It feels like the Taliban is just passing more and more ridiculous subjugation laws to try and get the west to attack them again so that they can go back to riding camels and shooting AKs with their ‘brothers’ instead of enduring the hell of office work and family life that is modern society.

I don’t think anybody here is siding with ISPs. We’re just happy to hear that they’re having difficulties policing piracy.

When I say individual rights I mean any and all rights an individual has or should have. In the case of piracy, an individual should have a right to entertainment media at a reasonable cost. The more corporations increase the cost of media access, the more piracy proliferates. In the case of AI, an individual should have the right to earn a living. Corporations are using the works of individuals to ultimately increase their own profits without due compensation to the individual.

I don’t know how you got to pro conservative capitalism from a single anti-corporatist statement, but it likely took you several leaps of logic that I’m not going to even try to follow.

It’s almost as if the people here favor individual rights over corporate profits.

His role in The Frankenstein Chronicles always made me chuckle.

My 2yo niece visited last week and wouldn’t stop singing this.

India is one of the last places I’d like to visit. This is based on how India has been portrayed in various travel shows over the years (Amazing Race, Top Gear). It looks crowded, dirty, and the locals often aren’t very friendly, especially towards women.

One of your main exports to the west is scam calls. It’s a huge PR problem and your government refuses to address it. Your other main export right now is Russian oil.

Indians used to have a fairly large online presence in English-speaking spaces with mixed results. There were a lot of helpful tech bros on YouTube, but also a lot of horny dudes on Facebook. I don’t really see much of either of those anymore though.

My wife works in software testing and has regular interactions with Indians. Some are really nice, but others are really not. Misogyny is far too common and when Indians are rude they are boldly rude.

They skipped the era of country music that was “I love my dog more than my wife, but don’t ask me to choose between my dog and my truck”

Compelling villains are written with a deeper motivation for their actions than just ‘hurt people’ or ‘be evil’ and they have a tendency to challenge the status quo in some way. Such villains become sympathetic because the current status quo is oppressive.

It must be very difficult to write a villain for a contemporary piece of media because they can very quickly become a hero of the people.

You never know. Someone could make a time travel movie with it one day and then collectors will pay an arm and a leg for the left door.

For me, the solution was drugs. Half an edible and half an hour later I’m relaxed enough to continue my day.

It sounds like your situation is similar to mine. My father is a sociopathic narcissist and I didn’t realize it until I was 30 when he effectively disowned me. It hurts to be rejected by a parent to such a degree and I was pretty depressed for a while, but it helps to know that he suffers from a mental illness. Knowing this also helped me to disown him, in turn. He was always toxic and harmful and I find now that I am happier without him in my life.

I do often wonder in what ways my life may have been better had I had a supportive father, but it’s much more productive to look forward than to lament over what could have been.

I hope that you are able to move past your father’s negative influence and be better off for it. Some men are just miserable people.

This would be a good experiment for Myth busters. I’d imagine that with the lid closed the increase in pressure would not be significant and the air particles would be accelerated more horizontally as opposed to vertically. This would, theoretically, cause them to accumulate more on surfaces below countertop level than above.

But I have no data to support this hypothesis.

So our choices in America are between conservative and slightly-less-conservative? So there’s a growing demand for a socialist party that doesn’t exist, but if it did exist it would lead to the domination of conservatives in politics?

Sounds like ranked choice voting would really help out with a lot of the issues that you presented. It’s too bad that the people who make our laws were voted in using the old system and changing that system in any way is a conflict of interest for them.

I guess things will only ever change if we force the issue.

Yeah, that’s the one. Back when we had the iPhone 1, blackberries, razrs, and the undefeatable Nokias that kids were trying to break so they could get an iPhone.

Man, remember that brief period of time where some people had those cell phones that had a walkie-talkie-like function. You’d be having a conversation with these people and their phone would do this weird blip noise and they’d say “Hold on,” and pull out their phone and “yeah, what’s up?” And then there would be some unintelligible gibberish and they would say “hang on, I’m inside” and then just go walk out the front door.

Oh, man, LotR is the exception to the rule. I can definitely still enjoy a 12 hour journey to Mordor.

Mine certainly is.

If you want to compare your attention span to what it once was, try watching older media. The wife and I were watching the walking dead and I was getting bored and that’s only 10 years old. Try watching 2001: A Space Odyssey without any distractions. It’s torture.

Thanks for the tip. The line break works, but the stanza spacing doesn’t seem to be taking. I’m on Jerboa so that may be influencing the formatting.

But they were all of them deceived, for another chip was made. In the land of Texas, in the labs of Neuralink, the Dark Lord Elon forged in secret, a master chip, to control all others.

One Chip to rule them all,
One Chip to find them,
One Chip to network them all,
and in the TOS legally bind them.

Before WotC there was Bethesda trying to make a profit on community mods. These companies love to recycle bad ideas.