That still blows my mind. At some point, a room full of risk-averse engineers all agreed that "rocket crane" is the safest and most practical solution to a problem.
If you don't care about practicality, take all the even rows of seats, board the left window seats first, then the middle, then the aisles, then the right window, middle, and aisle, then the same thing again with the odd rows of seats. (Steffen Modified) If you're really dead set on perfection, force every one of those groups of people to board back-to-front, effectively creating a separate boarding group for each seat. (Steffen Perfect)
If you live on Planet Earth, don't assign seats and don't have boarding groups. Let people sit whenever and wherever they want. (Random) It turns out most people will naturally do the things that make boarding quick anyway and literally all organized boarding is a conspiracy to make boarding take longer so airlines can sell you faster boarding.
* faster de-planing (this, and an assumption that people paying more USUALLY cause less trouble, thus better to seat near the pilots)
* the illusion of exclusivity (more important people 'go first')
* the actual practice of exclusivity (service is provided highest paying class to least) when things run short / out
* First Class, the one time I ever flew it, got meal choices that seemed actually good. Behind them it's always dry pretzel things for a snack flight or some mish mash of global fusion I'd never roll the dice on; or an overpriced stale sandwich from one of the stores in the area past TSA.
Last trip, I just packed ham sandwiches and cookies in the carry bag. I feel like a high-schooler on a field trip, but I'm not paying $10+ for box of terrible snacks.
Also, never pay the First Class premium on UK railways: it's the same sort of terrible box you wouldn't buy for $10 on a plane, but the fare premium was £20 on the train I took (Swindon-Plymouth)
Can I pay for last-boarding/slow boarding? Not sure why people want to rush onto the plane that will land at the same time as everyone else.
Other than the carryon issue, but, knocks wood, has always worked for me (Note I'm usually long-haul where not as many people try to avoid a checked bag, and sometimes I'm no carry-on, just a checked bag).
Ah they do? I was flying Southwest a few years ago (right before COVID) from Phoenix to Oakland (via Portland....) and the seats were assigned. I remember this because the whole family was scattered around the plane despite us coming in rather early and all together.
You must be misremembering. Southwest has an assigned boarding order, and you pick any seat when you board. It is likely that your family was scattered around because of limited available seats when you boarded. Those who fly don't fly Southwest very often aren't familiar with the check-in process and often end up in the later boarding groups. Showing up and checking in for the flight in-person typically results in a late boarding group, because most of the good boarding groups are already taken 24 hours before the flight when online check-in opens up.
This is probably due to the weirdness of that flight. It was our last day in the US and we were to fly from PHX to ODR at, say, 16:00 to fly back to France the next day. We were earlier than planned at PHX and there was an earlier flight to ORD.
I asked if we can take that one - no problem. It is only when the planse started and the crew announced that we are flying to Portland that I thought WTF??
And this is how I discovered that a flight labelled A to B in the US can actually mean A to B via C where C is on the other side of the country. Kinda our city bus or underground... :)
We met very nice people, though, and I had an interesting discussion about the US. My son discussed with a lady in another row and she wanted him to meet his daughters when they will be in Paris :)
Ah yeah, if you were flying Southwest and did a flight change at the airport and you didn't pay for upgraded boarding, you would have been put at the end of the line for boarding.
I too tend to have interesting random conversations on Southwest flights, especially when flying alone. My hypothesis is that since people get to choose where they sit, they often end up picking where to sit by the vibe others are giving off, and it's more conducive to conversation.
The way to do southwest is not only to check in 24 hours before the flight, but also to book a flight with a nearby stopover where you continue on the same plane. When the other passengers get off, whoever is left on the plane can go sit wherever they want. Grab yourself a front row seat right next to the door.
You can even get off the plane to look around at the stop over airport, you just have to sign out with a stewardess. Then you get to board first. Like first-first, before the preboarding/military/babies. Then everyone at the boarding gate can imagine what a big VIP you are.
None of them. The ultimate suggestion of the "steffen modified" is not much better than random. Neither is window-middle-aisle. For CGPGrey it's just nerding out for the sake of it. For the airlines it's publicity.
> That seems unrelated to this post, this one is about things we can't control being removed from the record, mainly wildfires from Canada and other US states.
The way your comment is phrased makes it seem like you think Canada is a US state, might want to fix that.
As someone who has prototyped games, no. This just isn’t true. When stuff happens without sound it feels plain and empty and lifeless and demotivating.
Further, the “is it fun question” is honestly a nonsense question. That’s usually a question about the larger game loop. A lot of games’ gameplay that people like is in fact not actively “fun” but is perhaps engaging or immersive. Which is not something you deduce easily from barebones prototypes.
This advice works ok if it’s just an arcade style game that you play and that’s it, but that’s not really common
More like try watching a comedy where nobody cared about getting the room tone to blend things right, no foley and sound effects work was done, and there was no provision in the budget for fixing things in ADR. See if you make it through the first 10 minutes before feeling the full ticket price was a scam.
Some kind of immersion is a prerequisite to a worthwhile experience. Sound is a pretty cheap and effective feedback medium for player actions, it quickly helps to define and telegraph changes in environments and settings (¿is this a safe encounter or the prelude to a boss fight?) and is crucial in helping to keep engagement during non-playable segments (in the earlier days, sometimes even printing dialogue text to screen was accompanied by sound effects to avoid alienating the player).
That's not a great analogy. Soundtracks are often in the top ~5 most important parts of making a game special.
A laugh track doesn't really change the narrative or the experience that much, except on comedies which are only barely funny to begin with. You could remove the laugh tracks of any of my favorite comedies and I'd enjoy them maybe 1% less.
But games like Fallout NV, Doom, the GBA-era Pokemon games, would be a whole lot less immersive (and less fun) without their amazing soundtracks.
"There is no data that can be displayed in a pie chart, that cannot be displayed BETTER in some other type of chart." — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Tukey
Interesting. It appears to me that I can better tell area differences between nicely shaped objects rather than long narrow objects. Is there a measure that can tell how nicely shaped an object is? The obvious one I could come up with is ratio of area of object to area of bounding circle. Closer to 1 is good. Lower than some threshold we pick is bad. I'm sure someone must have thought of this problem.
It certainly works to optimize squatter triangles over long narrow triangles, and these shapes over arcs.
Furthermore, what is this kind of chart called? How was it laid out? Is it a one off manual kinda deal.
Does this even have any advantages over a pie chart? IIRC people are not good at judging relative area at all, even circles. How much does un-wedging the pie help?
At least with a pie chart you can try to compare arc length which may be easier?
If you as a gamer or developer are unhappy with this outcome or are unhappy that this happened at all.
Have a reminder that Godot (an open source MIT License) game engine could use your support, Godot offers a way to address this long term instead of relying on a contract with an untrustworthy company:
Use:
Homepage with download links for Latest and LTS versions for Android, Linux, macOS, Windows, and Web (you can build for iOS but cannot write on it).
IMO there is nothing Unity can realistically do to regain trust, when a corporation shows you what their goals are and how they plan to reach them; believe it.
So, what I'm gathering is if you're bothered by the Unity (either a developer, publisher, gamer) developments, and wish Godot was a better alternative than it is, contributing to the project (by donating either time or money) is probably necessary to get there.
