Team Fortress, I’m assuming you mean TF2, was one of the very first games to have microtransactions. They aren’t required for play but they’re definitely there.

Something you learn in flight school is how not to over-correct.

If mine did that I would present them my vas deferens in a manila envelope with two little grease stains showing through the paper and sharpied in my off hand “The future you built when you voted for Reagan.”

I saw Biden give a press conference about the hurricane, and as he was walking out the door one of the reporters asked about his communication with Netanyahu, and he said over his shoulder “We didn’t talk about the hurricane.”

Leaded AVGAS is still in use.

Because cats are very stretchy.

Cut Google Fiber off and it can be a separate ISP.

Cut the Chromebook and Pixel phone divisions off. thay can support itself with device sales.

go ahead and kill the projects they’re gonna abandon in the next few years anyway, don’t let them replace them.

I bought a commercial digital signage TV. No Roku/Chromecast/whatever, but the damn thing STILL has Ethernet and Wi-Fi and nagged me about setting it up on the internet. I’m only buying computer monitors from here on out.

I think the genuine answer is “no but they are closely related.”

As my junior officer Ensign_Crab pointed out, Ginger is a rhizome, not a root, but both started out as low ABV brewed beverages flavored with spices (ginger and sarsaparilla or sassafras respectively) that with the invention of the soda fountain transformed into soft drinks made by mixing flavored syrups with carbonated water.

It’s how a cartoon gender studies major would pronounce “pin-up poster.”

Please don’t melt heavy metals in food prep areas.

When I first heard the word “man cave” it seemed to mean rec room/rumpus room as marketed by Spike TV. A finished basement, bonus room above the garage etc. often furnished with such things as a pool table, dart board, leather couch, big screen TV for watching The Game, wet bar, etc. From there it transitioned to mean any space that is considered “his” in the home, which might only be the parts of the garage that aren’t full of rubbermaid bins full of shit they own but never use.

Side note, remember when houses had a room called the “den”?

Yeah both root beer and ginger ale were historically made via a brewing process, often brewed to rather low ABV because the flavor of the spices was mostly the point, and with the invention of the soda fountain it became typical to make them by adding soda water to flavored syrup.

You will get different things if you ask a bartender for a “ginger beer” or a “ginger ale.”

Possibly an interesting and useful bit of sci-fi, that pair of episodes.

We live in an age where we’re confronted with new and untested ways of interacting with other people and their intellectual works and having to ask ourselves what we’re okay with. Case in point: Deepfake porn.

Star Trek would often do hilariously infeasible things with the computer. Remember how far-fetched asking the computer to just create a new scenario in the style of a Sherlock Holmes adventure? We can actually do that now. How long will it be, with things like LLMs and generative AI, before we can ask a computer to simulate a living person and it works like it did for Geordi? Is it okay to do when you need to talk to an expert? Is it okay to form a friendship or relationship with that simulation?

The writers of TNG thought of this in the early 90’s.

Yeah I think overall that Loss being a meme has less to do with the text of the comic itself and more the backlash and the backlash to the backlash. Few people engaging with the Loss meme are actually talking about miscarriages; I did see an example recently called “Loss but it’s a red state” which was actually a brilliant bit of political satire. And it’s almost a different meme to the one that produced :.|:; which is closer to “you just lost the game.”

Then abandon the platform as doomed.

Those are your options. Open one or more accounts on one or more existing instances as an ordinary user, run your own single-user instance to federate and defederate from who you want to, or GTFO.

I’ve seen people grousing about this topic since I’ve been here “uuh uuh what if too many defederations because tankies? uuh uuh…”

This happens on or to other platforms already. Either you get the “r/popularthing” vs “r/actualpopularthing” dichotomies where if you vote red you go to one and if you vote blue you go to the other, or if you’re politically extreme enough to be a problem for ad revenue you get kicked off the platform entirely and end up on the likes of Voat. Engagement algorithms already sort people into information silos, so each platform is already actually two or more that intersect only at right angles in the fifth dimension.

If pinching off the occasional Maoist or Nazi instance means I see slightly fewer reposts of the same news articles and memes everyone else reposts, I’m willing to accept those terms.

Something I think would be healthy for the Fediverse is for instances to be a bit more interest-focused rather than attempting to be general-purpose. I think that would knit a tougher non-political fabric with which to hold the fediverse together, then we can just pinch off the problematic extremists.

make your own instance then.

It achieved infamy for tonal whiplash. The series it’s from is usually irreverent and goofy. so the very heavy subject coming out of nowhere was…not received well.

So? We’re federated.

Feels like there’s a very simple solution to that. “We can’t use free software, you get what you pay for. We’re not switching to GIMP.” “Okay, what about Rasteditor? It costs $99/year.” “Sounds good, get a license for everyone on the team.” And Rasteditor is just a fork of GIMP with a different logo and the subscription model just donates to the GIMP project.