I had a friend who was married to a veteranarian who worked with exotic animals. They were constantly fostering bird rescues. He told me once he fell asleep on the couch and woke up as a parrot was reaching for his glasses. He said he knew this bird wouldn’t intentionally hurt him but seeing a 4-year-old child with a can opener on its face reaching for him was pretty scary.

I had a coworker who would frequently say “Not to be pendantic…” and I honestly could not tell if he was just fucking with me.

I use Garuda for gaming, but most would likely recommend Bazzite.

This works better when spoken with the appropriate inflections.

Quite a lot for online friends and gaming. For irl friends, it’s more sporadic.

We had a fundamental disagreement regarding the role of technology in business operations. In my view, technological change in an enterprise exists in tension between the business desiring a solution that perfectly fits their process and the flexibility of a technology package to approximate the business requirements in a cost-effective way. Ideally, technology should fade into the background so that you don’t even notice or think about it as it facilitates your work.

Microsoft seemingly disagrees.

My specialty is telephony, a space that Microsoft has only recently ventured into with a competitive and cost-effective, if feature-poor, offering in Teams. Telephony is a complex topic and the way telephones are used in business today is varied from people who barely use their phone (but want it when they need it), to people who depend on specific telephony functionality to do their work.

The meeting I had was in a beta-user group for new tech in that space, it was me and about 40 other admins from a variety of large businesses and a team-lead in Microsoft product house. Basically, it was a group of customers becoming increasingly exasperated at the arrogant ignorance of someone in charge of developing telephone technology at Microsoft who didn’t only have limited experience with enterprise-level telephony, but insisted that business units conform their processes to fit what Microsoft was willing to develop, and I want to emphasize here, that the audience was more than willing to meet the vendor halfway here, it was Microsoft insisting that people didn’t really need basic things like busy-indicators.

I spent about an hour getting more and more angry to the point where I just wanted to get rid of everything Microsoft, but I couldn’t torpedo Teams at work, so I went home and installed Mint on all my PCs (and later switched to Garuda).

I had a meeting at work with a product team lead at Microsoft. Went home and installed Linux that evening.

Of course a pest control salesman would look at natural pest control as a pest.

SMS/MMS and the PSTN are completely compromised by multiple governments. Not saying that makes smartphones any better, just be aware.

I had a spirited discussion with an LG repair guy working on the smart fridge that came with my home. I don’t allow malware on my network so the fridge doesn’t get to do whatever a fridge needs internet access for.

He tried to scare me by saying it would connect to whatever network was available but I live in the sticks and there isn’t even cell coverage here much less another router for it to connect to so unless they are putting a satellite uplink in it that would not happen and I would think he knew that since I had to put him on my guestnet so he could call his support line.

So then he said it wouldn’t work properly unless it was on the network and I told him if it somehow connected I would use an ACL to ensure it couldn’t talk to anything.

Anyway, bought a cheap fridge from CostCo with an extended warranty and they dumpstered that LG POS. Good riddance.

I stopped watching her generally when she put up her poorly thought out, TERF-filled anti-trans video, but the “Capitalism is good, actually” video came up in my feed and I watched it out of curiosity.

It’s so wrong it’s impossible to know where to begin. She invents a history of money that didn’t happen, defines capitalism in a nonsensical way and in the comments admitted she did no research for the video whatsoever and yet still defended her points as if her absolute ignorance on the subject was somehow laudable.

Absolute buffoon. Nobody should watch her videos. She is intellectually dishonest and generates ignorant content to garner clicks.

It was literally outlined as this in Project2025, ban porn then define speech you want to suppress (primarily LGBT but also women’s health) as porn.

I appreciate the discussion, I get out of my depth pretty quickly on the topic being a linguistic hobbyist rather than someone with actual education and background.

It’s an approximation, but the t is partially vocalized giving it a ‘d’ sound even if it’s not made exactly the same way.

This phenomenon is called “T flapping” and it is common in North American English. I got into an argument with my dad who insisted he pronounces the T’s in ‘butter’ when his dialect, like nearly all North Americans pronounces the word as ‘budder’.

I had a homemade vegan shepard’s pie at a coworker’s house (she lived in the US, but from the UK) and it was one of the best dinners I’ve had in a long time.

If the criticism is limited to “It’s too hard.” then I would agree. But that’s not a valid response to criticisms about specific design elements like “these power ups feel like they do nothing”, even if it’s a perception issue at hand you need to address the actual observation and not jump on with ‘git gud’.

I was learning a game a few months ago and struggling with understanding a specific character, so I went to the official discord and asked for advice, not complaining it was too hard, just asking for what kinds of strategies work and I was met with endless ‘try harder, scrub’ responses and literally no actual advice. I quit playing the game because the community was so up it’s own asshole.

And for sake of clarity. I don’t play HK, it’s not my preferred genre and my favorite game (that I can replay) is Noita so I am familiar with reviews that complain about difficulty. It’s fine for games to be hard and it’s also fine for people who find the games too hard to leave a review saying they found it too hard. That is part of informing buyers so people can only pick it up if they desire that kind of challenge.

It’s just a trend that is all too common in gaming. People like a game or a developer and become incapable of seeing an opinion that they disagree without taking it as a personal slight. It’s weird.

We should definitely talk about how levying criticism, especially thoughtful criticism, is treated as a personal attack by other people playing the same game. It’s a bizarre form of tribalism.

Muskrat looks pretty gross, plus all those chemicals can’t be healthy.

It is a Civ tradition, BotS made Civ4 amazing, but I’d argue the base game was solid and just needed some mechanical polish.