A #6 screw would have a 9/64" diameter, not 6".

Don’t ask me why I know this offhand. My eye isn’t twitching. Your eye is twitching.

Unless you have a reliable way of filtering out bot traffic, if you just go by raw access rates in the logs to judge the proportion of “people” who are bouncing your perception is going to be skewed because the vast majority of traffic these days is not, in fact, people.

I take an extremely ruthless approach to blocking, filtering, and banning bots from my website (my real one, not my stupid hobby one) and even so easily two thirds of the the traffic I get is still bots.

This is right in my wheelhouse. No, it’s not stupid.

The vast majority of web analytics are actually objectively useless. Yes, you will generate a lot of data. No, obsessing over this data is unlikely to lead to making your website better in any way whatsoever.

Thing the first: My personal “business” website (I use this term very loosely) isn’t even dynamic. Yes, Flightless Forge is static HTML. I don’t even use any Javavscript. The horror!

Thing the second: That’s because for my job I manage an online storefront that’s completely bespoke (written by: guess who) and part of the above is because I decided I really don’t want to bring work home with me. We used to use every stupid analytics platform under the sun and over time, one by one, I wound up turning them all off. This is because they’re not only privacy nightmares for our users but also incredibly bloated, and provide all-singing, all dancing dashboards that are veritable avalanches of useless information that management never successfully used to do anything. So I gave up.

The problems with these things is that they make big promises couched in marketing-speak, but there is no actual way to realistically deliver on those results. It’s the Night Watchman problem for the digital age.

There is very little actual useful information you can glean from your userbase other than what pages they went to and when. Especially now, mouse cursor heatmaps tell a distorted story because 90% of your users will be on mobile and will have no mouse cursor. Behavior flow indicators will only tell you what you already know, which is that your users insist on using incorrect search terms and don’t read. Vanishingly little you can do aside from ensuring that no part of your interface is outright broken will actually increase your conversion rate. You cannot actually determine what your users are thinking unless they tell you, and even then they will lie to you.

So my strategy has instead become to make our website work the way I want it to work on a daily basis, by avoiding the annoyances that annoy me. It must be working, because we have one of the highest rated sites in our industry and our clients go out of their way to compliment us on how much easier to use it is than our competitors.

The number one thing that will drive users away from your site and hurt your conversion rate is anything they perceive as friction in your process, because as soon as they encounter the slightest frustration or adversity or even a simple behavior of your interface that doesn’t behave the way they expect it to, they’ll click off and go somewhere else. Nirvana is achieved when you realize that a nontrivial fraction of the “friction” your users experienced was in fact them shooting themselves in the foot by being stupid and you can’t do anything about this. I log what people put in the search box, for instance, and you would not believe the asinine shit they put in there. Your best practices are therefore not to give the user enough rope to hang himself, and compensate for his stupidity at every opportunity.

(And no, I am not telling you where I work.)

Absolutely not. What’s actually unethical is the ruinous prices the name brands charge for their “genuine” batteries which under the hood are just as much Chinese garbage as the off-brand ones.

Which one would win is the intro to Gurren Lagann, coming in from stage right swinging a folding chair. (Also from Gainax, for whatever it’s worth.)

Bong.

Also, they did Jubilee so dirty in that intro. Cyclops lasers a bunch of guys! Rogue suplexes a sentinel with its own tentacle things! Beast punches a tank! Storm shoots lightning bolts! Wolverene goes “schwing!” Gambit dodges helicopter fire!

…Jubilee is being chased by angry villagers or zombies or something, and can’t deal with a fence???

Three times.

I use a couple of garlic on the top and bottom rows to funnel them closer to the center. Melons can hit chumps in a 3x3 area, so having everybody within a span of 3 lanes is optimal.

In terms of what you’re going to eat, though, I have no idea.

Hmm. Where have I heard that one before?

Which somehow has an indoor jungle, an ice cave, an underwater section, a fire cave, a cathedral, the entire Library of Alexandria, the inevitable clock tower, an arcade and bowling alley…

I imagine No Man’s Sky is doing this specifically to reference the trope as was originally commonly portrayed in e.g. Flash Gordon serials and various golden age comics. Similar to Starbound, this also has an intentional gameplay implication in that it forces you to leave the planet and find another one with the biome appropriate for whatever resource it is you need. Otherwise you could park your butt on one planet and never have any compelling reason to go anywhere else which really rather defeats the intent of the game.

As far as other works of fiction go, though, yes. It’s just lazy.

Megaman 1 was indeed quite difficult, partially due to some sections of it that were particularly bullshit. Luckily it’s also riddled with bugs, many of which can be abused to the player’s benefit, although back in those days we did not have the internet to enlighten us as to all of them.

I figured out the pause glitch all by myself. I’m just special like that. I also got myself stuck in various amusing and, alas, game-ending ways by stuffing poor little Rockman into all types of walls by abusing the platforms with the magnet beam to see if I could find anything interesting. In addition to not having the charge ability on the mega buster, Rush, or a seventh and eighth robot master, the one thing everyone forgets Megaman 1 did not have was the password system. If you got wedged someplace and couldn’t get yourself zipped out of it or contrive of a way to have an enemy kill you, that’d be a reset. If you wanted to beat the game you had to do it in one sitting.

My first Megaman game was actually 4, followed by 3 on the recommendation of a friend, and then 1. It’s surprising how archaic Megaman 1 is if you’re not already familiar with it. It’s amazing how quickly Capcom nailed what would become the iconic Megaman formula and how consistent the games became, starting right at… Megaman 2. The first game feels like a Mandela effect fever dream, certainly something that came from some parallel universe and was not, in any way, any of the games we actually got. Except it was.

Basically all of Elec Man’s stage has you climbing up a ladder. The pre-boss corridors are entire obstacle courses, not just the transitional anterooms we became used to. Rolling cutter kills Elec Man in just three hits, and somehow he also has two other weaknesses. Mettools don’t pop up but instead shoot at you by just lazily tilting their helmets to the side. You drop in to Bomb Man’s room from the top. The health and weapon energy pickups look nothing like in any subsequent game. The robot masters don’t have spaces in their names yet. And so on, and so forth.

Before you even get to that, the point everyone forgets is that if you’re using the typical type of zap-and-you’re-in-dinosaur-times method of time travel as invariably imaged by fiction, the planet will be in a very different place in the universe from where you are right now if you travel to any time. Even just a few seconds, in fact.

You’re going to have to come up with one hell of a hand-wave to cover how your location stays glued to some particular spot on the Earth’s surface even as you’re whizzing off decades or centuries into the future or past. It’s probably not even good enough to mumble about local frames of reference or what have you, because there is no such thing as a truly global frame of reference (because what would it be referenced to?) or even static spatial coordinates in the universe. If the simple Newtonian movement of the planet/solar system/galaxy/etc. doesn’t get you then the universe’s constant expansion probably will.

You might want to bring some oxygen and a very fast spacecraft with you.

For the record, my heat pump system works just fine throughout the entire year, including the times in the depths of winter where it drops into the single digits or, in the case of this last winter, below zero on the Fahrenheit scale. (That’d be -17° C, for our Euro bros.) And no, mine does not have resistive electric backup heat.

RIP to the Microsoft support forums, then. Although if these get tanked in the search results that will probably be a small net benefit for society given that not a single problem has ever been successfully solved by the Microsoft support forums in the entire history of computing.

You, uh, realize that’s really not the dis you think it is, right?

You’ll have to eat the insulation foam if you want to go around getting high on cyclopentane. Or maybe smoke it.

There is a small percentage surcharge imposed by whoever is providing the financing, but it’s basically the same amount as what the credit card companies charge per transaction, on the order of 1-2%, so from the store’s perspective it’s the same either way. It’s not quite correct to say that customers who are not financing hot dogs are paying for others who are, but all of the customers financing hot dogs are indeed paying for each other.

On the topic of credit cards, by the way, in some states it is legal for the merchant to pass the processing costs on to the customer and in some cases the shyster bastards actually do it. To my knowledge most or all of the banks providing in store financing or buy-now-pay-later schemes in fact prohibit that practice, so there is at least that.

Nearly 30%, for the scheme we have access to at my work. 28.99%. That exact number may in fact inform veterans of the industry of exactly who we use for financing.

Correct. They only care about this stuff because they don’t want anyone to use it on them.

If you don’t believe me, just note how basically every single weapons ban written in the US magically has an exception for law enforcement carved into it. So… We (not me, but all you Californian people) can’t have, say, a butterfly knife but for some reason the cops can? What do they need it for that we don’t, exactly?