EldritchFemininity

As my dad who grew up sailing says, “a boat is a hole in the water that you throw money into.”

There’s nothing you can do to them that’s worse than they’re already doing to themselves by owning a boat.

Besides, they’re talking about the kind of boat that you’d see in every harbor all over the world, not some monument to greed:

It’s no 15 foot Boston Whaler, but there’s hundreds of boats that size in every harbor and marina you can think of.

See, here’s the thing: they made a generalized comment on a screenshot of what looks like an Amazon order. That makes it seem like they’re talking about anybody who orders food online, regardless of whether it’s Door Dash or 5-7 day shipping. There’s no way to tell from that photo whether that’s a single can or a box of 30.

And that timesaving comment has the same levels of sarcasm as any “lazy youth” remark.

Besides, if you’re willing to pay somebody else a decent wage to deliver something for the convenience to you, what’s the issue? At that point it’s no different from ordering at a restaurant or deli - pizza places have had delivery drivers for half a century! Should we be upset with people who don’t cook all of their own meals?

You should hang onto it. They dug up some of the ones that were buried a few years back as part of a documentary and sold some of them at auction while the rest were donated to museums for preservation.

This is similar to how many of the big names in the video game industry were built. Disgruntled designers leaving companies like Atari to start their own company. It’s how Blizzard got their start, and I believe Ubisoft, EA, and at least a couple of the other big names were founded the same way.

Then, of course, the bean counters started taking over and it all went downhill from there once they went from keeping the designers on task with realistic goals to maximizing profits.

If anybody wants to know just how bad the crash was, Atari buried about 700,000 game cartridges and consoles in a landfill in New Mexico after the release of the infamously bad ET game for the Atari. A game that supposedly had more cartridges manufactured than there were existing consoles for them to be played on at the time.

It was so bad that the home console effectively disappeared from the US market as investors and customers believed that the fad had run its course and companies went back to focusing exclusively on arcade cabinets until Nintendo came in about 3 years later and proved that there was still a market for home consoles. It was so bad that Nintendo changed the name of the NES for the Japanese market to the Famicom - advertising it as a “family computer” system, not a game console.

Not necessarily owned by Amazon, but plenty of websites are running on Amazon systems on the back end for stuff like payment processing and web hosting, or the business uses Amazon to ship their products. There are plenty of Amazon affiliate companies out there as well, but sometimes buying from an independent business still gives money to Amazon through delivery or processing fees or something.

When the DM fits the villain’s entire backstory into one monologue

I think it’s more accurate to say that the majority of people are indifferent to AI and that businesses are caught up in the hype of cheap genAI being good enough to replace specialized workers for specific fields like graphic design.

People use it for certain things that they lack skills in or don’t want to spend effort on but seem to generally see a lot of it as a solution looking for a problem and resent how it’s being forced into everything. Similar to the resentment towards cars moving to put everything on giant touchscreens. The last time I bought a car I was talking to the salesman about how I had no interest in the newer cars with the giant screens and he said that practically everybody that came in said the same thing and that car manufacturers are pivoting back to physical controls because nobody wants the touchscreens. Enough people would rather buy 10+ year old cars than newer models because of the lack of physical controls that it’s forcing car companies to reconsider their push for touchscreens for everything.

Cell phone companies were quaking in their boots (okay, not really, but you know what I mean) over the fact that even in their own polling they were finding that 50% of users either didn’t use AI features or didn’t find them useful in their day to day phone usage and 30% found it actively made their user experience worse. 20% positive feedback is not a good sign for a healthy market with potential for growth.

Add in that kids are conflating AI with low-quality and false information. Literally using the term AI when they don’t believe something like the way we used to use Photoshopped or “fake news,” and using “slop” liberally and frequently.

Even experts in various industries seem to have a weird paradoxical opinion on AI despite being pro AI. There’s been consistent polling that has shown that experts say that AI is good enough to replace people in any given field except for their field of expertise, where it’s too unreliable to ever be able to do the job. It doesn’t matter what the field is, the opinion is the same.

It’s probably safe to say that people don’t really care one way or another about AI, but dislike the companies involved in the AI bubble.

You’d be better off calling in a drone strike. Capable of hitting the target from beyond visual range (over the horizon) with a low risk of missing due to the explosive payload, and zero chance of being heard or seen by any camera in the area.

Sarcasm aside, a gun is loud enough to cause permanent hearing damage to those around you, and the bullet will over penetrate the camera, continue to fly, and possibly hit someone downrange of the camera. Especially since cameras like that are obviously located in high traffic areas with a large number of people passing through. So under ideal conditions where you hit your target, odds are good that you will also hit a person. And in the event that you miss? Well, you most likely just shot someone. Isaac Newton is the meanest son of a bitch in space for a reason and 9mm is the preferred pistol round for the police and military because its generally larger size and smaller powder charge compared to other rounds means that it has a lower velocity and is therefore less likely to pass through a target and the wall behind them and hit somebody in an adjacent room.

I can’t imagine VR as a whole made anything other than chump change until 2018+, but it was indeed there and chugging along quietly.

The graph specifically calls out the Oculus Rift as the start of what it considers the VR segment.

I would consider things like the Virtual Boy as VR to some extent as well, but I do see the logic as to why they only started the line with the Oculus. Before that it probably wouldn’t even show up as the money there was a drop in the bucket of a tenth of a percent of anything else, but it’s also widely considered that the Oculus and the Vive were the first really viable commercial VR headsets that started the VR game niche/genre. Before that, VR could probably be considered as niche as eye and head tracking hardware for sim games, and I don’t think that I’ve ever heard somebody mention those when talking about money in the games industry. Or even mentioned them in general outside of conversations like this. I don’t think most people even know that that kind of stuff even exists.

Where the hell are you getting your numbers? Everything I see says that Steam made a record 16 billion in 2025 while PC gaming as a whole made 43 billion. That would put Steam somewhere around 27% of the PC market.

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/gamesindustrybiz-presents-the-year-in-numbers-2025-year-in-review

https://www.eteknix.com/steams-revenue-surpasses-16-billion-in-2025-new-estimate-shows/

You’re misreading how the graph is laid out. The y axis is the combined total revenue of the entire video game market, with each new piece of the market being added on top of the older ones over time (although arguably arcades are the oldest form and should be below consoles). VR is the newest niche, and so it goes on top of everything else as it adds its revenue to the gross total of the entire market, despite only being a tiny piece of that sum.

In your layout, consoles/arcade would be at the top with everything else underneath them.

I think there’s a cliff between affordability/knowledge and payload capacity that has kept this from being practical. Then there’s the traceability aspect. Where and how you buy it, how it’s controlled, etc. A drone controlled by a smart phone can be traced back to that phone, for example.

A drone is far cheaper than a missile, but the military can drop thousands on a drone and not blink an eye. That’s not something that’s practical for the average person, and the skills required to build one are also at the higher end of hobbyist level skills. It’s similar to 3d printed equipment. 3d printed guns are a thing, but it’s generally easier to go buy some PVC pipe for a barrel and a nail for a firing pin. Or just buy a gun, they’re about the price of RAM nowadays. People have even printed RPGs and man portable anti-air/anti-armor missile launchers, but it’s not something even your average skilled hobbyist can do.

The day somebody makes a flying pressure cooker out of an R/C car, though, all bets are off.

Yeah, and guns don’t kill people. People kill people!

Here’s a video she did of a 3d printed supersonic rocket. I think it’s the Mach 2 one, but I don’t exactly remember:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=HU3YnVzqExA

I remember watching a video from a physicist who failed her pilot’s license exam because she explained that and the modern theories of how airplane flight works instead of the old wingspan, weight, speed, and air density over the wings model.

Needless to say, she took the test again, gave the answer they wanted, and the video was about her building a plane out of wood about a month after she finished the launch of her Mach 2.1 capable model rocket.

Por qué no los dos?

Opt out on one account, use another as poison. If you’re gonna do this, I’d say move all your code to a new account and use the older account to poison - that way they can’t filter the bad out by account age.

You did say that it wasn’t useless if you and your kid both use the same system, so my first thought for how it could be useful in any capacity outside of adhering to a law, which in the US at least (I’m not as well versed in the Brazilian, UK, or other variations) has in some versions very explicitly stated that the intent is for the OS to provide said age information to any app that requests it, was for group permissions on the different accounts on your system, which can just as easily be set up using other settings already available to you. I would consider that “protecting kids.” If you meant that it was useful in some other way where you and your kid are using the same system, by all means, tell me.

As I said, I brought up the rest because that is the explicitly stated or easily inferred (in the case of increased fingerprinting of users for increased revenue) intent of the US versions of the law and “protect the children” is the tired old excuse being used by Facebook and the politicians in their employ.

Obviously, the data field equivalent of clicking the “I am 18 years or older” button is as non-invasive as you can really get, but it’s blatantly obvious that this is merely the first step in what the corporations and governments actually want out of this, and adhering to it before the laws are even out merely sets the stage for them to refine their language and push further. Something this easy could be rolled out at any time. There’s no need to comply before they have a leg to stand on. They won’t be satisfied by this, and they certainly won’t stop here.

Don’t forget the personalized ads! 🫠

And how is it useful then? Parental controls have existed for decades and you never had to give your age to Facebook, who is the main proponent of these laws in the US and has poured millions of dollars into their creation.

This isn’t about protecting kids. It’s about adding an additional fingerprint companies and governments can use to track and identify you and what you do with your system.