This just makes me think of Kleiman v. Wright, where Craig Wright (among many, many other shenanigans) claimed that a printout of an email wasn’t an email, it was a piece of paper. That didn’t end up going the way he wanted.

Vornado Evap40 and the zigbee/zwave outlet controller of your choice. It’s classic dumb tech; if you have it switched on but the power is off, it’ll start just fine when you turn the power back on. The top of the central unit just lifts right off for cleaning. And it’s a pure evaporative unit, so if something happens and it fails on, it’s still self regulating.

The problem with procgen for variety is that it’s almost always a few procedural changes layered onto a finite, typically small, set of “types”. You can see this in games like No Man’s Sky, where there are technically billions of different animals that you might encounter on a planet, but a lot of them are pretty similar. Even in DRG with their terrain gen, they’re building on room templates that you’ll start to recognize the more you play.

It’s kind of like those ad campaigns about how many millions of ways you can make a burger. Sure, a 1/4 lb cheeseburger with lettuce, tomato, onions, and ketchup on a sesame seed bun is technically different from a 1/4 lb cheeseburger with lettuce, tomato, onions, and mustard on a sesame seed bun, but they’re both still burgers. You might hit onto some unique combinations (e.g. meat, cheese, and toast on the bottom, with no top bun -> patty melt) but you’re ultimately still just seeing burgers everywhere, and the system that generated the burger isn’t ever going to generate aloo gobi.

I’m taking a break at the moment, too many hostile decisions that appear to only be getting worse (where have I heard that before?).

There’s no stock or similar security, so the SEC doesn’t care at all. Could be a plausible deniability thing, I just think it’s more likely that he really is that dumb, given the stories about Tesla/SpaceX having teams that basically existed just to control him.

Complex wires isn’t that bad once you learn how to account for the parts of the diagram that are deliberately confusing, but they’re a lot harder if you only have one person with the manual. If you have 2+ people with the manual, one can get to work solving complex wires while the other helps the defuser with other modules.

Some great suggestions here already (HT Wavelength, KTaNE, Love Letter, Codenames, and Mascarade), but Cockroach Poker is one of my favorites. It’s extremely simple: 64 cards, 8 sets of 8 different “vermin”. Distribute cards as evenly as possible across the group and pick someone to start. First player takes a card from their hand, slides it face-down to another player, and declares that it’s a certain critter in the game (E.g. “This is a rat.”) The other player can do one of two things:

• Accept the card: Say whether the first player was telling the truth or lying about what’s on the card, then reveal. If the receiver was right, the giver takes the card back and puts it face up in front of themself. If they were wrong, the receiver puts the card face up in front of themself instead.
• Peek at the card, then slide it to another player (who can’t have seen the card yet) and make a claim about what it is, which may or not be what the last person said it was. Then repeat this decision with the new giver and receiver. If only one player remaining hasn’t seen the card, they have to accept and make a guess.

The first player to get 4 of a kind loses, and everyone else wins. It’s always a smash hit when we play, provided you have 4+ people.

Also a big fan of Meow! The cult of cat, which is basically Mao boiled down to just the rules, which change from game to game since the rules are printed on the cards and are only active if they’re in play.

There’s no stock to tank. You could argue that he’s trying to tank the company, but there are easier ways to do that.