you could repurpose this headline to literally any creative or journalistic industry these days. “x industry is being propped up by underpaid freelancers” is just a fact of life now. it’s just so much cheaper when you don’t owe them any benefits or dignity or anything at all in fact.

it would be more like if someone intentionally painted that bottle to attract them then iterated that design using an the money in the world to perfect it. it’s almost Eldritch horror shit if it wasn’t just another person trying to make money.

ahh yes, the loophole that has non dictators absolutely flummoxed. can’t be a genocide if you don’t blow up ALL of the aid. this is just sparkling mass shooting.

always more complicated than the headlines would have you believe.

hell, Geralt spends damn near a quarter of the series straight up disarmed. one of the books is basically a legal drama about him trying to not go to jail after getting his sword stolen. don’t think he has his sword for about 99% of that one.

“gotta get my fuckin sword back” is a very common plot point throughout that series. not just for Geralt. ciri spends some time sword chasing too. i don’t hate it.

because that’s actually not in the books lol.

i honestly hate the show because it’s not at all accurate to the books either in spite of that being the bulk of their marketing. that said, the two swords things comes entirely from the games. in the books he makes comments a few times about the fancy metals in his swords helping kill monsters, but he only has one at a time.

but all of the same things could be said about Biden. he won. what changed?

the data does not support this conclusion. more young men did not vote for Trump, less people in total voted. almost no one changed their vote from last election. people were just convinced to stay home, which always results in Republican wins. both candidates got less votes total than last year, by a lot. i blame this on the “i refuse to vote for genocide” people that have just successfully accelerated that genocide.

the real metric that matters is that way way less people voted. not many people changed their votes from last time. many people are simply convinced to stay home, and as always, that results in a Republican win. the propaganda that was most effective was all of the “Kamala is no true Scotsman, so you should just not vote”. i believe this was lost by the people that “refused to vote for genocide”. i think that’s what accelerated the genocide.

they aren’t saying all media. they’re saying that the media conservatives consume is like that. this is about the media and information bubble that you clearly exist in.

really? they’re almost as common as cigarette butts once were now. are you a hermit?

what numbers? Russia has been the aggressor in nearly every conflict they’ve been involved in. Russia and its puppets are attacking countries around them and no one else in the region is. that’s the closest thing to an actual claim that i made. the rest was just me making assumptions about his mindset.

well, when you consider the United States to be 5 companies in a trench coat pretending to be a county to sneak into the g6, I’d say we get plenty of their attention. just none of the good kind.

i mean… that is one of the most volatile regions in the world in the 21st century and it is almost entirely putin causing that. if there’s little competition then it’s because he’s the only major power in the region stuck in last centurie’s mindset and trying to pull the rest of us back. everyone else being better now is a point against putin.

it’s like the rest of the world saw WWII as a lesson on how not to be, and he saw glory.

oh, that was a very different thing. in fact, i think it’s a shame that public reaction to that situation killed dolphin research.

there’s a really really good episode of radiolab on this. the experiment was actually extremely promising and groundbreaking. they had a dolphin spending his own free time practicing in the mirror making human words with his blowhole. he used the water to try and make a sort of lip, rotating the blowhole in and out of the water to shape the sounds. this dolphin was able to understand spoken language and was observably getting frustrated at his inability to say what he clearly wanted to.

the dolphin jerking thing happened because this was a dolphin actively in the throws of puberty. dolphins are intelligent, willful, occasionally evil animals. in nature they will masturbate themselves on shellfish and do other heinous sexually deviant things by human standards. the dolphin in the study was showing tremendous progress, but started exhibiting strong sexual urges. it got to the point that he was completely uncooperative. they jerked him off because he was cooperative after. there is no reason to believe the dolphin was explicitly attracted to the researcher and the researcher has said that she wasn’t attracted to the dolphin.

this story was highly sensationalized. so much so that it completely overshadowed the fact that THE DOLPHIN COULD TALK. he wasn’t very good at it, but that’s only because he lacked the hardware. to this day no one can get funding for dolphin research because of this. it left that much of a stink on the entire field. we have made almost no meaningful progress in this field since. THE DOLPHIN COULD FUCKING TALK AND ALL WE CARE ABOUT IS HOW GROSS IT IS THAT THEY JERKED IT OFF.

also very different from chimps raised by citizens with no real plan. this was an organized and funded academic study with many people working on it and many eyes watching it. this was not one of the things that we did to animals in labs at the time that was problematic. there were other things that actually were worth getting upset over.

alternatively, I’ve heard it’s a good emulator.

the horny brain will actively chemically supresses our “ick” reaction. we’re literally less capable of being grossed out when having sex.

mine just attached under my toilet seat. the water line connects to the existing toilet water line. it came with the fitting i needed and was easier than Legos to set up.

think i payed like $25 on Amazon like 5 years ago. i try not to buy from Amazon anymore, but I’m sure there are many reasonable options out there elsewhere.

eh, is got a little valve and i just turn it all the way. i like the cleanness.

what do you mean pairing? what kind of os do you plan to put on the mini pc? the biggest hurdle is going to be hdcp compliance with any legal streaming service. something like kodi on the other hand, just works like any other pc? a mini pc is just that. a mini pc. there’s nearly infinite method to connect streaming services to a pc. I have a Plex server, but it doesn’t play nice with all content, so honestly, i usually just use my network storage and pull things straight from the file browser. load them into media player classic with madvr.

I know there’s newer systems that do fancier things, but I’m content. I need to upgrade my nas to be better able to transcode x265 video streams. that’s s big drawback on Plex for me. my biggest use case is watching things virtually with friends. it’s how i watch movies with people. my server can current encode a single x265 video stream pretty well, but the second it has more than one client it chugs. forget it if 4 people want a 4k movie. I would need a crazy beefy rig to run that. it also won’t convert hdr without paying. most of my friends aren’t trying to watch on an hdr screen.

so, we’re back to me streaming via discord screenshare. it’s not the best, but at least i don’t need to keep a separate 4k hdr copy of movie for myself and a 1080p x264 copy for Plex that way. mad vr will even handle the hdr conversion for me when I stream.

it works well enough, though I’m open to suggestions as well. it needs to be easy for the clients to use. it can be hard for me, that’s fine, but jellyfin is too much for most of my friends and family. Plex is already pushing it.

not to be too stereotypically reddit butt…

a bidet makes it a lot easier 😅. it shoots a little water up in there like a mini douche every time. helps get those last little stubborn bits too if there are any.