the party standing for freedom

That died with the Hayes Administration.

it is just becoming possible to have an infinitely persistent entity

You’re just describing a library. And we’ve had those for millennia.

That said… we’ve had libraries for millennia! Imagine all the alternative universes in which Euclid’s Elements or Plato’s Republic or The Analects of Confucius or Naturalis Historia or On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres were lost before they could become cornerstones of human understanding.

Imagine a world in which we never developed the capacity for language or the faculty for written text.

And yet, despite stockpiling weapons for the next eight decades, never again.

Maybe that’ll change in the next decade, but hopefully we can keep 1945 as the last year nuclear weapons were used for a bit longer.

They killed Lincoln but they couldn’t kill the abolitionist movement. Congress ratified three of the most progressive laws written in a century and the Freedman’s Bureau took to the job of enfranchising and rehabilitating millions of black ex-slaves in the subsequent decade.

Pick up a copy of W.E.B DuBois’s “The Souls of Black Folk”. What he describes is, at it’s heart, a revolution in how our country treated men and women of African descent. It set the foundation for the next century of civil rights and paved the way for a modern era in which the core racist underpinning of the country are totally upended.

That kind of fundamental change would not have been possible under a Breckinridge administration, nor would it have been possible if the Union had been crippled into submission at Gettysburg or Antitem.

Lincoln was the tip of the abolitionist spear and critical to what came after. But he was not alone. And he was by no means the most radical voice within his party. His martyrdom became the bloody shirt that Republicans rallied under long after the war had ended.

There was an abstract conceptual theory of system agnostic game add-ons. It isn’t… completely inconceivable.

You could work with a relatively prolific engine, like Unreal, and set up a standard character model dummy with designated hard points for attaching accessories and certain default movements. Then any accessory could simply scale to the environment - Master Chef could swing a keyblade while the Elden Ring guy gets to wear Iron Man armor, because these are all “human” models with well-defined structures that could map to the associated equipment. The blockchain becomes a universal registry for these assets that a platform can read from to render the art.

The problem is that nobody ever actually implemented this universal protocol. They all just ran off making jpegs of weird animals and running fake auctions to create the illusion of a secondary market. You had zetabytes of data being processed so some Baked Alaskahole could claim his Kumming Koala was worth $40M.

I don’t even strictly begrudge “the blockchain” as an idea for licensing and data storage (just please don’t ask me to think about who is generating the licenses or storing the data). But it was all vaporware. None of it was anywhere close to being created, much less delivered. People were throwing billions with a b of dollars at entirely empty promises.

Why, Linux?! It is said that you would destroy the Blockchain, not join it!

Dated a few of Catholics, and they aren’t any grosser than the Protestants, Atheists, Muslims, or Buddhists I’ve been with.

I don’t think she’s planning to date a priest.

No way am I dating a Catholic

There are a lot of hot Catholics.

Going on Reddit for dating advice is a mistake.

Teach her to order something off a foreign-language menu, invite the family out to dinner, and see if she can place her order fluently.

Doing the “Five year old white girl shocks waitress by ordering Orange Chicken in perfect Mandarian” bit IRL would be pretty funny and adorable.

Can’t believe they got Weird Al to do “Dare to be Stupid” for that film. What a moment in history.

Carving my soul into seven unholy partitions in order to maintain my unnatural existence as a Windows Guy whose shit still works.

Was that game any good? The mobile version had a Gacha mechanic that scared me off, but it otherwise looked like a really smooth SNES style JRPG.

Most of the abstractions, frameworks, “bloats”, etc. are there to make development easier and therefore cheaper

That’s true to an extent. But I’ve been on the back side of this kind of development, and the frameworks can quickly become their own arcane esoteric beasts. One guy implements the “quick and easy” framework (with 16 gb of bloat) and then fucks off to do other things without letting anyone else know how to best use it. Then half-dozen coders that come in behind have no idea how to do anything and end up making these bizarre hacks and spaghetti code patches to do what the framework was already doing, but slower and worse.

The end result is a program that needs top of the line hardware to execute an oversized pile of javascripts.

I think it’s given us a big wave of “Return to pixelated tradition” style games. When you see 16-bit sprites in the teaser, you can feel reasonably confident your computer will run it.

emerge

I agree that this is bullshit and Linux is better. But as someone with a Windows work computer, this was a huge help.

I’d have to check the specs, but I believe its an M1 or M2.