I recently started Blood Meridian. It’s too early to tell if I like it yet, but I like McCarthy’s other works I’ve read. I’m also listening to the audiobook adaption of Alien: Covenant. It’s part of the Audible subscription right now, so I thought I’d give it a try. I like it a bit better than I remember liking the movie. It’s pretty similar, but I feel like it adds a little more nuance to some character actions.

I was really into Rooster Teeth for a few years, including when Ryan was there. I liked Ryan for a while, but I slowly moved away from Rooster Teeth in general as I found more channels that I enjoyed watching. I eventually decided that I was going to give Rooster Teeth another try to see if I wanted to get back into their content, and it was like 2 days later when the news about Ryan and Adam dropped. I peaced out again after that. It seemed like any time I decided to take another look at Rooster Teeth, there was some new controversy.

Ryan Haywood from Rooster Teeth was fired after a number of allegations that he was cheating on his wife with fans. These allegations also included statutory rape and sexual assault. Some evidence was provided to corroborate the allegations. Rooster Teeth removed some videos involving him and publicly distanced themselves from him. He tried to make a comeback on Twitch and got a ton of pushback from it. I believe he ended up getting banned shortly after.

I don’t have a ton of sets, but I absolutely love Rivendell. It is beautiful to look at, has all of the fellowship, and has so many tiny details. Truly one of LEGO’s best sets in my opinion.

I bought the LEGO Rivendell set close to when it came out. It was a fun one to build, and I would do it again. Honestly, I’ll probably need to disassemble and reassemble at least some of it whenever I move.

I had to log back into an account for an app (I think Taco Bell) that decided to remove passwords entirely without any notice. You typed in your email address, had to open your email account and click a link they sent you, it would open a webpage, which would then have a button to open the app again. If I remember correctly too, it would only work on Chrome, so I had to copy and paste the link since Chrome isn’t my default browser that automatically opens from my mobile email.

Besides that, I remember some website required a special character from an extremely small list and wouldn’t allow two of the same letter back-to-back.

I swear we live in different worlds

I couldn’t agree more. A lot of my family are conservative and talk politics all the time, and whenever any scandal or poor decision is brought up from Trump’s first term, they always downplay it as if it was barely an issue. According to them, just about everything was outside of Trump and the Republican party’s control, taken out of context, or just outright didn’t happen. It doesn’t matter how much evidence you provide, they refuse to accept that someone they voted for may have done something bad.

I’m on mobile, so maybe the photo isn’t loading at high resolution, but I don’t think your points lead me to believe AI generated this.

The finger looks a little odd, but it could just be the way the shadows fell. The garbage can doesn’t look flat against the wall. If you look in the reflection of the mirror, one corner is closer to the wall than the other, which would account for the distortion you mentioned. The blue coat of the back of the chair might just be a coat. The chair legs seem like they should be behind his leg and the trash can. The foot pedal on a plastic trash doesn’t seem like the sturdiest thing and can just bend. The lid seems symmetrical to me personally. There just aren’t enough pixels in the image for me to see if there are buttons or not.

Maybe I’m completely wrong and it is AI, but it seems to me like too many of the fine details match up with reality. It may also be the low resolution that makes things seem more realistic. If it is a fake image, I think it would be more likely that the photo was taken out of context or staged.

I have a “This is Fine” dog Funko Pop on my desk at work. He works well for rubber ducky programming, and he encapsulates the feelings I typically have after dealing with some of my clients.

This isn’t my picture, but it’s a similar setup:

I wonder if it is fishing itself that they don’t like, or if it is the prevalence of fishing photos on dating sites. I know that a lot of guys post fishing photos on their profiles (probably because most men don’t take many photos of themselves but will take photos with a nice catch), so maybe it just seems unoriginal or low effort. I’m honestly not sure, but my only point is that it may not be the hobby itself.

I’m not sure if you are in the same boat, but I bought ARMA 2 and Operation Arrowhead many years back directly from the dev’s website. I logged into their site about a year ago, copied the registration keys, pasted them into Steam, and was able to redeem it through Steam directly. If your games have CD keys, Steam can oftentimes accept those directly like you are entering a Steam product key. I think you put it into the field where you enter Steam gift cards and product keys.

“The Terror” by Dan Simmons. I already watched the show and enjoyed it, so I picked up the book and am only a few chapters in, but I’m liking it a good bit. There seems to be a good bit of historical facts thrown in, which I personally enjoy.

For those unfamiliar, it is based on the real life Franklin Expedition that disappeared while searching for a way to traverse the Northwest Passage in the Canadian arctic. The story follows the known facts regarding the fates of the expedition crew members, but it tells a paranormal horror story to fill in the blanks.

I volunteered at a thrift store years ago, and I was in charge of looking at the condition and prices of books that were donated. One person dropped off about 10 boxes filled to the brim with Playboy cartoons. They weren’t worth anything and couldn’t be put out on the floor anyway, so they were thrown out. I also remember that someone donated a biography of Benjamin Franklin from 1835. The cover was coming apart, but the pages were in wonderful condition. We sent that to a bigger thrift store in the area that ended up auctioning it for about $350.

Plenty of great advice here, but one more thing to think about is how such a large win for Republicans can be used against them a bit in the future. They won the Presidency and have majorities in the Senate, likely the House, the Supreme Court, and governorships. They have free reign to do what they want, which is scary, but it also means that they can’t blame the Democrats for any bad things that may happen in the next 2 years until the midterms.

Any law that passes with bad outcomes is solely their fault. If the economy gets worse, it’s all on them. If the deficit increases, they are the only ones to blame. If they don’t fulfill their campaign promises, it’s because they chose not to. If there is a government shutdown, it’s because they couldn’t agree on a budget. If bills aren’t being passed, they are arguing too much. They can’t even fall back on blaming the Democrats in the Senate because they have enough votes that they could cancel the filibuster while they are in office and reinstate it before they leave.

This means that you, and everyone else, can point out anything the government does that has a negative impact and say definitively that it is entirely the fault of the Republicans. If this is done frequently enough and loud enough, there may be enough frustrated voters to change the outcome the next time around. They will definitely do things that annoy almost every voter, whether they are going too far or not far enough in their agenda, and they can’t hide that it was only them that made those decisions.

I don’t think it is very well known, but I thought Scavengers Reign was very good. It was a bit slow, but I thought it gave time to see the weird alien world.

If you are on the fence about it, the show is a followup to this short and has some similarities in its world building.

As egrets mentioned, it is more sci-fi tech rather than realistic tech. I don’t think it is extremely unrealistic as a proposed idea, but it is something that could never work at the scale shown in the show. In a weird way, the end of the show felt to me like it got both more realistic and more unrealistic. I’m trying not to spoil anything, but I hope that can give a bit more info to decide if you would like it.

I second The Terror (never saw season 2 though). It was a slow burn horror for much of it, which I really appreciated. I liked the historical aspects and thought they conveyed the isolation well. I need to get around to reading the book at some point.

I really enjoyed Halt and Catch Fire, and I see so few people talk about it. The only issue I had with it was that each season felt like it was almost a reset point rather than a straight continuation of the plot. I wish they would have left a few more open plot points at the end of each season that flowed into the next. I felt the same way with Silicon Valley, even though I enjoyed that one as well.

Recently, Linux removed several people from their organization that have Russian email addresses. Linus made a statement that confirmed this was done intentionally. I believe that there was some mention of following sanctions on Russia due to the war. I haven’t looked into the details of it all, so take my analysis with a grain of salt. From what I understand, it sounded like it was only Russian maintainers that were removed and normal users submitting code from Russia can still contribute. Maintainers have elevated permissions and can control what code gets accepted into a project, meaning that a bad actor could allow some malicious code to sneak past. This may have also contributed to the decision since this type of attack has happened before and Russia seems like a likely culprit. The reactions to this change have been varied. Some people feel it is somewhat justified or reasonable, some people think that it means it is no longer open source, and some people think it is unfairly punishing Russian civilians (it is worth noting that that is part of the point of sanctions).

Someone I knew fell down the stairs while home alone and couldn’t get up. He was able to call out towards the kitchen and tell Alexa to call for help. If he wasn’t able to do that, he would have been lying there much longer before anyone could find out. It sucks for privacy, but those types of devices do have some legitimate helpful uses.