I was trying to look up a quote I thought was from parody CEO Hand Scorpio from the Simpsons, but it’s from Ron Swanson from Parks and Rec.

“Metaphors? I hate metaphors! That’s why my favorite book is Moby Dick; no froo froo symbolism, just a good simple tale about a man who hates an animal”.

Either way, it’s a great parody of artistic illiteracy of business bros, even without the A.I summary, they would have said the same shit. Most the time they’re reading non-fiction guru-self-help with a bro friendly veneer anyway.

As an entirely different tangent, I’m someone who is qualified in the arts and pretty bad at the sciences, but I’m always amazed how naturally people in the sciences pick up the art. I’m talking mathematicians and electrical engineers. I have no idea if it’s that they know how to learn from a background where it’s necessary, or if their brains have just developed connections in a transferable place. Maybe it’s even just a coincidence and just random correlation I’ve seen. Either way, I’d worry art was deceptively easy if not for the fact that armchair pseudo-intellectual business bros are absolutely awful at making and understanding it.

And sometimes just super plain ones. I remember getting my favourite Skyrim potion texture mod from there specifically.

Purple: Magic??

Green: Life/death??

Red: Life/fire??

Blue: Magic/cold??

Honestly the only colour I don’t feel uncertain about is orange, that’s always bad.

Also on the topic of health potions, a great piece of advice I once heard was that if your players are in a foreign land, remove health potions. Give them health biscuits and watch them reconcile with God.

Microsoft has absolutely been preparing for the end of traditional consoles more or less since the flop of the Xbox One. Their entire push a few years back to make “Everything Xbox” was a bit mistimed and disloyal to their console war cultists but they’re right that it’s the natural end point.

I think we’ll probably see streaming games from their servers reoccur in popularity pretty soon, as much as I’m not a fan of it, because it’s the total end point for non tech savvy consumers, they just pay a subscription, get a controller which can connect to the TV or phone and download an app, no hardware required. Meanwhile every consumer who is resisting the death of tech literacy (everyone else), is going in this direction. The physical console will reduce in popularity year by year as it fills a niche that nobody needs anymore.

That being said, the popularity of the switch and steam deck interests me, because it’s a third direction away from traditional consoles that I’d not have predicted.

I 90% agree, I swapped to wireless earbuds about a decade ago when my aux port on whatever phone I had then broke, and I immediately preferred it. I went from buying £10 wired earphones from a supermarket what sounded shit and broke every month to £25 wireless earphones that sounded shit and broke every 6 months, so for me it was am improvement. I was also a chronic “catch headphone cable on every handle” victim, to the point that I immediately preferred the wireless solution. Another thing is when my wireless headphones break, they fucking break; I go with one earbud for about a month then inevitably buy a new pair. When my wired headphones started to degrade, I always fought it, ending up in a losing battle of finding that perfect way to hold them to make them still work. The only downside I have nowadays is when I’m listening to music or a video and realise I’ve misplaced my phone, which isn’t really an issue, just that it was impossible when it was tethered to my ears.

But I’m probably part of a very small minority when it comes to my preference. I carry a compact camera any day I leave the house intending to take photos, so my ideal phone would have one rear camera that prioritises efficiency over quality. I’d have no headphone port, and to be honest, I could live with no ports and wireless charging and data transfer. I’ve had two smartphones in the last that had their USB-C ports fail as chargers (both galaxy S8s), and I could go years without needing to use the port for anything else. My dream phone would have no ports, one rear camera without a bump, no front camera, minimal tactile side buttons, be pretty slim, have a swappable battery and run a FOSS OS and mostly FOSS apps.

I respect the voices that want a smartphone equivalent to a ThinkPad a lot, but I don’t really think it’s anywhere near as necessary as a ThinkPad would be, because for most tasks that need something like that, I’d just use that.

That being said, there’s two reasons I don’t 100% agree. The first is to do with the fairphone specifically. More battery space and better waterproofing don’t really apply to a phone where I can swap the battery and it comes apart so much that it’s not really competitively waterproof. The second is larger, which is that I can just not use a headphone jack if I prefer wireless, while people who prefer wired are having increasingly few options available on the market.

I doubt any major power will intervene for Iran unless it looks like a regime change that actually benefits Israel / the USA happens. China and Russia have basically been minimal allies with Iran for the sake of funding an enemy of America, but they’ve always wanted Iran to remain weaker.

The small pro Iran groups, largely the groups Iran trained will act, but they have been already for the past 3 years.

Book your time travellers grand tour feast of flood beer, butter, cheese, whiskey, wine and chocolate.

For the cheaper package, there’s the toxic runoff, coal and radioactive material tour.

50% of the list is “The great chocolate and beer flood, where everyone got drunk and full.” And the other half is “The terrible toxic fossils fuel slip or ecological disaster and death”, except both have equal deaths.

In the countryside, we fucken too

I agree, knowing other people have sex is absolutely fine, in fact I assume it as default for basically any adult in a relationship. Not using protection may be unwise in almost all cases, but trying for a baby with a partner is the main exception, and it’s never been gross.

I understand that a lot of people have been raised with shame, and I feel a certain pity for them, but I’m not a fan of treating this shame as righteous.

The pentagon knew Israel was about to attack, they said so themselves, but denied any support or involvement. This seems to a valid reason for the pizza party, just to track, observe and be ready for any unexpected counter response.

I am in the camp where I believe the USA hasn’t actively been involved yet but fully intend to be in the coming days. We have a seen Israel do anything they weren’t already capable of, and the massive shift of US jets, missiles and an aircraft carrier to the middle east has largely happened after the initial attack.

Also I actually have less of an issue with other people buying Gaiman’s work. I have no love for the man and won’t buy anything myself again, but if you buy something of his, the money goes to him, and stops there. Rowling directly funds bigotry; the money people spend on Harry Potter is in a direct pipeline to funding the suffering of innocent people.

At the very least, before everything happened with Gaiman, he was known for having positive philanthropic ventures. Even if you gave him money, a sizable portion went to him, another portion went on to better the world. I’d presume he still supports these trusts and charities too.

This guy pops up everywhere online with screenshots of his silly tweets, and every time I think it’s Edward Snowden.

It takes me to the end of tweet to realise that’s a crazy post for him, and go back and read his name properly.

I’m the opposite, I want romance, character death, low magic, a later era (1700s theming more than 800s), safety tools out the wazoo and in-game bigotry that my party can rebel against.

Gal Godot.

I’m very impressed with Lemmy here for not doing what Reddit would have and naming a long list of women. That being said, if I didn’t feel a moral obligation to boycott Gal Godot, she is so talentless that she hasn’t made anyone else’s list because it’s such a low hanging fruit.

She’s very typecast, but she can act. If she actually got a role where she could show strong emotion, I think she could rise to it well. She’s good in Challengers and great in Euphoria.

He’s the only actor I can think of I actively boycott other than Gal Godot. Aside from his violent racism and American nationalism which is all well documented, I just absolutely loathe the type of character he likes to play; the macho snarky asshole who feels like he got kicked out of basic training and makes being a veteran his whole personality.

There’s few archetypes I hate more than the “former soldier who could kill a man, harbouring some deep unnerving instinct”, or the “American in a truck who loves the flag and is just a hard working guy”, and somehow he always plays and glamorises both, despite not actually being either.

This was my hometown’s team. It’s super strange having it put on the map, where basically everybody knows this story, and before then nothing at all.

It’s absolutely just a random investment in a potentially very lucrative industry. 21st century football is massively swayed by who can spend the most money, especially below the very top level where the money becomes too ridiculous. Wrexham had the oldest active ground in the UK and the ground itself is particularly goodnfkr the level of play. Wrexham had dropped from 3rd division to like 5th, near 6th when he bought it (I think). But Wrexham as a city isn’t small, it’s the largest population centre in North Wales, and before it gained city status in 2022, was a larger town than many of the cities near it. All it really needed to do well was investment, where it had the facilities to be tenfold more successful if anybody actually paid for it, it’s the same for probably a dozen other teams across the UK.

But the investment worked of course, and the team has done amazingly well since then. But don’t consider this anything but an investment where two celebrities used their image to aid it’s success.

He is very involved in the branding that results in his typecasting, so I have no pitty for it.

I agree, I think he could have pulled off the same persona written for both Bale and Patterson’s batmen. He’s also played a lot of assholes, and I’m not sure how much that just develops into a feeling that gets under your skin.