Make sure the edge of your bed isn’t resting on something it ought not to be and/or doesn’t have any crap stuck to the underside of it. My Qidi has two plastic tabs sticking up at the rear which are supposed to be end stops to assist you in lining up the magnetic plate back onto its base, but if you’re not careful you can wind up with the back edge of the base siting on top of them which has the net effect of making the build surface the equivalent of about a 1:64 scale skateboard quarter pipe. This has predictable results if you try to print anything on the back third of it or so.

Hey, our boat landed here 419 years ago. That’s totally different, see.

Yeah, Sarah Palin can see it from there and everything.

This reminds me in a roundabout way that I still need to order tires for the KLR. Spring needs to hurry up already.

Basically every console RPG ever. Certainly those which are not voice acted, and present characters “talking” at you by slowly ghost typing their lines out one character at a time into a text box and then awaiting your input at the end before proceeding to the next line, but inevitably with the dialog box refusing to even start listening for button presses until some seconds after I’ve read the text multiple times over, plus its partially completed form several times more.

I’m adding another dishonorable mention on this front which isn’t even a text box: That fucking treasure chest opening animation in Vampire Survivors. If you know, you know.

I’m always verbose. If you see that penguin knife over a post you ought to know what you’re signing up for.

Voles are tiny, like field mouse sized, and they’re also short and fat. Stoats are long and thin, like a ferret. They’re also much larger than voles. If whatever you have is one or the other, it’ll be hard to mix up between those two if you can get a good look at it.

Meta.

They’re almost always .bik files somewhere in the game directory. I have no clue why so many games still insist on using this specific format in particular even today, but at least it makes them easy to find. I have determined that quite a few games will barf if you delete the files outright, but if you just replace them with an empty text file with the same name it will still allow the game to launch.

Console players are usually out of luck.

These days I think my biggest gripe about games is those which through intentional design decisions either massively disrespect the player’s time, intelligence, or most often both. I’m looking very hard in Nintendo’s direction, here. Miyamoto says: If the player is not locked into a succession of inescapable and slowly plodding text boxes where they’re offered neither choices nor agency, it must mean they’re not sufficiently engaged!

This was marginally acceptable when we were twelve years old and had all day to sit in front of the video game console, and arguably nobody knew any better. But now gamers are adults. We have jobs and chores to do and some of us have kids, and most people have only a very limited slice of time left in the day for gaming. That time should be spent actually playing the game, not waiting for your game to get out of the way of its own damn self.

But games are now going in the wrong direction, to ever greater heights of trying to manipulate players in to make the fucking thing their full time job, either due to incompetence (in single player/traditional console games) or greed (in online/live service games).

So. Also cutscenes you can’t skip even after you’ve already seen them (this includes all the dumbass logos before the game actually starts), dialog boxes you can’t skip after you’ve seen them the first time as well, doubly so if you can’t press some button to cause them to skip their typing animation and simply display in full. Extra quadruple especially if you were too cheap to have your game voice acted — yes, Nintendo, that means you again, see me after class — because then you didn’t even have the excuse of trying to keep the text synchronized to the voice lines.

I’m a sight reader. I assure you, I can read your text as fast as you can put it on the screen. That’s probably why I write so many words. You don’t need to slowly type it out one character at a time with little scritchy bleepy bloop noises. If other people need that for accessibility purposes, fine. But let me turn it off. And if you are going to insist on forcing me to pause for several seconds at the end of each paragraph before the prompt appears and allows me to press A to receive the next text box, I’m afraid I’m going to have to hunt you down and slap clean out of your chair with this here rubber chicken.

This explicitly also includes games which force the player to grind for some critical resource or progression or need some absurd amount of in-game currency to do anything, and are clearly designed around the grinding being the point. I already have that. It’s called a job. If the grind can be conveniently eliminated by paying a microtransaction; in that case your game just got uninstalled. I’m also including stuff like, “You need this item to access this content, but it randomly drops and too bad for you that you need ten of them and it’s a 1/1,000 chance. Go kill more spiders. No, not those spiders. Only these specific spiders, which spawn in this specific area, but only with a 1/50 chance. The other spiders that spawn here are the wrong type.”

No Man’s Sky in particular is deeply guilty of this, forcing you to go to specific planets in specific types of systems which you often have no way of filtering or searching for to look for specific objects which may drop specific materials which you are required to have multiple of to build some object for your base/ship/suit/whatever. Let me just say, I’m glad that the item duplication bug in that one remains unpatched.

Games which force you to stop progression for a completely arbitrary reason, and for no other purpose than to be annoying. One example I can name off the top of my head here is Spiritfarer. This is a game that, by and large, revolves around doing menial chores to cater hand-and-foot to ungrateful people, all of which require engaging in some manner of real-time minigame. You do this while scooting all around the world to visit areas you need to be physically present in to trigger events in which you can gather required resources. Your boat sails itself once you plot a route, leaving you free to engage in said minigames (with varying levels of tedium) while it steams away in the background. The game has a day and night cycle. Your boat stops moving at night. You have to run all the way down the length of your boat (which gets progressively larger as you play) to go to bed in the cabin at the rear, whereupon the smarmy going-to-bed jingle can’t be skipped, wait for the fade to black, and then run back to where you were to pick up what you were doing before you were interrupted for absolutely no compelling gameplay reason. Fuck you very much.

The latter complaint also includes games which insist on stopping the action dead incessantly to pop up a message box and have your mission control fairy tutorialize at you in a condescending and unskippable manner. Especially if it’s not on your first playthrough. Frankly, if you can’t figure out a way to teach your game’s most basic mechanics to the player naturally and have to resort to unskippable popup nagging, you suck and you need to find a new career. Game development obviously isn’t for you.

For any poor bastards not in the know, here’s 162 pounds of Tannerite some rednecks placed in the center of a barn.

(You’ll want to be at about 2:19 for the money shot.)

Yes.

But this is also because your system administrators are incompetent.

There are myriad other ways to accomplish the same thing, but this is easily rolled out via Group Policy.

I did the lower left one once in school and got in trouble for it over not using color. Actually even moreso, since I did not use any shading and deliberately did it in a binary Tracer Bullet sort of style.

Of course, no part of the assignment specified that you had to use any particular colors, or even use colors at all. But apparently the moronic student teacher overseeing the art class that semester retroactively decided that this was “wrong” and that she was going to turn it into a big deal and make herself look monumentally stupid in front of everybody in the process. In response to her threatening to give me a zero for the entire assignment if I did not give in and use color, I responded by meticulously replacing the entire background with the brightest neon orange paint I had on hand (which as I recall was actually an airbrush paint) and still left the rest in stark black and white. There, color applied.

When this incited the nutty bitch to try to escalate again I took it to the administration who wanted nothing to do with it and passed it back to the actual art teacher. I won, she lost; When our creations were eventually put on rotation in the school lobby mine was visible from the street through the door. It was probably visible from space.

Bet.

The word you’re searching for is indeed “chevaline,” and I will absolutely buy one if it doesn’t cost a truly insane amount of money.

These also have an entire computer running Tizen behind the screen in the door, which generates waste heat and dumps it… into your refrigerator. Genius!

Don’t worry, in the realm of major appliances the majority of what these bozos are calling “AI” actually isn’t. They’re just using it as a buzzword because they think it’s popular.

LG, selling a washing machine two years ago: “It has weight sensors to determine the load size.”

LG, selling the same damn washing machine today: “With exclusive LG® AI DD™ Technology!!!”

(I am not making this up.)

When Angelo Moriondo invented what ultimately became the espresso machine, he didn’t do it to make coffee fancier, or better, or more exclusive, or more pure. He did it specifically to make coffee faster. Absolutely every other aspect of an espresso shot is a total afterthought.

Remember that the next time some pretentious dingus in a turtleneck is prattling at you about goddamn beans.

(And while we’re at it, nobody in Italy used a tomato for anything until, near as we can determine, the 1540s. Tomatoes came from the new world; they didn’t exist in Europe until they were brought back there. Anyone claiming that their modern tomato based Italian cookery is proud tradition dating back to antiquity is thus likewise full of it.)

Yes. And also while we’re at it, just remember who has been whispering in Trump’s ear all the goddamn time.

Nobody cares about mining anything in Greenland. Nobody actually cares about any resource in Greenland, or even the people in Greenland. Not strategically, anyway, before anyone gets it twisted. Rare earths, fine, whatever, that’s just a marginal distraction.

Greenland is the fence post on one side of the gate which allows NATO to control Russia’s potential naval passage into the Atlantic. At present Russia functionally cannot project any naval force to western Europe without literally going the long way around, all the way around Asia and Africa and past the tip of Cape Town, etc. Not at all coincidentally, the vestiges of the Cold War are why the US has always been so keen to maintain a military presence on Greenland in the first place.

With Greenland out of the picture and the US theoretically also on Russia’s side rather than NATO, Putin stands a much greater chance of being able to get his warships into the Atlantic by hugging the coast of Greenland and then subsequently threaten the rest of Europe.