I agree. I'm also not familiar with Bob Dylan in more than an abstract "he's a musician" sort of way. The second flowed effortlessy, conveying tone, intention, and imagery.
I have a friend who is having twins. I'm using some new woodworking techniques to make a pair of baby rattles for her. The real challenge is trying to make two shapes with organic curves and precise cuts that are as close to identical or mirror-image as possible, while also hiding the joints.
It's very low-tech. No screens, no CNC, the most technically advanced tool is the digital RPM readout on the lathe. It's nice to disconnect from my screens once in a while.
Around 1991 I remember having a book that was a cross between Choose Your Own Adventure and D&D. It was about the same physical size, but it was a full (albeit small) D&D campaign. There was a character sheet at the back of the book you could copy, and then as you went through the game you would roll for yourself and for your foes, tracking hits and HP on your sheet until you won all the loot or you died.
I've tried looking for these, but I've always run up against a brick wall. There's a good chance it was a European thing (I was there that year, and can't remember if I brought it or acquired it).
Any chance the HN hive mind has heard of something like this?
Some feature a branching storyline while in others the paragraphs are arranged in a 2D grid-like fashion and you can visit an earlier place multiple times.
(One thing that has stuck with me is a bad ending in one of them, where you are captured and the last choice you make is whether you want to sit in a small cage or stand in a tall and narrow cage for the rest of your life. I mean come on)
There were dozens of such series in the late '80s and early '90s. My first guess is the "Lone Wolf" series mentioned above (launched 1984). It has a grimdark flavor; if you remember creepy illustrations, I'd look there first.
I was able to break through the scam veneer on one of these calls. It was remarkably professional up until I outright called him out and told him how I knew it was a scam (the email "from Google" didn't have the right headers, he missed a bit of the terminology, didn't recognize a term, and the caller ID number was listed as being used for this scam).
I asked where he got my information, and he claimed he pulled it from Github and cross-referenced it with a large public dump.
Nice. We'll try this during our next team-building. I've got two suggestions for games:
Gartic Phone (garticphone.com) is a telephone-like game, suited for online play. Each player comes up with a phrase (e.g. "cat on a hot tin roof"). The phrase goes to the next player who is tasked with drawing that. Then that drawing is sent to the next player who has to describe the drawing. Then the description is sent to the next player who draws it. Repeat until you get back to the first player or to a certain number of rounds. At the end replay all of the transitions to great amusement.
The second that I think would work well is Liar's Dice. Each player is given 5 dice. Roll the dice and each player can only see their own dice. Players then take turns bidding on how many dice are on the table (collectively across all players). Bids must either increase in count, or keep the count and increase in number. e.g. if I bid five 4's, the next player could bid six 2's, or five 6's, but not five 2's. Any player may challenge the last bid at any time. Once challenged, all dice are shown, and whoever is wrong (the challenger or the bidder) loses a die. Losing becomes a vicious cycle; the more you lose the less information you have, making it more likely for you to lose. As an option (but one that I think makes the game better), any die rolled as a 1 is wild and counts as all other dice.
That wasn't my point. The point is such a back-door doesn't necessarily enable dragnet surveillance - of the kind that,for example, Snowdon revealed the US government was doing.
There is a big difference in my view between court authorized search warrants ( in effect ), and blanket surveillance.
Can authorities abuse the former? Sure - but on the other hand it's hard to argue that authorities should have no powers at all to perform searches if they make the appropriate case to the courts.
They've already demonstrated that they're willing to use secret courts and gag orders to prevent Apple from disclosing what they're doing (referenced in the article). How would you know if they're abusing it?
If there were abusing it large scale, I still think it would come out ( cf Snowdon ) - the more people are involved, the more likely something is to leak.
ie in terms of conspiracy theories - those that involve large numbers of people being in the know, but nothing leaking, are the most unlikely.
However I totally agree that the recent trend towards secret courts, the attempts to remove access to a jury of your peers, and the creeping abuse of terrorism legalisation is both wrong and worrying.
However that's kind of my point - the existence of state powers of search isn't the issue, the issue is whether they are under proper control. The issue isn't whether the government can see the stuff I have with Apple, it's what's the process to allow that to happen.
It's likely for Bluetooth access rather than WiFi. It's not uncommon for IoT devices to use bluetooth for setup, and it would be trivially cheap to put BLE beacons on every subway station exit in NYC, essentially giving you fine-enough location detection to uniquely identify most people within a week.
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