I believe the problem is that WOTC was incredibly hard to work with. They should have a lot more freedom with their own IP.

I would argue otherwise.

Wikipedia is incomprehensibly large. Perhaps the largest database of vetted human knowledge ever.

I know for a fact you can find inaccuracies and biased information if you look for it. But it’s rare relative to the amount of information that exists there.

Yeah, RDO is pretty much garbage. Blatant cash grab.

Did you beat the game?

I agree with this guy that it may be the best Western ever written.

Collect 3,000 cells in this wide open world to collect your skins.

Buy 4,000 cells to get this custom pirate skin for your character.

I don’t really want to play adversity Olympics with you but since you insist.

My parents were on food stamps and going to food pantries when I was a kid. Father was an absent alcoholic and drug addict. I myself struggled with heroin addiction in my teens and 20s and ended up ruining my life - or so I thought.

I managed to climb out of that hole (using Obamacare and the support of my family) to find a whole new perspective on my life.

I was angry, bitter, nihilistic, and selfish. I was obsessed with how bad and unfair the world is, and it gave me every excuse to keep buying bundles and nodding into oblivion.

Once I got clear of the horrible opiate withdrawal and paid back the considerable money I owed - once I stopped wanting to overdose and kill myself - I realized how nice it is to be able to take a walk on a warm day and just check out the birds. I realized a cup of coffee and a sandwich is a blissful experience, especially when shared with a friend or loved one.

When I think about the eternity I will spend in non-existence after I die, I know that I have very limited time to enjoy this strange and beautiful trip I’m on. I know this little blip would be the envy of the non-existent. If ghosts were real, I bet every one of them would kill to come back and just feel the sensations of smell, taste, touch, and sound. Or to look at something pretty.

Like dude, I’ve had parts of my life that were fucking miserable. Please don’t tell me it’s so easy. I’ve just decided to enjoy it and practice gratitude. Whatever happens to me, I remind myself that it’s better than going through opiate withdrawal on a plastic cot and wishing I was dead while everyone was disgusted with me.

Life, on average, is much easier now than it’s ever been. The wealthiest men alive didn’t have access to basic over the counter medicine that we have today. If you die of some horrific disease tomorrow, you’ve still had a higher quality of life than most of the richest people who have ever lived.

You know why my ramblings about the beauty of life sound so corny? It’s because a lot of people have realized it before. Because it’s so often said that it sounds cliche. There is a reason so many people have come to these conclusions.

My advice to you is to touch grass. No joke. And if you don’t want to touch grass, go watch a movie that makes you feel awe. Go read a book that moves you. Otherwise you’re going to have your eyes opened on your death bed and wish you had lived differently. Happens all the time man.

Bidet attachment https://www.amazon.com/Bidet-Non-Electric-Mechanical-Attachment-Self-Cleaning/dp/B00P2XZDGG

And I grew up with window unit air conditioners. They kept a couple rooms cool no problem.

I don’t see how I’m talking out my ass.

I really love that you said test hamster instead of guinea pig.

I’m using this from now on.

I actually think life, for all its faults, is a beautiful and amazing opportunity. It’s a special blink of existence where we get to witness the unimaginable beauty in our universe.

Perhaps our lives (in the West, at least) have gotten too easy. Not that I want to go back or live a harder life - I don’t. But for most of human history, there was a pretty solid chance you were going to live a sick, miserable, religion-filled life as a soldier, slave, or peasant. All the while, you’d have pretty much no control over what happened to you. Even the wealthy and powerful were shitting in holes and sweating in the heat. Today, it costs you about two hours of easy labor to get a bidet and maybe 10 hours of labor to get an air conditioner that will keep you cool for many years. People still found meaning and reasons to keep going through the thousands of years of famine, plague, war, and slavery. They kept seeing something that made them want to have babies and love them.

The world isn’t perfect but it’s better than it’s ever been in most ways. Even if we don’t survive climate change and late-stage capitalism, I think the time I’ve already had with my son has been beautiful and meaningful. I only hope he gets to experience love, satisfaction, simple pleasures, etc. Even just a comfortable nap or the feeling of accomplishment after completing a task. It’s all so fragile and temporary. We are the universe experiencing itself and it’s really beautiful despite the miserable parts.

I’m not saying it never happens, but it’s not a super common occurrence.

And even if it is, locking down the entire internet and monitoring people in an Orwellian fashion isn’t the government’s job.

What happened back in the day when kids walked in on their parents doing the deed? What did the parents do when their child snuck a passage of Shakespeare and read all the filthy jokes he wrote?

Oh, they spoke to the kids and guided them through a normal part of life?

I have a son. I would like for him to not see graphic images on the Internet. But when he does, I will explain to him that human beings have sex (which is why he exists). I will tell him that sometimes people like to watch videos about it because it feels good to them. I will explain to him that it’s fake, just like the action movies and violence he sees on TV. I will tell him it’s nothing like that in reality and I will explain to him that he’s not ready to see that material yet.

Fascists always gain control by offering “safety.” Ironically, they’re more dangerous than the thing they claim to protect you from.

Yeah, making a government list of porn watchers with their watch history available is 100% going to be abused. It will not turn out well.

I think what a lot of people are missing in this thread is that not everyone has access to convenient physical stores and many people do have good reasons to want faster shipping.

For example, young families who don’t live near a Walmart. When you realize you need a few things for the kid, it can be pretty tough to pack them up and drive however far to the store that may or may not have what you need. If they do have it, you aren’t going to get reviews or many options.

My recent prime purchases have included bottle brushes, a crib mattress protector, a replacement remote for our sound bar (dog ate it), and a cheap car camera to check the baby since he started daycare last week and I’m completely paranoid about my ADHD brain leaving him in a hot car and killing him.

Did any of these need to be prime purchases? I guess not but you can see how I would want them sooner rather than later.

Walmart near me didn’t have any good car cameras in my price range.

The sound bar remote was online only and was required for us to watch TV since our TV speaker doesn’t work.

The bottle brushes were just convenient.

The mattress protector could have waited but would have been a gamble on ruining our very expensive crib mattress. This could have been a a Walmart purchase for sure though.

I’m not saying these were life or death purchases. They weren’t and people got by just fine before Amazon. But does the convenience and reliability outweigh the monthly prime cost? For us, yes. And I admit we have become pretty dependent on it.

Right, and it still saves the studio time and money on other recording costs. That would be the way to do it.

While it would be really nice to have January 6th off of work every year, I unfortunately can’t get behind the creation of this holiday.

Perhaps a compromise? We celebrate the day Trump lost the election. The right can celebrate it the way they celebrate the death and rebirth of Jesus, while the left can celebrate it more like Festivus.

Imagine what their demographics would look like if they also started a war and killed their young people though.

Not saying they won’t do it, and they do currently have an excess of young men specifically, but a country with a population problem isn’t in a great place to start a war imo.

I teach lower income students and they love technology as much as the rest of us. They usually opt for used electronics and a lot of them are getting scammed into buying secondhand enterprise rigs that are converted into shitty gaming PCs, but don’t worry, you made some nerd’s day.

I imagine your priorities become different.

You start out young and idealistic. You find success and maintain that idealism for quite some time. Your morals are intact and you still feel connected to your users because you’re one of them.

Eventually though, you have to make some tough decisions. You want to maintain your community and sometimes that means choosing financials first. You make unpopular decisions for good reasons and your users don’t understand because they aren’t privy to all of the details. You have MBAs walking you through these steps and they’re probably more understanding than your users who don’t have a lot of stake in these choices.

Then your platform grows and it’s not just your computer nerd circles anymore. It’s open to the general public and corporations as well now. You have to deal with a bunch of vile, shitty people and you still have to make unpopular decisions. Nobody is ever happy no matter what you do.

Personally, I can understand reaching a point where you say, “You know what? Fuck em. I’m a different person now after all of these years, and the people using my platform aren’t even the same people I made it for in the first place, at least not mostly.”

I assume at that point you’re just trying to cash out. And you’ve listened to the MBAs for long enough that you’re thinking like them now. It’s even technically possible that Spez is still a good person and an idealist. He might still be making tough choices the rest of us don’t understand. Reddit may very well be in a place where it needs to get way more profitable or die. The Internet is tricky. Nowhere else in the free market do you have people who expect to pay $0 for a popular product they use for many hours per day.

I’m not a Spez apologist. Just offering a possible scenario that would explain how we keep ending up here with so many different companies.

I like the idea that tolerance is a social contract.

You’re only covered by it when you practice it.

You break the contract by being intolerant, nobody is obligated to be tolerant to you anymore.

Tiny Scanner for Android

For now.

And don’t forget, humans are also trained on the inputs of others.

The whole thing with folk music and punk rock is that it can be good whilst not technically sounding good.

As an example, Johnny Hobo is perfectly situated between folk and punk rock. Horrible chain-smoking voice pushed to its max, shitty acoustic guitar just being beat on, and it sounds so like it was recorded on a laptop.

But it’s completely unique, authentic, and heart wrenching.

You can feel his despair and a lot of it is precisely because of these things. I don’t think any high-quality version of this song would make nearly the same impact. In fact it would probably sound like shit.