Looks to me as if a meteorite came in at a shallow angle and basically skipped across the surface. Leaving dimpled craters as it bounced. Looks very similar to rocks skipping on a pond. Am I correct or is there another explanation for these?

For me, I've always called it the "school at night" phenomenon. The horror, or unsettling feeling, one gets from seeing a place at night that's usually only seen in the day. Had that constantly as a kid when going to school at night for performances or teacher meetings. A place bright and loud that's now quiet and dark. You know where everything is, but it all seems like it's just an inch or two out of place.

After all that was done, the phone felt like mine in a way that my iPhone doesn't. Was a good feeling. With luck, the Motorola + Graphene partnership will produce phones with screens better than the Pixel and I can keep doing this.

First time I've been accused of AI.

Oh well. From the UI's shown, I kinda like the 0-100 radio buttons. Yes, it's incredibly ugly. But I like the immediate precision of it.

Eventually gave up because of the constant slowdowns and crashes. Which in many ways fit the book. I liked thinking the data within was so dangerous and alien that my Kindle could not handle it. I know this wasn't intentional by the author but still, it was a nice metafictional touch.

I suppose a future horror novelist could replicate this intentionally. A creepy combination of symbols guaranteed to overwhelm a limited memory ereader. Coming at the right point in the story, it could be effective. Though it would also lead to a ton of 1-star reviews.

I just hope that GrapheneOS will be offered on one of the IPS phones in addition to the expected OLED model(s).

In the meantime, I use a Motorola G Power 2024 which has IPS. I'm very much a non-expert but made a minor hobby out of trying to de-google it as much as possible.

Never signed into Google with it. Using NetGuard with a whitelist to prevent most of the phoning home. Uninstalled or disabled most built-in apps. The apps I use are installed via either Obtanium or Fdroid. Have Dropbox from Aurora. Use Motorola's private space for keeping some data and apps in a separate, supposedly secure locker.

I'm sure this doesn't come close to GrapheneOS's security level but it's the best I can do within the limitations of this device. It was a fun mini-project. NetGuard is invaluable for this purpose. Almost feels like the phone is truly mine.

The "Dynasty" part comes from being able to have children and pass the village along to them if you play long enough. But everyone in game is a peasant of some sort. Nobility is mentioned but never directly visible.

I wouldn't call the game accurate exactly. But it is fun. I especially enjoyed having a ground-level view instead of the birds-eye view of most city builders.

Had a chance to ask a Russian / Soviet historian how one could spend a million rubles in the late 70s, early 80s. He just shrugged and laughed about it. Almost no way to spend that much. Nothing cost very much and there wasn't much of it.

Every single customer we had wanted to be legal. Didn't want to exceed their seats or do anything which would violate their sales agreement. In the case of our government clients, such violations could lead them into legal penalties from their employer.

Despite having an unusually honest customer base, the company insisted on horridly strict and intrusive DRM. Even to the point of using dongles for a time. It frequently broke. Sometimes we had to send techs out to the schools to fix it.

I ended up just ripping all of that out and replacing it with a simple DLL on the Windows client. It talked to an tiny app server side. Used a barely encrypted tiny database which held the two numbers: seats in use & total seats available. If for some reason the DLL couldn't make contact with the server, it would just launch the software anyways. No one would be locked out due to the DRM failing or because the creaky school networks were on the blink again.

This system could have been cracked in five seconds by just about anyone. But it didn't matter since we knew everyone involved was trying to be honest.

Saved a massive amount of time and money. Support calls dropped enormously. Customers were much happier. It's probably my weakest technical accomplishment but it's still one of my proudest accomplishments.

It's an almost infinite variety. Fractal even with how many subreddits are the results of splits from an older subreddit.

Kobo feels like something I actually own. More so than Kindle or even my iDevices. That's a little unusual these days from a mainstream product and that will make its users enthusiastic.