Shatire.

You just know that was tossed around Colbert’s writer’s room, before they decided that might wind up with them off the air sooner.

I really appreciate that there’s one character in Demon Hunter that has a gun. It works, and is incredibly effective… against lower-level demons. The world-ending upper-rank variety need at least a decapitation, and half the time, a secondary decapitation or dismemberment of some kind. Simply asploding demon parts with one or two shotgun slugs is not enough in that case.

As a storytelling device, it really grounds the entire power-system in both the supernatural and super-human. We get periodically reminded that a gun absolutely holds its own in raw firepower, but the situation is just a bit more of a problem than it can handle.

I’m all in favor of zuruck replacing return, because that just sounds cooler. Plus z doesn’t get enough use in my programs these days.

No, that’s more like: “bad cop, worse cop.”

Welcome to the wide-wide world of moral relativism!

There is no good or bad, just differently moraled. These two shoulder spirits advocate for different actions with outcomes of mixed better and worse consequences.

Eh, it’s more like electromancy, but… yes.

That’s okay. The company is set to go IPO in two.

Rearranging entropy by moving heat from one place to somewhere else.

Maybe. Depends on how well-sealed those bearings are.

You’d need ambush tactics

Smoke and rockets. At least until supplies run out. Then you get crafty: sticky bombs, fire traps, optical illusions, nets…

The last one is interesting since I bet they’re not dexterous enough to undo knots, let alone handle being tangled up in something. Once you know how they’re programmed, you hit them outside that envelope.

Possibly, but I’ll bet it’s too coarse to get into things. Middle-east environments are likely to be well within the operating requirements for any military-hardened versions. So think: dust, dirt, dry clay, and sand.

Diatomaceous earth, and any super-fine starch that can absorb lubricants would be my best bet here. A very, very finely pulverized sand or glass might also do the job. It might also be worthwhile to see what solvents and chemicals can penetrate sealed bearings, eat wire insulation, and corrode water-resistant alloys. Heh, maybe just a jar of brake cleaner would work.

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Well, I did have the older version on the left as a kind of rosetta stone for this. Plus, this kind of “init and/or return” pattern shows up a bunch of places, so it makes sense someone would want a quick version that’s harder to screw up or has fewer side-effects.

I’ve also spent years investigating better ways to do things through various versions of C++, D, Rust, Go, and TypeScript. After a while, the big-picture patterns start to emerge and you see different camps start to converge on the same kinds of things. Stuff like these weird features start to feel like learning a new slang term for something you’ve felt, but could never say so succinctly.

In the case of ??= it’s a more formalized Python x = x or y or x = x || y in JavaScript. The catch is that not all languages treat assignments like expressions that can be returned, so you get a clunky return as a separate statement; return (x = x or y) doesn’t always fly. That friction is all over the place, and it’s natural to want a shorthand for this very thing.

Sure enough, after searching a bit, ??= shows up in JS, PHP, and even Ruby has a version.

Edit: more context.

I find this alternate timeline incredibly likely. I had a friend in college who was all about SCO Unix back before they went evil, even when Slackware was the go-to distro. We would have a lot more BSD forks out here now, although NextStep (and maybe even OSX) would probably still emerge as one of the better commercial ones.

As an aside: what I find amusing is that Homebrew is basically BSD Ports, served from a git repo. In 2025, it’s a completely insane way to ship OS software to a single platform, but it does work.

Thanks. That makes a hell of a lot more sense now.

No. This is Super Mario World only.

However, your Mario could go straight through walls to enter negative worlds…

Edit: world… d’oh.

Eh, I haven’t touched C# since 2001. I agree that the more verbose style is more explicit, and so more readable. That said, I can figure most of the new style out from context.

• => is clearly a closure declaration operator, similar to JavaScript.
• x ??= y is shorthand for “assign y to x if x is not set, and return x” which is kind of nice.

There must also be some shorthand going on for getter properties being the same as methods w/o an arglist (or even a ()).

The only part that has me stumped is the unary question-mark operator: private static Singleton? _instance = null; I can think of a half-dozen things that could be, but I cannot decide what it’s doing that the original question-mark-free version isn’t.

::sigh:: This is the correct answer for a buttplug.io based workflow.

To be completely fair, I’ve worked in places that treat Git like it’s an over-engineered SVN and use the SVN workflow, fighting against the current the entire way. “trunk” would be just fine with that crowd.

Sweet jebus. You’re jumping into one of the biggest (if not the biggest) game console libraries ever. There’s a lot to pick from, and… there’s a lot of trash too.

It may not be to everyone’s taste, but I really enjoy the Burnout series. Each title brings something new to the table, and the music and energy just don’t let up. The only problem here is the brutal load times between every level, which on emulation, probably aren’t going to be an issue for you. The licensed soundtrack is also something of a time-capsule now, so it may be worthwhile on that point alone.

There are a few Castlevania titles for the PS2 as well. These are a fun departure from the side-scrolling formula, and seem to have learned a few tricks from Devil May Cry. They deliver on mood and challenge, but I wouldn’t rank them as high as the GBA or PS1 titles. Still, they’re fun to play.

If you wind up short on recommendations, I’ll add that PS1 titles should get an honorable mention here. The PS2 is fully backwards compatible with the PS1, so those cream-of-the-crop titles kinda/sorta count. For a lot of us, that was a big part of the experience of owning one of these machines as your library just kept growing into the new console gen. But you’ve probably already heard of Metal Gear Solid, Symphony of the Night, FFVII, WipeoutXL, Tony Hawk, and so on.