For post-nut clarity. A genuine reason why my problem solving skills improve when I work from home.

HoMM is a turn-based strategy game, not RPG (with the notable exception of HoMM IV where you had real hero development). That said, there was a genre of RPG's, which used to be very popular in the 80s and 90s, and which all but disappeared. Those were party-based first-person RPG's with turn based (or close to it) combat. Popularized by Wizardry, and followed by Might and Magic, they inspired other series like the Ishar Trilogy. Other games employed real-time combat, but slow enough or pausable, to mimic turn-based. Popular series were Eye of the Beholder, Lands of Lore, Dungeon Master, and others. Nowadays, I occasionally see one of these games from independent projects, but it seems that the golden age of this sub-genre has passed.

Don't know how the law is worded, but you won't find plastic straws in physical shops or restaurants, and all juice boxes come with paper straws. I don't have any issues buying plastic straws, both regular-size and for boxed juices, from Amazon.

Selling plastic straws is not permitted in the EU anymore, so I'm buying them on Amazon. Don't know whether these regulations apply only to physical stores or Amazon doesn't give a damn, but you can go around such laws quite easily.

Just to be pedantic: we've had a hell of a time implementing dynamic resizing of svg's in Firefox. Works fine with Chromium. We spent far too much development time to keep our 4% of users happy, but eventually we did it. Perhaps newer versions of Firefox changed this, but there are customer-facing oddities the bank's customers may experience.

I used to and still do, but I see it as an investment. In the past, I used to donate to various environmental organizations. Lack of money and disillusionment with the progress in environmental protection stopped this. Nowadays, I have a small monthly direct deposit to the armed forces of Ukraine. Living in Europe, I see this as investing into a peaceful retirement.

Very slow-burning books, and I almost always lost interest before finishing them. I found The Dark Tower especially tedious. After I couldn't force myself read it, I got the audiobook version a lnd tried to listen to it three times, but always fell asleep. Ironically, the books I genuinely enjoyed were some of his longest ones: It, and The Stand.

As Richard Bachman, on the other hand, he wrote loads of entertaining books. It almost seems like in that persona he didn't give a shit what others thought of his works, and the books ended up eminently readable.

I don't play multiplayer games, so I can't tell what kind of people the cheaters are. But speaking for myself, I did change my ratings from 5 stars to 1 and was very vocal whenever an upgrade to a game I purchased broke that game on my system, and there wasn't a way to roll back. Given that those were single player games, DDoS wouldn't hurt them, so I just kept spamming their support e-mails.

Without hard data it's difficult to tell to what extent this is accurate, but there seems to be a substantial portion of Linux gamers (including Steam Deck users) who are pissed off that due to the anti-cheat they can't play the game on their platform of choice anymore. Some of them may have joined the DDoS campaign, so there is a genuine venn diagram.

Since this is retro gaming, I've got to go with Microprose (Civilization, Colonization, X-Com games and more). But my love also goes to other developers that EA destroyed, in particular Maxis, Westwood Studios and Origin. Special shout-out to three more studios I had amazing memories with: New World Computing (Might and Magic), Sir-Tech (Wizardry) and Blue Byte (Settlers, Battle Isle, Albion).

We lost a good developer to AWS, so now we're poaching him back. He knows our office, so I'm hoping for at least a list of his coworkers who he'd recommend.

Spoiler alert: it's already happened, and all the virtuous people already ascended to heaven.

Must be a gold rush for companies that use the AWS infrastructure. My company is already trying to poach a few AWS engineers, with a WFH or hybrid contract.

My Mizunos (Wave Riders) usually last between 900 and 1100 km. The moment I start having niggles in my knees or hips, I know it's time to move them to my yard work rotation. Seriously, it's not worth tisking an overuse injury running in worn-out shoes, especially ones that provide such a good value as Mizunos.

Ireland uses a variant of ranked choice voting. In essence, voters get a list of candidates for their voting district, and rank as many of them as they want in order of preference. When votes are counted, the candidate with the lowest votes is eliminated, and votes of those who ranked the candidate first are distributed to their second choice. Rinse and repeat until only as many candidates remain as there are open seats in the constituency.

There is still some inertia, especially in rural areas ("my dad always voted for this candidate, so I'll vote for his son"), but the system still lends itself to more informed voting. From what I've seen in other countries, on average Ireland does a better job at electing more reasonable candidates than the US or EU countries.

You know how many bike stands could be built for that money? Dozens!

Deciding on the school for my master's. Had two choices: the no. 1 school in the US at that time, or an up-and-coming pgogram. The top school would have set me back about 200k in debt, but I was virtually guaranteed a job with a starting salary of 150k+, and a career path to the C-suite. The other school would give me a free ride, but it was anyone's guess where'd I end up. I picked the free ride, and ended with a dead-end job for 40k. That was 20 years ago. Since then, that job gave me the push to leave the US, settle elsewhere, find a wife, start a family, and have an exciting new job with career progression. The choice, when I was deciding, couldn't have been more clearly defined, and for years I kept thinking what if I picked the top school. Not anymore...

20C and sunny today, possibly the best beach day of the summer around here. And the local Starbucks had a sign up, saying that yhey ran out of pumpkin spice...

Two years ago, I quit FB for six months. Then I checked my feed, and counted six friends' updates and zero group posts in the first 100 items. 94% of posts were ads or "suggested" content. So, I closed FB and never went back again. Whatsap statuses is where I find my friends' updates these days.

World of Xeen? Such a fun concept, combining the two games. I've been trying to run the mod that lets you play 6, 7 and 8 within the same game, but my current PC can't handle it.