This is very upsetting to me–more as a point of principle than in fact–but I appreciate that it doesn’t bother younger generations at all. I just had a small argument with my 11 year old about how not-a-big-deal-who-cares this is, and it basically ended with us agreeing to disagree since it’ll be his problem and his kids’ problem.

And the problem is normalizing the notion that an OS doesn’t need to include a non-subscription word processor. The entire point of this move is to shift the OS Overton Window in favor of consumers accepting and expecting that features like word processors, spreadsheets, etc., should be installed separately and paid for on a subscription basis despite previous iterations of the same software being feature complete on install and purchased at a set, non-recurring fee.

WordPad hasn’t been anybody’s first choice for a word processor in years, but it was included with Windows and did the bare minimum for unsophisticated users. Now we’re entering an era in which those users will as a matter of course buy off-the-shelf computers that come pre-installed without WordPad, but rather with a trial of Office Fuck-You-Pay-Me Edition. Those users may well discover that after their first six months with their new computer (that has made Microsoft more money selling their data than they paid for it), they suddenly get a pop-up informing them that their trial is up and MS wants $99.99 to release the documents they’re holding hostage.

It’s a step backwards for consumers in general, so even for the sophisticated of us who are least likely to be personally affected by this change, there’s definitely cause for alarm.

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”

That is to say, the error is to conflate law with morality. They are not one and the same.

Crime. That’s the answer. I don’t suggest or recommend it, but people who genuinely can’t survive or achieve any meaningful quality of life while participating in the social order will violate it instead. Some people shoplift; others engage in elaborate plots to rip off their landlords and creditors, but there’s no squaring the circle. I’m not in the same boat, but I’ve been there, and it’s only a stroke of good fortune that kept me from a very different road.

Not what I was talking about. Fortunately you can believe whatever you want.

This was my first thought as well. I hate that being so cynical is my reaction now, but this is just DDOS by another method. The point is to make the platform unusable so people will go somewhere else. CSAM is just the weapon. It’s doubly vile because it’s just going to become ammunition in the war against federation altogether. The stakes are high enough that the institutional players have plenty of cash, no ethics, and no accountability, and I wouldn’t at all put it past any social media alternative to employ these kinds of tactics to kill the fediverse before it can gain a foothold. And (at the risk of getting too conspiratorial) that’s not even considering governments and ordinary black hats.

Yes, and yes to the OP. It’s very similar.

An older family member once asked my siblings and me, as older teenagers, whether we believed in Santa. We scoffed, laughed, and incredulously said of course not.

She responded that she believed in Santa, and she gave this explanation: Santa is a cultural shorthand for generosity. Do you believe in the spirit of giving? Do you want to see smiles on children’s faces on Christmas morning? Do you want to make the people you love light up because you had special, almost supernatural, insight into their heart’s desire and made it real?

I don’t believe a magical man in a red suit gives presents and coal to kids. I similarly don’t believe in a white bearded cloudy Jewish giant in the sky.

But I believe that there’s something sublime and immaterial in the love we can have for one another, something only partially explained by ecologic survival pressures and biochemistry. I think there is something out there beyond what we can perceive on a daily basis, and for lack of a better lexicon, “spiritual” is as good a term as anyone for the realm of the imperceptible.

So I think there’s a God, and I think there’s a Santa. I don’t understand either, and I think they’re neither anything quite like we expect. And God the Creator is certainly an asshole sometimes. But I think there’s Someone out there.

Cool cool. … what is that exactly?

For what?

And the professionals might also mistake you for the intruder. Or they might shoot you by accident or because you were “mentally ill”, “uncooperative”, or “black”. Or they might shoot you for fun. So, you know, choose your risk carefully.

If there are white people who qualify due to their own generational poverty, they should receive benefits. The systemic finger on the scales clearly didn’t benefit them. This has always been about money. That the money in past generations flowed to white families is a consequence of their greed. The racism was incidental. They weren’t doing it for the poor white subsistence farmers in the next town over. These power structures were instituted by and for the rich. The rich just happened to be white. Plenty of their white neighbors got left behind.

I believe that in 1978 God changed his mind about black people (black people!) 🎶

Disclaimer: I haven’t played it. So speaking strictly as a prospective purchaser, the feedback from the community so far has not inspired confidence. I was hoping this expansion would bring me back to the game, but by most accounts it’s hard not to get the feeling that the new devs have lost the thread. They don’t seem to understand what was good about the previous systems–namely, that they gave players choices. Sure, people could funnel to the path of least resistance with the old dailies, but at least that meant you could get them done if you didn’t have a lot of time. As someone who burned out hard on PVP, I liked the idea of being able to play a match or two, and then if I got frustrated I could switch to PVE and still finish dailies. I could make the decision on the fly instead of being committed to something that didn’t incorporate how my actual gameplay experience might go. My understanding of the new system leads me to conclude that if I were to decide I want PVP, the choice is then to either finish all of the PVP dailies or bail for the day, no matter how the matches went. Also, some of the old dailies were clunkers. Having the option to do the easier ones meant that no one was stuck doing content they despised. Finally, jumping puzzle portal conga was a defining feature of the community. I hope it’s still around.

Sure, there were optimal rune sets, but it sounds like those options have basically been removed altogether. Yeah, you’d have been a fool not to take Torment on your Renegade, but at least you could. Trapper sucked for the guy on the receiving end, but it enabled a whole new style of play. I feel like everyone predicted the rune/relic change would be garbage. Are there any relics anyone is actually excited by?

I also read this morning that armor weights are basically gone for the new expansion-defining sets. For people who might not have been around at the time: In Guild Wars 1, every class had its own armor styles. They switched to the weight system in the sequel to cut down on the design overhead, and now we’re abandoning even that. Looking at the quarterlies I didn’t get the impression that things were quite that dire, but doing away with basic content like class fantasy expression is not a good look.

The only good feedback I’ve read seems to be that the rewards themselves are better, at least on a reward-by-reward basis (if not in aggregate over time–mathematically it seems like just playing ordinary content is economically less valuable than it used to be). And apparently the maps and stories are pretty good?

The thing is, I liked Dragonfall. By which I mean: a new meta to run isn’t necessarily a selling point aside from just more variety. The systems are the thing that make the game fun to play moment to moment. If the systems feel shitty, then the game feels shitty, and it doesn’t matter whether the thing I’m swinging at is a spiky purple blob with red circles on the ground or a crooked green blob with red circles on the ground instead. I’d still kind of rather be playing my ritualist.

All of that said, to reiterate: this isn’t speaking from experience. It’s just my expectations based on what I’ve read and watched so far. I’m currently holding off on pulling the trigger in the hopes that someone will convince me it’s a good investment of time and money. As it stands, I’m not convinced that it isn’t really a step backwards with a view towards better monetization and cut development costs.

Absolutely. There is no business yet in which you invent money from nothing. Everyone works for someone else. It might be a capitalist boss, it might be a client, it might even be constituents or donors, but no one truly works for themselves. The only winning move is to not play, and the ones fortunate enough to not have to play were born rich. Being self-employed and/or owning your own business is just trading one boss for another.

Source: Was in private practice for a decade; now I’m a corporate attorney, and it’s just a different set of people making my job hard.

He is absolutely not certain to lose. If he runs on the GOP ticket, we have every reason to believe that it will be close, and wither it is or not, the GOP will lie, cheat, and resort to violence in order to win, disrupt the process, or, barring either, overthrow the government. The Biden slam dunk narrative is a GOP talking point designed to get needed Blue voters to stay home. The Republic is absolutely at stake, and that means everyone needs to take it seriously.

I don’t know California politics other than as it relates to national. What’s Newsom’s angle here? I ask because, at least at a glance, this seems like a loser for him. The best he can hope for is to demolish DeSantis. Let’s assume he does–and it’s certainly not a sure thing (the deck is stacked against him with the ref playing for the other team, after all)–but so what? DeSantis’s fire is almost already out, and if it doesn’t die on its own or thanks to Mr. Orange Indictment, the Mouse will finish him. Newsom’s already a rising star; if he annihilates DeSantis he’s basically punching down, and he’s taking a huge risk by even volunteering for this, since if he fucks up he’s done in national politics before he even started.

The best I can come up with is that this is a play by the party at large to try to revitalize Florida Man’s campaign by getting some free press on him, either to force Trump to spend more to squash him or try to get a repeat of 1972 (i.e., Trump as Muskie). However, that’s giving the Democratic party a lot of credit and making some pretty cynical assumptions about their future plans for Newsom.