BlemboTheThird

It's way cuter if he's kicking his stubby ol legs

Weird to segue directly from arguing that cluster munitions are illegal into claiming that the legality of weapons doesn't matter, but okay

No, they need a competent dev team. To this day, Valve is using a game engine that is, at its core, the Quake engine from 1996. Goldsrc? Source? Source 2? All increasingly heavily reworked versions of the Quake engine. And they can use it for everything from Alyx to Dota 2! If Valve can do it, why can't Bethesda?

This is a new tier of cognitive dissonance, even for Trump. I mean he literally got crowds chanting "lock her up!" Hopefully this is the icing on the cake of his felony convictions and gets a few more people to break out of the cult.

It's new in the sense they have rebuilt large enough parts of it to fully justify giving it a new name. Certainly it's very far removed from Quake. It's not like they've been sitting on their hands for almost 30 years. But it's not like they rebuilt it all from scratch, either; just the parts they needed to. Old code is still being used, and even new code still sometimes uses the old as a base. The most obvious visual example that comes to mind is the pattern they still use for flickering lights which has been around since the Quake days.

It's a bit of a Ship of Theseus situation, but I think my point still stands: Bethesda doesn't need an entirely new engine, they need devs who can (or more likely, need to give their devs time to) properly rebuild the parts that need it.

And here I was just reading that AMD GPUs showed much better performance in Starfield. Maybe it's because they're just not rendering stuff at all lmao

At least this idiot had the excuse of historical linguistics being so underdeveloped; it's understandable he'd think language was immutable... but he's still a total idiot who apparently thought God spoke English in the Bible instead of Latin and Hebrew.

if they're anything like cable ads, they actually make the ads louder than the regular programming on purpose to try to make sure you hear it if you tune out or just walk away. no relaxed, unfocused watching for you!

This girls team was winning because the boys haven't gone through puberty yet. Not saying it was ok to ban them, but it's false to claim that differences in bone mass and muscle density are imaginary. It just doesn't happen until after puberty.

And chess isn't exactly segregated by gender. The women's league exists to make women in chess more visible, to make it easier to pursue sponsorships, and to encourage more women to join the game. But women are free to compete in the "men's" category (which is actually called the "open" category), and often do. The reasons women haven't gotten to the top of it yet are cultural; women are discouraged from starting to play the game at a young age as all the top players do, and so far fewer women attempt the climb in the first place. But it will happen eventually.

Now if you want to talk about how transphobic FIDE is, there's some real merit in those accusations. Their rules around people who are transitioning are nonsensical, punishing people for absolutely no reason. But the women's league itself exists for good reasons.

The entire "different time" excuse is meant to apply to media, not people! Most texts written in the 1700s that include references to people of color are probably going to at least use outdated language, if not straight up racist perspectives, but because it was a different time you're supposed to acknowledge that it can still impart valuable ideas so long as you take it in context. Taking that scholarly technique and trying to apply it to crotchety assholes real people spouting hate makes me want to explode

Taiwan is a ridiculously valuable tech asset. If China can seize control of TSMC, it'd be in an incredible position to make tons of money and potentially spy on the rest of the world. If the factories wind up inoperable for whatever reason... well, most of the chips they produce aren't being sent to China anyway, so while it wouldn't be good for anyone, it'd be much worse for the rest of the world. And with TSMC making efforts to offshore its talent and production anyway (even if it has been with very limited success so far), China wants to make a move sooner rather than later.

This doesn't get said enough. Piracy is only damaging if I would have paid to get the thing in the first place. If I'm pirating something that I would have avoided entirely had I needed to pay, literally no one is taking any losses.

Used to be if I found the site of a newspaper I thought I liked, I'd turn off my ad blocker to see how it goes.

I don't even try any more. Again and again and again, every time I turn it off the page gets so cluttered that following the article becomes a chore and takes up so many resources that even scrolling slows to a crawl. Ludicrous nonsense.

You clearly haven't been looking very hard. I see it almost every day just sorting by new.

I'm making a note here, "SPY AMONGUS"

That's not what I said at all.

No, that is exactly the over-broad, willy-nilly, tossed-around definition they were talking about. Gaslighting has a much more insidious context than simply making someone question themselves. It means doing it on purpose; intentionally lying to someone and trying to convince them that they're crazy. Like if I said I was going to the grocery and then when I came back with nothing, I insisted I never said that. Or if i borrowed $50 and when it came time to pay you back, I try to tell you I only borrowed $25. It's inherently deceptive and cruel.

gives a whole new meaning to blasting ass

I like that part of firefox's summary was that it's free. Uh, yeah, they all are. Thanks Mozilla!

Redmond and blutarch are gonna be SEETHING when I collapse the gravel industry

hey, im not 30 yet! ive still got, like... a year...

When I did driver's ed they actually got a semi cab and had us all sit in it so we could see exactly how the blind spots work, even with fish eye mirrors. The cab is so high up you'd have to crane your neck to see most cars down there.

Bofa --> both of

People like you would be watching the Nixon resignation saying “he got away with everything”.

I mean... yeah? You think his resignation and pardon WASN'T him getting away with everything?

I'm as hopeful as the next guy that the supreme court won't just rule that nothing bad happened on Jan 6th and that Trump is allowed to be prosecuted, but 3 years on, it seems pretty reasonable to doubt it until it's done.

dont u ever talk shit about corn dogs again

This is a stunningly ignorant take.

Being a modern so-called "wage slave" sucks, no doubt. But equating it to actual, literal slavery belittles what those people actually went through to a disgusting degree. No one today can whip you if they feel like it. No one today can separate you from your spouse and children, selling them to some random asshole two states over, never to be seen again. If you decided to try to make it on your own and move, no one can sue to have you brought back to your workplace in a cage. If you break your leg, no one can shoot you in the head like you're a useless animal.

The closest thing to slaves we have today are convicts. There's a whole different discussion to be had there about how immoral it is to use prison as a punishment instead of rehabilitation, allowing a court to take away someone's rights, exploiting time behind bars for labor, the incentive that provides for pronouncing people guilty, and removing felons' rights to vote. But poor wage workers are NOT slaves.

English has never not been jank af

depends on who theyre fucking

"Ruined" seems like a strong word but the yolk wasn't supposed to break

I had a local paper do this to me a few years ago. Turns out I can ask my credit card provider to block payments to them at 2am on a Saturday and I still get access to the paper for another two months.

For what it's worth, here's an account that reposts everything NASA puts out: https://social.beachcom.org/@nasa

Mario ain't got shit on luigi

Trans and nonbinary people have existed for as long as humanity has. Your perception of this "stupidity" as new is the result of people finally overcoming hundreds of years of religious programming; bigotry that has been passed down for generations as superstitious fear anyone presenting in an unfamiliar way, and people are now more willing to express themselves as they actually feel, rather than as they feel they must in order to protect themselves.

Here's a short piece of a lecture by a Stanford professor explaining how wrong you are. https://youtu.be/8QScpDGqwsQ

Kill Six Billion Demons is my favorite right now. Gorgeous, sprawling, complex artwork from start to finish, philosophically interesting, bordering on pretentious but I love it. I sometimes read this one while wearing my VR headset to properly examine certain pages close up.

Johnny Wander is the homepage for an incredible artist/writer duo. I've really been enjoying their latest story Barbarous, but their archives are a bit of a pain to navigate to find the starting point for each story. Worth the pain though.

Octopus Pie has been over for a few years but is always worth returning to. Woman lives in New York, people are weird, and New York has a lot of people. Reading this one will make you feel good, Do Not Skip.

Sleepless Domain is an interesting one, generally a cutesy story with an anime, leaning towards chibi art style but focused around a set of brutal murders that happen towards the front end of the story and the survivor's guilt that follows.

Gunnerkrigg Court is hard for me to describe but gets a re-read from me every few years. A surreal examination of why we tell stories and The Power Of Friendship? It's been going so long that I half suspect it's not going anywhere and is just an excuse to keep chugging for as many years as its author needs it to, and also half suspect it's imminently ending in the next few months. I don't think I really have a problem with it either way; it's written very well.

I also want to add Questionable Content. Someone else mentioned it before but I think it needs linking to. It's one of the first webcomics I picked up so it's hard for me to judge it fairly, but even having evolved so much since the early days I think there's something to love about every stage of its development. It was just easy reading about hipsters listening to music and drinking coffee, and then somewhere along the way it became a sci-fi story too and goodness I love it.

They're still taking something they didn't make and selling it as though they did. I have every right to write and film a Batman movie, spend as much time I want making it professional, and then show it to people, as long as I don't charge them for it. That doesn't give Fox or whoever the right to take my movie and charge for it instead. Even if I did break the law by making people pay for it, the actual owners would only be entitled to that money, not to go make mroe money off of it themselves. It's still my work even if it uses concepts invented by someone else.

There's a reason every franchise under the sun has mountains of fanart and fanfic without the companies that own them trying to take control of it: it's blatantly illegal.

Just never turn it off, ez

i want to upvote qc but im morally opposed to taking photos of a screen

I'm not saying that piracy, as a general concept, results in zero losses for a company. There are people who would have paid to see a thing, who won't thanks to piracy. I am saying that there is also a ton of stuff I would never pay to see, but would happily watch if it were free. Having some interest in a thing isn't the same as being willing to pay for it.

Hell, there's also stuff that I saw thanks to piracy that I wound up liking so much I went back and paid for a copy. In that sense, companies can make money through piracy. The point is that piracy isn't taking something like theft is, it's copying something.

and that was on the campaign trail. he can say whatever he wants; as long as it's vaguely racist and/or homophobic more than a third of the country will vote for him.

and now republicans rag on BIDEN for having dementia. there are plenty of reasons to dislike the guy, but i guess it's a good thing his political opponents aren't interested in anything real

Maybe I just have wack taste buds but i think the morningstar faux fried chicken patties are pretty good. But they're basically a giant veggie nuggie so idk