Which is indeed why the Imperial officers all wore Hugo Boss nazi uniforms.

George Lucas did also say at one point that he based the red and green laser fire of the Imperial and Rebel forces on the tracers being fired by the US and Viet Cong, which was an iconic bit of imagery that was widely televised. Also:

However, when Lucas sat down with director James Cameron in 2018, he revealed how the Empire was also meant to resemble America — particularly the way it prosecuted the Vietnam War. Cameron pointed out how the Rebels are a small group using asymmetric warfare against a highly organized Empire. Today, Cameron added, the Rebels would be called terrorists. “When I did it,” Lucas replied, “they were Viet Cong.”

In other words, Lucas viewed the Vietnamese as the rebels and America as the invading villains. He further explained that Star Wars was a “vessel” in which to place his worldview that the United States had become an empire during the Vietnam War, doomed to fail like every empire before it. Cameron noted how those views carried over into the Star Wars prequel trilogy, especially in Padmé’s line, “This is how liberty dies, with thunderous applause.” Lucas replied, “We’re in the middle of it right now,” referring to the country’s political state.

(Via.)

It makes sense that they wouldn’t have anything to comment anyway. Google themselves don’t actually manufacture most Chromebooks, they only provide the OS. I imagine the majority of the mass of Chromebooks in the world by weight are actually designed and made by Lenovo, Asus, Dell, HP, etc. Even the Google branded ones are manufactured by someone else under contract.

It’d be like demanding Microsoft explain to the news why your Dell caught fire simply because it had Windows installed on it.

Yeah, like, first time?

The presentation has changed slightly but the content is much the same. Back in the good old days I was a moderator on Totse forums (the original, but its web bulletin board incarnation and not when it was a BBS) and we literally had an entire subforum just titled “Bad Ideas.” This was where things got launched, torched, smoked, blown up, stolen, scammed, or otherwise mutilated. Or at the very least all of the above talked about, at length. All of this with an strong implicit suggestion to try it yourself. Most of the kiddos did not actually have the means to pull of what they claimed they did but the ones who could and more importantly had the means to prove it were celebrities. Usually only for a short time, for various reasons.

The early Internet was basically just a repository for bickering about Star Trek, low grade porn, plans for how to build potato cannons, or schemes involving smoking dried banana peels. An immense amount of stupidity has always been there to be found, because the place was and is full of teenagers and teenagers are stupid.

I sure was, when I was one.

I’m upvoting this simply because it’s the first time this month, possibly this year, that I’ve seen someone correctly use and spell “queue.”

I almost bought one of these when they were new(ish), and given what a clusterfuck the fulfillment turned into I’m kind of glad I didn’t, as much as I’d like to have a physical keyboard phone now.

I will say this about on screen keyboards: Swipe typing is horseshit. If you actually intend to seriously write anything and you’ve got any kind of vocabulary whatsoever, especially a colorful and/or jargon-laden one, you have a zero percent chance the fucking thing is going to be able to guess all of the words you were going for in a sentence. “Convenient” doesn’t enter into it. I rank both this and autocorrect/autosuggest on phones as instruments of active evil; they have the net long term effect of restricting people’s thought and capability for self-expression because the designers can simply dictate which words the things do and don’t know, and even with the best will in the world nobody can predict all the words somebody might want to use in every language. And the majority of the public at large absolutely is too lazy to seek a workaround or alternative and will simply conform to meet whatever limitations their pocket rectangle inflicts on them. See also: The number of twits who have already replaced parts of their real world lexicons with TikTokisms like “unalived,” or can’t articulate any emotion without using a predefined emoji icon.

So there is a reason that since day one, keyboards on every other text producing machine never worked this way. My current phone has no physical keyboard, but its swipe and autocorrect are firmly set to off.

I guarantee you nobody’s swipe keyboard would have been able to complete this comment, because it would have tripped over “TikTokism,” and certainly also “horseshit” and “clusterfuck.”

I can tell you that what happens after option 1 is Snow Crash.

Always remember: The people who apparently faked the moon landing, are concealing the existence of a ruling class of lizard-men, are putting 5G microchips in your water, and have a functioning secret one world government operating in hidden tunnels and dark smoke filled rooms are also the exact some chucklefucks who couldn’t cover up the Watergate scandal.

Make no mistake, those in power absolutely are out to get you but mostly for the purposes of making themselves richer and remaining entrenched in power. The one and probably only factor working in our favor is that many of them are in fact working at cross-purposes.

But that domain’s apparently for sale for a cool $10,000 USD. What a bargain.

My current bugbear is “guesswork,” although in my case this is in the context of the marketing bumf that my vendors and manufacturers slather their products in.

Apparently in the corporate world, the only purpose of guesswork is to “take it out of” things. Take the guesswork out of this, take the guesswork out of that. It seems at this point you are guaranteed that any time “guesswork” appears in a sentence it’s going to be preceeded or followed by it being taken out of something, as surely as U always follows Q.

Once you notice the pattern (it doesn’t take you long if you’re sitting in my seat) the lack of originality becomes deeply irritating.

“Fast paced environment” is the one that always gets me, because that’s just explicitly admitting that their organization is a total clusterfuck but somehow this inevitably gets put in the bullet points list because some bozo apparently thinks this is a positive thing that will make people want to work wherever-it-is.

All it means is that you’d better show up wearing roller skates because management is going to expect you to be in three places at once all the time.

Especially when the poster does not disclose that it’s AI.

The perpetual Youtube rabbit hole occasionally lands on one of these for me when I leave it unsupervised, and usually you can tell from the “cover” art. But only if you’re looking at it. Because if you just leave it going in the background eventually you start to realize, “Wow, this guy really tripped over the fine line between a groove and rut.” Then you click on it and look: Curses! Foiled again.

And golly gee, I’m sure glad Youtube took away the option to oughtright block channels. I’m sure that’s a total coincidence.

W/e. I’m a have-it-on-my-hard-drive kind of bird. Yt-dlp is your friend. Just use it to nab whatever it is you actually want and let your own media player decide how to shuffle and present it. This works great for big name commercial music as well, whereupon the record labels are inevitably dumb enough to post songs and albums in their entirety right there you Youtube. Who even needs piracy sites at that rate? Yoink!

Those white power redneck types are all protestants (baptists, or some other evangelical wingnut strain) and most of them have a vehement anti-Catholic streak. A black pope would just confirm to them whatever-the-hell conspiracy shit they already believe about the Catholic church, so it’d more or less just be spitting on a forest fire anyways.

Not that the Vatican shouldn’t do it anyway, though.

We can only hope.

I get where you’re coming from, but in certain fields I don’t think that’s going to fly too far.

The guy selling me a sofa, I really don’t care if he has a bachelor’s degree or not. My doctor? Yeah, I kind of think he needs to have legitimately completed medical school.

He thinks it’s “golf.”

They did disclose it, though. I got popups every time I logged in for weeks warning of the imminent additional cut Apple was going to take from donators/creators, which explicitly spelled out that payments made via other platforms would not be affected by this cut.

Maybe they were prevented from doing so in the iOS app, but they sure did it everywhere else.

This is exactly it. It feels like about 99% of the crap these companies are pushing has no reason to be an app. Patreon is already primarily a web page. I guarantee you everything anyone cares about in the app you can do on the mobile version of the web page. Without being locked to the App Store/Google Play, and on (practically) any device. Isn’t that what these companies should want in the first place? Totally device and platform agnostic, ready for the maximum amount of suckers potential paying customers to be able to access it?

Whatever driver Windows hands you for your nVidia/AMD card is likely to be hilariously out of date. If the driver it gives you is the one with the bug that’s bugging you, you won’t have a choice.

I sort of get it, but also “Half Life game ends with G Man time-freeze BS and a random abrupt cliffhanger that will not be resolved for years, if ever” isn’t exactly an unexpected outcome for anyone who’s interested in Half Life.

You may as well just watch a Youtube LP of Alyx anyway, since I imagine the majority of players do not have the equipment to play it themselves.

If the cliffhanger at the end of HL:2 Episode 2 annoyed you, the one at the end of Half Life: Alyx will annoy you even more because it not only returns to that moment but the G Man uses reality warping shenanigans to overwrite what happens in it, and replaces it with a different cliffhanger.

Son of a bitch and his unforeseen consequences, indeed.

On the bright side, this also circumvents the need for the original events of Half Life 3 to happen, since Valve has consistently said they were not willing to make it as it was originally drafted (especially now since Marc Laidlaw leaked/released the entire plot online). So now I guess they’re free to do something new with the story direction… Whatever that might be.