Sounds more like a problem of failing to moderate bigotry, not a social issues problem. The existence of LGBTQ+ people who stream is not a social issue; assholes demanding they go away is

Costume Quest

And we just threw them that pizza party with mandatory attendance last week!

I can’t tell if I love this or hate it

Now we know where reddit took their profit strategy from

Shit, some of them charge the authors to publish.

I’ve been playing No Man’s Sky since they released the 5.0 content update. It’s made a huge difference in the look and feel of the game with things like modeled weather and oceans, and I’ve recently learned that sentinel attacks stop after you blow up the freighter they warp in.

It sounds counterintuitive at first, but if you think of real world examples, it makes a lot of sense. It’s the entire principle that casinos and blind bag toys operate on: you do the requested action (like placing a bet or buying the blind bag), you get something you didn’t want or expect, and you get a little mad that it didn’t go the way you wanted, so you do the requested action again. When it does end up giving you what you wanted, all the times you did the requested action get reinforced, not just the ones where you got the optimal outcome, like a big, “HAH! I knew I was right, I just needed to keep going until my ship finally came in!”

I don’t know what other psychology concepts have similar reliability, but another really interesting one is “diffusion of responsibility” or bystander effect in which the more people witness something terrible, the easier it is for everyone to stand around doing nothing because they assume someone else is taking charge. It’s why pointing directly at someone and saying, “You, call 911!” helps.

I’m not familiar with quilette, but there was a great Washington Post op-ed that broke down exactly why trying to recycle plastic is a bad idea. Here’s a link to it, no paywall: https://wapo.st/3VRnTNl

1.) Plastic breaks down into micro- and nanoplastic particles and get inhaled or consumed by everybody, and we’re just starting to understand how these bits affect our health (like increased systemic inflammation). Recycling facilities breaking down used plastic release untold amounts of plastic bits into their surrounding environments.

2.) “Recycling” old plastic into usable material requires the addition of a LOT of brand new, never-recycled plastic. It’s not a process where you put in used plastics and get some amount of usable plastic out, recycled plastic is like 30% old plastic and 70% new plastic to hold it all together. This is a process we’ve been trying to optimize for 50 years, and the improvements are negligible.

3.) The recycled plastic we get out of it isn’t safe to use for food and drink. (Have you seen those 20 oz. Coke bottles that say “I’m 100% recycled!”? Don’t drink those.) Nobody’s laying down the law and saying they can’t do that, and it’ll be a long time before anyone overcomes the social inertia and corporate lobbyists to stop that from happening.

Plastics are for landfills. I feel like such a piece of shit every time I throw another piece of plastic in the trash, but it’s the option that’s safest for everybody. (I feel like the French climatologist in Project Hail Mary every time.) Recycling isn’t a goal that will help; we need to adapt and reduce how much plastic we use.

Cats can have a little salami

They missed that thing on Matabele ants treating wounds on each other with antibiotics. The ants have done this for so long that they’ve evolved goo pockets to hold their ant-ibiotics https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/news-and-events/news/detail/news/ant-antibiotics/

We’ve done it, everybody! We’ve got an actual Cat Facts subscriber!

I feel like IT could yell at OP for a little bit, but would ultimately have to stare the fact that they allowed non-privileged users to just change the operating system square in the face. Like holy hell, 500 employees and anybody can just be like, “Hey, maybe I’ll make a major OS change today because why not?” What else are they letting happen?!

I would happily buy overpriced dessert coffees again if they worked out fair deals with their unionized workers and that all spread to non-unionized locations. This doesn’t need to be hard!

Hold on, shifting paradigm

Kinda wish I’d taken some comparative biology when I had the chance

Immortals: Fenyx Rising is on Steam sale for $6 standard/$10 with the DLC. It’s a story with the Greek pantheon providing most of the characters that doesn’t take itself seriously–it starts off with Prometheus telling Zeus a story, and Zeus is the world’s worst audience. The movement and combat are satisfying, and it’s a ton of fun so far.

What time zone are y’all in, and what hours do you typically play?

I read a LOT of Washington Post. I really appreciate the heads up on the Thursday strike–apparently, that’s gonna be a severe news diet day.

Anybody else weirded out by the terrestrial shrimp? Hahaha if they’re on land, do they count as bugs-akin-to-roaches or food-source-like-aquatic shrimp?!

Mario and Luigi are great games! I put so many hours into the first one. :)

There’s going to be an updated and remastered Super Mario RPG released for the Switch next month, and although that’s not a patient gamer choice for a while yet, the original game is still solid and can be played through an SNES emulator.