Congrats bro! I’m happy for you and also a bit jealous 😁

Good point on the ethics issue. Youngsters these days don’t know what hard games really are. Games used to be diabolically hard, design holdovers from when quarter-munching games moved to home consoles and every game you paid full price for was essentially a gamble on whether or not it was going to be good or even playable, but finishable was almost not a consideration back then because it was pretty rare to actually ckear a game from start to end.

These days to think it’s important and walk a line between challenging and entertaining not just for the sake of capturing a larger market share of players, but also to avoid bad publicity from having a game be too difficult to o complete.

Aw, but all my other bones are so low maintenance.

Mine is Magic: The Gathering, except I fully realize that I am pulling away from it and why.

The game sparked an immense amount of joy when I picked it up in high school. Now I barely recognize the game anymore. It doesn’t truly have an identity of its own and exists in this permanent state of limbo where 3rd party IPs are taking over the demand for new product and the rules are becoming so bloated that they can’t fit them on cards anymore.

This is such an “old man yelling at clouds” moment for me, because I heard just about every reason under the sun for why people quit the game when I was playing from power creep to changing art styles to just getting priced out of the hobby in general. I realize now that those people were not wrong, they were just not the target audience anymore. I am no longer a profitable demographic to pander to. I never buy packs anymore, and I’ve even stopped buying singles and I don’t attend tournaments or collect anymore, so why would Hasbro/WotC make products for me? Especially when there are deep pocketed whales out there who will pay top dollar for their favorite crossover set, no matter how silly or out of place it might seem.

I wish I could enjoy the game the way I used to, but I just can’t be bothered to hop back in when it doesn’t feel the same anymore.

I got accused of this the other day. Some random on Steam added me because he liked my profile pic. I was bored and decided to humor him. Two sentences in and he’s like “What’s with the ChatGPT sounding responses?”.

I honestly didn’t know how to react to that.

It doesn’t matter to anybody who has already made up their mind to vote/not vote for him.

It matters that justice is done and that the system holds him accountable.

One of the only fucking things we’ve done right in this country, right up there with banning coin-op pay toilets pretty much everywhere.

Yeah, this was my first thought as well as soon as I read the image. We have tons and tons of literally empty housing units. Even if you take away the ones that are only temporarily vacant while searching for a new tenant, you’re still left with a bunch of housing units that sit empty, waiting to be flipped for a profit by real estate investors.

Guestbook, hit counter, a midi file playing in the background, and a dead hyperlink to another page of the same website.

Edit: omg I can’t believe I forgot about marquees. Do that too.

I always thought that Fox was a cool name for a dude ever since I watched the X-Files. If I had to change my first name, that’s what I’d pick.

No, those are usually embedded into the video itself as a segment by the content creator. However, SponsorBlock works really well and will automatically skip those bits for you (assuming someone else already put in the effort to mark the sponsored content).

The only thing Pokemon-esque about it is the monster designs and that you catch them in spherical objects.

Everything else about it lends itself more to the survival crafting genre.

Gameplay I think is quite enjoyable from the bit I’ve played. It feels a lot more sandboxy than Pokemon would have ever allowed in their games because they care a lot about story narratives that everyone now finds super boring.

We should really not be normalizing calling money paid in advance to not have your food arrive late/cold a “tip”. It’s extortion.

Tipping culture in America is fucked beyond belief. Pay everybody a fair wage and let’s get rid of tipping so nobody ever has to deal with this bullshit again.

I want people to know that life was the greatest fucking thing to ever happen to me. I loved it all, even the parts that sucked, just because I got to take it all in. The highs of joy, the lows of sadness, the good, the bad. People will say “Too bad he never got to live a full life,” but I say FUCK that! This was fucking incredible! This IS a full life because it’s the one I got, and just the chance to experience this universe is so unbelievably goddamn beautiful

I don’t have anything to add to the discussion, but that particular line resonated with me. When I was in college, one of my professors said something pretty profound that I think is relevant to this. I can’t remember if he was quoting someone of if this was original, but I’m paraphrasing it here:

“Everyone who has ever lived was alive during the greatest time to be alive.”

So I think you are absolutely right. Life is a blessing and you got to be here for the best life had to offer, and that’s awesome. We are all but motes of dust, and the span of a full life versus a life cut short is inconsequential in the grand scheme. I’m sure you’ll leave something behind that will be worthwhile and will help carry your memory forward in time.

It will open Firefox or whatever your default browser is if you delete chrome or freeze it.

I’ve tried this solution and it doesn’t work. Chrome is running within the Google News app. Even if you modify Chrome on your phone to have adblockers, the version of the browser that Google News opens is unmodified.

Click where? If this is from an in-app web browser, like Google News for instance, there’s no way to link it back to Firefox AFAIK.

I guess my point is that it doesn’t really matter if their practice is backed up by hard science or not if some people still experience tangible benefit from doing it. Is it still a scam if the scammer provided you the product that you paid for?

Like I said, I would never advocate for someone to go see a chiropractor, an acupuncturist, a homeopath, a shaman, or whatever alternative treatments that might be out there over going to a real doctor or therapist, but if they’re already going to one and claiming that it’s working for them, why bother trying to convince them otherwise? You can tell them it’s pseudoscience until the cows come home, they’re not going to be inclined to listen.

This is one of those things, like acupuncture, that I will not fault anyone else for engaging in. There’s no hard evidence that they are effective, but if it helps you with your problem (even if it’s all in your head), then it was worth it, was it not?

I know people who have had their lives improved and their mobility restored thanks to chiropractors. I also know one or two who swear they got scammed for years because the pain always comes back really quickly.

I may not personally recommend a chiro to someone as a solution to their back or neck pain, but I won’t discourage them from going if they are considering it.

I mean, the philosophy behind correcthorsebatterystaple is good. I used that method for master passwords to password managers and it really does work well to help you remember a long complex password that can’t be guessed easily.

But some people might have been missing the point of that xkcd using correcthorsebatterystaple itself.

Looking over my original post, perhaps my phrasing wasn’t clear. Yes, this is one way to decrease costs, but it comes at the expense of comfort. Airline companies are no stranger to this process, and have been rolling out new methods of packing as many passengers onto a plane as physically possible since the very first commercial airplanes took flight.

Awkward and regressive ideas like this, where the airlines are contemplating stacking people in uncomfortable looking double-decker seating to save precious inches of space are only coming out now because no significant strides have been made in making air travel less expensive to operate as a whole. It is always going to be easier to shave off a few inches of legroom and pack in another row of seating in the next generation of jet airliner than it is to invent a new type of jet fuel that is cheaper and burns cleaner without sacrificing performance, or developing a new more efficient fuselage that can fly just as far as a conventional plane while carrying less fuel, etc.

It would be nice to see air travel improve for a change, rather than continue to get worse and worse over time out of necessity.