T w e n t y S i d e d

On the podcast yesterday, we talked about the controversy with the GTA Definitive Edition. For the record, I have not personally experienced the games for myself, so my complaints are based on reports from other people.

This puts me in a really annoying position as a critic. On one hand, I’ll get Rockstar apologistsA dying breed, no doubt. But they do exist. insisting that the controversy is all blown out of proportion and that I shouldn’t be talking about it if I haven’t experienced it first hand.

But if I had bought the game, then I’d have a different group of people yelling at me: “What did you expect? If you were dumb enough to believe Rockstar’s lies and give them your money then you got what you deserved. If you’re dumb enough to fall for this, then I can’t trust you as a critic.”

So you can either be too uninformed to write useful criticism, or you’re unqualified to be a critic. In choosing between these two equally obnoxious fates, I took the one that didn’t cost me $60.

However, the situation is even worse than I reported yesterday.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Grand Theft Auto Trilogy: Derision Edition”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

I’ve been thinking about fossil fuels and fuel efficiency lately. We’ve been trying for years to make more fuel efficient vehicles and by now we’ve gotten all of the low-hanging fruit. From this point, most gains will require high-tech systems that will make vehicles more expensive to produce and maintain.

So I started thinking that what we really need is a radical innovation to shake things up. Right now the average vehicle gets about 25 miles per gallon of fuel. So I came up with a larger one-gallon gas can that holds about twice as much fuel as a standard gallon gas can. Using one of these new gallons will get you twice as far, thus boosting the average fuel efficiency up to 50 miles per gallon!

I admit that we’ll need to change all of our pumps and tools to accurately support this new Shamus-gallon. And this change will effectively halve the number of gallons you can store in your tank. But it will double our fuel efficiency. That’s worth it.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “It’s That Time of Year Again”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.