@msprout I think the ideal would be for your library to fire up its own instance and give its librarians accounts. Sort of like how you get a company email address at your job.
@msprout apparently they all broke as a consequence of Twitter no longer serving content except to logged-in users. I wonder if this is what will push corporate accounts onto the Fediverse - it's no good for a company to say "watch our Twitter feed to learn about upcoming sales/flight delays/we're coming to your neighbourhood" if the general public can't do that anymore.
Just watched a piece on a Dutch newssite about a guy who started to learn to read and write at a later age because his little daughter was starting to read too and he wanted to be able to help her out.
And I found it pretty striking what he said at the end when he was asked what that felt like:
Freedom. It felt like a lot of freedom.
Education is important, folks!
Iran's Top Sunni Cleric Says Baha'i Rights Must be Respected - IranWire https://www.google.com/url?rct=j&sa=t&url=https%3A%2F%2Firanwire.com%2Fen%2Fnews%2F117605-irans-top-sunni-cleric-says-bahai-rights-must-be-respected%2F&ct=ga&cd=CAIyGmFiNTY1NDNmYjgzZGRjNmM6Y29tOmVuOlVT&usg=AOvVaw0GLYcJFKRrJufpKi3Evz9m&utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #IranianRevolution #WomenLifeFreedom
I really wish TSN would use some other method to indicate the team in possession of the ball. Simply colouring the down and distance isn't helpful when the teams are represented by such similar shades of red. #CFLoM
@emarktaylor@thecanadian.social @cfl someone explain to me why the PI flag was thrown on the TD play but not the convert? The defender had a whole handful of the receiver's sleeve
the far north burbs of chicago are a land of beautiful landscaping and elegant evening lighting shining onto massive homes.
surely the queen of landscaping & evening lighting in the north burbs is the baha'i temple of wilmette, one of my favorite places in chicagoland.
i got to visit it at night the other day. as you can see, it's extremely fabulous, with (extremely elegantly-lit) fountains and (extremely well-kept) gardens all around. i particularly like the herby/cedary smells in the gardens.
for an added bonus, i wandered into the wilmette yacht club (the dinky gate was literally wide open) & got a view of the temple from among the yachts. it seemed fitting for the north burbs (which is also a place of *private* landscapes).
as for the temple itself, my brother (a concrete enthusiast) tells me that it's made from white concrete with multiple kinds of quartz mixed in as aggregate so that it reflects light & shines.
coming from hawai'i to the flatlands of illinois, it seems obvious what they were trying to do: they built themselves a sacred, glowing mountain. they were like "well, no sacred mountains around here. let's build one!" and i think they accomplished their goal. people love it, gravitate to it, and it gives most people a feeling of awe. (in the language of hawai'i, i would say it has a lot of mana, or power). it's strange to have that toward a human-constructed object, but i guess it's something...
learn more about the temple: https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/a-vision-in-concrete/
@Diggler67 during the preseason there was a call - I can't remember which game, unfortunately - where the call on the field was RTP for a low hit, and it was challenged and upheld. That was an error, in my opinion, because on the play in question, the quarterback had been flushed from the pocket. At that point he's legally a runner, not a passer - and you can't have roughing the passer without a passer! It's perfectly okay to make a shoestring tackle on a runner, even if he is the quarterback. It's RTP, not RTQB.
@Diggler67 I'd have preferred it's a bright line rule. You hit him in the head, whether or not you mean to, you're flagged. If I were to make an exception, it wouldn't be for glancing contact, but for if the QB ducks.
Here I don't even think it was that light of a hit - Maier's head got snapped almost ninety degrees left from the contact, and rotation is thought to be a bigger risk than linear motion.
@Diggler67 meanwhile, very first halftime of the season and the panel's already publicly criticising the refs and command centre for failing to call the hit to the head on Maier...
@lapingvino For a frame of reference, today's millionaire would own less than $35k in 1912 dollars.
@peterdrake fair enough! I live in weather risk country, not seismic risk country, so I don't actually know much about how to prepare for an earthquake (or even what to do in the moment, really). I'd simply figured that promoting a mindset of "this bad thing could happen to you out of the blue, in the sort of places you actually spend your time" might prompt people to consider it more seriously in their daily lives, and mobile games offer a way to do that which you can't get on other platforms.
Looking at the ready.gov recommendations, the two things that come to mind are:
Keeping the surroundings safe: The player can do non-time-gated minigames where he rearranges shelves of knickknacks to put the heavy stuff closer to the floor. Maybe he gets an XP multiplier on the next time-gated mission based on how well he arranges things.
Memorising contact info in case your phone is damaged: The player adds in a handful of emergency contacts and the game periodically challenges him to recite a particular contact's phone number by memory. This can leverage the fact that he probably has these in his contact list already (another advantage unique to mobile) so reentering them is unnecessary. You can also detect focus loss and mark the task failed if he switches away to cheat by looking it up in another app.
@peterdrake phone games can initiate interactions at any time with a reasonable expectation of promptly being seen. For something like an emergency preparedness game, time-gating means you could leverage that to simulate having to react immediately, which is a feature not generally available on a console or PC which spends a lot of its life turned off with the player not in the room.
For example, the game could schedule a notification for a particular time, and then the user has only a limited window to complete a mission where he navigates his avatar to safety. Finish by the deadline, and he gets XP toward the next level. Level up, and he gets challenged with harder missions - maybe he has to save a child before escaping, or ride out the first wave in a semi-safe location and then evacuate before the aftershocks hit, etc.
Location was also brought up, and at least on Android that includes altitude. How high above ground level are you when the notification goes off, about four storeys? The game generates a four-storey-tall map for your mission. This way you make things as relevant to the player's circumstances as you can, which might help if your purpose is ultimately to improve the player's real-life awareness of earthquake safety.
@peterdrake Don't worry, they are working on bigger and better UX fails. I discovered when using a loaner car this month that the computer will just disable the gas pedal until you put your seatbelt on. I'm diligent about wearing mine when I'm on the roads, but making me buckle up to pull forward from the driveway into the garage is excessive.
@BCWilliams71 Yeah Huff has a habit of getting rid of players while they still have a season or two of high level play left. Charleston Hughes, Nik Lewis, now BLM... just have to hope that the money saved by switching to Maier is enough to make up whatever the difference in skill is at this stage.
@nomi see, that one doesn't even work on mobile. There's an infinite redirect loop if you don't have cookies enabled.
@nomi that's actually reasonably good on both. I browse with fairly restrictive JavaScript settings by default, and most websites end up far more broken than this. On mobile the welcome blurb never collapses so it takes up too much of the screen, and on desktop it has an unnecessary horizontal scroll, but other than that it's very usable. It's an A-/B+ site in my book.
@Downes this does the trick on most of that kind of paywall, where the content is on the page, just hidden. That represents most of what I come across, but some sites (notably WSJ) show just a paywall without content behind it in which case you're just out of luck.
@Bee Ah, thanks. Any ideas what models of those I ought to be considering? I'll note that TWSBI also offers a number of attractively-priced vacuum/plunger and piston fill pens, but they're quite wide for my liking.