Picsart. I’d like something that can do a bit of photo editing, adjust brightness/contrast/curves, work with layers, and conveniently slap together collages, but that doesn’t interrupt me in between every other operation with an ad or a request to sign up for a subscription to the app.
If you believe that laws forbidding gambling, sale of liquor, sale of contraceptives, requiring definite closing hours, enforcing the Sabbath, or any such, are necessary to the welfare of your community, that is your right and I do not ask you to surrender your beliefs or give up your efforts to put over such laws. But remember that such laws are, at most, a preliminary step in doing away with the evils they indict. Moral evils can never be solved by anything as easy as passing laws alone. If you aid in passing such laws without bothering to follow through by digging in to the involved questions of sociology, economics, and psychology which underlie the causes of the evils you are gunning for, you will not only fail to correct the evils you sought to prohibit but will create a dozen new evils as well.
—Robert A. Heinlein, Take Back Your Government
Harmonica holder
If you pick up a cursed armor or weapon and aren’t sure if it’s worth cleansing, throw it at an explosive trap, or throw a bomb at it. An un-upgraded item will be destroyed, while an upgraded one will not, and therefore may be worth using a cleansing scroll on.
Collapsible metal travel chopsticks. Always have a useful set of utensils on me. Cost me less than $10.
This is the way.
Virtually anything with a Newberry Medal is highly likely to have a traumatizing beloved character death somewhere in it. Maniac Magee and Bridge to Terabithia were good examples from my childhood.
1 moa (minute of audio in 128000 bps mp3)
Give me 320000 bps or give me death!
I’ve been playing Shattered Pixel Dungeon virtually every day for years, through I don’t know how many updates. I’m far from convinced that every run is winnable, but there are some patterns that I’ve observed.
Mage and Huntress seem to be my best classes. The Mage’s staff means that you are guaranteed to have something that’s worth upgrading. The Huntress’ bow and her special abilities like growing grass by walking can make for some truly interesting gameplay changes, whereas I feel like most of the other classes’ abilities are more about moderate improvements to quality of life.
A Ring of Haste is probably my favorite ring to find, since being able to kite monsters is a great path to victory. Tenacity, Elements, and Strength are boring. Wealth can be good if it comes upgraded, but I wouldn’t put scrolls into it. Evasion always seems to turn on me sooner or later. Energy and Arcana can improve quality of life but are otherwise pretty mid.
A Wand of Regrowth is almost always a path to victory, especially if it comes upgraded, doubly so if you become a Warden, and triply so if you can combine it with the Sandals of Regrowth.
A Wand of Blast Wave is incredibly useful when used to knock enemies off ledges or into traps, saving yourself the trouble of killing them.
Other wands are a super mixed bag, depending on what you can manage to do with them, but I’ll say that some of my most fun and successful runs are putting a Wand of Corruption into my Mage’s Staff and becoming a Corruption Battlemage. You whack an enemy, Amok him on his friends, then corrupt them, then rinse and repeat until you win.
I’ve already mentioned the Sandals, which I’d say are incredibly useful if you’ve got a Wand of Regrowth or a Blooming enchanted weapon, but are otherwise hard to keep getting enough fresh grass to make worthwhile. I think the Ethereal Chains and Hourglass are my favorite and most useful artifacts. Horn of Plenty is okay but not great, unless you can combine it with being filled by the Battlemage’s energy generating ability. Other artifacts are mid, but I’ll make a special mention of the Unstable Spellbook which seems to screw me as often as it helps and yet I can’t deny that I have a great time with the mayhem it adds to my run. The Alchemist’s Toolkit is terrible; I hope a future patch significantly alters or replaces it, because honestly why bother using it at all?
I think my favorite runs are Corruption Battlemage or a Sniper with a nicely upgraded Boomerang; I always get a lot of fun out of using the boomerangs.
There’s no end to the conversation but that’s all I’ve got for now. It’s far and away the most played game on my phone… possibly my most played game ever, measured by eternal hours. The publisher is an absolute treasure and he deserves all the praise and success in the world.
Not sure if I merit being called an audiophile, but…
Huge collection of mp3s ripped from CDs. Stored locally, currently using a Unihertz Jelly Star as a glorified digital audio player, running BlackPlayer EX, which I like for it being a good mix of minimalist and giving me freedom to customize as much as I feel I need. When I’m using headphones, I want my ears uncovered so I use Shokz bone conduction headphones.
I’m wondering if I could obtain some kind of old/used android phone, remove all the apps so the home screen is completely empty, transfer via USB or ssh/scp the MP3 files (and metadata + cover art), then have some kind of music player app which would be the only app on the phone/device.
This is exactly what I did. I used an older Moto and uninstalled or disabled everything I didn’t want and only used BlackPlayer EX. It also has halfway decent external speakers so I can just play music directly off the device if I want to. The only thing that doesn’t thrill me is that it’s a full sized phone, which can be a bit awkwardly large at times. It’s been working great, but when the time comes for another device, I might go with one of the little Unihertz models.
There’s RiffTrax. They’re pretty much the only way I can stand to re-watch the Star Wars prequels at this point.
Let Bartlett be Bartlett!
I’ll have it explain complicated topics using familiar frameworks. As an example, I had it run through various superheroes and villains and match them up with appropriate philosophers. This conversation was how I settled on the idea that Lex Luthor has a lot more in common with Ayn Rand than Friedrich Nietzsche.
And that’s why every carpenter bee horror story starts with “There was a knock at the door…”
Damn, I’ve got to go change the combination on my luggage!
Rubber hot water bottle. It is so nice to have when you’re sick or achy.
The thing is that you kind of have to define “worst” and “film” in order for the answer to make sense.
Like, you’ve got movies like the 2019 Cats where it was a pervasively horrible movie in multiple different ways, but it was absolutely not boring, and I kind of think everyone should see it. See also The Super Mario Brothers Movie with Bob Hoskins, or Star Crash from 1978.
And then you’ve got things that barely qualify as movies. Things like Manos: The Hands of Fate, or Troll 2, or Death Bed: The Bed That Eats, where, yeah, they hired actors and a director said “Action!” but… like…is it really a movie?
There’s different categories for bad movies. There’s “Mainstream Piece of Shit that Should Have Been Better,” there’s “Insane Microbudget Fever Dream,” there’s an axis from Boring to Glorious Trainwreck. All of these complicate the question and merit their own consideration.
All that said… it’s the Star Wars Holiday Special. It’s a totally fucking brutal experience. There is virtually no good reason to ever watch it, except to say that you have, and I don’t necessarily think it’s worth the time. It’s irredeemable.
I went through a few mp3 players and none of them were exactly what I wanted so I bought a Moto G7 Power and only ever use it for playing locally stored music via the BlackPlayer app.
I wanted something with Bluetooth and an aux jack, USB-C charging, and expandable memory. Tried a few different devices and none of them ticked all of the boxes, or else they had other issues that made me send them back. The only issue I have with the G7 is that it’s a full sized phone, when I’d really prefer something smaller. The next time I go through an upgrade cycle, I’ve been looking at one of the little Unihertz models, but that might be another year or more so we’ll see what’s on the market by then.
Kamala is the best version of a normal politician fighting against Trump. It remains to be seen if that’s enough, because he’s just so goddamn weird that it’s difficult to even compare Tool A to Problem B.
I think she’s incorporated virtually all of the strengths of any of her comparable peers, and almost none of their weaknesses. I think that, given the nature of the opponent and his total lack of seriousness, she said everything I would reasonably hope she would have said during this debate.
I also think that I don’t properly understand the collective psyche of the American electorate. I don’t understand how the election could be this close, when it is a choice between a serious, competent, passionate, talented professional, and a man who is literally a collection of all of the worst possible traits a person could have. That it could come down to such a narrow choice is a mystery for the ages.