This is not the kind of person that the meme is poking at, but my late best friend was one of the best people I have known, and I talk shit about him all the time. It feels like being honest about his depth and complexity is a part of how I honour him; I’m firmly of the belief that if you have to lie about something in order to love it, then your love is shallow and false.

It’s unclear, because the relevant official bodies insist that things are fine

How long have you been biking for you to see these changes? I.e. what is ‘lately’?

There are probably games or other media that you love that the average Stardew Valley fan wouldn’t click with. You’re not missing out, you’ve just got other stuff you enjoy.

Hooking up with one of the staff? Yikes

I don’t deny that you may have dodged a bullet, but I feel like the staff of a psych ward hooking up with patients is hella fucked up. Even if both people are adults, I think consent in that context is pretty dubious.

I am enjoying saying “Log back in to continue your Oral B brushing experience” in my best “customer-service/salesperson ad lady” voice. Like the kind of tone that’s so soullessly saccharine that it gives AI vibes

That would be a metal as fuck cell phone stand

"The fact that Google has that locked down surely violates some EU laws. But I’m sure they wave away the laws because of “financial security” or some other bullshit. "

I don’t know as much as I’d like to about the regulatory side of this, but I know that Google and other big tech have done a masterful job of proactively building themselves into systems such that taking action against them is difficult.

I think that’s part of why the US antitrust case against Microsoft a few decades ago fizzled out into nothing — even though Microsoft was deemed to have been a monopolist, the big question was how do we remedy that in a way that isn’t going to be harmful? The consensus on this amongst people who I respect is that the results of the Microsoft case was woefully insufficient and something that helped to lay the foundations of the big tech dominance that we see today.

When I first got into Android (I miss my Nexus 6 T.T ), it felt like I could do so much more with my phone than I can now. I had so much cool automation shit that leveraged stuff like Google assistant voice commands, but now it’s shit on so many levels. It goes beyond the user facing side of things; I used to use the app Tasker for a lot of the automation stuff, and over the years, it seems like the dev has been climbing an uphill battle against Google gating off functionality, and generally making things opaque and difficult for developers.

It seems like the relevant section in the Ubisoft EULA says

“Upon termination for any reason, You must immediately uninstall the Product and destroy all copies of the Product in Your possession.”

I read this wording of this to be stricter than the BG3 example you shared, because the BG3 one seems to be saying “if you don’t agree to this EULA (or if you agree, but later terminate that agreement), then you must uninstall the game”. Whereas the Ubisoft one seems to include Ubisoft terminating the agreement, rather than just the user. That’s just my interpretation of these snippets though, as someone who is not a lawyer. It’s possible that the BG3 EULA also includes other parts that would mean similar to what people are unhappy about on the Ubisoft EULA

“A torrent is never dead, it’s just waiting for seeders”

This comment section is surprisingly spicy

A friend of a friend is the daughter of a Russian oligarch. It was a messy situation in which she was at risk of being drawn into the politics, even though her dad was an asshole who she would’ve been glad to see defenestrated. I only know the surface level info, but it sounds like a fucked up situation in many ways

What’s really stupid about this cycle is that some of these fail-upward executives genuinely believe the crap they’re spewing. Weirdly, I think I respect the grifting executives more

Edit: by grifting executives, I mean the ones who participate in that cycle you describe, and are aware of the harms they cause in their wake, but don’t care because they’ve gotten good at knowing when to skip out

I don’t typically experience imposter syndrome.

However, it is my understanding that the majority of people I know seem to experience imposter syndrome (likely influenced by the fact that my social circle is mostly academics)

Thus I seem to be the odd one out in this respect, paradoxically causing me to feel like an imposter for not experiencing imposter syndrome.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

A sex worker friend told me that he had some homophobic (male) clients who didn’t seem to be gay, but frequented male sex workers. This confused me, but he explained that it seems to be part of a convoluted humiliation kink thing, rather than attraction.

For example, I know a subby guy whose domme makes him kiss her feet. She does this because he finds feet gross, and thus ordering him thus is a humiliating and submissive act that he ultimately finds hot. This association has become strong enough that even outside of the specific context of scenes with his domme, he finds the prospect of footplay arousing, whilst simultaneously still being grossed out by feet. He finds the paradoxical vibes of this hilarious, and indeed, reports that it’s one of the things he finds fulfilling about kink play.

In the case of homophobic straight men who have gay sex, it’s far more psychosexually complex. However, one plausible angle of it is that some men may actually just want to be pegged, but conservative attitudes may mean that being fucked by a woman with a strap-on is perceived as more taboo and transgressive than being fucked by another man.

Another bizarre example my friend relayed to me was an instance of a man who engaged in gay sex as a form of self-harm that was felt to be deserved due to being insufficiently masculine. In this scenario, the homophobic client was topping. The guy apparently seemed to believe in a sort of “conservation of masculinity” in penetrative sex. For example, let’s say that any act of penetrative sex (anal or vaginal, it matters not) contains a total of 10 arbitrary units of masculinity. In this guy’s ideal of How Sex Should Be, the penetrative partner would contain all 10 units of masculinity, and his partner, with 0 units of masculinity, would be the mostly womanly woman to ever woman. However, this dude was pretty insecure in his masculinity, and he would probably rate himself as having only 6 units of masculinity. This is sufficient for him to feel comfortable being the one who penetrates his partner, but by the principle of conservation of masculinity, this would mean that “balanced” sex would involve a partner with 4 units of masculinity.

I don’t intend to kink shame anyone, but frankly I find this bizarre, because it sounds like this guy is genuinely quite disgusted by having sex with another man (and likely not attracted to men either), but feels even more disgusted by the prospect of feeling insufficiently masculine and having sex with a woman. It’s like the gay sex is a punishment for not attaining the impossible ideal of hegemonic masculinity. I asked my friend if it wasn’t more likely that the dude is just gay and has a heckton of internalised homophobia to work through, but he was pretty sure of his assessment. I’m told that the job involves a surprising amount of “I’m not a therapist, but I’m the closest thing you have to one, so let’s talk”.

Saaaaaame. I’ve heard that semi-colons are similarly associated with LLMs; This is another thing that feels like an attack on me personally.

Only water when the soil is dry at least an inch deep. When you do water, water thoroughly, until water is freely coming from the drainage holes in the bottom. An optional way to water thoroughly is to let the plant pot stand in a tray of water for half an hourish (I use an inch or so of water). This is called “bottom up watering”

Make sure that any pot you use has drainage holes. A common mistake beginners make is to plant directly into decorative pots that have no drainage holes. This is bad because when the soil doesn’t have enough chance to dry out between waterings, it leads to root rot. You can still use a pretty pot if you want, just make sure that you have an inner pot with drainage holes that you can take out of the exterior pot when it’s watering time. (The decorative exterior pots can be useful for causing things to tip over less).

Finally, don’t assume that succulents or cacti will be happy in bright, direct sun. They can still get scorched.

Thanks for this perspective. I cringed so hard at the part about the guy with the PhD being listened to over you, because I know so many dumbasses with PhDs.

Whilst not open source, I appreciate that the notes are locally stored in straightforward markdown. I no longer use Obsidian, but I appreciated how there was next to no platform lock-in (the only snag I experienced in moving to a different note taking approach was a couple of plugins that gave additional features. But that’s easy to avoid if portability of data is important)