The best part about the “they control the weather” theory is that they are posting an old military patent on social media. What’s funny about it is that, American patent law being what it is, even if it was real it would prove nothing. I could file a patent for a working dragon; that doesn’t mean I have access to a fucking dragon. It just means I have ownership of any dragons that work like the patent I submitted. A patent is only to show ownership of an idea and nothing more.

Yeah, the preamble bit is funny, but I felt it was needed because I have… issues that make me insecure about being misunderstood. I tend to over-explain things so I wanted to make sure people knew where I was coming from. I agree that it can be a fun place, and it is especially nice for those with limited means to connect with people. It’s not like I’m arguing for the end of all social media platforms, but more that some people need to have limits. When you spend enough time disconnected form people and the reality of living people become an their username and not the person they were. I truly believe social media does more good than bad, but because of the human condition the negative will always outweigh the positive. As my final though, I just believe that there is a difference between making connections, personal or otherwise, and sharing too much of yourself. This may be personal, but I don’t even share EVERYTHING with my parents or close friends.

It could be that people backing off social media is why it seems to have gotten worse on some platforms. If all the dissenting voices leave it is easier to believe you are correct. I have also stopped using social media as much since Reddit went to shit. That kind of opened my eyes to how volatile typical social media is. I pretty much only look at social media to see if someone I watch is live, but mostly I’m on Twitch and YouTube just to watch videos. Every time I look at the comments I regret it.

I generally live by the adage that everyone makes their own personal choices for their own reasons so I try not to make fun of people for their choices, or in a few cases genetics. I especially try to avoid making fun of people for something they actually have no choice in such as genetics. I’m a bald man, but when I was a kid I used to make fun of my dad for being bald until he sat me down and explained to me how horrible it was to make fun of a person’s genetic situation. In general the rule I try to keep myself to is that I won’t joke about it unless the person in question would joke about it as well.

I’m okay with that. I don’t want some program I don’t control having access to the kernel of my system.

Breaking news, people on the Internet have no concept of nuance.

At this point Everything Search is goated.

As former Navy, a Navy shower is all you actually need. Unless I am having a stressful day or week I take a Navy shower. If it a stressful day or week I turn the temperature up as much as I can stand and let it relax me. A sauna would probably work better, but I don’t have that option.

Kind of. I’ve never bothered with them myself because it requires constant use and is kind of more trouble than it’s worth. It’s the same concept as something like Ginko Biloba in that it does have benefits, but different people will see different results based on their own body chemistry so the results you see will vary from person to person.

I feel like you are taking this way more personally than it’s intended. Most companies write stuff like this so the government can’t sue them. Basically, Microsoft is just covering their own ass.

It was so bad Nilay Patel had to apologize (semi-seriously) about causing a news cycle about a mouse.

The new CEO had the beginning of an idea in an interview. The interviewer tried to push back while still keeping the interview going, but it became messy real quick.

It may be horrible, but this is forever associated with NIN at this point. They’re both good songs, but The Fragile came out right in the middle of my angsty teen phase.

Because politics. That’s it. That’s the whole reason. If Trump had actually died it would give MAGA assholes even more “proof” that the “liberals” are out to get them. Since he survived everyone is working overtime to attempt to prevent the right from spiraling things even more out of control. Personally I would have been fine if he didn’t make it, but that would also harden the MAGA crowd.

I wouldn’t quite go so far as to say it’s gone “mainstream” since you still have to be moderately nerdy to know about it. I get your point though. This is one of the reasons I am so happy the Steam Deck exists. Before Valve released the Steam Deck nobody wanted to make games for Linux, so Valve said “fuck it, we’ll do it ourselves” and proved it was not only possible, but a better experience overall. While not all games work, having 78-80% of your game library work on Linux, with no Windows OS performance tax, is a great experience. Even with the Proton compatibility layer games generally run faster than on Windows.

People are still calling it a Pokemon clone even though only like 10% of the gameplay involves catching Pals. It’s closer to being a survival game with a dash of “Pokemon at home” than anything else.

To add to what you are saying, I wish they would make that message clearer. The first time I saw it, I thought they were still going to charge me for the extra copy and just not give it to me. Still not 100% sure about it.

“Screwed them over” may have been a bit strong, but as you mentioned WotC laid off a bunch of devs. The important part is that they were devs who working directly with Larian on BG3. This is more likely than not also the reason Larian halted work on BG3 DLC. The public statement was that they lost their motivation, but it’s no coincidence that the DLC was cancelled very close to the layoff announcement. There are also the backhanded remarks that Swen has made about WotC watching him. It really sounds like Wizards is trying to control the narrative and make it look like the parting was amicable.

It’s just unfortunate that Larian will most likely not be doing BG4 if there is one. Corporate greed ruined it for everyone again. For anyone who isn’t aware Wizards of the Coast basically screwed all of Larian over.

They are on all social media platforms.