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OK, I think it's time to reveal the solution I had in mind.

These are the clues that point to the answer:

Spoiler

- The last time I remember having the ear buds, it was to take them out and put them in their case, just as I entered the office.
- Both cases were identical.
- There are only a few steps (10 m) from the entrance to the closet, and I was in a hurry.

- At the end of the day, I expected to find the ear buds in my jacket pocket. (It was the first place I checked.)
- My jacket was then hanging in a closet shared with others.
- There were many people already in the office when I arrived. (Since all the desks were taken.) It can therefore be inferred that the closet was full of coats and jackets.
- By the time I left, most of the others in the office were already gone.

- I usually stuff things I won't need during the day in my jacket pockets and hang up my jacket after dropping off stuff I will need at my desk.
- On this day, all the desks in my usual seating area were already claimed, though some were currently unoccupied.
- I believe I hung up my jacket before going to an unoccupied desk to sort out my things.

- After arriving, I headed for a meeting room.
- The meeting rooms are between the entrance and my seating area, so past the closet.

[close]

With that in mind, here is my scenario:

Spoiler

I came in to the office, and took out my ear buds to put them in their case. Because the two cases were identical, I had to take out both to find the one to put them in. So I didn't finish fiddling with this and returning them to the pockets by the time I reached the closet.

I took off my jacket and hung it in the closet. I took all my other stuff, including the cases, over to a currently unoccupied desk in order to sort everything out (mainly to retrieve my laptop from my backpack). Since the desk was claimed, I couldn't leave my stuff there. On my way to the meeting room, passing by the closet, I therefore stuffed the ear bud cases into what I thought was my jacket pocket.

However, since the closet was full of jackets, I put them in the pocket of the wrong jacket, and another colleague brought them home unwittingly, with no clue where they came from when they found them.

[close]

Perhaps this is not what really happened, but it's plausible enough to put my mind at rest, in any case.

What does "properly render" mean in this context?

Pixel perfect.

In above user's example this is going to be 320x200 displayed as 320x240.

No, it's going to be 320x200 displayed as 1600x1200, where each game pixel is displayed as a 5x6 rectangle on screen.

You cannot properly display a 320x200 image on 320x240 pixels: the stretching will either involve e.g. linear interpolation which makes all the pixels blurry, or a nearest-neighbor filter where some lines of pixels will be twice as tall as the others.

So it's not really correct to say that "The game would technically be rendered at 320x200, then stretched vertically to 320x240 where each pixel is now 1.2x taller." The resolution always remained 320x200, just fit to a 4:3 screen (320:240 = 4:3) by making each pixel taller. That works on a CRT screen but not on screens like LCDs which have physically fixed pixels.

EDIT: also it looks like there's a confusion about ratio. Elvisish sais "6:5" ratio, you say "5:6". But 320x240 is 4:3 ratio, is not it?
Linked wikipedia article on 13h mode also mentions 4:3.

We're talking about the pixel aspect ratio, not the screen aspect ratio. If we follow the usual convention where the ratio is expressed as width:height, it's 5:6 (taller than they are wide), but people do sometimes switch it around.

Note that for this to display correctly without artifacts, it will often require quite high monitor resolutions. For example, to properly render a 5:6 pixel aspect ratio for a 320x200 game, you need at least a 1200 vertical resolution monitor, while it seems like 1920x1080 is still (!) – in the Year of Our Lord 2024 – the most common desktop screen resolution. Otherwise you'll get uneven pixel sizes or blurry pixel edges.

Thanks!

only because something has a number in the script name doesn't mean it will go in such order.

Not necessarily, but a disciplined game maker will usually arrange it so that the indices are consecutive and in order, since it simplifies coding and speeds up navigation in the room editor.

Your solution is good if they are not, though.

The New York Times Tech Guild, the union that represents the workers who build and maintain NYT games like Wordle and Connections, are on strike, and they are calling on people to boycott the games in the mean time. Instead, they are hosting a bunch of games on their website, including Wordle and Connection clones. (Edit: The Wordle clone, "Strikle," seems to be more of a gimmick than a real game.)

Once the day gains symbolic significance, people may schedule political or terrorist actions to that particular date for that reason, or annual remembrances may spontaneously turn into protests or agitation.

You put in two line breaks. The recommended way to add a line break is "\n" (backslash is used for "escape codes" to add special characters, and "n" stands for "new line"), so "First paragraph\n\nSecond paragraph" will display as:

First paragraph

Second paragraph

(AGS also supports using "[" to insert a line break, but this method is no longer recommended, and I believe it is removed in upcoming versions.)

I'm a tentative yes.

I'd be more interested in going to Japan than the US, especially now, but if there are a bunch of Americans who would rather do a more local Mittens, then sure.

My dates are probably flexible, and if we're doing it in Japan I would want to stay longer than one week (either with a group or on my own).

It wasn't the Republicans who won the election, it was the Democrats who lost it. And, like 2016, they will learn absolutely nothing.

I think that is unfair. This was an election that favored Republicans on the fundamentals: voters' biggest concerns were the economy and (illegal) immigration, issues on which the public have long trusted the GOP more than the Democrats. With voters unhappy about the state of the economy and an unpopular Democratic incumbent, that made things very tough for the party in this election. (I read something rather startling by one political analyst that I find credible: That Trump actually ended up benefiting from his insane "They're eating the cats, they're eating the dogs" rant, because it turned the focus further onto immigration, and when people are talking about "your" issue, you're winning.)

In retrospect, the best course would clearly have been for Biden to announce that he wasn't running, and hold an open primary in which a candidate who could credibly be a figure of change from the current, unpopular administration might have come out on top. That might have given them a chance, though I think it would still have been an uphill battle. With Biden insisting on running, that path was not an option, and I think Dems made pretty much the best of a bad situation. (Of course, there will always be mistakes to criticize.)

Perhaps Democrats chose the wrong issues to run on to counter Republicans. A lot of it was about reproductive rights and Trump's unfitness and danger to democracy. I'd argue that this was a fairly idealistic strategy: it is scary what Trump and his minions will do next, and taking away reproductive rights serves as a reminder of that. A more cynical strategist would observe that although abortion was a winning issue in the 2022 mid-terms, it has already started to recede from the foreground, and that most people who agree that Trump is a threat are probably already voting blue (or are tired of being warned for the third time in a row that they have to stop Trump to save democracy). Still, I expect that these issues did drive numbers to an extent, making the election closer than it would otherwise have been. It just wasn't enough.

Of course, one could also argue that if Democrats had done a better job on policy and governing, the economy would have been in better shape, illegal immigration wouldn't be an issue, and the administration would be popular. I have doubts...

On the economy, the big issue voters were angry about is inflation. Maybe the post-pandemic stimulus was to blame—as I recall, Joe Manchin was very worried about that, and had the original Build Back Better Act reduced and rebranded as the Inflation Reduction Act—but on the other hand increased inflation has been a worldwide phenomenon for the last few years, and it hasn't been as bad in the US as in many other countries. On immigration, what is the solution? There is a populist push for heavier enforcement—is that what they should have done? And again, this tendency for illegal immigration to stoke support for draconian policies often proposed by far-right parties is not exclusive to the US.

Now, I personally wish the US adopted far more progressive policies on a number of issues. It could start by ending its support for Israel's genocide against the Palestinians. (Though it's frankly absurd to consider opposition to genocide a particularly "progressive" position.) But that doesn't mean that these positions would be election-winners in the US. Gaza in particular was far down the list of things most voters cared about, and split the party.

If I'm optimistic, I would hope that there could be political capital to be mined in effective policies to address economic inequality. In fact, the administration adopted a number of such measure, including in the pandemic stimulus and the attempt to cancel student debt, but they were hamstrung by the Supreme Court (which ruled student debt relief illegal) and Congress (through the Senate filibuster and the House after the midterms). I'm afraid the US political system is simply too dysfunctional and skewed to the right to pass large-scale progressive legislation.

@heltenjon and @Creamy, interesting ideas, but they don't really fit. I am certain I had both cases in my jacket pocket as I entered the office. I think we have to assume that I forgot or misplaced them somewhere, or someone accidentally took them, not that they were deliberately stolen (I don't believe anyone would steal second-hand ear buds) or accidentally dropped (which I am pretty sure would have been noticed).

7) Perhaps this should have been question 1, but: When you say you "entered the office", are you referring to the specific office space your company occupies, or the entrance to a larger building which is used by multiple businesses?

1) How far is the distance between the entrance to the office and the shared closet? Right by the door? in a different room, on a different floor?

6) Did you hang the jacket on a hook or a hanger, or did you just dump it in a basket, or cubby-hole or something?

OK, I'll explain. The company occupies multiple floors of an office building (I only use one of them), and when I say "office" I mean this area. You enter through a lift shaft/staircase in the middle of the building, using an access card, and head to your team's seating area, which are arranged along the sides of the building by the windows. In between there are meeting rooms, a kitchenette, printer room, supply rooms, toilets, etc, divided by corridors. The closets are sliding-door wardrobes built into the sides of these corridors, with clothes hangers on a rod.

It's probably about 10 meters from the entrance staircase to "my" wardrobe (used by everyone in this part of the building), which is right on the edge of my team's seating area—maybe 3 meters from the desk I normally use, which was taken that day.

2) Could you clarify whether you believe you transferred the buds to your jacket pockets immediately upon entering the office, or when you approached the shared closet? Or at some point between?

I took the case out of my jacket pocket to put my earbuds in it as I was walking down the corridor to the wardrobe closet. I don't remember exactly when I put them back in my jacket pocket, or if I did so at all.

3) Did you go directly to the shared closet, or did you do anything else between the entering the office and opening the closet.

5) I'm not sure if you have specified exactly at which point you removed the jacket. I imagined you took it off when you got to the shared closet, or was it at some point before that?

I don't remember exactly. My usual habit is to first drop my backpack, access card and any other stuff I'm carrying off at the desk I'm claiming, then hang up my jacket in the closet (on a clothes hanger), stuffing things like hat, gloves, and things I'm not going to need during the day in the jacket pockets. But since the desks in that seating area were all claimed (though not all occupied at that moment), I think I hung up my jacket first, then put my backpack down by an currently unused desk, took out my laptop, and headed to a meeting room.

4) Did you stop and talk to anyone during that time?

Not for any length of time. I was in a hurry.

Spoiler

Depending on your answers to some of the above questions, and assuming that a) no one took them from your pocket deliberately, and b) you have thoroughly searched the closet and they definitely aren't in or around it, it seems to me that they have to have been dropped at some point between your entering the building/office and putting your jacket in the closet.

The key to solving the case is in remembering exactly what you did during this period of time.

[close]

You are close but to not quite on the mark of my hypothetical solution.

I split off the political philosophy debate into a separate thread.

Maybe it would help if there was a minimum

Game.MinimumTextDisplayTimeMs

I do recommend looking in the manual from time to time. This property is linked from Game.TextReadingSpeed.

A-ha. I was going by your earlier statement:

The problem with this approach is the one I mentioned earlier to eri0o: "trigger" areas would stop corresponding to their visual representations.

Therefore I assumed you would use both the visible and the invisible cards as trigger areas. But if you think having part of the selected cards be outside of the trigger area and cause them to be unselected is not a problem, then sure. (You could even do that with hotspots, just having the overlapping card regions as a separate hotspot that matches whichever adjacent hotspot was last active.)

I was kind of expecting that the "second way" is used, meaning that the trigger zone is always the same, regardless of where the card is located in the current moment.

That's exactly the way I'm doing it, yes.

If by "second way" CW means the second alternative I described, it's not quite the same solution.

Okay I see.
But that's why I was suggesting using other hotspot / transparent object to define that area. Because frankly relying on mouse not moving alone does not seem to be reliable. A tiny player hand's twitch may cause it to drop down again.

You could set an anchor when the selection state changes and then use a higher threshold of movement away from that anchor, but it depends on what you're actually trying to fix. This is solely meant to deal with the case of bouncing (the selection state flipping back and forth rapidly), and handling it in the case of a stationary cursor is sufficient for that.

It does not deal with the issue of wanting the selected state to persist even when the card is no longer under the cursor in general. That's why I suggested combining it with the invisible cards.

Because it seems to me that the invisible cards is not a full solution to the problem, as demonstrated in this mockup:

First we select the leftmost card:



Then we move the cursor off to a location that is not covered by either the current card position or the original one (i.e. the invisible card):



Now we leave the cursor in this position. Since the card is no longer selected, it will begin to drop back to its original position, but this makes it pass over the cursor and get selected again, and so we're back to the bouncing. By adding the mouse movement check, we avoid this: in order to produce bouncing you have to keep jiggling the mouse, and in that case having the card rapidly selected and deselected is expected behavior.

Another way to handle this case would be to include the whole region the card passes over as it moves as part of the "buffer zone" (where it maintains a selection once the selection has been triggered), but that's more complicated.

But if cursor moved, then it not necessarily is moved outside of this card's trigger zone.
So why checking whether cursor moved specifically when in the end you still will have to check whether cursor is staying within the trigger zone?

It's for the case where the cursor hasn't moved but it is now outside of the card's trigger zone because the card has moved, as seen in the example:



Without this check, it will behave as in the recording, unselecting the card as soon as it leaves the cursor, causing it to start to move back, which then selects it again, and making it "bounce" back and forth between the states. With this check, it does not unselect the card as long as you don't move the cursor, even though it's no longer over the card, so you don't get any bouncing.

@Crimson Wizard, the point is that the highlighted card should only change because the cursor has moved, not because the card has moved. This will stop the cards from "bouncing" when they move away from the cursor.

In general, the solution is to introduce hysteresis (dependence on history to determine current state) for stability. IOW, once the state changes, that state should be a bit "sticky," not flip back as soon as the trigger condition no longer applies. Both the invisible cards and the mouse movement test are examples of this.

A typical solution is to make the threshold/trigger region for selecting and unselecting different, e.g. for a GUI that pops up at the top of the screen, it might appear when you move the mouse to y<100, but once it has appeared it will only go away if you move the mouse to y>120. That creates a buffer zone where the state doesn't change but depends on history, providing stability.

One way to fix the bouncing problem would be to say that if the mouse hasn't moved, don't update the card selection. If combined with the invisible cards in the stationary positions, I think this will solve the problem completely.

The line down the middle of this photo:



(The other lines are just from the edges of the trowel, and will be sandpapered away.)

I'm redoing a wall, and before painting I've "wallpapered" it with a thin fiberglass mesh to make the surface sturdier. This leaves a seam between each roll, and I'm trying to plaster over it to even it out. Maddeningly, the seam appears even though I've plastered a fairly thick layer, gone over it with sandpaper, and plastered again. What kind of princess-and-the-pea sorcery is transmitting the seam through layers of plaster?

On arrival, after storing the ear buds in the carrying case, do you remember putting it back in the jacket? I assumed so but it's not written. And even if you didn't put one pair back in the jacket, the other one should have been there.

I don't remember specifically. At the end of the day I expected to find them in my jacket pocket, but I might have had them with me until some point during the day. I sometimes hang up my jacket and sort out my bag, badge, etc. before returning items to the jacket pocket.

Note that it is perfectly possible that I took out the other case as well, either because I was taking them with me or because I tried the wrong case first when I was putting away the ear buds.