Just tried out Chimera Squad, no issues at all yet after about half an hour. I'm liking it so far.

But, uh, XCOM 2! A good game. War of the Chosen makes it a better game. And mods—like the over 350 I'm rocking in the playthrough I started just last week—make it an amazing game. :D

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Quoting: PatolaWhat about the remote code execution [External Link] found in Team Fortress 2?

I've seen this debunked on a few sites now, though I'm sure Liam can get us an authoritative quote better than my "I read it on the Internet". :)

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Quoting: axredneckCarrot rocket launcher, pineapple frag grenade, durian stink bomb, onion tear gas...

This is like a game I used to fantasize about while working for a grocery store: all your weapons would be things you pulled off the shelves, so you could for instance grab a 12-pack of soda cans and launch them like grenades which would make the floor sticky over time, but which you could clean up by launching paper towel rolls at them, etc. :)

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Quoting: KimyrielleI really boils down to creative professions being much more desirable and satisfying than pretty much anything we can do for a living. Let's face it, people rather paint, sing and write than drive garbage trucks or sit in meetings led by pointy-haired bosses. This is in the end why it's so hard to make a living from creative work - there are just too many people out there doing the same.

And ironically, I think some of that comes from the ease with which it's possible to advertise and distribute your work now. Which makes it sort of a vicious cycle: more people see other people achieving fame and fortune via some new way of distributing their creative work, so they get into it, some fraction of them achieve success which gets more people into it, etc., all of which drives down the perceived value (in aggregate) of any single person's work and makes it harder to find the people who actually care about it specifically.

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I found an amusing bug yesterday (which I should see about replicating) where I told one of my scientists who was excavating a dig sight to take a break to check out something in a nearby system, only to get a notification that the next event had happened at the dig site. I checked it only to find that my scientist was apparently still working on the excavation, despite being in another system! I guess they found a way to work remotely. :)

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I just played it multiplayer with a friend a few days ago for the first time in maybe six months or so, and it definitely feels more…polished, somehow. Like nothing I could point to that was a huge improvement, but it just felt that much smoother overall. Definitely a fun game, especially playing with the ability to jump on! :woot:

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I like this, it's cute, but I can't get over how utterly weird it looks having a frog with front and back legs of equal length. :S:

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This looks really interesting, I'll have to give it a shot! Always good to get more practice with regexes.

Quoting: Purple Library GuyWeird. The definition sounds like a straightforward, fairly intuitive thing. What makes them so hard?

The main point of regexes is that they can use wildcards—symbols which don't match a literal symbol, but any of a (possibly very large set) of (possibly combinations of) literal symbols. (Like using '*' on the command line, but much more powerful and complex.) Using them for any but the simplest tasks thus usually requires a lot abstract, symbolic thought, and generally people aren't too good at being able to follow the combinatorially-explosive number of consequences that can come from changing a single symbol in the regex.

Like, imagine scanning a webpage to find a company's mailing address. As humans, we've got a lot of in-built tolerance for what an "address" might look like—depending on where the company is in the world it might have more or fewer fields than would be the norm in our home country, maybe the street or city name contains multiple separate words, etc. But we have a mental "prototype" of roughly what an address looks like and can use fuzzy logic to recognize things which, while deviating from the strict image of that prototype, are still addresses. Now imagine trying to get a computer to do the same thing; regexes allow you to encapsulate that insane amount of flexibility via (appropriately complex) combinations of wildcards. (Actually attempting to set up a regex that could handle addresses sounds like an unutterable nightmare. :O)

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Wow. I never knew I wanted a game with the visual style of Renaissance paintings, but I kinda do now. :O And if it's full of Baroque music (one of my favorite musical periods), well…

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and it's not surprising people forget about so many fantastic games when that happens.

Interesting, for me it's somewhat the opposite: I love the feeling of having my games auto-updating in the background without me needing to do it manually*, so when I fire up Steam I like to just check what's downloading, and sometimes I'll see something I haven't played in a long time and go "Oh! I should play that again."

*I only got Steam a few years before I switched to Linux, so it was my first exposure to the novel idea of there being a better way to update software than laboriously going to each individual program's page and manually downloading updates. (Fast forward to today, and having experienced the wonder of package managers ensures that I will never use an OS that doesn't have one ever again on a personal machine. ^_^)

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