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 check friends’ Snapchat stories from time to time, and Snapchat suggests public stories on the same page. I think Snapchat has the same sort of singular data point on me that “this account is likely a straight man”, because most of what they show me are sports clips, woman influencers in revealing clothing, and right-wing influencers talking about culture war stuff. I never view any of that sort of stuff, but it still shows up any time I try to check my friend’s stories. I guess I view public stories so infrequently that they just give me a default generic man feed.

You are correct. He used a VPN for several US locations in the video. He then compared what content was shown in different regions of the US to see if everyone sees the same thing or if the content is radically different depending on where you are.

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.

if so wouldn’t that just end up with the USA following strange semantics other countries don’t?

When it comes to renaming external locations like this that are used by multiple countries, I would imagine it would be a case of how wide the rename is adopted. If I had to take a guess, renaming the Gulf of Mexico or the Atlantic Ocean in more US-centric names isn’t as likely to catch on globally and will probably just result in confusion when people from different countries are referring to the same thing.

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’ve read through your various comments, and I’m not sure you see the difference here.

With other platforms such as Steam, you download the Steam program that acts as a single installer for every game on the platform. You have to be logged into a valid Steam account to download a game from their single installer. If you use a new computer, you have to log into Steam and download from Steam. On GoG, you download an installer per game. Those installers can be transferred to any device and download the games even if the computer has never logged into GoG or even connected to the internet. You can store all the installers on an external drive, which you can’t do for Steam.

If Steam eventually dies or your account is banned, you can never install those games again. If GoG eventually dies or your account is banned, you are correct that you can’t download new installers, but you can use any installer you have already downloaded.

If Steam dies or your account is banned, the game you already have downloaded may not even work anymore due to DRM (this is on a game-by-game basis). If GoG dies or your account is banned, your games are guaranteed to still run since they are not dependant on GoG DRM (with a small list of exceptions people aren’t happy about).

You may not care about any of this, but there’s a decent chunk of people who want to keep their games regardless of anything the purchasing company does.

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 don’t think the person you are responding to is talking about Trump winning the election like you are. Unless I am misunderstanding, it sounds like they are saying that Republicans will point to this case being dropped as a win and that they were right all along. In other words, they will say that the Democrats were just unfairly trying to prosecute Trump, and dropping the case proves they had no evidence (even though that isn’t why the case was dropped).

I don’t think the conspiracies are going to go away. I remember when Trump got shot that there were threads with quite a few people convinced it was all staged to get him sympathy votes. I still occasionally see it brought up all this time later.

Based on the context, I think they meant “divisiveness”, but “deviousness” probably also describes the nominations well.

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.