Oh, is EA the reason Popcap vanished? Honestly, if they were still around, they’d probably make some killer mobile games (if they actually sold them as complete games and not the microtransaction hell that most mobile games fall into).

Trump and Epstei- oh wait…

Sheriffs are usually elected, not appointed. It’s one of the big reasons decriminalization is so difficult; No elected cop wants to look soft on crime, because their opponents can use it against them in smear campaigns during the next election.

There’s also the fact that the entire American education system is set up to teach Americans that peaceful protest is the only acceptable form of protest. History classes teach about the American revolution as if it was a fully justified break from an oppressive monarchy… And then as soon as it’s done, there’s a hard turn towards “but that was the only time violence was justified. In every other case, you’re expected to peacefully protest instead. Here, have another portrait of MLK Jr in case you forgot what he looked like.”

The Black Panthers were barely even a footnote in my history books. There weren’t any mentions of the union riots, where factory workers threatened to drag the owners out of their offices and lynch them. Because those would show that violence is effective.

Homeslice is smoking crack on an airplane.

And this is the real crux of the issue. If there are no penalties for ignoring the court order, then we have already entered the “we need to start lighting dome-topped buildings on fire” phase of protests. Because if the judicial branch is truly being ignored, then there is nothing to stop it from escalating to straight up “Secret Police disappearing citizens in the dark of night for having dissenting opinions” levels.

Yeah, the EU has forced Apple to allow third-party browsers, but that was only a few months ago and there aren’t any currently available yet. Since they had been disallowed for so long, no browsers had something ready to go; writing them to be compatible with iOS will take time.

Yeah, my “Public Transit” option on google maps is entirely greyed out. This is my daily commute to work:

It’s always entertaining to see the Europeans go “lol just ditch your car, it has to start somewhere” like it wouldn’t require me to move my entire family across town, (and pay 3x as much rent to live in the city…) Like I don’t even have the option of taking public transit, because there are no connecting lines between my home and my job. Literally none. The nearest bus stop is almost as far away as my job, and it’s in the opposite direction.

And to be clear, that 2+ hour walk would be on a highway with no sidewalk. I’d be dead on day 1. If I wanted to avoid the highway, the walk would be closer to 4.5 hours; The highway is the only direct path.

This feels a little bit like Brainfuck tbh.

For what it’s worth, I can think of one thing that would make brainfuck even worse: Instead of using 8 arbitrary characters (it only uses > < + - . , ] and [ for every instruction) for the coding, use the 8 most common letters of the alphabet. Since it ignores all other characters, all of your comments would need to be done without those 8 letters.

For example, “Hello World” in brainfuck is the following:

++++++++[>++++[>++>+++>+++>+<<<<-]>+>+>->>+[<]<-]>>.>---.+++++++..+++.>>.<-.<.+++.------.--------.>>+.>++.

If we instead transposed those 8 instructions onto the 8 most common letters of the alphabet, it would look more like this:

eeeeeeeeaneeeeaneeneeeneeenesssstonenentnneasostonnIntttIeeeeeeeIIeeeInnIstIsIeeeIttttttIttttttttInneIneeI

Apple has had it built into iOS for a while now; This person likely got scammed out of $10 to “buy” a feature that was already baked into their OS.

Yeah, one of my most often stated phrases at work is “you can’t make people read.”

Error pops up, explaining exactly what the issue is and how to fix it? Oh god, let me call IT to see what I need to do. Yeah, you can’t make people read.

Some piece of equipment or machinery has changed in some meaningful way? Management is quick to go “just hang a sign on it, letting people know the new process.” Nope, you can’t make people read. People will physically move the sign to the side, try to use the machine like they previously did, and get surprised when it doesn’t work as expected.

Some area is unsafe due to work happening overhead? “Oh just hang signs on the doors, telling people not to come in.” No, you can’t make people read; I have seen people push their way past physical barriers with big “do not enter” signs, just to ask if we’re open. How about we lock the doors, and disable the keyways on all the doors (except one, where we have physical barriers to entry) until the work is completed?

The floor is freshly painted? People will walk past six different “do not enter - wet paint” signs and physically push past stanchions or barriers, and then act surprised when their shoes stick to the floor.

I mean, her feet are chained. Which also feels appropriate…

Yeah, this is what a lot of people don’t initially understand about eldritch horror. The horror isn’t in seeing something scary. The horror is that seeing that thing teaches you things that you can’t even comprehend.

Imagine if there was a living, breathing, real two dimensional creature. It’s a stick figure on a piece of paper. All it knows is is up, down, left, and right. As far as it is concerned, the infinite X/Y plane is the entire universe. And then one day, you rip it off of that sheet of paper and drop it into our 3D world. And it can’t even begin to comprehend what it is experiencing. It literally doesn’t have the right sensory organs to experience 3D life. It struggles to understand anything. And after letting it experience 3D life momentarily, you simply stick it right back onto the paper where it came from. The stick figure screams, for it knows the universe is much larger than any of their friends believe… But it doesn’t even have the right words to describe what that larger universe is, because it doesn’t even understand it in the first place.

That is where the mind-melting horror comes from. To an eldritch being, teaching us anything is like teaching calculus to an ant. Anything it tries to teach us is just going to be useless, because we won’t even have the ability to process the information after we’re dropped back into our current existence. Even if it’s not trying to teach us anything, the simple fact that we encountered it is enough for us to start seeing things we can’t even comprehend. But we’ll know it exists. We’ll know it’s out there somewhere.

Yep, this is the big issue. Majorities rule by force. If the minorities were able to change things by fighting back, they would have already done so. But as it currently stands, one side has a much larger capacity for violence, and it is not the minority.

I’ve said for a while that you could shut down an entire city with just a few buddies and like $200 in drywall screws. Have each friend drive on a different highway (or in a different direction on each highway) and sprinkle drywall screws as they go. Not just like a single dump, but a good consistent scatter so the entire highway is a minefield and takes hours to properly sweep up.

They also removed radar, which is what allowed them to make all of those “it saw something three vehicles ahead and braked to avoid a pileup that hadn’t even started yet” videos. Removing radar was the single most impactful change Tesla made in regards to FSD, and it’s all because Musk basically decided “people drive fine with just their eyes, so cars should too.”

Yeah, Gnome is like the Apple of the Linux world. The devs have the same kind of “we know better than you do” mentality towards design. The issue tracker is a lot of “hey the OS won’t let me do [edge-case scenario that an OS should be able to do, but which most users won’t bother with]” followed by the devs going “Gnome isn’t designed to support [edge-case scenario]. Bug report closed.” Like the devs have a very “it’s not a bug; It’s a feature” mentality, and anyone who runs into that bug must be using the OS “wrong”.

It has always been there, but until Trump’s first term the Nazis were at least cautious about things. They were afraid to openly and publicly spout their BS, unless they were in large groups. Because they knew that if they held up swastika signs on the street corner, that they’d very quickly get punched in the mouth.

But Trump changed that. Depending on how old you are, you may remember the “he tells it like it is/he’s not afraid to say what’s really on his mind” types of support for Trump during his first term. What a lot of those people were really saying is “he makes me feel empowered to say what’s is on my mind.” And what was on their mind was white supremacy and nazism. When the highest office in the land is tacitly (and sometimes directly) supporting white supremacists, they feel emboldened. And when they feel emboldened, they escalate.

What used to be whispered racist jokes escalated into passive racism. What used to be passive racism escalated into active racism. What used to be active racism escalated into openly hostile racism. And what used to be openly hostile racism escalated into nazism.

And the issue is that Trump/Musk have given Nazis a forum to meet other Nazis. Before, being a Nazi was a fairly lonely hobby. Finding other Nazis carried a lot of risk, because it meant potentially exposing yourself and getting your life ruined. But with Musk buying Xitter, Trump building Truth Social, etc… Yeah, suddenly the Nazis felt empowered to actually start talking to each other. The same way flat earthers used to just be your crazy uncle who smoked too much in his garage. But now that crazy uncle is part of a Flat Earth Society that regularly does large “experiments” to try and prove the earth is flat. By finding a forum to connect with other like-minded individuals, people feel emboldened as their views feel more normalized.

I know a dude who introduced himself with “hey, my name’s Mike but call me Spike.” I think it was one of those “I just changed schools and want to reinvent myself as someone cooler” scenarios.

That was like 15 years ago. To this day, we still call him Spmike (pronounced “SPUH-mike”).

Exactly this. Top Secret clearance typically extends out to three degrees of separation. They’ll check on you, your friends/family, and their friends/family. Because when national security is concerned, they don’t want to risk a leak due to something like a cousin being a spy and going drinking after work with the employee.