Oh phonics is the old one (although it’s making a comeback). The “new” one that they’ve been promoting for a couple decades (and have recently realized isn’t very good) is cueing, the one where you just show kids words and encourage them to use context clues to guess what they mean, and hope that they eventually learn to read by doing that. Phonics is the one where you start with letter (and letter group) sounds and learn to sound out words by reading out loud.

She hated the concept of… teaching what sounds letters make? Was she a big proponent of cuing, or something else?

Yes, I think so. I also did Hooked On Phonics with my grandfather before starting kindergarten which meant I could already read by the time we started school. This was in Texas in the early '90s.

If you search for “poker” on PEGI’s site, it seems that many games which are actually about simulated gambling are rated 12 or 16. They seem to think Balatro is more likely to expose children to realistic gambling than, say, Prominence Poker or Pure Hold’em World Poker Championship, which seems completely bizarre, given that those games are about playing poker and Balatro is a fancy kind of solitaire with no betting.

If it’s to avoid clipping, then something is badly wrong in the older game, where the person walks inside a bunk bed, lies down, then sinks all the way through the bed before rising up to slightly levitate above it!

Although in that case the idea of a margin might make sense, since at the end they’re only barely above the bed. In the new game they’re in the right place at first, and then rise up like a foot and a half above the bed once the player approaches them…

They won’t, because there’s no other company that can credibly meet the Artemis objectives for a lunar lander in a reasonable time frame. Boeing is the main competitor but they’re already struggling to satisfy all of their current contracts: Starliner was supposed to be operational in 2017, but it had its first crewed test flight this year and it malfunctioned seriously enough that they decided it wasn’t safe to bring the astronauts home on it. NASA pulling SpaceX off of the Artemis project would functionally be the end of it.

As someone who swore off WoW not for gameplay reasons, but due to appalling behavior by Blizzard management, I’m not sure I think associating your political campaign with the game is a good idea.

Sorry isn’t “gender identity” the most common public restroom type in America, and also the opposite of the one they’re concerned about? They aren’t putting windows in the boys’ room or the girls’ room, which are segregated by gender. These are the gender neutral restrooms that they want to peek into (or really, discourage anyone from using). Up is down with these people.

I had a Tamagotchi, but it was the original Digimon toys that I was really obsessed with. I got my friend into it too so that I had someone to battle with. We were even raising them in class. We had all sorts of hypotheses about what made them stronger, which were probably based on no real evidence. I had a bulking-cutting strategy where I force fed my 'mon to increase its weight and then trained it until it reached the minimum weight for its rank.

I picked up an anniversary digivice a few years ago, I should replace the battery and raise some more digimon.

Why isn’t Echoes of Wisdom in the “upcoming” category? It doesn’t release until the end of the month.

The headline is a little misleading. The actual article is talking about why, given that Project 2025 is the culmination of 40 years of far-right thought, the media has only begun sounding the alarm bells since the publication of the book, and why the focus is on the most sensational aspects instead of on explaining the pernicious, foundational, fascist ideas it’s built upon.

Ohhh I probably disabled it right away and then forgot about it.

Huh, I was using Ubuntu as my daily driver circa 2014 and I don’t remember this at all… maybe I stopped just prior to them implementing it… or maybe it just didn’t make enough of an impression for me to notice.

All, top 6 hours.

Did he? My recollection is that he gave her a 70% chance of winning, which is not at all the same as predicting that she will win.

They’re by different writers, and I know on their podcast I have heard people disagree in the past about things like whether a polling difference is meaningful, so maybe they’re just each calling it like they see it.

Innocent people plead guilty or no contest to charges all the time, tbh. I think what’s crazy is running for office as a member of the party famous for its calls of “law and order” after spending eight years in the big house at the hands of the “law.” You might think that would clue you in that maybe the legal system is not all it’s cracked up to be.

In the section about his personal life, it says that he is sometimes invited to preach at churches. I think that’s about the extent of it.

I am not surprised that Yennefer selling out the Lodge got scrapped. That sounds like a plot thread that deserves way more room to breathe than being crammed into the ending sequence.

I am just about to start the DLC, but I think the quality of the major bosses in the base game is pretty good. I would actually say that my main complaint is that they aren’t balanced around using all the new bullshit, so it ends up being more fun to fight them without it. Like, I’d love to mess around with spirit summons, but most of the bosses have terrible decision making when there’s more than one target available, so you just get a bunch of free hits. For my replay I just used a bastard sword and restricted myself to “fair” Ashes of War that feel like normal parts of a weapon moveset, like Stamp (Sweep) and Impaling Thrust, and only used a shield on fights where I couldn’t figure out how to do the fight without one, like Radahn, and it was a lot of fun! I also tried out perfumes for the first time and I think they might have to be relegated to the “overpowered” section in future playthroughs: Uplifting Aromatic in particular giving on-demand Opaline Bubbletear effect is extremely powerful and let me win some fights that I wasn’t actually proficient in. (Also it’s not especially fun to farm snow trolls for Arteria Leaf once you run out.)

My secondary complaint is that a lot of minor bosses, especially in the overworld, have a lot of terrain jank and camera issues, like Lansseax going down the nearby cliff and then having weird geometry issues with the tiny raised section down there, or the tree spirit “miniboss” in the rotten pond in the Haligtree that is encircled by raised roots that make the proper part of the boss arena too small, and which it regularly clips through during its animations, making it even harder to see what it’s doing than usual.