Some of these are real stretches involving band names getting swapped around.

The original band called “Judas Priest” broke up entirely. KK Downing, and Ian Hill were in a band called Freight together. Al Atkins of the now-defunct Judas Priest joined Freight, and they decided the now-available name of Judas Priest was cooler. It was not the same band. Furthermore, before their first album was recorded Atkins was replaced with Halford, and Tipton also joined. So I would count Ian Hill, Rob Halford, and Glenn Tipton all as founding members.

Opeth is similar. The first Opeth before Ackerfeldt broke up without recording any albums.

I have some confounding factors.

First of all, my house was built in 1921 so is not designed around a big screen. We have a 70" TV in our living room, but it’s over the fireplace and rough 12’ away from our faces. Experts recommend something larger for that distance, but that is the biggest thing that fits between the mantle and ceiling. We could look into one of those fancy moving TV mounts for fireplaces, but they’re quite expensive too and seem like a pain.

The second piece is that I had my retina re-attached a few years ago. Even with a strong prescription I still find it harder to see details from far away ever since.

So I prefer smaller screens closer to my face in general. I do a lot of my gaming on the Steam Deck. I watch a lot of stuff on my phone, and I have a 10" tablet I use sometimes too.

Sound is another thing. I find good quality headphones best anyone’s fancy expensive home theater setup consistently, but the tradeoff is that headphones are usually less convenient and get uncomfortable to wear after a while. Bluetooth means less battery life for my phone, wires means I’m tethered (I have an Xperia so I have a headphone jack at least).

That’s being mean to gas station sandwiches, but otherwise I agree

For a the past few years, I had wondered why videogames, movies, and TV shows nowadays feel so… Bland. Meaningless. Soulless. Corporate. Like, I know they ARE corporate, but these industries have all been dominated by gigantic corporations for my entire life. What changed recently? Am I just getting old and curmudgeonly and preferring content that was made back when I was younger?

Then I was watching DoorMonster talk about some show (I could be wrong, but I think it was the video about how Arcane had a great Season 1 that was largely ruined by Season 2) where they kept joking about not accusing them of using AI to write things.

Then it clicked. The Writer’s Strike from May-September 2023. On paper, the Writer’s Guild secured restrictions on the use of AI. And I can’t point to anything specific and say “that was clearly written by AI”. But I can say that for the past few years everything put out by pretty much every company has felt very… “Meh”. Nothing new has grabbed me and said “wow I need to watch/play that”. Could be a coincidence, but I also have to wonder whether AI tools involved in writing and visuals have cost us something intangible that I can still feel.

This may be unpopular, but I think this is great news.

Skyrim became one of the best-sellign games of all time in part BECAUSE of how great it is to see your character get ragdolled into the lithosphere by a giant, or to watch the chaos of spawning thousands of wheels of cheese on top of the throat of the world and watching them roll down.

An Elder Scrolls game that was built around having realistic physics, or being restricted to more cinematic movement and knteractions, would lose a key essence of what made the earlier games great.

I don’t want engaging combat in Elder Scrolls. If I want combat that I have to pay attention to, I’ll go play a Souls game or a fighting game or one of the thousands of games that have tried to be “Skyrim with better combat” that have languished in obscurity because they miss the point.

Geese

The article is behind a paywall. Do they have any statistics or evidence backing that sentiment or is it just vibes?

You can find articles and reddit posts claiming this same exact thing going back years, and yet personally when I go through the store and look through reviews it’s really hard for me to come across hate speech, especially if you don’t specifically look at reviews that have been downvoted to hell. It’s never going to be perfect, but I encounter less hate speech on Steam than most other platforms.

They also have guidelines for “user generated content” which includes reviews, and you can report people for violating those guidelines.

Sure Valve does not pay for moderators to check things proactively. I quite like that they don’t have AI or some other half-assed attempt at “moderation” like other platforms have. I hate the way that the whole Internet has moved to censor “fuck” and made up the word “unalive” because the automated systems of platforms I don’t even use have decided they are the arbitora of what language is allowed.

I think the responsibility to monitor reviews should lie with whoever controls the Steam page: I would assume the publisher most of the time? The publisher and developer should be looking at reviews anyways. Add in the ability for users to vote reviews as helpful or unhelpful and I think it’s one of the better systems left on the internet.

There are guidelines on Steam that ban such content, and you can report people for violating them.

So no, Steam does not do “nothing” as you claim. A very basic Internet search can confirm that.

Even better, users can rate reviews as helpful or unhelpful. Which is great for a wider variety of reasons, but is also good for reviews that get into a grey area or use dog whistles to hide their true intentions.

Some apps use eye tracking on devices with front-facing cameras. Not sure if Netflix does or not.

BioShock 1 and Infinite both have the same problem.

On your first time through, the story pulls you through the game. There setting and characters are so mysterious and interesting you’re compelled to figure out what the hell happened and get to the bottom of it. You might notice, on your first run, that the games are really easy and the gun play isn’t particularly good. The actual gameplay gets repetitive, basically moving from big room to big room shooting things.

The special powers are fun the first couple times you use them but are mostly situational and the kind of thing other games just use items for (land mines, grenades, etc), just re-skinned.

Then at the end there’s a big reveal. Some plot twist that re-contextualizes the whole game and leaves you thinking about the game for an entire week.

Then you replay them and realize… The big twist at the end? There’s almost zero foreshadowing and it would be impossible to have predicted either of them on your first playthrough.

There are plenty of factions that have different political ideologies, but they are nothing more than a setting. The most obvious is how they spent the first half of Infinite pretty clearly establishing that Comstock and his associates were violently oppressing the working class in Colombia and that Daisy Fitzroy’s rebellion was both personally and ideologically justified. Then all of a sudden Booker is there enemy because… He thinks they were too violent in their pursuit to overthrow that oppression or something? It really felt like the devs just needed to throw more enemies at you in the back half of the game so they made a flimsy excuse to do that.

The BioShock games give the illusion of talking about politics and ideology, but really the only message is just “extremism bad”.

I have had issues in the past with bad SD cards on my pi-hole that cause it to stop working after a few minutes. I know you said it works fine without Mullvad, but was that just a quick verification or an extended long-term test with traffic?

Look at his voting record before vs after in the Senate. He has the stroke before he was even sworn in, but mostly voted along party lines in 2023 and 2024. His only real deviation, going back to his campaign, was that he was pro-fracking.

Anyone cane go ahead and look up his voting record, but it’s incredibly tedious to try to figure out what a vote actually means, how It aligns with the rest of the DNC (which is not necessarily what I would call "progressive), and how to feel about it. Everyone really SHOULD do this on their own, but for the lazy here is a website that at least claims to be progressive and tries to evaluate how members of Congress have voted over time.

2023: 200/207 votes were progressive 2024: 210/230 2025: 454/594 2026: 30/33 so far

You can find other websites that show a similar trend, and this matches my own personal observations as a Pennsylvania. Part of what got Fetterman elected in the first place was distancing himself from a tarnished DNC, and he was mostly doing a good job for his first year or so. In either later 2024 or 2025 something changed.

Someone got to him, and I could only speculate who. I doubt he’s in the Epstein files because he was not important enough for Epstein to care about until years after Epstein died. Could be AIPAC. Could be that oil companies had him in their pocket the whole time. Could be something else. But it’s certainly not correct to say that PA voters should have seen this coming.

I always like to think: what happens if some random hacker (either a bored teenager or hostile state) was able to control this thing?

Operating locks? Hell no. Controlling my thermostat/furnace? Hell no.

Monitoring locks? Like, having a sensor that indicates that a door or window is locked or unlocked and can notify you when it changes? Well, personally I still don’t do that because broadcasting to the internet that my window is unlocked seems dangerous, but I could also understand how that could be helpful, especially for people with OCD.

Controlling my window-mounted AC units? Mild inconvenience at worse. I could go without them in the summer and just be a bit uncomfortable (and some years I do to save money). They aren’t powerful enough to be dangerously cold. I could always unplug them or kick them off my wi-fi if I had to. Worst-case scenario is that someone runs up my electric bill if in away from home for a bit. The ability to change the settings, set automation, and monitor room temperatures remotely is convenient enough to be worth the risk.

Lights? No problem at all, especially because I still have dumb lights in some fixtures that I just don’t use often. So the worst-case scenario is that someone turns them on/off when I don’t want, and the solution is just… Unscrew the bulb, unplug the fixture, or flip the switch to cut the power. Or turn on a dumb light. LED’s are so efficient that I probably wouldn’t notice a difference on my electric bill if all of my lights were on vs off for a full billing period. In exchange, I’m able to use light turning on as a much gentler alarm in the morning, or turn everything off from bed when I’m ready to sleep, or if I’m out at a friend’s house it’s nice to have lights on before I go home.

Each piece of automation is its own evaluation. What could go wrong, and how much damage would that cause? What information do I care about potentially being leaked? How much efficiency and convenience am I getting in return?

Also interesting to note that it seems common for the ruling party to see a lot of retirements in mid-terms, at least in the House.

Republicans have 30 retiring this time. In 2022 the Dems had 29 retirements under Biden. Trump saw 34 Republicans retire in 2018.

There are other outliers of course. The top year, 1992, was a presidential election and both parties saw a lot of retirements.

I would disagree with this quite strongly. Most brands have several different tiers of products. Often, especially for the budget-level options like Squiers, the manufacturing is outsourced. For example, my first electric guitar was from Cort, a South Korean company whose main business at the time was doing contract manufacturing for Ibanez, Squier, PRS, and G&L, Kramer, Honer, and more. Literally the same wood and parts, just with slightly different shapes and branding.

The highest-end, elitist guitars would be small shops that focus on handmade custom work. Stuff like Dunable or what PRS used to be. Jackson is now owned by Fender, but it used to be a more premium brand. Custom shop stuff is always going to be premium regardless of brand- Schecter, Ibanez, Dean, Gibson, Fender, doesn’t matter.

To compare this to OP’s prompt, it would be like if Hershey did custom high-quality chocolate options, also sold good quality chocolate, and also sold a decent value option in grocery stores, and also sold the plastic brown goop they sell today as a budget option.

The message should have been “take accusations seriously” rather than “believe women”.

Justice can be messy and unsatisfying. The “me too” movement highlighted a lot of patriarchal flaws in the current justice system, but it also sought to create its own separate “cultural justice” system even more flawed in the other direction. Believing every accusation is how we ended up with so many innocent black teenaged boys getting lynched in the south.

We will probably never know the real numbers- how many sexual assault are unreported, or how many sexual assault accusations are false (or perhaps target the wrong person). But there is a very good reason that the justice system applies “innocent until proven guilty”.

For breakfast I like egg cups. Take a muffin tin, spritz with cooking spray, and line each depression with a slice of ham, basically acting like a cupcake wrapper would. Crack an egg in each one. Add some salt, other seasonings, cheese, veggies, whatever else. Bake at 350F, usually for 20-30 minutes but I would recommend checking every 10 to start. Put them in a container and refrigerated for a week or two. Every morning I take 1 or 2 out, microwave them for 30-40 seconds, and put some hot sauce or ranch on them.

For lunch: protein smoothie. Orange juice, vanilla protein powder, peanut butter, ice. Optionally, a banana. I typically make one batch real quick and split it between my wife and I for lunch. Basically add them in and blend until smooth, and I would recommend starting with 1 serving of each basically (8oz OJ, 1 scoop protein, 2tbsp peanut butter, and as much ice as you need for texture). It’s like an orange creamsicle- the peanut butter adds a lot of texture but not a ton of peanut flavor that might be weird with orange.

My wife and I are on a low-carb diet, so we use low-sugar OJ and only 4oz. 2 scoops of low-cabe whey protein. Considering switching from peanut to almond butter, or just a bit of peanut oil instead.

For dinner is the real serious meal prep: chicken breast/tenders and vegetables. Put 5lbs of chicken in a casserole dish. Add whatever seasonings you like: pickled jalapeno, soy sauce, rosemary + thyme, Dijon mustard, ranch seasoning, etc. Chicken is an incredible canvas for pretty much any seasoning across the world. Bake at 350F for… At least an hour, probably more like 90 minutes. Get some decent re-usable sectioned containers (microwave + freezer safe required, dishwasher safe is required for me personally too). If you have whole breasts you might want to cut them into portions before cooking (halves or thirds usually. You could cut it into bite-sized pieces if you’re ambitious). Or you could cut after cooking, just let it cool off a bit first.

For sides, I like frozen bags of broccoli and cauliflower. Carrots, squash, and peas are good when I’m less concerned about carbs. Some things are better fresh, like mushrooms (with soy sauce), cucumbers (with soy sauce), or other local seasonal stuff. Brussel sprouts are good frozen, better fresh. Artichoke hearts are great. Stuff like onions and bell peppers can be good additions, but j typically need them to be mixed either with each other or something else to work.

The idea is you can put all those containers in a freezer and then microwave them for roughly 3-5 minutes depending on how much is in them. We have a dedicated freezer in our basement for this. It’s nice that my wife and I can independently choose whatever flavor we are in the mood for that night.

When the price of chicken has been really high, it’s easy enough to switch to another meat. Sausages are good. Pork loin cut into medallions.

All our friends have so many conflicting diets and dietary restrictions that are a certain point we are better off having sinners that are Being Your Own Meal, so those frozen dinners are really nice.

To make these vegetarian… If eggs are alright then you could probably remove the ham from the egg cups, but the egg might stick to the muffin pan. Maybe you could find some other sort of liner. My mom uses canned crescent roll dough in a similar way to make miniature quiches, so maybe something like that would work?

Protein smoothie does not require any animal products. Could be vegan pretty easily as long as you check the ingredients. The big issue is cost, especially for protein powder.

Frozen dinners might be trickier to make vegetarian just because I’m not sure what protein sources would do well frozen and microwaved. Maybe tofu? Or noodles?

Here are some things that I’m not eating on my current diet, but are great for saving money.

Oatmeal for breakfast (make steel-cut oats in a slow cooker,you can add milk, egg, peanut butter, maple syrup, brown sugar, butter, salt, spices, frozen or fresh fruit, protein powder, whatever).

Chilli. If you want ground meat, brown it and season it first (if you aren’t familiar with seasonings, start by grabbing a chilli powder mix from the store, look at the ingredients, then buy those things and experiment with proportions). Then add it to a slow cooker. Add at least 1 can of tomato paste, crushed tomatoes, and beans (I like black beans, but kidney is good too). Add more tomatoes and/or beans, or if you really want to save money add rice (might need a bit of water too). Cook on low- it’ll probably be ready after 4 hours but will be fine for 8 hours. From there you can dip tortilla chips in it, make some cornbread, pour over rice, make sandwiches like Sloppy Joes, etc.

Rice, bread, noodles, and potatoes are all great cheap fillers.

Honestly I think the bigger reason is that most games are more suited to a miniseries or full TV show.

Also Use Boll “retired” in 2016, and while he has still done some film work since, he has stopped cranking out bad videogame movies.

Recent stuff like Minecraft, Uncharted, Gran Turismo were “meh” instead of “terrible”. TV shows like Arcane, Cyberpunk Edge Runners, Castlevania, Fallout, and The Last of Us have been pretty well received. Heck, the first season of the Witcher was really good. The Mario movie did well enough that they made a sequel, and are making a Zelda movie.

Not to mention other cross-media franchises. Marvel has been gigantic. D&D has had several videogames and movies over the years of varying quality. Warhammer is getting a TV show. Pokemon has been a gigantic mess of good, bad, and mediocre media of all kinds. Star Wars too.

Also weird that this isn’t an article. It’s not news or an academic study. Only a link to a web page from the Australian government saying “smoking is bad”. It doesn’t even clarify that they are talking about tobacco, unless you look at the directory and see this is under “tobaccofacts”.

Also to be clear I agree with the message, but I also agree with you that this is an odd post.