addie

Well, at least she looks good in it.

Having hired suits and whatnot before to go to weddings, I'm not quite seeing the logic here. $19k "tax the rich" dress seems a bit of a tasteless disconnect between medium and message, but renting it for $1k doesn't seem crazy. Committee "did their own research" and thought $3k would be more appropriate, when most attendees pay nothing at all? Surely getting her fee refunded would be more in-line?

The two-boss combo => Ornstein and Smough? It can kind of go two ways:

• the first time you play DS, you'll get to that point in the game, and then the fact that your build is probably sub-optimal in many ways, combined with not really having had to fight two enemies with different movesets before, means that you're going to have a really bad time. Can't kite these boys out to fight them separately. Anor Londo isn't particularly great for grinding - you get a lot of souls, but the drops aren't great, so you're probably going to be going back a long way to get better stuff.

• every time you replay DS after beating it, you know these guys will be coming, and you'll have a decent build and decent weapons specifically for them. AL is about the point where a magic build really takes off and you'll finish the entire boss battle in the time it takes to cast crystal soulmass about three times, but there's plenty of viable builds for them. Last few times I've played it through, I've beaten them first time - it's a completely fair fight and it's not hard, exactly; just very unlike anything else you've had to do in the game.

Alas, defeating O&S means that you've pretty much finished the good bit of Dark Souls 1. It's a near flawless-game up until then, enough to rate it as one of the finest games of all time, and then they ran out of dev time. Duke's Archives is good, but brief. Londo Ruins is fine, but the boss is DPS race. Tomb of the Giants is ass. Lost Izalith is beyond ass; should have remained lost. Fortunately, the DLC is excellent and you can go and play that instead.

If we had the technology to freely form diamond, then it's exceptionally hard, has incredible chemical resistance, among the very best thermal conductivities of any material, and it isn't particularly heavy.

Being able to coat the inside of chemical vessels and pipes with diamond would hugely increase their lifespan, a heat exchanger made out of it would be incredible. Great for food processing, since you'd be able to clean it easily; great for abrasive or highly acid / alkili materials that corrode everything else. Probably awesome as a base layer for semi-conductors, as it would be great for heat dissipation.

But we are probably talking about nanotechnology to lay it down in sheets, which we don't have (yet).

They're centrists, in theory. But considering our 'Labour' party behave like moderate right-wingers, and the Tories are attempting beat Reform for the title of 'most unhinged right-wingers', then they come off as very left in comparison.

If he dies while he's over here, I'm all for chucking the cunt in the Moray Firth. It can be an 'ocean current lottery' to see which country finally receives him

Thanks, appreciate that ;-)

Um Jammer Lammy remake when? Not that it's the kind of game that needs an HD update, but getting it low-latency enough to play in an emulator is tricky.

Nice. Am envious of that bread - my dough-from-scratch usually turns out like a loaf, completely wrong for the task at hand.

That sounds pcocainenful.

Fight Club, by Chuck Palahniuk, perhaps? Not that it's a bad book by any means, and the idea is superb, but the execution isn't quite so great - it was his first published novel. The film is exceptional, though.

You'd assume that, but then you've not had the misfortune of using Google Cloud. "Because fuck you, that's why." -- Sundar Pichai.

The big benefit of AWS Linux and Azure Linux is they start up really really quickly on their respective platforms, so if you've an app to run that's fairly platform agnostic then it's easy to deploy at scale. If it's not very platform agnostic then you're in for a world of pain. AL2023 in particular seems to just rename all the packages differently from any other distro just for the fun of it.

Ritardando = slowing down, it's a tempo notation.

pp = pianissimo (very soft), mf = mezzoforte (medium strong). One of my old conductors would say "it's not about volume, it's about feeling", so intensity is a good word, although it often refers to volume. One of the main jobs of the conductor is making sure the music is interpreted in a way that fits the venue; pianissimo can be quite loud (but 'soft') in a big auditorium.

Die doesn't mean anything - at least, not too me as a violinist. Might just be a percussion instruction to let the sound die away, rather than muffling it.