msfroh

A lot of people don't think I can act

Inconceivable!

Whoops... I saw a grainy promo photo and listened to the song and jumped to conclusions. Thanks for the correction!

As someone commuting to the city from the Eastside (now taking the train every day), I was unfamiliar with the sad state of the 8 line before this post.

There's a dedicated website: https://fixthel8.com/

I learned from that site that all-girl punk band Tacocat wrote a song called F. U. #8: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRFlROqgFwo

The sound of a dog drinking from a sprinkler?

Usually the "trick" is the fact that the ring fits through the hole.

I think I managed to win my first run after about 40 tries, where I got lucky with a really good build. I think it was with the rail and a couple of the bomb upgrades from the Daedalus hammer -- the rocket and the 5-shot. I probably had a boon that increased special damage (Aphrodite, maybe?).

I didn't win again until number 55-60, but then I started winning every three runs or so. Eventually, I started winning every run, regardless of weapon. Then I started dialing up the heat and winning without using Olympian keepsakes. I eventually hit 100% on Steam.

A year later, I replayed it on Xbox when it was on Gamepass, and I think I won on my 11th run. (I needed a bit of metaprogression and time to relearn the enemy patterns after being away for a while.)

My opinion is that it's a near-perfect roguelite in terms of luck and metaprogression helping beginners, but there's still a definite skill element. Builds that I hated when I first started eventually became some of my favorites. I feel like the learning curve wasn't punishing, but the game wasn't "easy" for me.

I'm guessing that most music platforms get the majority of their sales from outside the top 20.

Or are they talking about PC gaming versus console gaming? Actually, if you include mobile games, do the top 20 represent the majority of sales? Again, it feels like there's a very significant long tail on mobile as well.

Then it sure is a good thing that the vast majority of the US census is not the result of door to door enumeration. Most people complete the census online or by mail.

Isn't it a reference to the trick that mentalists have been doing for decades? My mind immediately went to Uri Gellar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_bending

But terrapins are not tortoises, since they're semiaquatic, but are differentiated from common turtles by their presence in brackish water.

Do you think prices work like "A big Mac is 3", so it will be CAD$3 or USD$3 or 3€ or 3£, and that's what makes the Canadian dollar weak for travel?

Otherwise, I don't understand the question. Like, yes, 1 Canadian dollar is worth less than 1 Euro, but after conversion a lot of prices end up being similar. (Beer and cheese tend to be a lot cheaper in Europe than in Canada, but that has nothing to do with exchange rates.)

In Canada, polling stations are also run by members of the public. I think they get paid, but it's a small enough amount that most people think of it as volunteering. In my experience, it's usually retired people. They also sit there for the day. On election day itself, they're also responsible for counting the ballots and making sure that the ballots are preserved. (I was once a volunteer scrutineer for one of the political parties, so I got to be there to watch the ballot-counting process.)

Regarding early voting, my recollection is that a subset of polling places were open on two or three specific days in the weeks leading up to the election. Like, if my riding had 25 polling sites, only maybe 4 (one in each "quadrant") were open for early voting. On the plus side, I think the early voting days were usually on weekends.

On the topic of "remote voting", my wife is Romanian and used to vote at the train station in Iași, since her official residence was still her home town. I always thought that was an interesting solution to the "voting outside your home district" problem, since it kind of implies that you're away from home because you've been riding a train. That said, since Iași is a university town and most people never seem to update their official residence (like, most of my tech worker friends officially "lived" in their hometown, even if they'd been in Iași for 10 years), the lineup to vote at the train station during a presidential runoff could be hours long. Of course, nobody needs to "register" to vote at the train station, since they just show their national ID card to prove they're eligible to vote.