n1ckn4m3

These laws never seem to backfire because for them to backfire, the left would have to start using all of the loopholes that the right have put in place, and for some reason the left continues to act like they're "better than that" as the entire country devolves into fascism. I hope they sleep well at night when they say "well we may have lost our country to fascist dictators, but we didn't break a single rule on the way!"

Just look at the gerrymandering in this country and how it wholly benefits the conservatives and you'll realize the democrats are wholly incapable of even stressing against the rules, even to save our country from people who are actively working to destroy our freedom and our rights. We're never going to beat the opposition when the opposition cheats at every turn and we obey all the rules. It's a losing game and there's no ethical silver bullet that we can say we upheld when our country is overtaken by immoral and deceitful thieves.

Not only that, but their PR person gaslighting people with the article claiming that the game wasn't bad, it was just "cool to hate" has left a really bad taste in my mouth. The game could be absolutely amazing now and the expansion pack could be the game that we were always promised, but the experience and the follow-up has been so bad that I'm similarly waiting until post launch (heck, perhaps even until GOTY with included DLC) for any future CDPR games.

I've been playing GW2 since beta -- heck, I've been playing Guild Wars since the original game's beta, I am a sucker for a good MMO that isn't pay-per-month. I still remember the end of the original Guild Wars beta when meteors started falling down killing everyone in Ascalon. My wife isn't quite as interested in MMO-esque experiences, she more likes the couch co-op style (we played D3 until Paragon 950+ on PS4 Pro and play D4 on PS5), so I haven't been able to get her playing it yet -- but I'll keep trying!

Same experience here -- I started a seasonal character and gave up at level 12 because while the malignant hearts were a neat concept, everything else was ridiculously trite and stupid.

D4 is an exercise in how a lot of effort and a lot of thought can go into something and result in a game that's inferior in the important ways (is the game actually fun to play, is progression fun and rewarding) while also being technically superior to its predecessors -- the game looks amazing, the engine is fantastic.

I'm playing it with my wife and it's just not very fun yet. It reminds me of grinding levels in classic WoW, but without the benefit of getting new skills and feeling more powerful with the levels. I'm hoping that after some patches, seasons, and expansion packs that it gets to be a little more fun, but right now they've made leveling so slow and so inconsequential that the game is just a repetitive slog. You're not getting any new skills past level 50 but it takes absolutely eons longer to go from level 50 to 100 than it did to go from 1-50, all areas in the entire game except for nightmare dungeons are level scaled so you aren't actually getting any more powerful with each level, you're just watching numbers go up while killing exactly the same things in exactly the same way you have been for the last 50 levels.

Appreciably, Diablo 3 was kind of crap at launch as well and it wasn't until they removed the RMAH, added a new class, added adventure mode and bounties, and added a lot of seasonal content that it fleshed out to being as fun as it is now. I'm hopeful that D4 eventually gets there but man it's just not the fun I was hoping for presently.

I gave them a crap review in the Android app store because of it -- I have absolutely no need for my lights to be able to be controlled over the internet outside of my house, and I don't want the feature nor do I want my hue bulbs connected via any stupid cloud link so they COULD be managed over the internet outside of my house. Their response was "as we add new features, so too do we add new security features to protect the platform and that justifies us requiring you to have a login and make your devices controllable via the cloud". Uh huh.

I've set the Android app to never automatically update in the future and I'm really hopeful that I can avoid this garbage requirement by doing so, but I'm sure they've thought of it and I'm going to end up having to move to 3rd party apps to control them eventually.

Agreed, between the exceptionally slow indexing speed and the near arcane witchcraft required to get it to appropriately use hardware transcoding (honestly I've just given up -- everything says it should work and I've tried like 15 different things people say fixes it but it always just crashes the transcoder for me, heh), Plex's ease of use and quality of life just seems so much higher. I really want to like JellyFin!

You are correct about it being shot on a cell phone -- at present the top comment on the video is from @RickAstleyYT and says:

My wife Lene and I shot this video on a phone in Denmark, in a forest beside a beautiful beach. The song in essence is about how there is so much technology out there pulling and pushing us in our daily lives, that we need to remain human in this fast moving world. The idea of making a video simply, somewhere beautiful and real like this resonates with me, and I hope it does with you too! Rick x

^ Exactly this. I was an Apple fanboy (perhaps even shill) until the iPhone 5S when my device had a bad NAND chip causing it to randomly and sporadically blue screen and reboot (as a PC user, the blue screen irony was not lost on me) and Apple jerked me around for 3 months until the phone was out of warranty and then told me I should have bought Apple Care on the phone even though the issue started before the 1 year warranty had expired.

I didn't find this acceptable as I had written proof I'd taken the phone in to the shop multiple times during the warranty period, ended up calling their corporate office of the president where they worked with me to generate logs from the device and send them to Apple techs who would review it, at which point they came back and said "yeah it looks like the NAND chip is bad" and "but it's out of warranty". When I told the person from Apple this was ridiculous because I'd been an Apple customer for decades and I'd had umpteen Macs and Macbook laptops and iPhones and I'd never had this problem with any other Apple device (the whole point being the devices are 30% more expensive because they're high quality and don't have these types of problems), she cut me off and said "Apple doesn't have a customer loyalty program, sir." and dead-ended the entire conversation right there.

I took the 5S out to my driveway and smashed it with a hammer and went and bought a $200 HTC One E8 and I've been an Android user ever since and will never give Apple a penny if I can avoid it. The products were fine, the software was good, but the service/company is rotten.

Sure, but who is going to hold him accountable? The justice department can't do anything when the supreme court is willing to fold on constitutional law in favor of personal interest and partisan loyalism -- checks and balances only work when they're impartial and that's just not the case right now. I definitely wouldn't be holding my breath waiting for any Trump conviction to have any actual impact.

I think it's a mix of things. I agree a lot of people don't participate in the primaries and they really should, but I'd also stress the importance of elevating the quality of the candidates we have. I don't believe any of the primary candidates right now have any idea what it's like to live in the USA as an "average" person. For starters, the average age of US citizens is 39, but the average age of the 3 current candidates is 74, with each of them being a minimum of 30 years older than the average American. I am not trying to promote ageism in any way, but I would really prefer if we had leadership that was less removed time-wise. I just don't personally believe that someone at 70 or 80 has any reasonable idea what it's like to be an American in the 30-40 age range right now -- their experiences with that age come from a time prior to the advent of cellular telephones, social media, personal computing technology, etc.

On top of that, even if you look past the age gap, the choices we have so far really don't instill great confidence.

RFK Jr is an admitted openly vocal anti-vax believer and also a vocal science denier (he still promotes belief in the link between vaccines and autism which has been systemically dis-proven), neither of which are popular positions to the left and will likely cost him votes. Biden has a low approval rating and a lot of Democrat voters don't see him as a strong or effectual president, but he's likely to get the nomination because he previously beat Trump and seems to be the defacto "if you're voting against Trump instead of voting for someone, vote for him" nominee. Marianne Williamson is at least a fresh, non-dynastic face in the political race with a reasonable track record as an independent, but because she'd been an independent until 2019 and because she's female there's a subsection of voters who will adamantly refuse to vote for her regardless of her political stance, making her unlikely to win the nomination over Biden.

I really hope that we start to see greater candidate diversity in the future and I agree that it starts with showing up to vote, I just wish we had candidates that felt more representative of the party ideals and also of our overall population than what we're getting now.

In a world where Steve Huffman has called reddit's data "his data to sell", it has become abundantly clear that he has absolutely no respect for the fact that it is his users and moderators that create the community -- all that he and the admins do is create a system whereby the community can create and curate content. Without users, he has a big expensive and empty server.

It's not "his data", it's the community's data. The fact that he's acting like he owns all of it pretty much sums up why I overwrote and deleted all of my content on reddit, and it is precisely why I will never provide free content for that website ever again.