Thrashy

Rasputin v. Stalin (v. Lenin v. Gorbachev v. Putin) still pops unbidden into my mind, especially in light of current events.

I'm the host with the most glasnost!

Mass Effect 2, Grunt's loyalty mission on Tuchanka. Always, always take the renegade interrupt to headbutt Uvenk and cut off his rant.

When in Rome...

I was as well, though my family weren't in deep. A friend from my co-op is estranged from her IBLP family due to abuse, though, and many more of my co-op classmates just failed to launch after graduation because they were book-smart but had no idea how to navigate a world that wasn't completely managed and controlled by their parents.

Laughable, maybe, but not surprising. Since the Web 2.0 boom started picking up, the game for tech startups has always been to attract users as fast as possible, profits be damned, and hope a FAANG buys you out for your userbase before your VC money runs out. Post-Great Recession, debt has been near as makes no difference free, so VCs have been willing to extend very long runways to the companies they invest in, but with interest rates going sharply up the music has stopped and it's time for companies like Reddit to show they can become profitable or else.

On the one hand, if somebody wants to Haussmanize their Paris I'd say more power to you, the bulldozer tool is in the menu. On the other hand, some mechanic like Transport Tycoon's where local councils stop letting you build around them if you get too aggressive remodeling their town could be interesting too.

At the end of the day, though, I wouldn't want to take to much power or of the player's hands. Will Wright described those classic Maxis games as "software toys," and the freedom to mess around and see what happens is both part of the appeal and how games like SimCity came to seen as educational.

I got my money's worth from the original, but I have two major complaints about it that, from what I can see, the new game doesn't address:

First, the developer originally made transport games and that bias shows. C:S makes it incredibly hard to design a city that isn't car-centric, and gameplay in practice tends to center on optimizing car traffic at the expense of everything else a city-builder could be.

Second (and this ties into the first, to an extent) is that the game doesn't represent the passage of time, in a technological or societal sense. Real cities grow and change over decades and centuries, with decisions made in prior eras imposing informing and imposing restraints on those made after. C:S cities exist in a weird, timeless and anachronistic "now" from the start. This was something that classic SimCity games did well, at least in the context of an American boom town: as the years advance, so does the tech tree, opening up new mass transit options, cleaner and more efficient infrastructure items, and new kinds of commerce and industry.

Personally, I'd love a game in this genre that plays like SimCity but takes in the whole arc of history, say from from the Middle Ages onwards, so that players can start to appreciate how decisions they make hundreds of years prior can leave their mark on the city in the present -- for example, where a defensive wall gets placed during a medieval time of war leaves a mark of the street networks, and changes the way that that social classes distribute through the city and leads to a high-rent luxury district in a future era.

Toyota's efforts to win on merit instead of by default continue to be cursed for no readily-apparent reason...

Really good race overall, and portends well for the future of LMH/LMdH as a category. A different manufacturer on each step of the podium, even Peugeot was legitimately leading for a while, and the Caddies were in the hunt the whole way through, in spite of the being in the more restricted LMdH ruleset. Porsche still seems to have some teething problems to work through.

Looking forward to next year, with BMW, Alpine, and Lamborghini in the Hypercar category, and more accessible GT3 cars for GT!

I'm having a similar experience right now. I wonder if there is a more complete setup walkthrough out there than what's in the codeberg wiki? I had the same problem standing up an instance of Mastodon, in that available walkthrough seemed to assume knowledge I didn't have, and additionally just didn't work right if you were, say, setting it up in an LXC instance instead of using Docker. I got it sorted eventually, but the process was pretty annoying

Three and half hours in, there's been a heap of attrition already, and Race Control is forecasting more rain imminently. This may end up being one of the messier races in recent memory.

I don't quite agree. Fueling would add an additional dimension to pit strategy in combination with tire selection, which would play out on track as greater variation in on-track speed -- ie., if you're on a stint with a harder tire, do you run enough fuel to get to your next tire stop, or go light for extra speed on track and plan for a splash-n-dash mid-stint? The time penalty per kilo of weight in F1 is such that it might be worth the extra time in the pits.

Partially wet track for the start, this is going to be interesting...

edit: aaaaand one of the Cadillacs went into the barriers on the Mulsanne right on Lap 1. Good on Aitken for getting back to the pits, but that was a boneheaded move.

as far as refueling goes, it's true that Formula 1 has a bit of a sordid history with it, but the fact of the matter is that it's a solved problem for other series. IndyCar has a developed and mature system for it, for example. I don't think that adding it back would be inherently dangerous if appropriately regulated -- and in light of Grosjean's crash, there's a counterargument to be made that having less fuel in the cars at any given time could offset the added risk of fueling in the pits.

Another thing that could help would be to focus on reducing the size of the cars. Over the last 10-15 years F1 cars have become enormous -- partially to account for crash structures and fuel cells, yes, but also for performance reasons. Wider track and longer wheelbase aid with grip and stability, but added size means added structure, and besides the cars are now too big to comfortably run at classic tracks like Monaco. Shrinking them down again would reduce individual performance, but improve the racing overall.