You so absolutely nailed my feelings on it. I was really excited for BZ and it fell pretty flat for me. The extra time out of the water just felt so forced and unnatural to me. I was moderately excited by the big ice worm until I actually played and just found it to be a nuisance. I couldn’t get finished with the ice shelf soon enough.

Also, why is everything so much smaller in BZ? It’s THE OCEAN. It’s supposed to be huge. If anything it should be bigger than the first game. Anyways I agree I hope they learned.

It’s easy until it’s not. I’ve got a decent gaming rig and have been running Linux on it since I built it a couple of months ago. Once an update completely broke my sound but the next one fixed it. Otherwise it’s been fine.

On the other hand I set up a Raspberry Pi to be a print server and have been troubleshooting it since Christmas. It will print the first job just fine but subsequent jobs are stuck in the queue until I reboot. I’ve googled endlessly, tried everything I can think of and it just won’t work unless I constantly reboot. Same printer worked flawlessly in Windows 10 for years before I set up the Pi.

So, yeah. YMMV is the problem with Linux.

Language isn’t always about logic. Discussing things in terms of male/female is fine in many contexts but is often done when discussing science or medical topics. Ex: the male pelvis has a different, narrower shape than the female pelvis. It’s also used in situations where people are deliberately ‘othering’ people. Watch any police bodycam footage and you’ll see that cops frequently say “male/female” when discussing non-police individuals.

In daily life, most people use men/women for non-scientific discourse. The women’s restroom. A group of men at the restaurant. Etc.

But here’s the thing. Male/female are used for any species (a male beetle), but man/woman are only used for humans.

Assholes like Tate push a twist in this dynamic so that men are called men but women are called females because it can be dehumanizing to women. When you say female you could be talking about an insect, but a man is human. It’s a succinct example of their philosophy. That’s why people consider it derogatory.

I’m a huge DRG fan but wasn’t interested in Survivor because that’s not the type of game I usually play. A friend bought it for me so I felt obligated to try and it and holy heck it is so much more fun than I thought it would be. It is my go-to game when I’m on my Steamdeck.

Every country in the world needs all the other countries more than all of the other countries need it. There’s just no real leverage, because we’re all interconnected; you can snip one country out, and it’ll slightly hurt everyone, but it’ll *wreck* the country that was snipped out.

This is just such an absolutely perfect summary. I wish we could American politicians to speak this clearly to explain why this is such a bad idea.

Too soon.

Next headline: FTC leadership all fired by DOGE.

Have you tried smiling more?

I’ve had a similar experience overall. The breaking point for me was about 2 weeks after I set up Apple Intelligence I had a vacation planned and important details were on my calendar (flights, hotels, rental car, etc). My wife and I were discussing logistics of the day we were leaving and she wanted to know what time our flight departed so I asked Siri “What time is my flight on Saturday?”

It was literally one of two items on the calendar that day and she couldn’t answer the question. She kept resorting to trying to search the web for “flights for Saturday.” I tried a lot of other things also before disabling the feature but it was just useless for most basic things.

Is there a full version of the article archived anywhere?

they take a hard left and blame minorities somehow

Or a hard right, maybe?

Recently one of my opposite numbers, a columnist up in Vancouver, B.C., announced that he couldn’t take America anymore. He broke up with us.

“Goodbye, America,” wrote longtime Sun columnist Pete McMartin.

“Goodbye Bellingham, Seattle and Portland — how I’ll miss my Cascadian cousins with our shared Pacific sensibilities.”

“What was once so close has never been so far.”

McMartin, channeling the bitter mood of betrayal in Canada right now, said the heedless U.S. president is forcing all Canadians to make a choice — between being “vassals or enemies.”

“I’m choosing the latter,” he announced.

“So, goodbye America, it’s been nice knowing you, but I don’t know you anymore. I’ve reached that point in our relationship where any admiration I have had for you has been replaced by a new, angry resolve, which is: I won’t consort with the enemy.”

Ouch. The enemy? What can I say to that in return?

The awkward reality is I don’t know what to say to Canadians at this juncture in our shared history. On the Peace Arch at Blaine between our two countries, the inscription reads “Children of a Common Mother.” This feels then like the world’s biggest family breakup — with us as the cause.

Would it help, Canadians, if an American said he was embarrassed for America right now?

Would it count for anything if I pointed out that we were as blindsided as you by Donald Trump’s suggestion of annexing your country, and making it the 51st state? That he didn’t bring up his weird Canada animus until after he’d won the election?

No, that probably won’t help. The bitter truth is we knew Trump was impetuous. We knew he loves to bully his allies more than his enemies — witness how he relishes humiliating, say, GOP senators. And we knew he would act out the Ugly American shtick on the world stage. We elected him anyway.

Still, picking on … Canada? I think I speak for more than a few Americans when I say that the only people more baffled by this sudden choice of enemies than you, Canadians, was us.

So for what it’s worth, Canada, let me say that I admire how you’re rallying to our threat.

I loved how you mocked the idea of Trump requesting Canadian troops on the border by instead posting hockey sticks in the snow with googly eyes on them.

I love how everybody’s wearing “Canada is not for sale” hats.

I smiled at how a British Columbia coffee house has started a movement to change the name of the espresso drink “Americano” to “Canadiano.” Quiet acts of resolve matter, even silly ones.

I also like that there’s now a weekly protestoutside the U.S. Consulate in Vancouver, with signs like “Stop Him, Americans” and “Toque off, Trump.” And I endorse how your sports fans are lustily booing our national anthem. Atypical for you supposedly polite Canadians — but exactly what the times demand.

All this makes me envious, Canada. You’re behaving as we ought to be.

That we’re not protesting or booing right along with you blameless Canadians was the most wounding part of Mr. McMartin’s breakup note.

“Goodbye to my American friends,” he wrote.

“Your silence and the silence of all Americans in response to this aggression leaves me disheartened. That silence speaks volumes. I — we — have heard you loud and clear how little our friendship as a country means to you.”

How can I explain this quiescence? I cannot.

I could report to you that people here are exhausted. I have readers in Seattle who write to me daily saying they no longer read the news, because they can’t take it anymore. It’s their way, I guess, of also saying goodbye.

I could tell you that some people here still regard Trump as a buffoonish cartoon figure not to be taken seriously. He won’t really try to annex Canada, they blithely say.

Or I could try to convince you that we’re only hibernating. That you just have to be patient, Canadians, as the old America you once knew, the one that famously does the right thing only after exhausting all other options, is about to burst onto the scene.

But I can’t honestly sell any of that right now. You got it right in your breakup note. You called us quiet cowards, which hurts because it’s true. We kicked up a million times more fuss when a transgender celebrity drank a Bud Light, or when they asked us to wear masks, than we are right now that our bonkers boss is threatening to economically crush, and then imperialistically occupy, our closest ally and friend.

As one Canadian wrote in response to McMartin’s goodbye:

“The United States is not what I once thought it was. Their true character — or lack of — is in clear view. I can think of excuses, but in the end, Americans had a choice, and this is the one they made.”

What can one say to that?

I have a friend in Canada who insists the main difference between Canadians and Americans is the apology. Canadians apologize two or three times before breakfast, he says, while you Americans won’t do it even after you’ve, say, invaded the wrong country.

So that’s what I got, Canadians. It’s bound to be small solace. It won’t end the tariffs or the takeover madness. It won’t “stop him.” But it’s the only thing I have from the heart to communicate that there are some down here who not only hear you, Canada, but who stand with you.

Which is to say: I’m sorry.

I think you will find, Mr. West, that it is not so easy to unring the bell. If you are truthfully NOT a Nazi then I would say you have a long road of public actions fighting Nazis convincingly if you wish to be believed.

I felt your comment in my bones.

We are all at a loss to understand how this happened.

I would just like to point out that the Tennessee Federation of Republican Women posted an online statement stating “Hitler and all intelligent leaders throughout history have understood that the way to change a country was through the training of its youth, to get them while they are young.”

It seems like the sort of thing that should be in text as well as screenshots just so we can help out any future web crawlers coming through these parts.

Strongly disagree. The patient remains anonymous so not a breach of confidentiality. Beyond that, there is value to society in everyone seeing and contemplating the ethics of a situation like this. Because it is an extreme, unusual circumstance it forces you to examine your moral and belief systems to try and determine what you would have done and what you believe is “right.” Such introspection is critical for all of us to grow and hopefully do the best thing when we are thrust into an unusual moral dilemma.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

It’s always worth the budget for this shot.

Whatever you do, don’t look up silicosis. Not a problem at all. Not relevant.