I almost never buy multiplayer-focused games anymore. Of course not all gamers are shitty, but enough are to matter. Having left those games behind I can see how they were taking more joy from my life than they added. If friends want to do private co-op that’s cool, but it’s also rarer now that we’re all older.

As far as sales go, I love playing a year or two behind new releases. Patched games at a discount ftw and timing doesn’t matter in single-player games.

Worked through my obsessions a bit and let go of them. In the following weeks I asked three women out and got shot down each time instead of thinking about doing so for a month and being a creep.

Unironically, good on you. That’s character progress and it takes a lot of courage and self-confidence to accept rejection in a mature way and keep trying regardless. For what it’s worth I as an Internet stranger think we should help more people do the same sort of things.

Her name is [kept to myself because I’m a gentleman who doesn’t kiss and tell]. I hope I, in turn, am not someone’s most alarming thing but it’s possible :P

All too true. It hurts to see. It’s also worth mentioning the sabotage/blockade of aid by Israeli protesters and that the UN says it’s out of stockpiled supplies.

As much as the “hurt with one hand, help with the other” approach bothers me, I really hope this enables sufficient aid to safely reach the civilians who so desperately need it.

I’d say it’s sometimes ok, sometimes necessary for brevity, and sometimes accurate. Accurate = “All people need oxygen, water, and calories to survive.” Brevity = “Generally speaking, people enjoy good food and good company so those situations work well for forming relationships.”

Consequences of generalizations have a lot to do with how tolerable they are. If I say, “most people like pizza” there’s not much harm if several million people don’t. If I say, “all or most people of this gender/ethnicity/religion/whatever have X problem” that’s a lot more problematic because it can easily lead to a consequence of harmful prejudice. When it comes to matters of ethics, beliefs, accusations etc. it becomes very important to handle cases individually as much as humanly possible.

For a moment I thought it was Columbia University and was a little shocked by the reversal. After correcting myself: it’s good to hear another nation is drawing some lines in the sand regarding behavior. Rules of war should mean something.

Can I get a courtesy indictment?

I have previously wondered what scientists like Nile from the YouTube channels NileRed and NileBlue or Styropyro could do if they wanted to.

Nile is a chemist does things like turning plastic gloves into hot sauce or making super-reactive chemicals that really don’t want to exist. In some of his videos he’ll be making an intermediary chemical and say stuff along the lines of, “If I drop this we all die”.

Styropyro is legitimately like a mad scientist without the evil, and deals mainly with huge amounts of electricity and military-grade laser builds. He flat-out tells people that if they try to reproduce his experiments there’s a very good chance they’ll die or be seriously injured. In that military-grade laser video he burns a hole through a steel truck door from hundreds of feet away.

It’s probably Photoshop or something similar, so you aren’t far off. I’ve had it since 2015 and there are a bunch of them based off a pic from that time, like this one captioned “Some men just want to watch the world learn”:

“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”
― Epicurus

It’s one of my go-to arguments against intelligent design.

That’s a solid criticism and I upvoted. I hadn’t thought about YouTube. Anecdotally I’ve had factual comments about how many kids are killed, what Israeli politicians say, etc. auto-moderated into oblivion on YouTube. But at the same time I get a lot of the facts I use from YouTube (basically never been on TikTok) so it holds water. I also get a lot of info from other sources, but I can’t think of something specific I’d get from them that I could never find on YouTube.

In my defense, I’m basing my opinion on why TikTok is particularly targeted on interviews like this one with Ted Cruz. He talks about how TikTok is specifically designed to push messages that are harmful to America, including what he calls pro-Hamas content but I suspect is actually anti-Israeli policy, pro-Palestine content. That is why I would argue there’s some evidence of a campaign against TikTok in particular that might skip over YouTube or other major platforms. Perhaps the Western powers feel that YouTube is still acceptably moderated towards their interests whereas TikTok isn’t. Perhaps Google is just too influential domestically.

Edit: I found a video I was looking for: Biden talking about passing the TikTok/Israel funding/Ukraine funding package. A bit of language he uses that I think is telling is “it continues America’s leadership in the world and everyone knows it” which could signal US dominance as a motivation and thus TikTok as a target and not US companies.

That doesn’t mean your point isn’t worth discussion, or that my points aren’t opinion. I’m interested to see how it develops. I’ve based my opinion on the conversations I can find and language used, but I’m open to adjusting my view if evidence prompts that.

I 100% admit that my take on the TikTok ban is opinion based on the hearings and arguments + the scope of the bill, so you aren’t being unfair. I have never heard that about the Twitter purchase - I had read it was a poor decision Musk made only half-seriously and then was basically forced to follow through with.

Here’s Bernie Sanders from a year ago talking about how a handful of companies control the news people see, read, and hear. TL:DR - He makes the argument that it’s not fake news, that journalists are usually hard-working and honest. He says the problem is the limitation of allowed discussion - what topics make it to the consumer. He says for instance that he’s never asked about wealth and income inequality.

I believe TikTok is being banned because as it stands now it brings topics outside the limits of allowed discussion to a lot of eyes in ways US government/companies haven’t proven able to control. If the issues justifying a potential ban were truly data security or mental health as some argue (not without merit mind you), then the legislation to address those issues would look a lot different and include companies like Meta, Google, Instagram, etc. Those are valid concerns but the new measure is clearly not designed around them.

Finally, we’ve seen how Trump can tie up the courts for months on end even after all his self-snitching. Thus I very much doubt we’ll see any actual action in the 9 months + 3 months grace period laid out for the resolution of the TikTok matter. There are too many constitutional and business law challenges in my (admittedly layman’s) reading of expert opinion.

All hail our Lord and Savior Gaben, and treasure the relics of his reign: