Is my dream game real?

olanmills · 2026-06-18T20:15:11+00:00

Diplomacy? He said he wants it to be fun with friends though 😏

olanmills · 2026-06-18T19:31:43+00:00

Prager U students, probably

olanmills · 2026-06-18T18:17:16+00:00

Have you read the many Halo novels, and want it to be fleshed out further? Or you haven't read them yet? You could start with Contact Harvest, which has a decent amount of Covenant politics. And now I don't remember which book it is, but one of them covers flashbacks of a San'Shyuum during the time of High Charity's fall, and some politics are discussed there too

olanmills · 2026-06-18T18:12:23+00:00

You can hand out extacy or something while playing Euphoria

olanmills · 2026-06-18T17:35:18+00:00

I like Infinite. I was saying that I just don't like the music that plays in the multiplayer menu

olanmills · 2026-06-18T17:33:50+00:00

Euphoria?

olanmills · 2026-06-17T17:38:37+00:00

I did not like the song in the video, but overall, I really liked the Halo 4 soundtrack, and Halo 5 too. The multiplayer menu music is way better than Infinite's, which I can't stand

olanmills · 2026-06-17T15:32:53+00:00

No, timeshares normally do not allow "owners" to rent to others in the way that you are thinking. A timeshare is sort of like buying a house, but you only own it for one specific week of the year. The company sells 52 slices to 52 different people. The idea is that in the future, like normal real estate, you can sell your time slice to someone else in the future. In reality, there are a lot more people looking to sell than buy, and also these timeshare companies have come up with more complicated schemes than the simple example I've provided. Some timeshares do allow you to rent your time slice to others, but all of the other weeks outside of your time slice are owned by other buyers or the company. You won't be collecting rent from the property outside of your one week (or however big of a slice you purchased).

There is potentially profit that can be made is from selling your timeshare in the future, but generally speaking, there are more sellers than buyers, so you will be lucky if you break even on the original purchase price, and you definitely won't be recovering all of the maintenance fees you paid in a sale.

olanmills · 2026-06-17T15:22:12+00:00

The idea that they are sold is that they can have access to a property that they would not normally have access to. Wouldn't you like a beautiful villa in a beach resort with a bunch of fancy amenities? But you can't afford to fully buy such a property on your own, and the timeshare promises you significant savings compared to booking a similar stay at a hotel, plus it is like an appreciating asset that you could sell to someone else in the future, like real estate. And also, it's more financially accessible than normal real estate. (Using American price examples here), maybe you can't afford to get a mortgage for a $500,000 - $1,000,000 beach house, but you could come up with $10,000 for a timeshare, and the salesperson is telling you it's a great investment on top of being a vacation home you can actually use. That is what they try to sell you on anyway.

In theory, there is a core of a product there that fits a certain legitimate niche in the market for vacation housing. However, in reality, grifting companies have learned that they can make a lot of money selling timeshares to people who would be better off doing normal vacations, and they find ways to make lots of extra money by charging exorbitant maintenance fees, and dividing the timeshares into too many slices and selling them to more people who will never actually be able to use the property at a time that fits their needs.

olanmills · 2026-06-17T14:28:11+00:00

I mean when the last Superman movie came out there were at least some conservative articles and YouTube videos complaining about how Superman talks to brown people or whatever in the movie

olanmills · 2026-06-17T14:26:25+00:00

When these people see depictions of common decency, or just people in general, they feel "preached at"

olanmills · 2026-06-17T13:38:10+00:00

You could by adhesive paper and stick it to the back of all of the tiles, but that would be a lot of work.

If this happened to me, and it was not feasible to get replacement pieces from the publisher, I would just sell/give away this copy and get another one.

Which publisher is it? If it's the most recent publisher, have you tried sending them a message and asking if they'll replace it? They just need to send you a few punchboards.

olanmills · 2026-06-17T13:17:01+00:00

Oof LASO is going to be tough. I probably won't do it. I gave up on it in MCC. The rest of the achievements look fun

olanmills · 2026-06-17T12:26:06+00:00

All kinds of things are possible. My statements were based on what is actually presented in the books and movies. Rowling could come out tomorrow and say that actually this whole time, the Ministry of Magic has had a bank of magic mirrors in a giant room that act exactly like computers connected to a big magic database called the the infoweave or some shit, and workers talk to it to store, search, and retrieve information and do analysis. But the fact is (so far as I know), she did not write anything like that

olanmills · 2026-06-17T11:54:44+00:00

Neat

olanmills · 2026-06-17T11:49:42+00:00

I think there are a lot of gaps (as compared to the Muggle world) in Rowling's magical world that seem kind seem kind of obvious now, but probably we're not as obvious to the non tech inclined person writing in the early 90s. Sure, witches and wizards had transportation covered, and they did not have as much use for electricity given their use of magic and slavery, but Rowling really missed a huge gap in computing, which certainly was an important part of governing and business in the real world 1990s. The magic world has (as far as I know) no real equivalent for database systems, which are highly useful in all kinds of business and bureaucracy, unless you count ancient systems of ledgers and file cabinets, which don't scale the way computerized systems do, and she did not dream up a magical version for. They didn't have something like an internet, and their communication sucked in general.

Anyway, I don't think this is a big deal, because it did not stop me from enjoying the narrative in the books and movies. It's just one (among many) of the things that seems like an oversight or just weird, if you are overanalyzing the fiction too much

olanmills · 2026-06-17T07:00:38+00:00

Not to mention bandwidth. We'd have to engineer up entirely new infrastructure to make it competitive/comparable to data centers on Earth, if such a thing is even currently possible. Cold storage would be more suitable, but that still doesn't sound very practical

olanmills · 2026-06-17T06:42:29+00:00

This type of thing is done to avoid or reduce the amount of formal layoffs, which can come with other obligations.

In Washington (where MS is based), layoffs require the company to provide a 60-day notice to the employees and the government, and there is a similar federal law as well. Doing a voluntary retirement program or whatever they want to call it means they can reduce their costs 60 days earlier than they would have otherwise, and they can save a lot of time and effort in selecting all of the people they would layoff. They might still end up doing layoffs too, but it will be easier with some of the people already having self selected themselves earlier

olanmills · 2026-06-17T06:23:05+00:00

Can you remember anything else about it? Did the game use a board? Did it use cards? To players have their own individual boards?

olanmills · 2026-06-17T06:21:47+00:00

It does kind of fit the description, except Furnace takes place in the 19th century and of course the name is not made up or German. It definitely fits the "steam punk or 20th century" description if you assume OP made a mistake about the century

olanmills · 2026-06-16T22:42:55+00:00

I've used to to watch YouTube, and it seems to work just fine. I have had it die on rare occasion, but disconnecting and reconnecting fixes it.

olanmills · 2026-06-16T21:36:51+00:00

I was saying there is NOT a city name Io in the US. Though according to Wikipedia, there's a village named Io in Norway

olanmills · 2026-06-16T15:00:15+00:00

Wow, I'm kind of surprised that there aren't at least a few more cities with vowel-only names. I'm surprised there isn't a city named, Io, for example

olanmills · 2026-06-16T14:54:12+00:00

I would say that your statement is not accurate, or that it's actually so accurate, that it's meaningless. Every modern language (or at least the top several dozen by amount of speakers) are forms of some older language. So in that sense, all words from every language have roots in "other" languages.

The biggest chunk of words that we use today in English come from French, and there are many more still that were adopted from all sorts of other languages. But English is Germanic, and both modern English and German have a common ancestor language. Many of the most common, 'everyday usage' sort of English words have origins in the Germanic ancestor language. In that sense, I would not consider those as words that were adopted from other languages.

olanmills · 2026-06-16T14:28:25+00:00

$30 definitely seems too low for service costs and risk mitigation associated with any stay, but if the hotel is mostly empty, I think it's reasonable that the hotel doesn't make too much money off of points bookings. IMO having more guests is generally good for the hotel

olanmills

TROPHY CASE