I'm 31 and it happens sporadically, but in the past couple of weeks I had one guy double-take because he figured there was no way I was that old and one lady who gave me a good ol' "keep doin' what you're doin'."

The ego boost is necessary since my body insists on groaning every time I sit down.

It's the maccas nuggets, really. God bless Bae, she needs it.

It's been almost a decade since I used C++ and had to verify, but after some quick searching around it looks like it hasn't changed a ton since I last looked at it.

You can use smart pointers, and certainly you should, but it's a whole extra thing tacked on to the language and the compiler doesn't consider it an issue if you don't use them. Using new in C++ isn't like using unsafe in rust; in rust your code is almost certainly safe unless marked otherwise, whereas in C++ it may or may not be managed properly unless you explicitly mark a pointer as smart.

For your own code in new codebases this is probably fine. You can just always make your pointers smart. When you're relying on code from other people, some of which has been around for many years and has been written by people you've never heard of, it becomes harder to be sure everything is being done properly at every point, and that's where many of these issues come into play.

C and C++ require more manual management of memory, and their compilers are unable to let you know about a lot of cases where you're managing memory improperly. This often causes bugs, memory leaks, and security issues.

Safer languages manage the memory for you, or at least are able to track memory usage to ensure you don't run into problems. Rust is the poster boy for this lately; if you're writing code that has potential issues with memory management, the compiler will consider that an error unless you specifically mark that section of code as unsafe.

It is genuinely ridiculous how much content there is in this game for the price. Like, a lot of it looks like an excuse to play the same levels a dozen times with minor variations, but then there are tons of levels, lots of events, ongoing updates with new content of all types, so many different towers and upgrades to play with, community maps to add even more variety... It looks like I've played over 200 games and I have so much of the game that I haven't even touched yet.

Just to throw a few other options on the pile:

• Valheim is more combat oriented, but is probably my favourite survival crafting game after Subnautica. You're playing vikings trying to earn their way into Valhalla. I die a lot. Very fun.
• Planet Crafter is more chill, more jank, and more linear, but it's a survival crafting game that is clearly heavily inspired by Subnautica. You are sent to a mars-like planet to terraform it as part of your prison sentence. It's a great podcast game, just build and explore and watch numbers go up.
• Less on the survival crafting side of things, the environmental storytelling is also really good in Outer Wilds and Return of the Obra Dinn. Very different games, but they were actually what I went to after Subnautica to scratch that itch and it worked weirdly well.

The irony kills me on this one. I would like to imagine that if you send your ID in they auto-fail you, but I'm sure they're not that clever.

I wouldn't call it a bug, just that a naive ranked ballot naturally favours the centrist voices. I don't even mean this in an extreme way: in Canada we basically have three centrist, neoliberal parties running parliament, and this would mean that the Liberals just win a majority almost every time. NDP voters generally won't vote Conservative, Conservative voters won't vote NDP.

This can turn into a bug because it ends up pushing other voices out: if the popular vote suggests equal support between left, right, and center candidates, you would typically hope the make-up of the government reflects that, but more likely it would look like a center majority. There are ways to mitigate this (large number of parties, electing multiple candidates on a ballot, proportional components of the vote, etc) but ranked choice on its own tends to be a centralizing force, not a way to get a more representative democracy.

Again, not a bug, and I definitely wouldn't call it worse than FPTP, just making it clear that it has its own biases that are worth taking into account.

Ranked choice is one of the simplest ways to get a more representative, but to the question in the title it does tend to favour centrist parties. Progressives will vote for a centrist over a conservative, and a conservative will vote for a centrist over a progressive, so the centrist party will win almost every time.

It's still an improvement over the disaster of FPTP because it will at least elect parties that the majority can tolerate, but there is still a bias present.

There are a lot of ethical concerns around Chinese worker treatment, economic concerns around Chinese subsidies driving the price down, privacy concerns around Chinese tech's tendency to phone home, geopolitical concerns around giving China even more power in our nation...

But honestly, same. Nowadays I can't get a car at a decent price in a decent time frame, even worse if I want an EV, so what's the expectation? The auto industry has dropped the ball so hard that China would trivially dominate the EV industry if they were allowed to compete. That's bad, but it's so bad because the local industry isn't even in the ballpark of good enough.

Nenshi was a good mayor with a meh council and his frustration with dumb political issues came forth in ways that felt like actual human emotions, even if some people thought he was arrogant.

He was pretty obviously the right choice here. Everyone's platforms were basically the same. Ganley and Stonehouse are basically unknown, and Hoffman is more known for being the overweight health minister than anything else, unfair though that may be. He is the most recognizable of the leadership candidates by a mile, he has actual demonstrated leadership abilities we hardly see from anyone nowadays, and Calgarians generally like him. The only major downside is that he's not a currently sitting MLA, but he would probably win any riding in Calgary handily.

Calgary is pretty much a swing city at this point, since Edmonton goes mostly NDP and the smaller regions mostly go UCP, so someone Calgary can get behind is automatically a huge bonus. There's a better chance of seeing another NDP government under him than basically anyone else in the province.

If they put the effort in this could be a really good show. The LN has a lot of rough edges, but on the whole it's a great concept that goes in interesting directions. But the art does a surprising amount of heavy lifting; the depicted horror of the characters to those unfamiliar with them creates this interesting dichotomy with how a lot of the day-to-day interactions proceed, and it would be really easy to just gloss over that and make a fairly generic isekai.

Honestly? Bash. I tried a bunch a few years back and eventually settled back on bash.

Fish was really nice in a lot of ways, but the incompatibilities with normal POSIX workflows threw me off regularly. The tradeoff ended up with me moving off of it.

I liked the extensibility of zsh, except that I found it would get slow with only a few bits from ohmyzsh installed. My terminal did cool things but too slowly for me to find it acceptable.

Dash was the opposite, too feature light for me to be able to use efficiently. It didn't even have tab completion. I suffered that week.

Bash sits in a middle ground of usability, performance, and extensibility that just works for me. It has enough features to work well out of the box, I can add enough in my bashrc to ease some workflows for myself, and it's basically instantaneous when I open a terminal or run simple commands.

Babel does sound neat, I'll probably check it out.

I've had D-Genesis on my to-read list for ages and can no longer remember why, but I guess a new volume release is a good reminder to get on that sometime.

Code: White was so much fun in theaters. It kind of runs into similar problems to a lot of other anime movies, with the non-canon status-quo excuse for a big fight, but Spy X Family naturally handles that better than many series and it turned out to be a ton of fun.

!The fact that the fate of the world rests on Anya not taking a dump is just peak comedy, I don't care what anyone says.!<

The Konosuba LN is really funny, great read.

The Konosuba anime is peak comedy, the crazy VAs and goofy-ass animation bring so much to it and it hardly loses a thing in the process.

I have a few evergreen notes that I update as needed, but the most frequent one is simply a list of what books I have on preorder and when they're expected to ship. I have a book buying problem.

Otherwise most of my notes don't get referenced often because they're stores of knowledge, not items related to active projects. I have several reference docs for fiction writing and DnD that I reference and update often because I work on those projects often, but my note on the Zanclean Flood is just obviously not going to come up almost ever. But writing is how I learn, so I wrote about it 🤷

I was conveniently hoping to catch up on some non-LN reading, and it's nice of the release schedule to make that easy on me.

As promised, Apothecary Diaries, vol 11: This was a wild volume. Lots of politics, lots of tension, and the climax hit out of nowhere in a way I found surprisingly satisfying. Finally finding out more about Gyouko-ou, the Yi clan, and Rikuson was great, although some of it felt like back-filling information that could have been presented in a more cohesive way over time.

Still, super good volume with a lot of interesting developments. Honestly it speaks to the strength of the cast that Maomao took the backstage for most of this volume and it's still fantastic.

Yup. If my merino shirts didn't work so well through my workouts I'd probably hardly ever do an intense workout. My back sweats like I'm my own personal rain storm.