single enemy totally ruined it for me.

Oh you don’t need quick reactions for Deus Ex. It can be played in a very slow and methodical way. It’s just that you need precision to get the most out of the sniper scopes (which can be used on multiple weapons).

The original game has plenty of characters who are true believers in the government lie: the UNATCO soldiers, the mech agents, and even multiple civilians who either work for or support the government.

The main resistance force, the NSF (Northwest Sessionist Forces), is pretty controversial among the public. People seem to be split between viewing them as terrorists or heroes. Not unlike the way people view antifa in real life!

The original Deus Ex is perfectly playable today as long as you follow a guide to get it patched up and configured for a modern system. Plus it runs at a rock steady frame rate on any PC today, whereas it didn’t at the time of release (it was very laggy, buggy, and crashed a lot).

The game is definitely meant for mouse and keyboard though. You need some very high precision aiming and a steady hand to cope with the scope wobble (unless you train to master level).

I’m honestly quite tired of remasters. Why can’t we see some new original games?

The original Deus Ex is this bizarre mixture of jank, camp, and sheer brilliance. So much of what made the game amazing was unintentional and contingent with the era. A remaster is never going to be able to recapture that lightning in a bottle. It’s always going to be soulless.

Git is not very efficient for handling a lot of binary files. Your best bet would be for hosting fanfic and erotic lit.

Phoenix Quill? Down feathers are the small, soft feathers close to a bird’s body. The long flight feathers are called quills.

That’s fair! I’ve often levelled this same argument against my friend when it comes to mastery and video games.

I mainly play video games during my lunch break at work. It would not really make sense to practice a musical instrument in the office.

Of course. But that’s often a sign of bad game design. Difficulty should follow a smooth curve. Enormous difficulty spikes are what you expect from old games in the 80s.

But there’s also an element to mastery that gamers seem to completely neglect: downtime. I finished my math degree a couple of years ago and throughout that entire process I got stuck on math assignments thousands of times. Bashing my head against a wall trying to solve the problem right now rarely worked. I had much better success putting the pencil down and coming back to the problem later, after a period of downtime.

Since graduating I’ve been revisiting a lot of old NES games that I never finished growing up because they were too difficult. Since I’m busy with work I don’t have a ton of time to play every day. This forced downtime actually has the benefit of getting me to think and reflect on my approach, just as I would expect it to!

It is, but different people enjoy different things. Hard games like this focus on long term goals and achieving mastery as the source of fun. Other games aim to be more relaxing.

I like all types of games. I just think it’s a bit silly when people argue “why isn’t this orange more like a banana?”