BougieBirdie

Metal is like cereal. There’s a thousand varieties, its marketing has vibrant characters, and everyone has their favorite style

This is a reference to Warhammer 40k, a tabletop gaming / book / video game franchise

The Orkz in the setting paint their war trucks red because they believe it makes them go faster. And it does, in fact, make them go faster

Oh, beans…

In a high court judgment handed down in May, Mellor said that Wright presents himself as an extremely clever person, “however, in my judgment, he is not nearly as clever as he thinks he is”. He said he was an “extremely slippery witness”.

Sick burn from the judge

If you want an out of the box distro that just works and has that old-school flavour, maybe look into Mint.

If you want something a bit more modern, then pop_os! is something of a Linux darling

Ubuntu probably has the widest community support. Although it does seem to have some issues

I’m not clear on what your bugs are, but if it’s like, you run a command in the terminal and a bunch of scary sounding messages come up, that’s normal. That’s just how it likes to be

If it’s been a while since you’ve seen used it, then I’d say Linux is probably worth another shot. It’s come a long way, and it only gets better with age

Counterpoint: if people feel like they can’t talk about these things then they’ll never talk about them and the condition often worsens.

I also feel pretty powerless to help in a meaningful way. But I’m not going to shun someone who’s struggling either

Well of course the victim is going to play the victim. That’s just good marketing - and what is marketing if not propaganda?

Your comment reads as though the invading state’s actions aren’t propaganda. This is the whole reason why I came here to warn people to be skeptical of what they read online.

In an ironic twist, here’s an online source about the Russian disinformation campaign telling citizens that if you play Stalker 2 you’ll be drafted to fight in Ukraine against Russia.

Again, you should be skeptical of what you read online. In a vacuum, I’m inclined to believe the victim of invasion. In reality, I know that the situation is more nuanced - although the credibility of the aggressor is extremely suspect.

For what it’s worth, my impression on the game is that it’s yet another over-hyped game that couldn’t possibly live up to its expectations. The developers are financially incentivized to deflect that criticism through any means available to them. But that doesn’t mean I don’t acknowledge that malicious actors are also trying to discredit the game.

They’ll pay you peanuts to protect their gold. The only gold trickling down is a shower

I haven’t played Stalker 2 so I don’t really have a dog in this fight, but it’s very politically charged and has Russian state sponsored disinformation campaigns running against it. I’m not sure that you can get a truly accurate read of it online.

The developers are Ukrainian, and development had to be paused because their office literally turned into a warzone. The fact that the game came out at all is extremely based, and that certainly adds to the mythology around the game. But again, I haven’t played it, and gameplay-wise that doesn’t actually indicate anything about the game.

I want the game to succeed because of the developers’ existential struggle. The people causing that existential struggle want the game to fail. Neither of us have actually played the game, so again, there’s all this bias around it and we haven’t even looked at gameplay yet.

Be skeptical of anything you read online

I’ve done a couple tours myself, it’s no picnic

I feel it’s one of those jobs that everyone should do at some point in their life. That or customer / food service. Either exposes you to some of the rudest, most entitled people, and if everyone had that exposure I feel there’d be more empathy to go around

I tell you though, hearing people yell at your mom all day is great motivation to stay in school to find a better job

I was the kid, mom was working in a call center

I learned that people suck, and I still hate talking on the phone.

I also learned sudoku because you have to do something between calls.

Spotify has vaguely attributed the need for the API changes to improving security:

• In its blog post, Spotify says that it rolled out the changes with “the aim of creating a more secure platform.”
• In a community forum post, a Spotify employee says that “we want to reiterate the main message from the blog that we’re committed to providing a safe and secure environment for all Spotify stakeholders.” The post has many pages of replies from frustrated developers.
• In a statement to The Verge, Spotify spokesperson Brittney Le Roy says that “as part of our ongoing work to address the security challenges that many companies navigate today, we’re making changes to our public APIs.”

This is fairly disingenuous. The affected endpoints are all GET requests, which are read-only requests that provide some data about the track/artist/playlist/etc. There isn’t really very much potential to do anything insecure here.

The only thing they’re securing is their hegemony.

I believe this is indicating that it’s using the Python syntax highlighting.

Which is still a failure, don’t get me wrong. But I don’t think that AI truly knows the difference between one language and another anyway

Mind the toothpick

Zombii looks like my void. Then again, I suppose most voids look like my void

Can you tell me more about gall fruit? I’ve never heard of it, but I guess it must be good for cats if you put it in their toys

I learned it by watching you, dad!

Every other skilled trade just says “Fast, Right, or Cheap: pick two.”

It’s not my fault if they always pick fast and cheap

I don’t know, I guess I must have forgot

Friendly reminder to DMs that Counter Spell is a reaction, so after your fireball gets counter-counter-counter-counter-counter-counter-counterspelled you can just have some other mook cast another.

I mean, you shouldn’t counter-counter-counter-counterspell if you can help it. But having multiple casters in an encounter adds some more strategizing, especially if you have a scenario where a player might want to hold their reaction for something else.

I feel like “don’t laugh at your own jokes” is a piece of ancient wisdom from the entertainment industry.

Like, if you’re a performer and you’re laughing so hard that you can’t get the punchline out, then it prevents people from actually hearing the joke.

When you consider that performers in traditional media have a limited time slot to work in, then taking a break to laugh could be considered a waste or unprofessional.

I don’t think that long-format content has the same problem. If you’re making an online video or a podcast then you’re not limited by time. Authenticity is more important than fitting into a five minute set