It’s okay guys. You can just call it a Tempest 2000 emulator. Don’t feel bad.

Tres comas, indeed.

More Tales to Tremble By is the only one so far I might be eventually talked into thinking is the one, but no epiphany yet. The low angle drawing of the house and the sailor peering over the railing feel familiar (particularly that greenish wash over the sailor one), but they don’t quite match the admittedly 35-40 year-old memory in my head.

The Tales of the Black Freighter vibes in it are pretty cool as well.

I just looked through it and that’s not the one, (art style is too different) but I have to say I love block-print drawings. Hell, seeing all this mid-century spooky artwork has been really fun even if the for-sure right book never pops up.

Thanks!

End stage Fry’s was so weird it could have been a Terry Gilliam movie or something. Vast expanses of mostly empty aisles with the few bits of leftover inventory still there, but interspersed with filled-up cages of AliExpress junk at 10x the AE price or 3x the “get it tomorrow” Amazon price. Then there would be one or two areas where the vendors had gone along with their cockamamie “we’ll sell your shit on consignment!” scam, and a few sad employees trying to avoid making eye contact.

Yet Microcenter endures.

I see it, and it’s not an absurd guess, but of the suggestions so far, the “Tales to Tremble By” books seem closest. I tried AI first, though not with the entire post as a prompt. Oddly, my initial slimmer prompt got something that’s closer than the full thing, though I’ll leave it to the dear reader whether that says more about AI or me. Thanks for the new approach!

I am glad to see ChatGPT is a little less assertive these days about how confident it is.

Lol, they did a few more, but while fun, nothing comes close to giant magic kaiju polar bear specifically murderizing its rivals before using its F16 to destroy the entire Earth, Scientology style, then body surfing the resulting F16-destroying explosion at warp speed to make it to its asteroid-based hockey arena on time, but making sure to blow up the hockey goal as well.

I will have to take a look, but I tend to think this is not it. I was familiar with Ripley’s as a brand from the newspaper comic, so I think I would have recalled that detail. Still, thanks so much!

I’m not willing to commit, but I can’t dismiss this one out of hand. I will need to track down a copy and see if anything gives me that AHA! moment.

Thanks!

Well Labour wanted a leader who could appeal to Tory voters…

Strummer also did a fucking AMAZING arrangement of an Irish political hymn from the early 1800s (or possibly earlier for the tune) for Black Hawk Down.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PSTus_5bl8

I was really optimistic that the Schwartz books with the original Stephen Gammell illustrations would be it, but it’s just not quiiiite right. It could all be jumbled enough that it’s just me whose wrong, but this feels like one of those times where I think the component parts in my brain are sufficient that the memories will coalesce if and when I see it again.

In a Dark, Dark Room seems to be from something a little later and slimmer. My book was also a good inch and a half thick, maybe pushing 200 pages depending on paper weight.

Ed Gorey specifically got me thinking about this book again, but his style is also not quite right. Thanks for the suggestions, though!

So super late here, but while I haven’t read Artemis Fowl, some skimming of summaries makes me think they’re pretty similar. Amari has a setting of a fish out of water in an educational setting that brings in some Hogwart’s and Percy Jackson vibes, but that all share that same low-fantasy (in the sense of “weird shit coexisting with the normal world”) vibe. It’s all very derivative, but it takes its representation seriously and is willing to have sympathetic characters make poor choices.

1177 is dense but good, like listening to a charming professor who’s been given free rein to indulge himself. I was familiar with some of the players and geography from previous reading and podcasts, but even then I find myself glossing over some of the verbiage and long-dead citites in the ancient Near-East. The overall thesis remains pretty easy to follow even if you don’t remember exactly where Ugarit was.

Redacted registrars and contact info at this point just means small-time origins. Most registrars will offer it for free or very cheap.

Poking around reddit, it appears it’s not a scam per se, but the low barrier to entry on both sides means there’s a lot of low-info/low-budget creators on one side, offering gigs that may not be worthwhile and including a lot of people asking for “samples” or tryouts that seem suspiciously like requests for free work. Then on the jobseeker side there are a lot of unskilled newbies just putting their availability out there.

Seems like having a profile is not a bad idea, but each specific opportunity would need to be vetted, and anything that smells fishy probably is.

So, he modded a GBA either to accept control input from modded controllers, or he stuffed a SBC emulator with two USB-C ports into a GBA case.

Pretty cool, and a clever concept to work towards, but hardly revolutionary. I wouldn’t be “drooling” until it was past prototype stage and didn’t look like a it was stuck together with a piece of tape or that a single bump on the train would snap the ports right off those control pads.

“White” has always been more about fitting a certain narrative than a specific shade of skin. Ask any black soccer player who’s ever missed an easy shot whether there’s a problem with racism in Europe. Or anyone of Roma descent.

Most of their countries do not have the same issues of structural racism that the US does (largely because there weren’t enough people with recent non-European origins to make a viable political constituency to target), and they don’t have the legacy of dealing with a country that was involuntarily multicultural from the beginning, but in some sense that has allowed casual and personal racism to fester in a way that most Americans would find disconcerting.

I’m generally of the opinion that most people, even stupid people, are fairly chill when there’s only a one visible minority in their town, even if clueless and rude. Where things get dicey is when you combine economic insecurity from any source whatsoever with whatever number of visible minorities is enough to make a particular stupid person think, “hmm, that’s a lot of visible minorities.” Bonus racism/xenophobia points if any significant percentage of the minorities are gainfully employed. Double bonus points if any of them has ever committed a street crime.

All the more reason to emphasize the tough ones!

Also, have you SEEN inflation lately?!?!?

Even then, I can’t quite find a single Linguistics term for this phenomenon, where it becomes a thing of its own or even replaces the original. ‘Eggcorn’ and ‘Malaphor’ seem to be pretty decent casual terms.