Quite a lot for online friends and gaming. For irl friends, it’s more sporadic.

SMS/MMS and the PSTN are completely compromised by multiple governments. Not saying that makes smartphones any better, just be aware.

I ended up cracking my copy of it (which was pirated anyway) and gave myself a ton of money at the start as well. Fun game for kid me, not really a classic.

I also cracked SimCity and 688 Attack Sub but I had legit copies of those, I just hated keeping track of an extra piece of paper to play them.

I had a spirited discussion with an LG repair guy working on the smart fridge that came with my home. I don’t allow malware on my network so the fridge doesn’t get to do whatever a fridge needs internet access for.

He tried to scare me by saying it would connect to whatever network was available but I live in the sticks and there isn’t even cell coverage here much less another router for it to connect to so unless they are putting a satellite uplink in it that would not happen and I would think he knew that since I had to put him on my guestnet so he could call his support line.

So then he said it wouldn’t work properly unless it was on the network and I told him if it somehow connected I would use an ACL to ensure it couldn’t talk to anything.

Anyway, bought a cheap fridge from CostCo with an extended warranty and they dumpstered that LG POS. Good riddance.

I stopped watching her generally when she put up her poorly thought out, TERF-filled anti-trans video, but the “Capitalism is good, actually” video came up in my feed and I watched it out of curiosity.

It’s so wrong it’s impossible to know where to begin. She invents a history of money that didn’t happen, defines capitalism in a nonsensical way and in the comments admitted she did no research for the video whatsoever and yet still defended her points as if her absolute ignorance on the subject was somehow laudable.

Absolute buffoon. Nobody should watch her videos. She is intellectually dishonest and generates ignorant content to garner clicks.

It was literally outlined as this in Project2025, ban porn then define speech you want to suppress (primarily LGBT but also women’s health) as porn.

I appreciate the discussion, I get out of my depth pretty quickly on the topic being a linguistic hobbyist rather than someone with actual education and background.

It’s an approximation, but the t is partially vocalized giving it a ‘d’ sound even if it’s not made exactly the same way.

This phenomenon is called “T flapping” and it is common in North American English. I got into an argument with my dad who insisted he pronounces the T’s in ‘butter’ when his dialect, like nearly all North Americans pronounces the word as ‘budder’.

Muskrat looks pretty gross, plus all those chemicals can’t be healthy.

The ears pointed back in that one shot is such a pouty look for not getting her way.

My reaction to both The Dying Gasp and Seat of Sacrifice fights was “Can’t I feel good about winning just once?” and then speaking to Seto at the end was full on waterworks.

It’s no exaggeration to say it changed my perspective about life, I still can’t hear Final Voyage without tearing up.

My sister tried playing it and didn’t get very far, but her preferences are for highly character-driven material so I think it’s just not for her.

A few times.

Most notably, when playing Outer Wilds. I was playing it during the pandemic and had lost two friends, my grandfather and my cat within the span of around 3 months. I was struggling with depression and I got to one specific spot in the game and the revelation caused me to just sit there and cry for like 10 minutes, I was so emotionally shut down at the time that the tears felt like a life preserver. I had to stop playing for a bit, but it definitely helped me process my grief.

I also cried during a couple of quests in FFXIV. The post-Shadowbringers content especially, not because it was sad, just very poignant. And again in the last area of Endwalker, where Masayoshi Soken’s incredible composition combined with some very emotional content just got to me (especially the Endwalk, jfc).

I think I cried a bit at the end of Journey just because it was a powerful experience, but I had an amazing partner in that game who stayed with me through the whole thing.

He really tries not to bother me, but the screaming gets my attention and when he’s about to physically destroy the computer I feel I have to step in and fix it. That being said, he is not comfortable installing it himself so I want something that provokes the minimal amount of hand-holding. Honestly, the biggest issue with me not putting Garuda on his system is that he needs Davinci Resolve for his work and it doesn’t install directly off the AUR, you have to download the application separately from Black Magic Design’s site and edit the build file. He is not going to understand how to do that.

I am very happy working in Linux as my daily driver, while my husband is bugging me to switch his desktop and laptop over since he is frustrated at how awful the UI in Windows 11 is. But I know he has a low tolerance for frustration and while he has decent technical skills, he tends to accumulate the absolutely most peculiar technical problems I’ve ever seen. I mean, I’m rather savvy with Windows and he comes up with problems that take me a long time to figure out - issues that would be difficult to cause even if you were intentionally trying to break Windows.

So I don’t really know what to do here. He likes my Garuda setup because I’ve shown him how customizable KDE Plasma is, but the amount of weird shit dealing with the AUR that I have run into, stuff that I can solve fairly easily but a layperson would likely not be able to handle, makes me want to put Mint on his system even if he’ll find it less suitable.

Definitely read the original SecureAnnex article as well. The behavior of this software and the people behind it are damning.

They added a toggle at some point when creating a sim so you could be a male who could get pregnant, if you wanted a sim to be a trans man, for example.

At least I think that’s vanilla. I have so many mods its hard to remember anymore.

Men could get pregnant in Sims 4 for awhile, I think. I guess the bug is it that neighborhood stories aren’t working and checking if someone is in a relationship and has the ‘can be pregnant’ tag.

Germany has been on my list of places to flee to if the fascists here start rounding up LGBT folks. I have lapsed fluency from when I lived there 30 years ago but I am confident it would come back quickly. The problem is that my husband doesn’t speak any German at all and I think it would be a culture shock for him.