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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • You know now that I think about it, I wonder how many M-rated games were released on the Game Boy/DS systems. I know some of the obvious ones would be id Software ports (like the Wolfenstein 3D seen in the picture) and the GTA games (both the GBA one from the mid 00s and Chinatown Wars from later), but other than those I can’t imagine the list is a very large one, especially considering most of the people who would have been playing on those systems at the time would have been kids and teens.

    Edit: after a quick google search, it looks like there were a grand total of 9 M-rated GBA games released, most of them being not very good ports of more popular console/PC games (though an exception apparetly goes to Max Payne, which managed to successfully convert the original third person shooter into an isometric game). Similarly, only 11 M-rated games were released on the DS, the best and most well known of them being Chinatown Wars.




  • I’ll preface this by saying I don’t really know anything about the Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry so I can’t really give an informed opinion on the matter, but if I had to guess what makes Chinese nuclear reactors cheaper and faster to build, my guess would be that Chinese Government regulations surrounding nuclear reactor construction are looser than those in the West (and it makes sense on some level, China is a fast-growing nation and Party officials are probably more concerned about getting power plants built to meet rising demand than they are about potential disasters that may result), meaning that Nuclear Reactor designs in China can be simpler, lacking many of the same safety devices and controls that are mandated on Western nuclear reactors, and as a result are cheaper and faster to build, just like how Soviet nuclear reactors were cheaper and simpler than their Western counterparts as a result of lacking many of the features designed to make reactor operation safer and reduce the risk of a catastrophic failure.

    The problem is it only takes one Chernobyl-scale catastrophe (and sometimes not even that) to bring the entire industry to a screeching halt and permanently damage the public’s trust in the industry and confidence that it is indeed a safe source of energy to be pursued further.




  • One of the most encouraging stories of the last 15 years has been the dramatic fall in cost of renewable energy and its emergence as a real competitor to existing non-renewable energy sources.

    Wind and Solar power are obviously not without their own problems, the largest is that they are intermittent power sources and there is a need to store the energy for days which are cloudy or windless; there is ongoing research in improving battery storage technology for grid-level use and creating carbon-neutral fuels that can be made using renewable energy to meet this need.

    But the fact that solar and wind power are so cheap and easily scalable, especially compared to other methods of generating power, is a positive development in the ongoing effort to de-carbonize the energy sector worldwide, although there is still a long way to go before we as a species are truly finished with our dependency on non-renewable energy.