Quality job being a dad
The Walton Adventures has a great set of videos of a dad and his daughter.
Mattress review sites are completely corrupt
What started as a Fast Company reporter getting a free mattress from a friend’s friend led to a web of lawsuits, corruption, and a revelation of just exactly how blurred internet reviews and advertisings had become.
The long story short? A great number of mattress review sites are often simply paid advertising for mattress companies. In other cases, the mattress company simply buys out the review site. This happened in 2016 – so you can probably expect this method of taking over review sites to have become even more popular.
Some of the worst offenders? Bed-in-a-box company Casper was known to sue bloggers that gave unfavorable reviews while promoting bloggers that gave good reviews. Casper apparently tried to use cyber-warfare tactics and even tried to buy out a review site that tried to blow the whistle on them.
- Fast Company report ‘The War To Sell You A Mattress Is An Internet Nightmare‘
Photoshop 2024
The things we’re able to do with 2D images with just a few clicks is absolutely mind blowing.
You can’t spell funicular without F-U-N
Switzerland is Life takes you on a cogwheel train that transports passengers to the top of Switzerland’s Mount Pilatus at 6,983′. It starts getting quite hair-raising around minute 10
Or maybe just go outside and live it yourself
There’s a new life simulator game inZOI that takes the idea of The Sims and updates it for modern graphics. The 4K gameplay trailer shows an incredibly detailed virtual world and with its avatars going grocery shopping, cooking fried chicken, watering plants, and going to the gym.
Or, maybe just go out and live real life in infinite resolution.
Kinetic PC case
Idea Idea wanted to make a unique PC case. Why not make one that is also a kinetic, moving piece of art.
Programmable Music Box
Most music boxes can only play one song, but why not make a music box that is fully programmable? The Muro Box can play any song by using computer-controlled wheels to pluck the metal forks. You can program it using a mobile app or a MIDI device. It has a 40-note chromatic scale, and more than 50,000 songs in a downloadable library.
It’s going for an eye watering $995 pledge on Kickstarter. I think it’s ridiculously steep for a few dozen stepper motors and an app, but they do offer a smaller $299 version.
Bugs exploitable in Payday for Speedruns
Engine exploits are great fun in games. They make the impossible possible and speedrunners love them. Payday and Payday 2 were written using the Diesel game engine and there have been a number of interesting bugs found over the years.
Here is a breakdown of 6 of the more exploitable bugs used by speedrunners.
Care of the Eucharist
In my post-Christmas days off of work, I went to morning daily mass as I often do.
While most people are excited for the run-up to Christmas, I think the days right after Christmas are a quieter time for spiritual reflection and enjoying the miracle of Christmas. Many places in the world don’t give gifts on Christmas day, but on Epiphany (Jan 6th, when the magi are said to have arrived). It’s a good reminder that Christmas is celebrated from Christmas day until the Baptism of the Lord, which usually falls on the Sunday after Epiphany (so, usually the second Sunday of January).
The day after Christmas while I was praying before mass, I wondered what it was like for Joseph and Mary with their 1 day old newborn. Surely Jesus was like every other 1 day old newborn. Equal amounts of being very tiny, vulnerable, precious, and probably the most beautiful thing their parents had ever seen.
While kneeling during the eucharistic prayer during mass, it occurred that this same Jesus, this same tiny child, was present there on the alter as the Eucharist.
It reminded me of the wonder and care we should have when we receive the Eucharist. It should be no less than that of how we would love, adore, and have care with that of a newborn child placed in our arms. The actual presence of Christ our Lord who is carried in us when we receive the Eucharist and go out into the world each day. A Lord who was not only the creator of the universe, but inexplicably, was also willing to become as vulnerable as a newborn infant.
This is an astounding demonstration of love – and one that utterly defeats the pride and arrogance of evil. God gives up an infinite heavenly paradise to join us in our daily lives of joys, toils, and struggles. This is who is present in the Eucharist and wants me to carry Him into the world.
How much of my own comfort am I willing to give up to help those who have it much worse than myself? Would I give up living in a palace to come live with and help the homeless, the spiritually and emotionally lost, the ill?
Perhaps that’s why we have so many saints who did exactly that – such as Elizabeth of Hungary who eschewed her royalty as princess and queen to put a leper in her own bed to care for him. She later used her extensive wealth to open hospitals and then cared for the sick in them. Another is the work of Mother Teresa, who picked up the dying poorest of the poor from the gutters if only to give them a little dignity before death. What am I called to do?
Beware
Beware is an in-development demo by Ondrej_Svadlena. At a glance, it’s an open-world driving game that first appeared in May 2018. In it, you are a driver in what appears to be a rainy, foggy eastern block country in the 70’s. What makes this thing stand out is the atmosphere of tension, disorientation, and paranoia it creates. It’s really fantastic. The player is dropped into anonymous, listless locations, hampered by dense fog and rain-slick backroads. The player encounters various solitary landmarks—as well as mysterious and menacing events.
It’s definitely worth checking out. His Patreon page has the latest information about development and supporters get access to extensive additional content. It seems he is up to version 13 and it appears to maybe even support VR now.
Download here: https://www.indiedb.com/games/beware/downloads
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