Here’s my complaint about this. Had trump lost the election, he would be demanding recounts in every possible place as well as launching lawsuits to delay and distract. We KNOW this, since he did it in 2020.

How unreasonable is it, then, that with all the questions raised by both his statements in public (such as “we’ll have it fixed so good you won’t have to vote” regarding 2028) and the statistical anomalies we can’t call for a recount in places where things seem amiss? If nothing is found, great, we elect a fascist; but if there was an attack/hack/fraud, then we find it and expose it. We have nothing to lose (we’re saving money over a trump loss and recounts everywhere) and Democracy to win.

I’m in a swing state and I definitely checked after the election to see that my ballot was counted. However, I can’t see the details as a private citizen, so I can’t verify it was tabulated correctly. I’m in NC, where the republican governor candidate was truly repugnant, but trump won by 3.39 points and Josh Stein won by over 14! In fact, more people voted for Stein than Trump. Maybe we could get Mark Robinson to request a recount…

I believe we are well and truly fucked.

Education and critical thinking is lacking in the majority of the electorate and the trend is that we elect leaders that reinforce that instead of mitigate it. Defunding education doesn’t improve this situation, and I feel we hit a tipping point where we might not be able to get these skills back in the curriculum going forward.

Same! My 15k lumen, 6500 Kelvin lamp is honestly one of my favorite things. My office is brightly lit regardless of the world outside. My wife hates it and demands I use soft white, 75w equivalent lights everywhere else.

I can live with the lights that imitiate candles, but I go to MY space if I need to see something clearly.

Passive aggressive ‘All your veggies are actually fruits’ energy here. I love it :)

This has been a regular debate in my household and I’m with you on this.

I’m going to echo Ahardyfellow and Auster, but put it here so it hits your inbox.

It sounds like you are struggling with connections and novelty. Be active and ping your friend network, see who is up for doing new things with you: find a new restaurant and catch up, go to an active collaborative activity like an escape room, etc. Push yourself a few times and it will build momentum and keep you all connected.

If your friends aren’t up for these things, find new friends (and keep the old, you can have more than one friend group and they don’t have to interact).

I’m an introvert and leech off my wife’s friend group so I’m not the expert on making new friends, but I think Auster’s idea is solid: Find a hobby that gets you out of the house and talk to people doing the same thing. Plan to see each interaction as a success, even if it doesn’t make you a new friend or even go well. The goal is to socialize, and if you do that enough, you will find people who make you happier.

Novelty is a big factor in our happiness that doesn’t seem to be talked about much. If you are always following the same routine, try and shake it up. It’s not comfortable at the start if you’ve been in a rut, but it will make you happier. Put it on your calendar to do something new. Even if it’s only once a month, and the ‘newness’ is just doing something you like in a different place. Again, it’s momentum, and more challenging new things will seem less daunting over time.

That’s some really neat context. I wasn’t overly concerned with Jeb at the time, since I had no interest in any of the R candidates, but the ‘please clap :(’ sure did the rounds.

I can see now, though, that Kamala Harris was certainly aware and trying to not hit the same landmine during the DNC. Watching her try to politely tell the crowd to shut up for what felt like an hour got quite painful.

Crowds: You need to let your speakers speak!

I don’t mind the taste of the “healthy” tortillas. I generally prefer the taste of whole grain bread and pasta over white flour variants. My largest complaint is that they all seem to disintegrate when you look at them – probably a gluten thing, but they all just break or shred instead of hold together, which defeats the purpose of wrapping your food in them.

It does indeed. Thanks for sharing this, and I’m now a fan. Sadly, they seem to have split up after rebranding as ‘Twin Beasts’. I found the album for this on bandcamp: https://thetoottoottoots.bandcamp.com/album/outlaws ; and the rest of the album is great too after sampling a few tracks.

That lead vocalist is mostly incomprehensible, but his voice is awesome.

don’t trust polls.

This isn’t telling you to not be confident or to be scared, this is telling you to not assume victory is assured. Vote regardless of polling. Polling can be accurate or not. If the polling is accurate, and a majority would vote for A, but A is so far ahead of B that A-voters sit out the race, B can still win if enough voters choose to stay home.

This is a really interesting question. If I were a researcher, I’d try to go chase this topic, since it seems to be fairly quantifiable.

Like Mudskipper, I can replay music in my head but it has a few caveats: I don’t really process the instruments… I remember the pitch/volume/etc but primarily of vocals. I also replay with the original singer’s voice and not my own. Replaying a few songs in my head now and I can’t even focus on the instruments if there were vocals unless they are critical to how the song works, like a bass drop. If I try to replay music that is instrumental, I get verbal recreations, like someone performing the song acapella. If i focus hard, I can hear instruments instead, but that requires thinking about it. This matches how I ‘sing along’ with instrumental pieces in otherwise verbal songs. It might just be that the backing music isn’t retained, so I can remember the melody, but not, say, a bass line unless the bass is being highlighted.

Are there people who CAN’T replay music in their heads? Are they immune to ‘ear-worms’ or do they just perceive it differently?

I’ve combined these headphones with earplugs for a plane trip. Engine roar overpowers the sound for bone conducting headphones the same way it does for earbuds or headphones that don’t isolate. You might still need to crank the volume up, though. Planes are loud. No issue of other people overhearing it at that point though.

Umm… trigger warning, I guess, but the best way to fight fears that you know to be somewhat irrational is information and exposure. This guy, https://www.youtube.com/@travismcenery2919/videos , has very deep and detailed videos about the spiders you are most likely to meet, along with some cool pressure tests of said spiders showing that they really just want to be left alone rather than hunt you.

I liked spiders to begin with (except for the jerks that spin a single invisible strand at head-height in front of my door every morning), but his videos do a good job of giving them character and making them into cute eight-eyed goofballs instead of super predators.

Is there no example of prior art anywhere? Someone doing this, but not explicitly calling it out because it’s obvious?

I think the FromSoftware games have had a modular animation scheme that allowed contextual selection of sub-animations with priorities so that things looked fluid during combat. If the animations change based on context, what’s the difference if that context is incoming weapon angle vs “tiredness”? Hundreds of games have characters react to low health with a different movement animation. Other games have characters react to weather like rain or wind by bracing against it. How is this different from that, other than simply having more factors taken into account?

Software patents in general are just scummy. No one is going to buy your game specifically because your characters limp. No one bought the Mordor games JUST for the patented nemesis system. No one is going to buy a Nintendo game JUST for the loading animation that shows where you were and where you just teleported to. All patenting these things do is limit future potential and piss off vocal parts of your fan base.

I know I’m preaching to the choir here…

Don’t just identify places vacuumed vs not, but include places vacuumed multiple times. Provide a score. Goal is a perfect 0, negative score implies missed areas, positive is over-vacuumed… Positive score only counted if the whole area is vacuumed to avoid just cleaning the same tiny area until the over-vacuum score counts for the whole rug.

Now, make this an AR game, with leaderboards based on rug dimensions.

As a parent, and as a kid who grew up in the infancy of the internet/Social Media, I think there is a very fuzzy line here. Specifically, I’m fighting the concept that ‘parents are 100% responsible’. I’m responding to Cookie, but not really disagreeing with them.

Kids have attempted to subvert their parents rules since the beginning of time. “I’m not touching you…” says the older brother in the car as his sister screams in annoyance. “You didn’t say I couldn’t have Ice Cream – With sprinkles on it!”

I am an IT professional, focused in Cyber Security. I can lock down anything that touches the internet – if it’s in my house.

My kiddo, though, has access to a school chromebook. Guess how much control I have over that.

Chromebooks are fun. I have one, I have a family account for him, where I can control what and when he can access the internet. If he logs into MY chromebook with his SCHOOL account, he bypasses all of those controls. Hell, even his school chromebooks have a ‘guest’ option that bypasses almost all controls at the OS level. That was a relatively simple fix (for MY chromebook, not his school one) once I caught it, but it’s a symptom of a bigger problem. All these internet connected devices tend to have their own flavor of browser with their own flavor of parental controls, if any. For any non-tech-savvy person to understand all the ramifications is unreasonable - and you’d better believe that the kids are more tech savvy than their parents and will find the gaps.

I don’t claim to know the solution. And I fully agree with the article linked: ‘Age verification’ and ‘Parental approval’ are BAD (from a tracking standpoint, but also because kids and parents might not align on some issues) if not merely insufficient, but I do think there needs to be some culpability on the service provider to ensure that children are not subject to obvious( and here’s the rub – what is “bad”) bad stuff.

If my kiddo turns out to be racist, that’s partially on me, but I need help from other parties to ensure it wasn’t because he tripped over a pokemon lets-play where the streamer was spewing hate-speech and he internalized that because he is 8 and takes everything for face-value. I literally cannot keep him off youtube completely, and even if I could, I would also deny him any bit of the cultural knowledge that would help him to make relationships in the real world. I have forbidden fortnight and roblox and you can’t imagine the angst I get from just those. (And he plays them at friend’s houses anyway)

The majority of the onus falls on parents, that is true, but kids are not rational and don’t see the world the same way adults do. I need help ensuring that my kid is not subject to the trash pit that the internet is. There are too many ways and places for my kid to fall in to terrible things. The linked bill is terrible, but we probably do need something to help the average parent keep their kids away from large parts of the internet. ___

My city is on there! And it nearly fills in the whole circle. Unsurprising, as we effectively have streets that intersect with themselves. East coat USA is a clusterfuck of city planning.