Competitiveness and skill-based matchmaking is what killed multiplayer gaming for me. It used to be you were good at a game or bad at a game, and you could always tell yourself you lost matches because too many really good players happened to be on the other team. Now there are only two options: you play better than you did yesterday and you win, or you play worse than you did yesterday and you lose. I despise that constant pressure. I want days when I get rofl-stomped by a team of demi-gods, and, dammit, I want to occasionally be the one doing the stomping. That just doesn't exist anymore. You're playing with a bunch of people who are about as good as you and if you don't try your hardest you're going to lose every time.
I hate the Kardashev scale. How is it useful in describing technological advancement? A civilization that technically had the ability to capture all the energy output from a star may not decide to do so. There's also the fact capturing the energy of a star and capturing the energy of a galaxy is the exact same level of technology, given galaxies are made of stars. "Capturing the energy of a planet" isn't even a coherent concept.
These look very nice for marketing purposes but as I user I despise this trend of making the icons for everything look nearly identical to each other. It completely defeats the purpose of having an icon in the first place.
If you haven't tried it, I highly recommend the Dreamcast version. It has the graphics and voice-acting of the PC version with the tight analog controls of the N64 version.
Ads for multi-function products have featured the single-use products they're intended to replace being crushed, shoved into them, destroyed, thrown away, etc for decades. Artists are just extremely salty right now about being replaced by AI so they're sensitive.
“As a charity, we support families to make informed choices about medical technologies, so that they can give their deaf child the best possible start in life.”
A pleasantly measured response. For those in the know, has the deaf community calmed down in recent years? I remember a time when they were radically opposed to anything that smelled like a "cure" for something they considered more of an identity than a disability, though I haven't read anything on it in a long time.
Why now? They're expected to announce a successor printer in the next few months and they've said the X1C, as their oldest printer, will stop getting firmware updates next year.
I've found it's often impossible to get keyboards like Swiftkey to stop autocorrecting "ok" to "OK". It's so irritating because while grammatically correct, it makes me look like a boomer in text conversations.
If I recall correctly, 3D printers don't even handle smooth curves in 2D. I've heard CNC people express contempt at how primitive the Gcode used by printers is, how it doesn't support any of the advanced features of machine movement that create smooth curves.
That's very interesting. It would explain why the "high level" takes such as papers and articles keep saying crime is plummeting but all the anecdotal accounts are "crime is getting worse and worse and nobody does anything about it".
I would be interested in an analysis of how refusals to prosecute are or are not affecting statistics. If you stop prosecuting a certain crime, does it appear like that crime is happening less on paper?
The article makes it pretty clear the shift was prompted by their ongoing failure to meet their nuclear goals as well as a dropping cost of renewables, not by a philosophical choice to embrace only renewables.
My life would have taken a different and probably less computer-centered path if I hadn't found the act of writing physically uncomfortable. From the day I learned to write all the way through to the present, it doesn't take more than a couple of minutes for my hand to begin aching. How fascinating it would be to be one of those people who can put pen to page for hours at a time, or buzz out notes in real-time then look down without being repulsed at the form of their handwriting.
We reasoned. We begged. We screamed at IA not to do what they did, that this would be the inevitable outcome. This is like someone left a bear trap on my front lawn and because I should have the right to do whatever I want on my property I refuse to listen to the crowd of people telling me not to stick my dick in the bear trap. The controlled digital lending was already completely illegal but the IA was making headway on making it a culturally accepted practice. Then they burned it to the ground. The loss of the IA would be one of if not the greatest Internet-tragedy in history, but the fools in charge of it don't deserve anyone's sympathy.
It spreads the interesting stuff out too much for me. Halfway through the third season I realized the episodes were starting to run together in my head and if I waited more than a day to start watching again I ended up rewatching half the episode before realizing I'd already seen it.
Singular "they" was one I resisted for a long time, but it's a lost cause.
I've had almost the opposite experience from you. I'd long embraced it as the correct word to use when referring to a person of unknown gender or to a hypothetical individual, but having to use it regarding real people caused me problems. When my wife became coworkers with a non-binary person and its usage came up every few days, the better I got at gendering them properly the worse I got at everyone else. First I started accidentally calling her other friends "they", and then I started sometimes referring to any woman as "they". Fortunately that coworker took a job elsewhere before I started referring to men as they too.
I hate this word. When I'm reading a novel it's often hard to tell which meaning the author intends, and whether a character is confused by something or unbothered by something can be important.
Somebody doing drugs behind the Walmart doesn't bother me. The endless stream of people at the gas station who "just need some money to get home" does bother me.
You also have to actually do it and not just say you're doing it. There's no point in jailing people for marijuana possession while parts of the government are selling cocaine to generate revenue.
I don't understand the Western approach to drugs. If what you value is individual liberty and the principles of self-ownership and not punishing victimless crimes, you decriminalize drug use. If what you value is the elimination of the individual and societal harms of drug addiction, you jail users and execute dealers like Singapore. The half-measures taken by Western governments seem to combine the worst aspects of every possible approach, both disrespecting the individual and failing to protect society.
I liked math up until my pre-calc teacher told me I couldn't go any further until I memorized two dozen different trigonometric identities and was able to immediately identify which to use.
You are aware Samsung encrypts the bootloader of their American devices, yes? If you have a way to decrypt Android 12+ Samsung bootloaders I know two separate people running unlock businesses who would love to pay you a lot of money.