This one I’m not such a fan of. The number of times I’ve found an interesting bulletin board community, and been told I had to wait 48 hours before I could comment once on the introductions board, before waiting another 24 hours to comment once per day on another small set of allowed forums, but only if my introductory comment was approved by the moderation team….

Yeah, the alternative is a bot and troll riddled mess of a site like reddit, but at least I can usually ask for the source of that furry scat porn without being instantly banned for speaking out of turn to the ruling elite of the forum.

Always a bit of a shock to realise that Bob is still chucking along, angry as ever.

Might have to catch up on 15+ years of comics.

There is apparently an action scene in which ice cube needs a thumb drive, so orders one via Amazon drone delivery. The drone goes down in all the chaos, and our characters have to barter with the homeless man who found the downed drone by offering him Amazon gift cards. The man is a conspiracy nut who thinks the government is tracking him, but a $1000 Amazon gift cards convinces him to risk his life for the characters.

So yes, it is worse than Borderlands.

It’s a stereotype. Why do many people instantly think of Texas when talking about conservative states?

“Scientists are still racing to understand the causes of devastating marine heatwaves.”

It’s a real head scratcher.

The process involves numerous steps, including tests of physical coordination; checking the driver’s blood pressure and pulse; squeezing the driver’s limbs to determine if the muscle tone is “normal” or not; and examining pupil size and eye movements.

Steps not mentioned:

• is the suspect Black?
• does the suspect fail to defer to you as an infallible authority?
• have you hit your quota of arrests/citations today?

Nobody who is mad at this situation thinks that taking inspiration, riffing on, or referencing other people’s work is the problem when a human being does it. When a person writes, there is intention behind it.

The issue is when a business, owned by those people you think ‘demonised’ inspiration, take the works of authors and mulch them into something they lovingly named “The Pile”, in order to create derivative slop off the backs of creatives.

When you, as a “professional”, ask AI to write you a novel, who is being inspired? Who is making the connections between themes? Who is carefully crafting the text to pay loving reference to another authors work? Not you. Not the algorithm that is guessing what word to shit out next based on math.

These businesses have tricked you into thinking that what they are doing is noble.

No I don’t, but we’re not talking about a single copy of one book, and it is grovellingly insidious to imply that we are.

We are talking about a company taking the work of an author, of thousands of authors, and using it as the backbone of a machine that’s goal is to make those authors obsolete.

When the people who own the slop-machine are making millions of dollars off the back of stolen works, they can very much afford to pay those authors. If you can’t afford to run your business without STEALING, then your business is a pile of flaming shit that deserves to fail.

You’re right, each of the 5 million books’ authors should agree to less payment for their work, to make the poor criminals feel better.

If I steal $100 from a thousand people and spend it all on hookers and blow, do I get out of paying that back because I don’t have the funds? Should the victims agree to get $20 back instead because that’s more within my budget?

Wow, you might be right. It’s always the hands…

“Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” “Israeli and US support”

My nose started bleeding, trying to unify these concepts in my mind. Its like the “Bird and Small Mammal Support Foundation”, run by house cats.

Get this conspiracy shit outta here. Looks like the guys about to tell me that there’s a Walmart under the pyramids.

Christine married into the family, inherited her wealth when her spouse passed, and is not involved in the running of Walmart. She has previously donated to anti-trump groups.

Could she be doing more with her billions? Definitely. Is she the head of a corporate conspiracy to oppress the American people by funding a single ad in one newspaper? Highly unlikely.

These are my feelings too. I loved the trilogy when each came out, and return to them at least once a year. But nice graphics aren’t enough to make me support Konami.

As much as I wanted to support this film in cinemas, I am so glad I missed it until it hit streaming. My wife and I spent 80% of this movie in tears because it was so touching and emotional. A beautifully made film about love and protecting those that you call family.

Finding out that the writer was also responsible for How to Train Your Dragon and the original Lilo and Stitch makes a lot of sense.

Doom Eternal? The game with a soundtrack that was made up of butchered parts of Gordon’s work, welded together by a novice, at the command of an egotistical dickhead who slandered Gordon after the fact?

https://medium.com/@mickgordon/my-full-statement-regarding-doom-eternal-5f98266b27ce

Eternals original OST was very poor compared to Doom 2016. Big reason I never bothered with the game.

Find something you enjoy (or might enjoy), and look for groups that do that thing. Groups that run regular events or classes or workshops are good because new people are always coming into the hobby. Keep in mind that just because you share interests with someone does not mean you will be instant friends, or friends at all. That’s why the activity is important. You can focus on doing something fun while you connect with new people, rather than stressing about if this specific person is going to be your friend.

I would like to know the plan here. They mention following in Australia’s footsteps, but as far as I can see, Australia is still trying to figure out how to implement this ban as well

The best they seem to have come up with for determining age without requiring an onlineID is letting AI look at your hands (NPR link.

Also, what is a social media? Because if you lock it down to specific sites and ban ‘Facebook’ and ‘X’, Musk or Zuck will just launch MashFace or Z, and get around the ban for a little bit longer. If you make it too broad, then kids could technically be excluded from text messaging.

All of this also assumes that a simple vpn won’t bypass all of this, the same way you can still watch pornhun in Texas that Ms to this weeks sponsor: SurfAtlus VPN.

Huh? These are the people who claim to represent the people. They instead raise money to stroke their egos and support policy that boosts their own wealth rather than the wants of their constituents.

“We the people” have no say over which puppet they place at the front of their R-lite party, and are told to suck it up and support genocide and bad environmental and economic policy or the other side will win.

I don’t think we should pity the billionaires.

Who has the time and hate to render their fellow humans like this? Grow up and get a life.

At least it gives people who are using their switches a chance to buy one, instead of them selling out in seconds to a network of bot accounts before winding up on eBay for $300+ the following week.

It’s not the perfect system, but I can understand why they are doing it.