I’m 99% sure that they’re joking.

I think it depends on the amount of fun you have. There’s a difference between “I grinded for 30 hours to get this item, I felt pulled into doing it and now I’m 6 hours late for work” addictive fun, “I played for 30 hours on and off, it was such a relaxing experience” chill tf out fun, and “I played for 30 hours, I broke my controller from gripping it too hard and my heart was pounding the whole time” hardcore action fun. It’s tough to gauge a game just on how much time it takes to complete.

A lot of people simply don’t because they can’t. It’s absurdly expensive because the system isn’t designed for people to pay for it out of pocket. If someone doesn’t have insurance, they’ll either beg the hospital for mercy or ignore the medical debt because it doesn’t count against your credit score. Even if they do have insurance, it often doesn’t cover a portion of the cost, the insurance is extremely expensive, or both. The people with quality insurance through their employer have it good, but the system expects everyone to have that privilege.

First, Alex Jones’s trial was a civil matter. The families of the Sandy Hook victims took issue with him and took him to court of their own initiative. This is a criminal matter. This involves people being tried and jailed by a foreign country over laws of which they were potentially unaware. That is a significant escalation of the situation.

Second, no country has the right to tell citizens of other countries what they can do in their home countries. That’s nonsense. Allowing the UK to extradite random people over Internet comments would set an awful precedent for the future. If a right-wing extremist became PM and made it illegal to promote gender-affirming therapy online, would it be right for him to extradite US citizens for “causing physical or psychological harm”?

Here’s a longer excerpt from the interview. In the words of the police chief at about 1:40: “And whether you’re in this country, committing crimes on the streets, or further afield committing crimes online, we will come after you.”

“Being a keyboard warrior does not make you safe from the law. You can be guilty of offences of incitement, of stirring up racist hatred. There are numerous terrorist offences regarding the publishing of material. All of those offences are in play, if people are provoking hatred and violence on the streets, and we will come after those individuals just as we will physically confront on the streets the folks who are causing the problems for communities.”

I didn’t pick up on the word “extradite,” but the wording means either they’re going after anyone in the world who commits a crime against their laws, or they’re only going after UK citizens. Either way, this nonsense is what you get when there is no First Amendment.

Based on this article, she’s been doing weird stuff with kids for years. She violated the terms of her bond - not being allowed around children - twice. There may be some mental illness involved, but some people are just evil.

Oh, I do know it. I’m just saying why it happens. It’s a very hard hole to crawl out of.

It’s the same reason people use porn, but for emotional fulfillment instead.

To be honest, Yorkshire Gold is probably the best black tea you can get in US grocery stores. I have some kind of weird tannin sensitivity that causes it and most grocery store black teas to be painfully bitter, but it’s a nice “try this and see what you think” tea.

Here’s what I recommend: get some silver needle white tea - Yunnan Sourcing has good stuff - and a big tea strainer basket that goes in your mug. Boil the leaves for three minutes, but don’t dump the basket, just put it aside. Drink the cup. Then boil them again for 3 minutes 30 seconds, drink, and boil for 4 minutes. See how that goes. If you get a big bag of tea, you’ll be able to experiment.

I used to believe tea was trash too. That was because I was only drinking grocery store bags. Problem with those is the tea in them is stale, like breadcrumbs, and typically devoid of flavor. Broaden your horizons a bit.

I prefer loose-leaf tea as well. I can’t tell whether I prefer a sweet and relaxing cup of silver needle or a whiskey-strength brew of gyokuro. Genmaicha with matcha dust during a work day is a great little escape, and you can’t go wrong with a big-leaf Chinese black tea.

Ironically, the Brits conquered the world only to shut themselves out of every culture they could have learned from.

I used to believe I had developed an inter-universe, romantic, quasi-religious relationship with an anime girl (I will not say who). That ended not long after I started taking meds. Recently the delusion has started to come back on the occasions I need to change meds and I’m without them for a while. Instead of being fulfilling and joyous, though, it’s infuriating and shameful.

Said like a true “never had good tea in their life” individual.

Permanent sanity.

I had my Sonata stolen last year. The problem is that, by default, there was neither a key checker nor a steering immobilizer built into the vehicles. These are industry standard features for every car manufacturer… Except Kia and Hyundai. These are required features in every car sold in every Western nation… Except the United States. To have excluded this literal 90s tech from their vehicles when they’re so common that no one would ever stop to think about whether their car has them constitutes a serious lie by omission on the part of Kia and Hyundai, in my opinion. If I knew that all you had to do was rip off the ignition and shove something onto a peg to screw off with the car, I would have told the dealer to stick it up his butt.

For those wondering: I had comprehensive insurance, so I was paid the full value of the vehicle after it was totaled. I bought a Toyota Camry with the money and it’s a great car. I am never buying Kia or Hyundai cars again and I recommend everyone else avoid them from here on out. Like, if this is what they’re willing to do to save $30 per assembled vehicle, what else might be lurking in their newer vehicles that we won’t know about until it’s too late?

I’ve played about 150 hours of ESO. One of the big problems, IMO, is that the surface-world PvE story content is so unchallenging it’s boring. They made it so that someone with an intentionally atrocious build can solo everything that’s required for story progression, which means that anyone who puts the slightest thought into their character will steamroll the game. If I thought that’s all there was to the game, I wouldn’t have played it more than an hour.

Honestly, even the default-difficulty dungeons are lame. There’s technically a story in it, but everyone just rushes through it so fast that you have no idea what’s happening. All you know is that you and your party are sprinting from room to room, wiping out huge groups of enemies just by spamming your most efficient area attack. I play a healer character, a Templar in light armor, and when I do standard difficulty I think I pop a basic heal once the entire time if I’m lucky. Sure, the fast pace is exciting for the first few times, but you catch on at some point to the fact that you’re just mindlessly spamming AOEs every time.

If you actually want a challenging game, you need to do the world bosses, veteran dungeons, and trials. World bosses are technically group content, and there is usually a group running a schedule for the world bosses in each zone, but if you hate those people you can kill them yourself. Veteran dungeons are roughly on the same level of difficulty that WoW dungeons are. I actually have to pay attention to my positioning and resources when I’m in one, which is refreshing. Also nice is that the targeting system works seamlessly with my heals; all I need to do is point at my teammate and hit the spell key, no specific targeting required. It feels like I’m in a combat with magic I can control instead of playing with a UI. But anyway, it’s such a different experience from the default difficulty that I really recommend you try it out. You’ll be fine, I sucked my first few times and I never got vote-kicked or even flamed.

Trials are the one thing I don’t have experience with, and to my knowledge it’s the most challenging content by far. Someone else could tell you more about it, though. I also don’t have a ton of experience with PvP, other than getting ganked in Cyrodiil a few times while looking for delves and a match where I just ran around spamming heals and running away from enemies. My team didn’t win and I didn’t get so much as a single kill, but I got the highest score of anyone in the lobby. Good times.

Thank you based Ross.

I really don’t see why an indie dev would oppose this. If you were an artist, you wouldn’t want to watch your creation completely disappear from existence because you couldn’t keep working on it, would you?

Those zero-interest payment plans will friggin kill you.

Sadly, this won’t stop Google from killing off Manifest V2.

A Certain Kind of Death. It’s a very stark and dry documentary about what happens to the bodies of people who die with no next of kin. It follows the journeys of three people who die alone, with no heirs, and no relatives to come pick up their stuff.

I remember the guy in charge of the place talking about how very often he’d call the family of a decedent and the survivor would say something like “Oh… well, we always wondered what happened to him.” It struck me, made me realize that this is how I was going to go at some point if I didn’t change my ways.

I have yet to change my ways.