games

And spent like 10 looking at and configuring mods. It's a great pre-game!

https://twitter.com/ConcernedApe/status/1769772266227671525 - original post

1.6 drops TOMORROW and CA has been teasing patch notes for the past week. Everyone thought it might be a swamp farm type, so this is wildly different than what's been speculated. Giving you a coup that early is absolutely wild.

They released the character creator early as a demo! Here's my main pawn Ringo.

You're a liberal if you don't choose either bread dog or the dog that looks like Stalin

new trunk is pretty good i guess

this game still sucks though

The actual execution was a mess, but Skullface's inspiration for his parasite weapon being the experience of linguistic imperialism as a child was a really novel premise. The idea that he would get his revenge by creating a weapon that killed anyone who spoke English is some cool super-villain shit I don't think I've ever encountered before. "Race-selective" weapons, genetic-targetting weapons, religious indoctrination viruses, I've seen all those, but I think MGSV is the only time I've encountered a weapon that targets a language community.

Online games will now be banned from giving players rewards if they log in every day, if they spend on the game for the first time or if they spend several times on the game consecutively. All are common incentive mechanisms in online games.

The new rules revealed on Friday are the most explicit yet aimed at curbing in-game spending. Besides banning reward features, games are also required to set limits on how much players can top up their digital wallets for in-game spending.

Games are also banned from offering probability-based lucky draw features to minors, and from enabling the speculation and auction of virtual gaming items.

Ever since I got introduced to the joys of Minesweeper by Girl_DM_ I've been having a lot of fun playing it as a little timewaster. I'm specifically playing the version from Simon Tatham's lovely Portable Puzzle Collection (more specifically the Android port via F-Droid) which unlike the original Minesweeper does NOT require guessing. Most of the time, I'm well-versed enough in patterns and testing candidate solutions that I'm able to clear a 16x16 board with 99 mines in about 3-5 minutes. But on a fairly regular basis I'll run into situations where I get stuck and it seems like I'd either have to calculate an inordinate amount of possible solutions or just make a random guess, neither of which are appealing. Here's one such example:

with annotations

without annotations

There's probably some cool Minesweeper shorthand I could use to describe the constraints, but what I tried to show with my annotations is how I understand that, for each of the annotated squares, there is a mutually-exclusive binary choice (or in the case of the 3, two choices) for where a mine could be located. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, while the choices are internally mutually exclusive, it doesn't seem like there's any permutation of those choices that is invalid so I can't eliminate any possibilities. My usual strategy is to fix one choice and see if it results in a contradiction. For instance, if the other mine for the 2 is the upper choice, we can clear the lower square. That means the lower square for the 1 must be a mine, and this still leaves either of the two bottom choices as valid for the 3 (so this is a possible configuration based on these constraints).

The only remaining sections have a lot of freedom which makes them daunting to analyze. Of the remaining unanalyzed squares, from top to bottom they have 2, 2, and 3 mines remaining, respectively, which is quite a lot of options to fully check, and I can only eliminate a few heuristically (e.g. the top 3 must have at least one mine in either the east or southeast space, since otherwise the 4 to the south can't be fulfilled; the 4 must not have the remaining mines all in the east column because otherwise the 2 and 1 can't be fulfilled). I'm sure if I went through them methodically I would eventually arrive at an answer, but that's pretty tedious, so I usually just give up and generate a new board in this kind of situation.

TL;DR: am I missing some neat heuristic(s) that will allow me to either slash the possible solutions to a more manageable number or eliminate individual solutions very quickly, or is this kind of difficult spot just an inevitable outcome for some boards?

I want a Mario gashapon machine in my home.

Snagged a pair a few hours from my location. Seeing available seats disappear before my eyes 7 months out.

RAINBOWS??? I can't believe the industry has been woke for 20 years, SMH my head