I got a free month of Game Pass and am digging into whatever's interesting as a result, and man, I'm really glad I finally tried Clone Drone in the Danger Zone, even though it did not actually look like my kind of game; I just let myself be influenced by Steam's overwhelmingly positive reviews—and they're all correct!

~~What really threw me for a loop (since I only watched the trailer and didn't otherwise read much on it) is that you do not stay in the coliseum! Without spoiling much, it is just hilarious and unexpected how far the game actually goes beyond the trailer~~ (and the difficulty becomes as easy or as hard as you want it to be, in case skill is a concern among any readers here). Edit: Huh, apparently I entirely missed one of the trailers which already reveals this. Never mind, but the shock value was great, so if any of this interests you, try to not watch the first trailer lol.

But even in the arena, you truly feel like a sci-fi gladiator (bonus points if you watched Gladiator—the first one, of course), facing level after level of interesting different enemies with the commentators comedically going at it. You can upgrade your bot with different skills, weapons, or clones to keep going; if you pick cloning (buying extra lives, basically), they say things like, "Upgrade bot is not pleased" (since it would rather have spent that turn giving you an upgrade instead), or "This human fears death. Typical."

It is just so amusing and well-done as you hack and snipe enemies to bits, causing them to hop on one leg, or taking out an arm, or even having these situations happen to own robot body. The AI dodging of your bow's energy slices is also well-done and tricky, and it's crazy fighting giant spiders when they dynamically adjust their movement based on which legs they've lost. Giant alien spiders are no joke.

I actually didn't realize that it has a free demo on Steam, so go check it out!

I can't find this anywhere. Is there also any way to check all the posts you've upvoted?

Ultimately, it would be really nice if we could get a history section of all posts viewed. I miss this from Boost.

Someone had asked this elsewhere but then deleted their own post and I don't know why! I was meaning to come back to it and read it, so rest assured that I won't delete this one as there were some really interesting stories of unconventional ways people landed their work.

TL;DR: I got headhunted after directly emailing dozens of people and pitching myself as an available, on-call substitute in my line of work, instead of submitting job applications traditionally.

As for me, I cold-pitched myself via Google Maps and other searches as an available substitute to those in my skilled trade (upon moving to a different region) in basically a 50-mile radius, and eventually word of my availability reached a large, overarching institution that connected me with an organization that had a full-time opening. It took me probably 4-5 months from the move to the job offer.

Edit: My story is actually a little more complicated than that, now that I recall the details from years ago; there wasn't actually a full-time opening at my now-workplace at the time, haha. What happened was that I was briefly interviewed and quickly hired as an assistant to an overwhelmed director who ended up getting massively sick and nearly died from COVID, so I subbed as the director. They had been having interpersonal problems with her and I rapidly noticed them in the weeks before she got sick and warned them of her. While I wasn't trying to take her place, the higher-ups said they were aware of her shortcomings (she had basically said "Shut up" to another director higher than her rank, to give you one of many examples of how bad it was, and she must have been in her 50s if not 60s).

Nearly everyone at the org apparently loved my work while I subbed for her for nearly a full month, and they eventually fired her and made me her replacement after another interview. It was definitely unusual...

This link was a really intriguing post entitled, "How did you get your job?" I was planning to read through some more of the comments (it got really popular quickly), but the author deleted the post for some reason!

I can't believe I slept on this title for so long given how it has a free demo. As a Slay the Spire fan who has also played Monster Train, Indies' Lies, Pirates Outlaws, Dawncaster, and a bit of Dicey Dungeons, I was utterly and immediately gripped. It is so well-done with a snappy, responsive UI and turn action, and it's just as excellent on mobile as it is on PC.

I feel it solves UI issues in, and has way more diversity relative to, other dice-builders like Astrea: Six-Sided Oracles (which was way too tedious in its die face-checking) and Circadian Dice (whose UI just seemed to be too small and similarly a little harder to work with). S&D's numerous hero classes and just how many branches they can randomly take in leveling-up between fights are staggering. It's also extremely efficiently programmed, using very few CPU resources (which you'd think should be standard for these kinds of games, but isn't necessarily).

Give the demo a shot! It's only content-limited, not time-limited.

Is it possible? Press-holding does nothing and the Share button only generates links or images.

Even though the polygons don't exactly merit much of a second look, I'm shocked by how smoothly it runs and just generally how well-implemented the engine is. Especially with the incredible diversity of the different factions, it sort of feels like a more relaxed but still tactical WarCraft 3-like RTS. You have gold, wood, stone, and a food quota to manage, but some factions function so differently; one sort of copies StarCraft's Zerg or Protoss in the way that it has existing units irreversibly upgrade and specialize in specific forms, and another summons some units on the fly instead of at a base building.

I also see that it's extremely moddable and some people tried to make sci-fi total conversions, but I unfortunately see none that have had any recent work (sci-fi's really my jam).

Has anyone else tried this cross-platform FOSS game? It's great!

One of my NY resolutions for 2025 is to ditch AutoHotkey for any cross-platform equivalents, and Espanso is one of them. However, an AHK script I heavily rely on is a modular address autocomplete (I refuse to store address data in the browser), which I just don't know how to replicate in Espanso. I know it can use Python, but I'm not well-versed enough in Python to figure out:

1. Storage of 2-3 addresses (and the selection of 1 of them):
   • Street Name
   • Line 2 (but only for certain addresses)
   • City
   • State
   • ZIP Code
   • 4-digit ZIP extension
   • Google Maps (or OpenStreetMap...) share URL
2. Send only the street name
3. Send everything with modular inclusion or exclusion of the ZIP extension and/or related URL as:
   • One line (comma-divided)
   • Separate lines for pre-city data and the URL
   • Simulate tab keystrokes to navigate through a webpage
     • Be able to account for whether the web form has a separate line for Line 2 or not (like with a checkbox in the Espanso form or whatever'd work)

Any help with this would be much appreciated. This is as far as I got:

- trigger: '`address'
  replace: '{{output}}'
  vars:
    - name: form
      type: form
      params:
        layout: |
          [[street]]
          [[city]]
          [[zip]]
          [[zipext]]
          [[share_url]]
        fields:
          street:
            type: list
            values:
              - 123 Main St
              - 456 Elm St
          city:
            type: list
            values:
              - It was at this point that I realized that the cities should be bundled with the prior lines in some sort of list, or dictionary; I don't know what would be best
    - name: output
      type: script
      params:
        args:
          - python
          - -c
          - |
            if '{{form.}}':
              print(f'{{form.street}}, {{form.city}} {{form.zip}}-[[form.zipext]] [[share_url]]')
            else:
              print(f'Alternative rendering methods here')

IrfanView has an extremely niche feature that literally no other image editor I've found, not even Photoshop, can do, called Remove/Insert strip. I literally use this regularly for work and have donated to the dev because of it, but would like to try to find something open-source that does this if possible.

Let's say you have an image which is comprised of 3 rows: ABC (there aren't literal rows with lines, but we could just say the top 33% of the image is A, the middle 33% is B, and the remainder is C).

IrfanView can crop out just B (or any similar interior portion) and have A and C touch each other, in a single menu click after you've selected the portion-to-delete. It can also do this as columns, if ABC were treated as vertical columns instead.

It can also inject X amount of pixels in either height or width at any specified location in the middle of the image of whatever color you specify. This is also powerful, as I sometimes have to replicate part of an image elsewhere in the image (they're sheet music), so being able to generate that placeholder and the immediately putting actual contents in the injected space is really helpful.

These are insanely creative features that I literally can't find any other program capable of doing, open- or closed-source. Any guidance towards an alternative would be great!

In Boost, many-column tables have a certain minimum width and their own horizontal scrolling separate from the rest of the post.

When I hold on a word to start highlighting text, the delay appears to be longer than what I had set my phone to. I didn't know that an app can override this setting. Could it be set to follow it?

I've been recommended TNG, DS9, and Voyager, and have been told that the rest pale in comparison.