Messages

[Derry Girls]

LameNick is apparently caught in the CleanTalk anti-spam filter and not able to post, but he PMed me with the right answer:

Derry Girls



(The clue in the previous image was that Liam Neeson is from Northern Ireland.)

If you haven't seen it, check it out. It's a delight.

Hopefully Nick will be released from spam filter purgatory soon and allowed to post the next challenge.

There is a piece of trivia about this actor which, if you know it, could help you zero in on the show:

Yay!

I feel like I haven't had a lot of luck with britcoms in this thread (Lovesick and Ghosts in particular were surprisingly hard for people to get), but I'll give it another go:

I just came across an article about this show and recognized the guy.

Ramy.

There is a Mac port of AGS now, and a lot of AGS games do have Mac releases. It just takes a few extra steps (and I think you need a Mac to do it). So that's the easiest: if the game has a Mac release, just play that. Your friend might be able to create a Mac version of their game (or could send you the files to do it) following these instructions: http://www.edenwaith.com/blog/index.php?p=112

If not, you can still get Windows-builds to play on Mac. Here is one guide to how: https://anthonyirwin.com/adventure-game-studio-ags-macos-build/

Another approach is to use the Web engine to play the game in a browser (note that some games may run slow): https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/engine-development/ags-engine-web-port/

Or for older games, it might work better to run them through ScummVM, a universal adventure game engine that now supports older versions of AGS: https://www.scummvm.org/

If you have an older Mac, you can also try to install Wine, a program that lets you run Windows apps on Mac and other platforms: https://www.winehq.org/ This is what I do for games that don't have a Mac version, and I find it usually works well. Unfortunately Wine doesn't work on newer OSX versions. (The last version that supports Wine is 10.14.)

Finally, if all else fails, you can run a Virtual Machine with Windows installed. Parallels (commercial) and VirtualBox: https://www.virtualbox.org/ (free) are the two main contenders. However, I find that AGS games run too slowly in VirtualBox to be playable. (My MacBook is ten years old, though, so not quite top of the line.)

OK, so this looks fantastic, I love the premise, and I really hope you complete it. Seek out help and support when you need, there are a lot of people in the community who will be happy to provide it.

(Also, if you haven't already, check out the AGS Discord server: https://discord.gg/bxVEXWxm)

I don't know if this actually grinds my gears, but when I listen to someone reading a book aloud, and they read out onomatopoeia in dialogue, such as "ahem," "harrumph!" "pshaw!" or "tut tut"/"tsk tsk," as if they were actual words rather than ways to spell out other sounds people make. It makes me think of Gaspode the talking dog in Discworld, and how disconcerting people find it when he'll say "Woof!" instead of barking.

Incidentally, I just learned that the representation of "tsk tsk" (two dento-alveolar clicks) in the International Phonetic Alphabet is [| |].

Commiserations. I just played it and also struck out.

Spoiler

PARER is a bullshit word, anyway.

[close]

I haven't really enjoyed Wordle since I switched to hard mode and NYT made Worldebot subscriber-only, and I haven't been playing regularly. I still feel that in hard mode the element of strategy is almost gone, and there's little to do but just type in the first word you think of that fits. Like today, what's the difference between you getting it in 4 or not at all except luck?

Quordle is fun, though. I'm still trying to get a game in 5.

You're right! The Rescue is a documentary, while Thirteen Lives is the fictionalized film with Viggo Mortensen. And they're about the rescue of the kids and coach stuck in the flooded cave in Thailand, of course.

(I figured the air tanks in the second photo and the "iDive" shirt in the third would get someone on the right track.)

No…

[Disk Utility]

I also prefer milk chocolate to dark chocolate (which to me tastes like baking chocolate), but each to their own.

This is a very niche one: It grinds my gears that in Spotlight App Launch on my Mac, typing "DI…" defaults to Disk Utility (which I hardly ever need to launch) instead of Discord (which I launch all the time).

Thanks, milkannan! Yeah, I think so.

Anyway, I like The Like. I got into them after I saw them open for Tori Amos in Chicago. This is a great diss-track from their second (and last) album that just came up in my playlist. Z Berg apparently claims it's totally not about their former bass player, Charlotte Froom. Listen to see if you can spot the "subtle hints" that she might be fibbing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZUs19XT_6k

No, but you're on the right continent:



Pretty big hint in this picture…

I haven't seen it, but recognized the face of that boy (and the soldier on the left) from stills.

Here's one everybody should have a chance to work out (eventually), even if you haven't seen the film:

Come and See

The Algorithm has figured out that I'm interested in this topic, so now it keeps throwing new articles about it at me every day. Here's one that might interest you: a guy used the AI tool Stable Diffusion to "upgrade" pixel art into photorealistic images:



(If I understand the process correctly, it's actually more like generating a new image from a detailed description, using the pixel art as a guide.)

I think you'll agree that the output is pretty goofy-looking (King Graham cracks me up!), but it's also pretty convincing. I probably wouldn't have spotted most of these as fake (or at least, not as AI-fakes) without close inspection.

Meanwhile, another guy entered a digital painting generated by Midjourney (and then upscaled with Gigapixel A.I.) into an art contest at a state fair, and won first prize in his category:

Last night I went to an open-air concert on the roof of the Oslo Opera House (well, the roof was the audience area, the actual stage was on a raft), headlined by Madrugada.


(As always, it's hard to judge inclines in photos, but we're standing on the sloping roof of the building)

They were less technically perfect than the last time I saw them live, but I liked this show better. They did 2–3 tracks from their new album, but mostly the old hits. (I was thinking about how many times Høyem must have sung "Higher" in his life. Yet he gives no hint of being bored.)

They did a cool, louder version of this song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psd3duWcs6w

I'm inclined to think that the hyphenated "slash" spelled out has a slightly different meaning than the slash sign. When spelled out, it suggests (to me) a definite dual role, while the slash sign suggests alternative possibilities, uncertainty. An "artist-slash-art director" is someone who is both. An "artist/art director" might be one or the other, or possibly even something else along those lines.

One thing that always sets my teeth on edge is when people refer to the Nordic countries as "the Nordics."

To nudge this thread even more towards adventure-related: https://hpjansson.org/blag/2022/08/16/adventure-game-graphics-with-dall-e-2/

The Word part is probably because they don't know any other way to get an image from the clipboard into a file (and don't think to paste it directly into the email). Right?

(This sort of thing would be hilarious to me, but I guess it gets old pretty quickly.)