Im on a work trip to Sweden and it made me smile walking past an opticians who have a Haarland collection - slightly out of date marketing as he cut all his hair off at the start of this season!

Burnie and Ashley talk about jetlag, their trip to LA, short time changes, repressurizing, grasshopper declines, World Series losers, EV misinformation, diesel prices in California, and keeping tools in the van overnight.

I was debating on posting this or not, I even deleted the first post I had made. Absolutely gutted to hear that EA is shutting down BioWare. The next Mass Effect has been cancelled and EA is laying off 400 people. I'm not sure if they all worked at BioWare or not.

I'm sure that many of us here have fond memories of the games made by one of the most respected developers in gaming history.

I am angry at EA for this as this is an unforgivable act by them in my eyes. I'm hoping that BioWare can get picked up by another publisher. The first Mass Effect was originally an XBOX exclusive. I would love for XBOX to acquire them again.

For now, it's just a sad day for gaming and those who are now out of a job.

Edit: A BioWare dev leaked a trailer on Reddit. I saw the video on Twitter. https://x.com/kalaelizabeth/status/2113300791146790915

Hearing Ashely talk about Take Charge of My Heart last week, and her journey into kdramas over the past year or so has been an absolute delight. That being said, I wanted to share my experience with MyDramaList, just in case she doesn't already know of it.

I've been using MDL since 2016. If you make an account, you can create watchlists, adding old dramas you might be interested in based on descriptions or community ratings, or adding future ones you're looking forward to. The site also has news from the k/c/jdrama sphere, including topics about actors, scandels, future projects, etc.

I mainly use it to keep track of what I'm watching and which episode I'm on, because I watch a boatload of them, and tend to forget if I've seen something already. Also if an actor I like is doing a new project, I get news first hand there.

I'm pretty sure you can also hotlink your watch list, which might be fun for anyone interested in keeping up with your kdrama journey.

Anywho, check it out if you like making lists!

This morning, Burnie was talking about his love for Velveeta Shells and Cheese. What’s your favorite box Mac & Cheese? I’ve buying Annie’s brand recently and really appreciate how the cheese tastes compared to Kraft or store generic brands.

Burnie and Ashley discuss the World Series, fliking with jetpacks, queuing at mountain summits, camera blindness, Red vs. Blue's Cam the Cameraman, unlocking Halo armor sets, McDonald's hash browns, end-of-year plans, Dune Messiah, and The Batman Part II.

I’ve been a Boba Fett fan since I was 3 years old. Seeing someone actually in costume flying around was and still is mind blowing. I can’t believe the video was posted 19 years ago.

Why are we working on AI when we should be developing consumer grade jet packs?

Burnie and Ashley discuss Tesla Roadster announcements, full self-driving promises, flying car hype, the cost of pre-orders, forgotten tech demos, 9,000-pound electric Hummers, practical uses for jet packs, and trusting autonomous vehicles.

Ft. A real spicy lemonade

Burnie and Ashley discuss the Burnie's brutal sports week, college football playoff frustrations, the Texas Renaissance Festival Fairy Weekend, elaborate costumes, three-foot margaritas, EV road trip charging, skin checks, sun safety, ren faire roleplay, and the MMO Shadowbane.

I know i am late but Burnie asked if anyone else knew how many they have, from what I can tell I have 626.

Don’t mean to rub it in Ashley’s face, but the store I work at received our holiday beer and wanted to show it off!

Was there an unofficial Easter Egg in Reach: Exodus?.. BUBU is that you?

I've always been kind of envious of America and their arcades, i know there's likely not as many as there once was, but i feel like America still has infinitely more of them than we have in the UK.

I just don't think they ever really were a "thing" here, sure we had some, especially if you live in a tourist place, but i get the impression that at one time most towns in America would have an arcade and that was certainly never the case here. My local shopping centre did have one back in the early 2000's but it was never very big and quickly went from having a handful of cool games to only having one or two actual games and the rest were those dodgy "skill" games and then it closed not long after.

I do remember, around 25 years ago, there used to be a massive place in London, called the Trocadero, i think, that had multiple floors of every game you could think of and even had some experience attractions/rides, but when i last checked several years ago it was long gone which is a real shame.

All of this is to say, while i'm aware how pricey arcades can be, the one in london was pay per machine, there's at least a handful of arcades around the uk, that have all their games set to free play and you just pay to enter for a certain amount of time, some do it hourly, others you can stay the whole day for a set fee.

I'm not sure if any of them are particularly close to Ashley and Burnie, but if they ever go for a bit of an explore further south in the UK they might want to have a look online and see if there's any near where they're going.

On Fridays podcast they were talking about Adobe and office products being decompiled and served up for free. I'm ok with this especially since Adobe started this hell that is software as a service (SaaS). Not owning your software is such a scam and I hate we just have to deal with it. I respect it gives devs funds to upkeep and improve their software but these big companies generally haven't created anything that impactful since 2016 and now just force AI down our throats. So serves them right.

Into what do people do when they automate large portions of their jobs through program scripts. I did this twice. Once using vba when I was an intern at a defence contractor and once early on in my pharma career.

In the first instance I was charged with data analysis and cleanup of large excel sheets in Windows 95. Much of the cleanup was to remove duplicates and text based analysis for manual pivot tables. I taught myself vba and trained in the data set and completed my tasks in half the time. As an intern I asked for more work but there was none so I read cracked.com articles for 4-6 hours a day and explored the abandoned buildings at the plant.

For the second my firm and myself had to deal with access and excel "databases" that then fed to a web based app with some SQL smooshed in for reporting. One engineer came up with a program that could click all the on screen prompts while I created a data cleaning and data transfer utility. Shortening process time by 30-40% from manual input. What this meant is we finished the contact faster and took more work from our competitors. And we had cubes still at this time so we could relax more during the day. But in both instances IT checks web activity so we couldn't go too crazy. I think one engineer watched Netflix on a hotspot.

So in short depending on the environment automation of a job can lead to either the employee finding secretive ways to bunk off or lead to more work. But in both examples it led to more reliance on the tool created and the person who built them because no one else knew how they worked.

Get ready for another sour grapes Burnie eps on Monday

Stick with me on this one folks. As we’ve learned on previous episodes, Burnie bought a copious amount of the Lando Norris Monster and has been making his way through that supply. Now the Burnses are having their mornings in the Lone Star State. And who will also be in the Lone Star State later this week (or possibly already is, I don’t know any of these people’s movements). Lando. Norris. For the United States GP at the Circuits of the Americas. My friends, I think the timing is slightly too convenient and coincidences don’t exist! All these events have been leading up to possibly this moment. Mr Burns and Mr Norris in the same geographical location. I fear, if Mr Burns has any amount of Lando Norris Monster in his system at such a close proximity to the source that is Lando Norris the person, Burnie may become an F1 fan. Thoughts and Prayers.

A few days ago, Burnie mentioned that he downloaded movies to watch on the plane. how would he have done that?

Burnie and Ashley discusss the NLCS, the Brewers, Slow Horses, contract paralysis, Xbox Nano controllers, Hall-effect sticks, and vibe coding everything.