I absolutely didn’t acknowledge that it isn’t the intent, I said it may not be.

I absolutely think that is the intent and I find those communities to be gross and have them all blocked.

You are so weirdly defensive about it. Almost like you know a lot of people find it highly questionable and they may have a point. If you think every anime fan is into that crap, you are very sorely mistaken, and if you don’t, you are using inapplicable generalizations to make a point and that’s just deceptive.

I’m with you on this. That may not be the intent, but it sure as hell is the vibe they give off.

I’m not going to look it up, but I’m curious about the hyphenated last name.

Is he married and took his wife’s name as part of his own (progressive!) or did his parents do that (also progressive, but makes one wonder where he fell off the tree)?

Not just a useless middleman!

A nepotism monopoly middleman! Yay!

Oof.

Thanks for the link. It’s one thing to be told “trust me bro”, and another entirely to… have context.

Wait is this real…? Are they saying the quiet part out loud again…? Screaming loud…?

What’s the context here?

Sure, they might know my identity. But very importantly, they aren’t every single random company out there whose website I happen to briefly access for whatever reason. They don’t need to know anything about me, and they shouldn’t.

I can’t do anything about big tech companies knowing things about me, tho I do try to limit it when I can, but not literally everyone needs to know who I am just because I want to access their content. That’s absolutely absurd.

It definitely isn’t impacting me in the slightest. Idk what you do with your time, but I don’t really want my platforms to be unmoderated cesspools, and the places I do choose to exist or use are in line with what I want, so… meh. It’s literally not an issue I have.

Breweries and bars in my area are often kid-friendly with toys and everything, and I just don’t go to those places. I do the same with online spaces. They aren’t meant for me if they aren’t what I’m looking for, so I don’t go. There’s plenty of places that are for me, though, and I go to those places on and offline.

Nope.

I don’t want anyone verifying my identity for any reason other than government or financial business, where there is a legitimate reason to do so. There is absolutely no reason some random-ass company needs access of any sort to my demographic information, when I am a legal adult doing things well within my rights to do. Especially if this thing was automated to feed that data without my consent or knowledge, as you are suggesting. Absolutely fuck all of that. Plus that would mean there’s a central query database of all the sites you’ve ever accessed for any reason, and that’s fucking scary, even if you aren’t doing anything wrong.

This wouldn’t work any better than any other privacy-leaky method anyway. People hand down phones to their kids a lot without factory resetting them. And stolen IDs/identity theft are a thing. And you don’t think that central identity bank would be prime target #1 for hackers? If the last decade has taught us anything, it’s that companies WILL NOT protect your data properly, and they WILL NOT suffer consequences of any sort when (not if, when) there is a breach.

At the end of the day, ensuring someone else’s kids don’t have access to something said parent doesn’t want them to access…? Not my problem, and absolutely not a good enough reason to violate my privacy that thoroughly.

He honestly isn’t really my cup of tea… I love stand-up, but his stuff always just felt wrong to me, and not like politically wrong but…

Norm-violating wrong.

(Hehehehehehehe)

My bad. I’m not a comedian. Idk where the line is between “so real it’s funny” and “so real it’s not funny”… it’s just a thing I experienced.

So here we are.

Sorry.

Not where I expected that to go, but then… I never know where to expect comedians to go… I think that’s the point.

Anyway, keeping to the subject, when I worked at the hatchery there was this guy… he was the guy who killed all the male babies, and that was his whole job… he was fucking weird, in a bad way, and we all gave him tons of space. It didn’t bother him at all to kill thousands of birds in a single day as just his normal job. That’s all.

Y’all would be fucking horrified by the state of food manufacturing if you knew.

I used to work at a food processing and distribution company, in the document processing department… we weren’t strictly supposed to read the audits, especially the internal ones, but we did, to make sure they were complete and compliant, which was our job. Also our job was intensely boring and we needed something to gossip about.

The number of our distributors (first level manufacturing) who got C or D grades on their inspections… fucking gross. I reported a few of them, but the company did not care.

Before that I worked at a chicken hatchery. The cultures I cultured -doing an audit just like those I read later in life- were sooooo gross and problematic. But I was instructed to cover it up because, and this is important context, it was all self report after the initial inspection. I was doing this at 16, and was likely significantly more thorough than any veteran employee would have been. (Absolutely not why I was chosen; they chose me due to incredibly mild nepotism, as my manager was my step-dad, and he knew science stuff was up my alley… plus I was a filler worker, being under 18.)

I really hope things have improved, but somehow I doubt that the past 20 years has made a positive impact from my audit experience. (The document processing was less than 10 years ago, supporting my belief nothing has changed for the better.)

I would have figured people new to the hobby would go to used game stores first, then new game sections of regular retail stores… maybe swap those around.

I don’t even know that many long-term gamers who preorder…? They might pick it up on launch day but… typically not preorder.

You aren’t wrong. I freakin love mobile games, very addictive. I don’t play them anymore… bad habits form for me…

Roguelike games can have a similar appeal tho; turn it on, do a dive or two for 20-40 min, then come back next time.

I found so many adorable little short games that are nonetheless amazing fun. Tinykin, cat quest, troll hunters, stray… none of those are over 10 hours, even if you achievement hunt. Maybe stray, since you have to beat it more than once.

Like they don’t have to be super long to be super good. And sometimes you only have the energy to play my little pony (actually fun and super quick because it’s made for small kids, and sometimes you just want something that takes 2 hours to get 100% on because that’s the mood…)

I normally prefer super long exploration games, but those get old. Especially when they are all filler content like run here run there kill 5 things then go back to the same place 6 more times for dumb little quests you could have done all at once if they just gave them to you… I like 100%, but man they often make that so very tedious.

I have a greenworks push mower and I can clearly hear the birds while I’m mowing.

It’s not the most powerful thing, but it does the job really quietly.

As someone who has always been on a low-sodium diet, but who nonetheless has a hankering for processed food, thank fuck.

Everything has become so ridiculously salty, if you aren’t already used to the salt, that it’s largely inedible. It would otherwise be really good, but holy shit.

If we can get people consuming less salt in some places, they will want less in other places as well, maybe food as a whole will be less salty… that would be a win in every single way for everyone. Everyone who regularly eats with me tends to want less salt in their food overall as a result, so I know it works, and it doesn’t even take that long.

I just say the following every time:

“Your mother would be so disappointed in you if she really understood what you were doing, wouldn’t she?

Ruining the lives of little old ladies, just like mama. She’s probably not well off either, right Mr scammer? I feel for you. Really I do. I’ve lived in poverty my whole life too, and it’s been a huge struggle just to get by. But me? I wouldn’t shame my family by scamming people just like us out of what little they have. My mamma raised me better than that. I’m sure yours did, too.”

I always get a reply meaning it definitely strikes a nerve, usually get some sort of bravado about how mama is proud because they bring home the money, and I just respond “if you tell yourself that enough maybe you’ll believe it someday, too!”.

But I don’t want to be totally heartless because a lot of them don’t have meaningful options, and I get that, and I’m not the ragey sort generally. Or at least I try not to be.

Tons of people would pay-per-view that, if only for morbid curiosity. You could sell limited numbers of commemorative recordings in big collector packs and everything. They will be worth trumps fortune in a few years only (since that doesn’t really exist).

Sure sure it’s immoral and unethical to sell commemoratives of someone’s death to pay for the costs to bring about said death… but like… meh. He’s done way more harm than this would.

Throw musk and zuck in there with him, just for good measure, and our healing can begin.

Here’s the thing though…

I’ve bought now three single-player (with online features) games on console not realizing the servers had already been shut down for whatever reason within a year or two of launch. I can’t play them, and I really wanted to.

Sure they might not have made money off me this time around, but if they put out a game in the future and I’d been able to play these, I’d be more likely to try those and give them my money. Instead, because I wasted money on these year-old games that were already trashed, I just won’t touch anything from those studios ever again, since they clearly don’t believe in their games at all. It makes me look real long and hard into how “online” they are… if I need an internet connection to solo play? Immediately not interested, which is becoming much more limiting as that gets more common.

Meanwhile, if I ever bother setting up my ps2 with an Ethernet cable, I can play with other people who have the same setup with 20+ year old games (like champions of norrath, last I played that “online” was about 10 years ago, but it seems to spin up an on-demand server for whomever is available).

There’s tons of games that still have all of their DLC listed for ridiculous amounts 15 years after the game comes out, I guess I just don’t understand why they would scrap all that work when there’s other viable options that could potentially have future returns… instead they just close the door entirely.