Yeah, with the problem Amazon US (maybe elsewhere too?) has with fakes which get mixed in with the real stock at the distribution centre, and the problem I have on Amazon UK where no matter what household product I search for all the results are from brands I've never heard of, many of which are obviously Chinese from the name, or I'd guess are Chinese from the weird English or the mystery chunky quotation marks all over the description, it's not so easy to know any more.
I have a new rescue cat and I was going to buy some cat toys but after half an hour on Amazon I felt increasingly unsure that any of the products were safe for my cat to sink her teeth into, so I guess all the toys she's getting will be coming from the local pet megastore, the only pet shop left on this side of town.
I recently got a dog and had a very similar experience. The only toys I could see that I could attempt to trust were Kong toys, but they were more expensive on amazon, weren’t covered by prime and the delivery time was 2-3 days.
which is an interesting article about pigeon service in WWII from a different British literary review magazine, and the writer of the article turns out to be the author of the book reviewed here. Definitely interested to read the book, based on these two articles.
Some fun updates on the "rock family trees" [0] idea but it might have been interesting to have more technical detail - for some of them it says what technologies are used, which is interesting to know, but I'd love to see links to a github or any blogs/interviews where the creators talk about the tech and any design decisions they made
(e.g. how do you represent lineup changes over time, how do you stop lines and names appearing on top of other names, any other concerns about readability when members have been in a lot of bands all over the map - for a hand-drawn example, the Louisville hardcore/post-rock scene map [1] looks lovely but is kind of hard to track the individuals in because they're all just so interconnected)
I liked the page though and will definitely click through to find out more about these later, so thanks!
I've definitely noticed the rise in alcohol-free beers (normally only one or two per pub, but now usually prominently marked on the drinks list or blackboard), alcohol-free wines (only seen one once in a pub, but my local small supermarket has a couple of varieties - pleasant if rather sweet and Shloer-like) and "mocktails" in the pubs near me in the UK, and I hope the trend continues.
One of my favourite restaurants does delicious fruit-based cocktails, but has some mocktails and fruit smoothies which are just as delicious and half the price. However, I admit they are sugary and no doubt very calorific, so probably not good for regular drinking either, alas.
(And I'm afraid we tried Seedlip, which round here costs as much an alcoholic gin, and didn't enjoy it at all - but we liked the concept so if there's a market for it perhaps we'll like the next flavour or competitor...)
On one hand, I don't 100% miss those times unless I can have as much spare time as I did aged 14 to spend walking round a game without necessarily progressing.
(It helped that I only got a new commercial game every few months and maybe a couple of mostly short shareware games, so plenty of time to explore each one. Now I have a massive backlog of unplayed Steam games and still keep buying more.)
But not having hints and walkthroughs to fall back on definitely enhanced how much attention I paid to the game. I replayed various Lucasarts games from my teenage years recently and remembered a little bit from each section of each game, until I got halfway through Grim Fandango.
I knew I'd finished it before but the last two or three areas seemed completely unfamiliar, I think because I first bought it in the UHS Hints era, looked a hint up halfway through, and started leaning way too heavily on hints for the rest of the game.
I'd love that too - although I have to say I didn't really like the endings to MI2 or Thimbleweed Park, so I might love it even more if RG writes everything except the ending...
Yeah, the MI2 ending was definitely bizarre, but for me it was an off-the-wall way that made me really interested to see what happens next... Kind of like the ending of Nightmare on Elm Street 2.
Apparently Ron had a final chapter in mind for Monkey Island, but with Disney/Lucas owning the rights, we'll probably never see it. I'm guessing the last chapter might do a bit of retconning on the final moments of Part 2, but no one outside of Ron apparently knows how it ends. :(
I think the site author comes from an interactive fiction background, so I suppose there were text adventures that did switchable playable characters and time travel before DotT [1], but I don't know of a graphic adventure that beat DotT to it. I found the interaction between the 3 timezones pretty innovative as a kid too and think he does the game a disservice here.
It also opens the game up in terms of how many puzzles you can be thinking about at once; if you're stuck in a traditional 1-protagonist game you might only have one or two things you think you need to do next, at least in a pretty linear game, but now you always have at least 3 things to work out at once...
[1] I'm not a big IF buff, but I guess Infocom's "Suspended" (1983) is a classic game where you can control different "characters" at once, and I really loved "T-Zero" (1991), where you also open up 3 different timezones you can travel between at will, and changes in the past affect the present/future in a slightly DOTT-esque manner - although it's a very different game.
Chrono Trigger was a really good old SNES RPG that had gameplay centered around time travel, where actions in one timeline affected outcomes in another. Not an adventure game, but it's something that your comment reminded me of.
Much less known than Chrono Trigger, but the Game Boy RPG SaGa 3 (known in the west as Final Fantasy Legend III) was a case of Square's attempt at time travel in RPGs that came before CT. It had a lot of thematic elements in common, eg. actions in the past affecting the future, objects that appear in all time eras, separate dimensions that exist outside of the regular time continuum, etc. Unlike CT or DoTT, the eras were only decades apart, so you could also run into the same person as a kid and an adult.
The same team at Square did not work on it, but it should have at least had some influence on CT.
Zork III (1982), Sorcerer (1984), Spellbreaker (1985) and Trinity (1986) all did time travel, and Suspended (1983) did multiple characters.
Zork Grand Inquisitor (1997) definitely did time travel as different playable characters in a graphical adventure, but that was four years after Day of the Tentacle (1993).
Another stereotypically-opposite but actually possibly related pairing I find interesting: the OCD stereotype is "neat freaks" (not all that accurately, because hoarding is also compulsion-related, and many types of OCD operate on a different axis to neat/messy anyway), and the ADHD stereotype is messy and chaotic, but in a way they both centre around not being able to control what your mental runtime is spent on.
You try, but it ends badly repeatedly, sometimes unobtrusively, sometimes suddenly and catastrophically and in public, until the memories of those times plus fears of everyone's second-guessed reactions put you off doing anything; you go so long without succeeding at planning and discipline that even trying seems alien and scary; add the two together and you're well into "learned helplessness" territory.
As you say, sampling the space of behaviours and getting apparently random, mostly negative results back and wondering why your mental map of cause/effect and effort/outcome makes no sense whatsoever.
So... what does one do, when in broken-EF state for so long?
I think that generally humans cannot recover from being "in broken-EF state for so long" alone - that's why we invented society, as horrible and oppressive and stressing and annoying as society can be! Get connected to "functional" and "positive" people. Be open and not defensive to any kind of feedback from them - even if the feedback is very negative, treat it as "technical feedback". Change/get a job/relationship. Seek therapy.
Even if the puzzle-solving-logical-thinking can still work with a broken socio-emotional brain, the part of your mind that does planning, execution and motivation/energy for action needs well balanced social and emotional parts aside to work properly.
Oh, and do it fast... one can recover later too, as long as there's a will there's a way etc., but... you never recover that lost time when you could've been productively solving important problems and positively connecting with others!
> So... what does one do, when in broken-EF state for so long?
Seek help from other humans. Get medication (because at this point it's usually an untreated depression & anxiety), get therapy, but most importantly: have support in your life, sometimes with the most basic things like cooking, keeping your sleep schedule healthy, cleaning your apartment, job seeking, etc. Removing the biggest stressors (usually related to school, work, family, relationships, etc.) is also essential, and sometimes very hard to accomplish.
And yes, it's easier said than done, especially if you didn't have a good support network to begin with - which is usually the case for both autistic people and people with mental health problems.
I guess they mean that most people can smell freshly sprayed cleaning products but think the products don't smell of much when still in the bottles.
The aisle has a faintly bleachy/detergenty smell to me, but not usually oppressive, more just pleasantly clean, I suppose.
But I have noticed my hands/sweat smell different when I have a cold, and sometimes a day or two before I feel ill. I usually only get close enough to notice it on my own body, but I have a couple of times entered someone else's room/office and smelt the same smell before hearing confirmation from their croaky voice, snuffling, or them just telling me they have a cold.
(And no, it's not the smell of cough sweets or lemon/honey-based cold remedies, but it might be partly the smell of damp tissues and stale phlegm and other such nice things. Subtle but sickly sweet.)
Obviously this is neither particularly useful nor a superpower, but I'm glad research is going on into more useful applications of similar phenomena.
I have a new rescue cat and I was going to buy some cat toys but after half an hour on Amazon I felt increasingly unsure that any of the products were safe for my cat to sink her teeth into, so I guess all the toys she's getting will be coming from the local pet megastore, the only pet shop left on this side of town.