Darth Fluffy

Don't be insulting nuts like that.  They are an important part of a squirrel's diet.

"Got The Dot!  I got it!" - Explorer the Cat.
 

"Buffy takes an oboe to the sternum for two points to the opposing band, while the Cougar and the Eagle tussle near the sidelines."

And thank you for that ear worm.

So far today, haven't needed analgesics, I hope this keeps up.

My uncle gave me his Commodore 128 (one of the two "C64s" I was talking about) when he moved on to a Windows 95 computer, including a ton of  games (most of them pirated). It was fun playing around with for a while, but I eventually realized that none of the games I tried could hold a candle to the games we had on the NES (let alone SNES). In retrospect I wish I had tried out the Zork series (which for some reason were among the few games I got from my uncle I didn't try, despite them being my uncle's favorites); I suspect that would have kept my interest better. At any rate we lived in a small house and the C128 required a lot of space, so as soon as it became apparent we weren't using it much it went into storage.
I just bought a RCA to HDMI converter for my parents this spring, so they could hook up their old VCR and/or Playstation 2 to their new TV.

/me and you get a 4 SDB impacts on your page.

My youngest niece just turned 20.  I think the oldest one is 32 now.

I keep misreading it as Tax avoidance thread.

Getting a bit meta here.

It will drive Tolkien fans around the bend, I can tell you that from posting it on the book of faces.

I finally managed to win a game of Terraforming Mars today, against my son and one of his friends, no less. Couldn't believe it when it happened. And by a decent margin, too. There wasn't one particular stat that led to my win, it was just an all-around thrashing. Wow.
In other news, Alabama lost. So did Tennessee. Bodes well for Texas's ranking in the next AP poll.  

Oh, since Leonard Nimoy was brought up on the Listening thread, I thought I would mention that Nimoy provides all of the narration for Civilization IV.

You don't need to resort to anything as primitive as a pile of dirt. There is a Swiss company that creates vehicular decoys to order. Ukraine bought dozens of them made to look like a HIMARS. So the Russians ended up expending a lot of very expensive missiles on some quite cheap decoys, which is optimal only in a universe where you can convince Putin that they were actual HIMARS. And might help explain the Russian claim that they had destroyed more HIMARS systems than Ukraine had actually received.

BTW, the laptop got shipped on October 1st. It'll arrive on the 7th. It had to go UPS Ground, since we had to ship it with its lithium ion batteries still inside. Those aren't allowed to travel via air freight at UPS. 'Twas an expensive package to ship - something like $50, mainly due to the insurance on the $3k replacement value of the thing.
One thing this event has helped motivate me to do is to get my installations of certain software on the Music Computer up to date. I'm currently updating - and moving -  my copy of Native Instruments KOMPLETE 14. That one piece of software took up so much space on the system's C: drive that I nearly ran out of disk space, quite literally. That's one reason why I installed a new 2TB NVMe drive some while back as a D: drive. (Not to be confused with the new 4TB D: drive I just put into the laptop a few months back.) I'm now in the process of moving every single one of KOMPLETE's libraries from the C: drive to the D: drive. All 254,750 files, taking up 605,146.2 Megs of space. This has taken the better part of 24 hours so far (including verification after copy by Total Commander's copy process), and there's still an estimated 1 1/2 hours left to go. I'll still have some manual follow-up work to do after that, but it won't take nearly as long. Suffice it to say that my system should operate a lot more smoothly afterwards. I am wondering if I should find a standalone TRIM utility to release all of the sectors that were used by the moved data when I'm done, though...

I will repeat my last stance; "It's a good idea, I'm sure it is benign, for now, but is is situated on a slippery slope. Eventual fratricide when your tanks overrun their current zone for instance is a thing that is going to happen. Or your scout vehicle. Or a family fleeing the conflict. Even human beans have this issue, how much more so a clueless idiot savant that 'knows where to blow up' but can't discern the subtleties and edge cases?
Are they necessary? Uhm, probably, especially if you are the Ukraine, for instance, up against Goliath. Is it safe? In the short run, it's safe enough. It will probably save net lives, at least 'good guy' lives, even if it occasionally screws up. But consider the narrowly avoided WW III scenario. It isn't hypothetical. It's already happened. Multiple times. Fail Safe (or Dr. Strangelove, if you prefer) came close to being our reality. Where do we draw the line? Do we even know there is a line to draw?
I deal with software every day. It does way more than it used to. It has not gotten fundamentally any better over time, quite the opposite actually. Being spied upon and (poorly) advertised to is now a thing I have to be concerned about. AI is not good nor evil, it is a tool. Like any tool, it can be misapplied (hence, the crappy mis-targeted ads).
Even AI has fundamentally changed over the years. In the 1980s, 'Expert Systems' were the bees knees. They were rule based, readable, could be analyzed, required significant manpower to create, and had fairly good results. The modern trend is trained neural networks, which are much more quickly and easily created, have been demonstrated to have training biases (which can be exploited to defeat them; make your tanks not look like an tank to the munition's AI), and defy analysis.
AI isn't going away any time soon, but I'll refrain from waving a flag for it and throwing a party.

Added irony, the bear thought he needed fiber in his diet, and viewed the running shoes as an extra treat.

Found out what this was about. Spousal abuse. And his wife is also a high ranking enlisted Marine so they are paying some attention to it.

And the vertigo is over. Time for breakfast and maybe some social media on Godzilla instead of the 2-in-1 in bed

This comic comment cracked me up: "People think Trump is playing 3-D chess, but actually he is eating the pieces."

Only barely qualifying for this thread, but...
I was playing a game of Civilization 2 out of sheer nostalgia. Late in the game I suddenly discover that I still have a trireme from the early game sitting around in a harbour. I was about to disband it when I realized something odd. It had one more movement point than it was supposed to have. I couldn't understand why until I realized that I had developed nuclear power, which as one effect grants all ships an extra movement point.
Somehow the Navy had retrofitted this ancient and utterly obsolete oar-propelled vessel with a fusion power plant. I am utterly baffled. And I admit, also impressed.

ROFL, Trump claims that Kamala is lying about having worked at McDonalds. Your stable genius, ladies and gentlemen. We'll be here all week. Try the veal XD

With Diane, so this can be done in real life.  
https://www.egscomics.com/comic/2016-08-29

In some of the better news I've seen, a Haitian rights group is going after Trump and Vance for spreading lies about Haitians in Springfield and endangering lives. They are cutting to the chase and asking for arrests, and yes, it is already formally requested. Seriously, nail those S.o.B.s for their callous disregard for others. (Apologies to actual bitches. Who's a good doggy? You are!)

And it's been the GOP doing it every time. At this point even if the Democrats eventually do cause a shutdown, people will just blame the Republicans anyway out of sheer habit.