Yeah, thanks - that must have been it. I read their post with the inference I took from the title in my head and didn’t re-examine it after reading their message. And they didn’t say anything like “it’s been a great 8 years” like a lot of similar posts might to dispel it.

I mystified what it was that I read in that post that made me think that they only lasted a month to begin with, before announcing they were shutting down in a month. And even more confusing that I’ve literally never heard of them, that seemed reasonable when I thought they were a month old.

Some people are going to get screwed pretty hard here then, if they’ve been buying games there for years. Pretty horrific management of the situation if they can’t work out a deal with steam to save people’s games.

How could their costs be high enough that they can’t survive more than ONE month after launch? But we all dodged the bullet I guess, can you imagine this happening a year in when people actually had a chance to buy multiple games from them? What a pitiful response. It’ll be harder for anybody to enter the market when things like this happen.

They plan on using local materials as often as possible. 100% guarantee that would include making lunar concrete, not shipping terrestrial concrete up there. Rough napkin math: It would take a full, dedicated Falcon 9 launch just to ship the 15 metric tonnes needed for a single launch pad. Not a great use of resources.

Regolith is SHARP, never having been eroded by water. Don’t want to get that stufd in your lungs. Or engines, vehicles, or electronics, I imagine.

Yeah, for sure. I’ll posit the same question I asked of another lemming:

Let’s pretend like he didn’t persevere, even after remembering, and save two planets in the process. Now where are all the other book moments that make him a proper coward? Or is one weak moment when faced with death all it takes for you? He’s just irredeemably a coward because he couldn’t force himself to elect to die with 4.5 hours notice?

Yes, that is the ONE moment of cowardice I have repeatedly alluded to, sorry if I was being too discrete while trying not to directly spoil the plot. Let’s pretend like he didn’t persevere, even after remembering, and save two planets in the process. Now where are all the other book moments that make him a proper coward? Or is one weak moment when faced with death all it takes for you? He’s just irredeemably a coward because he couldn’t force himself to elect to die with 4.5 hours notice?

The word coward was used 5 times total in the novel, and it was Stratt accusing him of being a coward twice before he ever called himself one, denegrating himself AFTER recalling the memory of his selection for the mission.

Like I said, he did certainly have a cowardly act when faced with death. One act does not make a person a coward, and for the whole story up to AND after that point, he dives headlong into danger.

Maybe the literal word wasn’t used - but I’m failing to think of a single other cowardly act from Grace in the whole novel. I’d be happy to reread any section that you think fits your narrative, but for now I really strongly disagree and had the opposite takeaway.

He might have thought himself cowardly, but he was certainly not a coward. That same “coward” didn’t sit on his ass and drink the second he woke up, he figured out what was going on and set his mind to solving the problem. Grace didn’t scream bloody murder when he shut down the centrifuge, he… just did it I guess. (Like, wtf else did you think was about to happen, movie Grace?) He didn’t scream and try and run away from Rocky, he was instantly excited and eagerly worked his ass off for a first contact with an intelligent alien race.

I’m not sure about unbearably cringe…

There was so much humor in the book, I found myself laughing constantly. But I do have to agree that for some reason, the humor of the film hardly ever landed for me. Some of the jokes that carried over from the novel worked fine for me still.

My theater was roughly half full and they were surprisingly quiet too, so I don’t think it was just me. It was the first showtime on my large format screen - maybe they were all enthusiasts who were just as angry as I was that the highly competent Grace of the book was turned into a bumbling, constantly terrified idiot in the film.

If you’re looking for more competency porn like The Martian, they pivoted HARD away from that with this adaptation. They turned Grace into a bumbling idiot and a top to bottom coward. It was awful. Did the screenwriters even read this fucking book, or just the plot synopsis?

One time as a kid, I got myself in trouble and I got TV taken away from me - my dad came up to my room with a pair of scissors and just cut my coax cable. I stripped that bad boy and shoved the end back in to my TV, worked a treat. I also had my wifi antenna from my desktop taken from me at some point, so I took a paper clip and stuck it in there - not GREAT reception, but it was good enough!

JUST. FUCKING. STOP. YOU DON’T HAVE THE CHOPS.

I’m absolutely not an expert and not qualified here. But if we accept that you’re 100% right and need way more broad options, is it even possible to solve this at scale? (I’m assuming we’re all talking about the US since our education is atrocious). 350M Americans spread out across 3.5M sq miles - only smaller in landmass than China, Canada, and Russia, but with substantially LESS uninhabitable land and a relatively large population. That means our population density is nearly ¼ of China’s.

How many different learning styles do we support? Do they each get their own tailored schools, each with their own full staff? How do you equally support the 1/5 of the country (60M+) that live in all those spread out rural communities? And what time scale can we even fix this problem on, understanding that we’re in the midst of a teacher shortage as it is?

I think proper spending on education absolutely is part of this equation, but someone will have to gut our military spending, so that’s hurdle number one. But regardless, tax dollars being a limited resource… I wonder how much spending doing this right would cost. For a full educational overhaul.

Hope they’re ready to enforce this, because it’s meaningless if they don’t and you KNOW that ICE will just blow this off and they’ll have a derth of opportunities for enforcement.

Yeah, boo Larian, making games more fun and interesting. The fuck they thinking? /s

This is some quality reporting - that’s more details on the memes’ origination than I’ve ever read before. As far as I knew it was utterly random.

“Where did this even come from?” Vance continued. “I don’t understand it. When we were kids all of our viral trends at least had an origin story.”

First of all - hilarious that the article explains where it came from and then ends with this quote.

But no, we absolutely did not have an origin story for all of our childhood memes. Every kid knew about the Mew under the truck in Pokémon red/blue, or that Marilyn Manson removed a rib. People still marvel today at the proliferation of that (false) information - how did we all hear it, and where in the world did it come from?

I feel this same way about Dakota Johnson. How can anyone watch ANY of her previous work, and then they CAST HER AGAIN???

I never did get too into PVP - I did enough arena to get a bunch of low hanging achievements and always enjoyed the occasional casual battleground, especially when there was a lot of downtime between patches… But otherwise PVE was my jam.

I think it’s a pretty easy call for me - World of Warcraft raiding was some of the most fun I’ve ever had gaming. The pinnacle was probably when my guild got Realm First! Fall of the Lich King (25-man heroic). We spent MONTHS grinding away at it - we had the 10-man realm first achievement as well and could clear heroic with a variety of group comps, 2 or 3 groups per week would run on off-raid nights. But for 25-man heroic, we could clear the rest of the raid in 2-3 hours as I recall, so we’d take some swings at him on night 1 and then we’d spend 2 full raid nights on The Lich King - the final boss of Ice Crown Citadel raid and in fact the final boss of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion.

For SEVEN months we did this. He was tough af. He had a number of abilities where a single person fucks up and either the whole raid wipes immediately, or it rapidly snowballs out of control otherwise. So after a month’s long uphill fight, and with competing guilds just as close as we were, it was an INSANE moment when we got our realm first kill. It was such a ridiculous high, everyone screaming with relief and excitement. The realm second kill happened that same night, too - so we just narrowly managed to earn our server first kill.

We continued with realm firsts in the Cataclsym expansion on Sinestra, Ragnaros, and Deathwing. I got my first and only legendary weapon - Dragonwrath this expansion. And finally the Mists of Pandaria expansion was the beginning of the end for our guild as a lot of long time players like myself started falling off, so after earning #1 for the first raid tier, things slipped from there. I had a ton of personal victories in game too - after earning Dragonwrath, the most esteemed of all was earning the achievement Insane in the Membrane.

And yet - none of those other victories remotely compared to that first kill of the Lich King. It was truly a special moment.