What may be one of the oldest known rocks from Earth has been found in the material that Apollo 14 astronauts brought home from the moon nearly 50 years ago.

He was indicted yesterday for, among other things, obstruction of justice and witness tampering, and was arrested at his home in Florida this morning by the FBI.

CNN story here.

Associated Press story, via MSN, here.

New Scientist: We may finally know what causes Alzheimer’s – and how to stop it

tl;dr: Possibly caused by the same bacteria that causes gum disease, maybe. And the report mentions a possible cure for gum disease - that is showing some signs of also treating Alzheimer’s - is currently being tested.

CBC Op-ed: Donald Trump is the best president the left has ever had

Quote:Not to commiserate over what a pig the man is (calling someone a pig is presidential language now, so that's fair ball, right?). That's just easy. What's fascinating is the reaction when you advance the argument that Trump, judged solely on his actions, is the most left-wing president any of us has ever seen.

By people "on the left," incidentally, I don't mean small-l, bourgeois, reflexive urban liberals. I mean committed progressives; people who believe in collectivism over rugged individualism, in the replacement of social hierarchy with social equality, who advocate wealth redistribution and robust government intervention to restrain the predations of the market. Generally, these people also oppose government austerity and militarism and globalization.

They are generally well educated and serious. And they can be irritatingly self-righteous. Which is why it's such fun to point out that Trump has often been their objective ally.

(non-embedded)

Man, I love PMJ

My playlist is pretty cool, but epic trailer style, gothy metal (Nightwish etc.), black humor and sarcasm do not make for a good mix when I just need cheering up. Any suggestions? Not rap, not country, and not too much in the way of percussion-focus like techno because it tends to give me a headache.

The Register: Wow, fancy that. Web ad giant Google to block ad-blockers in Chrome. For safety, apparently

Quote:Content blockers may be used to hide or black-hole ads, but they have broader applications. They're predicated on the notion that users, rather than anyone else, should be able to control how their browser presents and interacts with remote resources.

Quote:"The declarativeNetRequest API provides better privacy to users because extensions can't actually read the network requests made on the user's behalf," Google's API documentation explains.

But "better privacy" here means privacy as defined by Google rather than privacy defined by a third-party extension developer.

Here's a question that I don't recall has ever been asked, let alone answered: If Doug is having (for whatever reason) an out-of-body experience, does his power go with him?

The specific case that made me curious was in a particular work - simply naming it is a major spoiler. The work has a cyberspace that can be accessed "in person" using a method that is shown to involve the consciousness (and possibly the soul) of the person who makes the trip while the person's body remains behind.

If Doug were to access this cyberspace, would he still have his powers, or are they linked to his body?

Disgaea 5, a dissapointment of a perfect game

How can that be? Well, it's just so fun to play, except when I have to wait through one of the main story scenes. The gameplay is definitely the best in the series, but the A-plot is beat for beat the same generic, hackneyed JRPG fare that previous games in the series parodied, played absolutely straight. It would be a much better Disgaea game if Killia (most prominent of the six-member main party, and as you can see from the image above front and center only a bleach job and a half-dozen extra belts short of being another clone from the "every Squeenix MC ever" bin) was written right out of it, making the A-plot Seraphina (the pink one) running from an arranged marriage and not falling for her muscle-head childhood friend (the red one) when they cross paths again. Let Killia be a background-only element or post-game character to explain why Void's (the white one) daddy issues spilled over into dimensional conquest, if you can't live entirely without him. To quote The Supreme One, there are a lot of things I super hate, but I definitely can't forgive this!

The skit-style segments in the base area are full of the classic Disgaea flavor, so you know the writing team was up to it - or maybe they were added as an afterthought when play testers came back saying it was a great Final Fantasy Tactics sequel, but not so much fitting Disgaea lore and tone - the whole, "this is what goes on in the background of the afterlife" aspect is ignored entirely aside from timeline-breaking DLC characters from other games and a couple of lines if you track down the right Prinny (the penguin-y ones) and talk to him between missions in the base as well, to the point of eliminating the otherwise series-wide Ghost and (allowing for the redesign from D1) Reaper type monsters.

This is also the first DIsgaea game I'd actually give a content warning for - one of the CGs that gets repeatedly shoved in your face is Killia's standard issue tragic backstory girl, which isn't too bad at first glance but if you look closely she's being blown in half and that red blob at the left is where it's happening right now, with flying shreds and everything. You could probably still show it on morning cartoons - it's not super-explicit and it's more of a colored energy ball than an explosion of gore, but still. Girl with nothing left below the rib cage. Part of the package of why I think it would be better with Killia and the details of his story removed.

Control layouts are mostly familiar from previous games with the occasional hiccup, most notably having the same buttons do different things depending on whether you're looking at the item inventory from the basic menu, while equipping items to characters, the Innocent Management screen, the Innocent Farm screen, the Item World screen, or the Item Assembly screen. They do all have different purposes to fulfill of course, but the way you sort and change sort order or move innocents to and from an item, for example, are the kind of interface elements that should be the same all the time. At least there are button prompts at the bottom of the screen rather than having to try to memorize it, or look around everywhere on the screen to find them when you just want to get done and away from the Ensemble for Hold and Elevator shop-music loop. Changing the Character World from another variation on normal battles to a virtual board game is particularly appreciated, partly because it makes for a nice way to change up the play style for a bit of a break, and partly because it's just plain faster. Since it still takes somewhere between dozens and hundreds of runs through to max out a single character, that's a major improvement.

Music is something I've seen other people complain about in D5, but I'm not going to. Serphina's taste in base music may run to saxophone-laden soft jazz, but you can change that if you don't like it (except for the shops) and there's plenty of old favorites and fun new pieces to go around. The voice acting is also unexpectedly good for a non-AAA title, with emotion that doesn't (usually) come off as being wooden or melodramatic and overdone, both in the Japanese and English versions. Some of the DLC characters' English voices are terrible, due to contract disputes with the original performers from what a quick search tells me, though that's "some guy on the internet said..." level reliability so don't go betting the server farm on it or anything. I leave the Japanese audio on most of the time anyway so it's not a prominent feature in my mind.

My rating: 7/10, all time low for any Nippon Ichi game. That is praising them with faint damnation I suppose, but being demons they should be offended by merely faint damnation.

However, if you've never played a Disgaea game but like long JRPGs, call it 9/10 after knocking off a point for how much you're going to have to grind the post-game to see all the content when most games don't even have anything but a cut scene, credits, and maybe a NG+ after you beat the final storyline boss. I've seen a six-hour speed run video to complete all trophies, but expect more like 100 hours as a first timer, because there's 80-ish story maps plus item worlding to power up your equipment plus level grinding your characters plus the character world mini-game for passive abilities plus doing it all again with the enemies hundreds of millions of points stronger in the Land of Carnage and maxing absolutely everything out for a party of 20 so you can (just barely) survive having characters enter the map and make an attack against the Truly Final Boss, aka 20 Star LoC Baal. Two hundred hours wouldn't be unexpected for that last one, though normal Baal or even no-stars LoC Baal are much more manageable.

The most critical advice for new players, I'd say, is ... actually, that's still long enough to stick in a spoiler. It's a complex game with lots of stuff to do!

Spoiler

1. Bugs are rare, but leaving it running for a very long time (which with DLC Nisa's unique Evility giving her a 1% increase in all stats for every ten hours is directly rewarded) can occasionally lead to a crash, so do save now and then. If the sounds stop playing, STOP NOW, GENCY NOW, SAVE IN A NEW FILE NOW, YOU ONLY HAVE ABOUT A MINUTE. Using two or three save files in rotation and a new one for each chapter so you can step back if you forget or miss something is as always recommended, even though there is a NG+ and a Memories shop where you can view any skit, cut scene, CG, or alternate ending you've previously reached.

2. The one really critical generic character is a Thief, preferably 3-4 if you can stand leveling that many but definitely at least two. Enemies will frequently have gear better than you can buy, plus the stuff in the shop doesn't have any Innocents included and is always the absolute lowest-stat version of that item. One of the healer classes, a Pirate, and a mage or Mystic Knight plus a Scientist and Sea Angel for buffing and some slime or shroom monsters for bouncing thrown characters are also recommended, if you don't go for a full set of generics. A couple of Maids for their unique skill that lets another character act again in the same round is also handy.

3. Map 4-2 at sixteen stars in the Cheat Shop and Martial Training 1 at one star have Lv99 enemies, which give out the same experience points as Lv323 due to an oddity in the formula for how it's calculated. The developers included that for a reason, go right ahead and abuse the hell out of it, along with turning down everything else on the first page of the shop so you can turn EXP (or Mana, when you're trying to get that one awesome evility, or Weapon EXP to learn the 3x3 high-tier skills, usually around the low 20s of proficiency levels) all the way up. Like the Cheat Shop NPC says, for a demon it's only proper to cheat any way you like! It's a single player game anyway, no one is going to be bothered by it. Getting to where you can one-hit-kill the Lv99s is a matter of an hour or two if you try for it as soon as you can reach 4-1, but worth it since Lv 300-400 will carry you easily through the story mode and early Item World at 0 stars. Remember that the Eryngi enemies in 4-1 weaken female characters nearby, so either plan for them to be higher level than the guys or get the Gender Bender evility on them from one of the recurring quests. Evilities and Revenge Mode buffs/Overload skills play a huge part in this game, so be aware of them and always check enemy units' until you're familiar with them.

4. Getting maxed out is a bootstrapping process of levels and gear and reincarnations and more gear, etc. Check the Hospital and Item World prizes and back out without taking them until you have a piece with a Statistician innocent (WITHOUT a star on its icon, the star means it can't grow on the Innocent Farm) and save those Statisticians on the in-use equipment for the character you're focusing on until you've subdued enough more common Innocents in the Item World to unlock the Hunter Squad and captured enough enemies and powered up the Hunter Squad so you get double the effect from subduing before you go in to get them. A Sage or Ninetails with their unique attacks that hit huge swaths of the map is perfect for Innocent hunting, just remember that it has to be a member of the Hunter Squad that lands the final hit to get the bonus. Upgrading equipment frequently is a hassle but still worthwhile, and if you keep stealing or buying one of the best currently available you can always pass it down to the other characters - any humanoid can use any weapon, they're just better or worse at learning the special skills for it, and monsters all use the same ATK or INT weapons. Don't bother grinding cash to buy gear, though, you can pretty much always find the same or better items and usually at better Rarity (which means higher stats even if it's not Rare or Legendary tiered) in the Bonus Gauge or by stealing from enemies.

5. If you're not getting the Switch or PC "Complete" version of the game and only get one DLC character, get Metallia, because she learns all the top-tier attack magic and her Overload skill will capture every enemy on the map (except bosses) as long as she could one-hit-kill them. With how critical captured enemies are for leveling up your Squads to get various passive bonuses, this is a very significant factor. After her comes the Disgaea 3 character pack with Rasberyl and Salvatore, who have very useful Evilities, and Zetta, who has beastly base stats and a powerful unique attack. Plenair also has good evilities and stats, but is only available after getting all the other DLC so it's either Complete or paying twice as much for the game for her. For standard game characters, the female magic user, Pirate, and Sea Angel probably have the best Common Evilities to transplant onto unique characters, which is as simple as setting a subclass and continuing to level them normally. A unique character that doesn't have a subclass set is wasting half their potential per experience point, so make sure to do that for both story and DLC characters as soon as the Strategy Assembly becomes available. The first evility to get for anyone is Mana Lover, though, because 10% means a lot when you're trying to scrape up 30,000 Mana during the first run through the story and can't afford to turn up the enemy levels much.

Ongoing stuff from the end of the last thread:

"Turn of the Millennium" lists:

(01-08-2019, 04:34 PM)Bob Schroeck Wrote: Do we really need all the subpages under Turn of the Millennium? I mean, they're just lists, not content. If the pages are properly categorized, this is all redundant. And they're all at least six years out of date anyway, as new works pages get created and not added to these lists.

(01-08-2019, 07:12 PM)robkelk Wrote: Much like that no-longer-existing page of where all those tropes' images came from, we can use them as checklists to make sure the works actually have the categories. As we confirm the categories are present, we can take the works off of these lists... and eventually redirect the pages to the matching categories.

(01-14-2019, 08:47 AM)Bob Schroeck Wrote:

(01-13-2019, 07:17 PM)robkelk Wrote: Oh, and has anybody else had trouble using the search box to find categories, templates and files since the last upgrade?

It's not just the search box. The pop-up hints no longer offer templates, categories or files, either.

(01-16-2019, 10:20 PM)robkelk Wrote:

(01-16-2019, 07:25 PM)robkelk Wrote: I just tried setting the project namespace to being a namespace that has content. Let's give it a bit of time to index, and check in a few hours whether we can search for All The Tropes pages.

Two hours later, and no joy. (And I won't have time to enter a Phabricator report until tomorrow night at the earliest - could somebody else file a trouble ticket, please?)