Looking forward a TSA officer looking at me like an idiot for either not taking my shoes off or for taking my shoes off. It’s comforting to know that no matter what I do, there’s a TSA agent who will treat me like I’m a moron for following the same instructions I overheard them give the person in front of me.

Correct, they do scale the boss HP when solo vs a normal trio game, you also get one guaranteed free revive and shops are guaranteed to sell a revive item. Personally, I’d still rather queue with randoms, but we’ll see how that goes when they add duo games. Queue times can already be a bit long sometimes, and I’m a bit concerned that losing duo teams to their own mode will make solo queues even longer and more annoying.

I’ll admit I tried talking to a local deepseek about a minor mental health issue one night when I just didn’t want to wake up/bother my friends. Broke the AI within about 6 prompts where no matter what I said it would repeat the same answer word-for-word about going for walks and eating better. Honestly, breaking the AI and laughing at it did more for my mental health than anything anyone could have said, but I’m an AI hater. I wouldn’t recommend anyone in real need use AI for mental health advice.

As someone who was in Christian Schools/Home-School for my entire education, this is lowkey the real reason. Most won’t (openly) admit it, but the whole Christian school movement was a response to desegregation. Eventually the reasons would grow into “we don’t want our kids being taught Evolution” and now “we don’t want our kids learning that LGBT exist” but the original reason was desegregation and racism.

As someone who has casually considered running for office in South Carolina (because our local representative is an incompetent buffoon, and while I don’t consider myself qualified to run, I know I could do a better job), I kinda agree. If you want your representatives to be normal people, and understand what reality is like, then you really need to pay them at least a somewhat liveable wage, because as it stands, the only people who can afford to do the job are those who are basically independently wealthy, own a car dealership or some other business that basically runs itself, or are retired. I’m not saying politicians should be making boatloads of money. But their pay should also be a liveable wage for the area they represent.

Considering Eric Adams already is running as an independent, Cuomo is more likely to siphon votes away from him. Although I think it will be ranked choice anyway, so “splitting” the vote won’t really matter.

I also want to think it’s a little bit the management/CEOs who think their employees are their friends who get lonely realizing the stripper doesn’t actually love them. Meanwhile they refuse to develop a personality or real friendships.

So, I never believed the “Golden Dome” was going to actually be a thing, but wasn’t the contract for that supposed to be going to one of Elon’s companies? Is the project just off now? And follow-up question: is anything (short of scrambling some nearby jets) preventing Elon from “landing” a Falcon Heavy Rocket on the White House?

Unironically a top-5 movie for me. It’s bad, but it’s also everything I want from a movie.

Fakespot was somewhat accurate at catching when Amazon sellers take a well-reviewed item and swap out the product for another, by changing the title, description, and pictures. We’ve probably all read a review on Amazon that feels like the reviewer is posting a review of a completely different product, like a review that seems to be about a kitchen utinsil on a listing for an unusually affordable camera. It’s a pretty common scam that Fakespot was pretty good at catching. It didn’t seem as good at adjusting ratings for legit products and seemed to kind of randomly knock off a a half to one and a half stars on pretty much every listing, even on quality products.

Yeah, I agree it’s weird. As an American who grew up in an area where sweetened tea wasn’t the norm, I hate having to specify. But I also don’t have any faith left in my fellow countrymen, and feel like I have to make it clear for them.

Unfortunately, most bioplastics are more like 300 years, which yes, is significantly better than 300 thousand years, and with industrial compost heaters you can push those 300 years down. But I’ve also had to come to terms that my failed 3D prints will likely outlive me (although I do collect the waste to hopefully recycle someday). I don’t print that much compared to most in the hobby, but it is something I consider before I print things.

That said, I’m not going to let perfect be the enemy of good, and the biodegradability of bioplastics is still exponentially better than petroleum plastic.

I beat the rush and stocked up in December, and I hate that that purchase is already feeling justified. One option to keep in mind as well is that tea is relatively good natural source of fluoride. So if things get bad enough, becoming an unsweetened tea-drinker might help.

I was going to say there’s no way they still are since Silverlight was discontinued by Microsoft in 2013, but it is Riot Games so ¯\(ツ)/¯

A bunch of Disney movie sites did for a while, back in the day when every movie had it’s own website with trailers, promo, and a link to buy tickets and/or the DVD release.

I wish I was joking, but he doesn’t like the straight line border on the map. He wants to “get rid of that artificially drawn line.”

I was absolutely on a version of the alt-right pipeline a decade ago. I was raised by far-right, Mike Johnson-style “Christians,” so I was already pretty far down that path before I was drawn into any pipeline.

Luckily, I ended up on a weird libertarian branch of the pipeline (LearnLiberty rather than Prager U), and somehow the YouTube algorithm steered me into Veritasium’s content on climate change, and clips from Adam Ruins Everything. It sounds a bit crazy, but those things started opening my eyes and expanding my worldview. Probably didn’t hurt that my favorite TV show at the time was Leverage, which had plenty of its own anti-corporate-grifting themes.

Eventually, I realized that the Libertarian utopia doesn’t work because greed is an unlimited resource, and that makes regulation important.

Of course, there were other things that helped me escape my upbringing and the alt-right pipeline during gamergate (I wasn’t into gaming at the time, so that probably helped), but looking back and seeing how easily I could have ended up being a January 6 insurrectionist. I’m so thankful for all the little things that nudged me out of that worldview, and helped me see reality.

I wish there was an easy way to show young guys that the people they are listening to are liars and grifters who are manipulating young men into believing that their real pain is somehow the fault of women. But if I look at my own journey, it was a thousand little nudges. I didn’t change overnight, but there was a day during the 2016 election cycle that I remember realizing that even though I had spent almost 8 years despising Obama, that he had been an alright president - especially compared to the Republican nominee, Trump.

Mine (early LCD model) has “Made in China” on the label, which even if most of the parts are made elsewhere, if final assembly is in China, that’s the tariff rate that will apply.

Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if the SteamDeck doubles or triples in price before long. We already knew Valve wasn’t making much, if anything, on them, and with a 245% tariff, I kinda doubt they’ll just eat that.

But what qualifies as social media? We can all probably agree that Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Reddit, etc. count, but what about say Discord or WhatsApp? How about browsing older forums (like open ones where you don’t need an account to read them)? What about news articles or blogs with a comment section? Is a wiki social media? Depending on how you define it, the majority of the internet could be considered social media.

Plus there are plenty of sites that just won’t ever bother to try to comply. For example, I live in one of the more stupid states in the US that has required age verification for porn sites, PornHub has complied by just blocking their site in the state with a notice that they won’t implement a system like that for privacy reasons. But they and their sister sites are the only ones I’ve seen that have bothered to make any changes. The same will inevitably happen with social media. You’re just going to push kids to shadier corners of the internet that don’t care about laws, and they’re gonna end up radicalized by nazis, or taken advantage of in worse ways.

The whole problem is parents who don’t want to be parents and tell their kids they can’t have a smartphone. And I get that the dumbphone market is kinda limited, and that some parents just don’t care what their kids are exposed to. But trying to fix this problem by changing the internet is never going to work. The only way to fix the problem is to have a spine and make appropriate changes IRL - like banning smartphones for underaged kids in school, or show your full distopian side and prosecute parents who let their kids use social media.