So yeah if “not a car guy” you might bounce off of the first couple of seasons. Here’s a sample from the shenanigan era: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bf7q8lWEd-o

Early mods didn’t have the luxury of engine hooks and data separation designed for the purpose of third-party modding.

Yes they did. id Software, Valve and 3D Realms included their SDKs on the disk. All the way back in the 90’s they gave players the same tools they used to build the game. Any game that descends from Doom, all the way into the Source engine, store their assets in .wad files. We were replacing imps with Simpsons characters and titty chicks back when Clinton was president.

Now, the distinction between a game and a mod, I don’t buy the standard to be it’s own game as “started from scratch.”

Valve licensed the Quake engine from id Software. They changed it so much that the GoldSrc engine is considered it’s own thing; anything from skeletal animations to weapon reloading. They hired a novelist to write the story, they generated a ton of their own textures, models, sound effects and music.

Compare that to the original Counter Strike which was a pack of maps and some logic layered over Half-Life’s deathmatch mode.

Standalone product? Buy and run with no other dependencies? Game.

Officially released product from the same developer and/or publisher and/or rights holder that requires owning the original to function? Expansion pack.

Officially released product from the same publisher/developer/rights holder that does not require owning the original to function? Sequel.

Unofficially released product often a fan work that requires a copy of the original game to function? Mod.

I didn’t have to buy Quake to run my copy of Half-Life GOTY edition back in 1999. Though it came with a copy of TFC, which I think is technically an expansion pack as it required Half-Life to function but was officially released as a showcase of those modding tools I talked about in the beginning.

Is it worth it? I think so, I enjoyed it. Does it hold up? Complicated question.

The Clarkson-Hammond-May show ran for a couple decades and went through three major phases: journalism, shenanigan and adventure.

In earlier seasons they were more of a typical car show, they did more journalism relevant to the average driver…in early 2000s Britain. Top Gear isn’t looked back on fondly for Richard Hammond reporting on viewer polls for new car reliability in 2002. They still made an entertaining show, the cool wall and things like that are entertaining, but I would start you out with later episodes and let you watch these later if you like it. Series staples like taking sports cars for a fast lap around their track to compare their times, and doing celebrity interviews complete with a racing lap around the same track in a compact car, the “Star In A Reasonably Priced Car” segment, begin here.

5 or 6 years in they started the shenanigan era, which is probably what peopel mean when they say “This reminds me of Top Gear.” They’d buy three used cars and go do ridiculous things, like turn them into camper vans, or outfit them for racing, or make sports cars into ambulances. In the words of Richard Hammond, “What this was, was fun. And I think we’re quite good at fun.” If I can point to an episode to introduce new viewers to the series, it’d be the British Leyland challenge episode. The show really starts to shine in this era; the three hosts have great chemistry together and the shenanigans give them more opportunity to play off one another.

That gradually transitioned into the adventure era, as “three guys drive some old cars to the other side of London” becomes racing Veyron against a Cessna 182 across the length of Europe, or driving three old four-by-fours across South America or three ordinary RWD cars across Botswana. The show gradually abandoned the studio segments and became just, the three guys go somewhere in the world and drive some cars in interesting or spectacular locations. There’s great stuff here, their Botswana trip is amazing, their Korea trip is amazing, their Nile trip is wonderful, their North Pole trip is NUTS. But I’d watch earlier cheap car challenge episodes first.

No, that’s too much of a stretch. Half-Life is it’s own game, they licensed and then modified Quake’s engine. That’d be like calling Satisfactory a mod of Fortnite.

After about a decade on Mint I ended up on Fedora.

Building PCs.

I’m perfectly capable of it, I built the PC I’m typing this on. It’s just…the world’s gone to hell in a Depends Adult Diaper.

Woodworker with a small, badly ventilated shop here. I’ve been known to apply oil-based urethane outdoors. Some lower fume options for finishes:

• Latex paint. Water based, emits less toxic fumes than you do.

• Drying oils. Synthetics exist but go with linseed or tung oil, or if you’re extremely bougie, walnut oil. No solvents here; it’s a plant oil that soaks into the wood and then reacts with the oxygen in the air to polymerize.

• Shellac. Old fashioned, not the most durable. Functions like a lacquer but it dissolves in denatured alcohol, one of the easier ones to tolerate. You can get stunning results though it’s not the most durable available, most notably if you spill booze on it it’ll dissolve the finish. Easy to repair though.

• Acrylic. If you need a built up film finish, acrylic is perhaps a way to go. Dries crystal clear, doesn’t amber the wood like an oil-based poly does and isn’t quite as durable, but it’s water based.

• Epoxy. Or some other catalyzing finish, usually fumeless, for when you need your projects entombed like a Reddit hot dog.

• UV curing finishes. These can be a little pricey as they’re kind of new, but you paint it on the surface, and then shine a UV light on that surface for 2 minutes and it’s set and ready to install and use. Because there is zero solvent or carrier, no evaporation, you get more coverage per unit volume of product than a urethane or lacquer.

Here’s a picture of my mother’s cat

And here’s one of a little night stand I built, shortly after finishing

Tonoight:

• James trips over a phone cord, “Oh cock!”

• Hammond says the word ‘egalitarian’ “Egalitarian.”

• and I hit a man with a shovel. PANG “oof!” “Sorry.”

dump a pregant cow next to the kitten labeled “Chromium”

My main thing with solar is I wish they’d put panels over existing parking lots or large buildings. This is a thing that is already done in some places, this is a solved engineering problem, but in my area anywhere a solar farm has sprung up it’s been a field that previously either grew crops or was undeveloped woods. And I know the reason someone’s going to come back with: To install solar awnings over an existing Wal Mart parking lot, you need to tear up the asphalt to install power lines, build the actual structure, permitting is probably more expensive, and you have to have some or all of the parking lot down for awhile during construction restricting the use of the store. Meanwhile, clear cut 10 acres of forest and you get lumber to sell to a paper mill.

Consider a stack of solo cups. They’re tapered and designed to efficiently nest one inside another for efficient transport and storage. Though they are filled with each other, we still consider them empty. Because though they are designed to nest together, that’s not what they’re for.

You cannot fulfill your own life by filling it with similarly empty people.

Fill it with booze instead.

An irrational decision.

He got polio and was bedridden, and he came up with this hoist system of pulleys and ropes to move himself around with, which went wrong and strangled him. So at least his death was sufficiently hilarious.

Stand back 3 wolf moon, we’ve got two sauropod lightning.

As in, they’re gonna stop making redundant bullshit proprietary memory cards in formats no one else uses?

Great. Glad to hear it. Good riddance. Don’t let the casket lid hit you on your way out.

Well if he woke up obviously the first stab didn’t kill him so I’d stab him again.

On the surface, that works. Problem is, to use the Fediverse you have to get a bit deeper into it than with email.

Email is designed to evoke the UX of the physical post office. To use the post office, or email, you need to know your address, and your recipients address. You need to know where to put outgoing letters, and where to get incoming letters. Even if you’re vaguely aware of Grumman LLVs and letter sorting machines and trucks and trains and whatnot, you can still get away with conceptualizing it as, you put a letter in a box, it is then “In the mail” until it is delivered to the recipient. Email presents itself to the end user as exactly that.

ActivityPub might be “just another protocol” like smtp or pop3 or whatever but the user experience is vastly different in ways people really haven’t had to deal with before. Lemmy isn’t lke the post office, it’s like Reddit, except there’s 90 little Reddits each with their own slightly different rules and a complex web of which will communicate with what. The format of the electronic communique is of no consequence to the end user.

On Reddit, if I write a post in a subreddit and click Post, it is stored on Reddit’s servers, and anyone with a Reddit account can access Reddit’s servers and see it because we’re accessing the same monolithic system. On Lemmy, I’m currently posting to lemmy.world from a sh.itjust.works account in response to an account from programming.dev. On which of those three independent platforms will this message be stored? How could someone from, say, piefed.social see it? I genuinely don’t understand this fully msyself and I’ve been on Lemmy for a couple years now.

The several apps thing I don’t see as much of a barrier to Redditors; most are already used to the platform’s official app being garbagepuke and going with something else so they’ll figure that out relatively quickly.

I haven’t yet seen the “Pick an instance to sign up with. It doesn’t matter, well actually it does, for reasons we’re not explaining right now” problem really addressed in a meaningful way. Those lists of instances to join when you go to Lemmy or pixelfed or whoever’s website? Most of them don’t get filled out correctly by instance admins; so they’re either the default boiler plate, or they’re the first two-thirds of the first sentence of a paragraph about what Lemmy is.

Lemmy.world

Lemmy is an open source, federated link aggregator platform powered by ActivityPub, the fastest growing…