I will say I don’t like the direction imgur went, but to play devil’s advocate, I don’t think there was any way around it.

The problem is that being an image host used by millions of users is incredibly expensive, and between needing to pay for the infrastructure, content moderators, and (in this case) regulatory compliance, it all adds up.

The only income model they have is ads, which is why they needed to re-tool the UI to hinder users’ ability to direct share images, and converting it to a more social media type of format keeps users on the site so they can cycle in more ads for more revenue.

An ideal internet would not need to rely on ad money to work, but I’m struggling to think of what else could be done at the scale imgur operates, as donation models can barely even keep Lemmy instances above water. If ad money wasn’t a thing, would sites like imgur be able to exist? Maybe they shouldn’t, I don’t know.

I’ve played a lot of JRPGs in my time, and I can also say I don’t enjoy Ni no Kuni. It’s definitely more style than substance.

New England? There’s an entire Pennsylvania and New York between Ohio and New England.

Gozaimasu

Don’t forget that Crunchyroll is also owned by Sony, who have basically picked up a monopoly on anime streaming services by buying out all of the competition. Aniplex, Funimation, Crunchyroll, Kadokawa, all under the Sony umbrella.

For this one, I think it’s nothing quite as exciting, basically just what you’d expect.

S30.852A - Superficial foreign body of penis, initial encounter

Guessing that column is truncated “Allergies,” though I’m not sure if the exclamation point means that they have a major allergy or maybe their allergy information wasn’t recorded yet.

Just not to worry about them, explaining a bit more about their relationship with their producer.

Nintendo raised the price of the Switch 1 and most of their accessory products in the US and Canada in May for Canada and August for the US.

This was following price increases for Nintendo Switch Online in Latin American countries which started in January. Nintendo has not raised prices of the subscription globally, but in their press releases about increased costs of hardware, they state that “price adjustments may be necessary in the future” for NSO, presumably after evaluating trends when the free trial period of GameChat ends for Switch 2 early adopters in March 2026.

And I know you said you don’t care about Sony, but just to share sources, Sony has already increased the price of their hardware in Japan in August 2024; Europe, Australia, and New Zealand in March; and the US in August of this year.

This was following earlier price increases in 2022 for Canada, Japan, Europe, Australia, and Mexico.

Sony also increased the cost of PS+ in North America, Europe, and Japan back in 2023, more recently for Southeast Asia back in April, and there are rumors of another upcoming price increase to be announced at some point now that we’ve entered FY2026.

So all of this is just to illustrate that what Microsoft is doing isn’t really anything new—it’s just the latest development in a continuing industry-wide trend.

Raising the price of hardware twice since May and now raising the price of game pass by 50% is not something a company does if they’re interested in competing against Sony or Nintendo.

But when Sony and Nintendo are doing the same thing…?

Don’t worry, the games industry has you covered on that now. They just release games that are broken or half-finished without the day 1 patch, but then allowing it to update removes all of the licensed content.

If that is truly the case, then it is just a bit potentially concerning that you might be codependent on this person, given the extent to which your conversations with others keep circling back to them.

I am not one to judge others on the way they want to live their lives, so it’s all good as long as you’re happy and safe.

But if you happen to feel like this person might be restricting your autonomy or that everything has to revolve around them, it might not be a bad idea to reach out to other people you can confide in for some support.

Ok, forgive me if this sounds offensive, but I am legitimately curious. Is this “producer” that you mention in almost every single post just a pseudonym or alternate personality that stands in for you? Like is this a dissociative thing, or just a bit you’re doing, or…?

If you’re referring to having customizable icon silhouettes, Android has been doing that for a while with Material Design, which has gotten old at this point.

I don’t believe any desktop environment behaves similarly because they don’t have a dominant app store and OS-level app standards encouraging design compliance like Android/iOS do.

That’s how I read the intent of the author, at least. Getting scientists out of their isolated bubbles and allowing them to actually experience the world drives innovation.

That, or the one physicist who figured it out was so traumatized by merely being outside that she figured it out as quickly as possible to make it all stop, haha.

Fair, I guess I’m just letting the world get to me!

I almost kinda dislike the messaging on this one because it implies authoritarianism is the key to discovery. Scientists are implied to be passive and unindustrious when left alone, so the government (FBI-type characters) declare a truth they want proven, force development of it through the threat of violence, and it eventually yields an answer they’re happy with.

I’m reminded of the film The Death of Stalin and it’s depiction of the USSR’s treatment of bourgeois intellectuals like doctors.

I barely even buy 5 games a year, and often not at full price. And usually the games I want aren’t even on GamePass anyways.

$360/year is crazy. Only a good deal if you’re buying more than 6 full price games a year and plan to 100% beat them and never play again before they disappear from the catalog.

Mar-a-Lago Face

Better AI than humans. Humans have the potential to be gay and will end up shoving their corrupt ideology into the minds of our children.