It’s probably because damsels in distress get rescued by the male protagonist while hags are on their own and have to rely on hissing and casting spells.

Definitely not 9-5, M-F. Most billionaires inherited substantial wealth to begin with. But executives, in general, don’t have “hours” in the same way as rank and file workers. It’s more about knowledge and meetings — well, hopefully knowledge — so you might have an 11am meeting, a 2pm call, and then a 7pm dinner with a potential investor or whatever. You don’t really “work” in between those obligations unless it’s a small company (where you probably aren’t a billionaire anyway). At most, you need to make a board report or PowerPoint for a presentation or something like that.

Billionaires who just own things and aren’t in the C-suite don’t work much at all. Even if you’re on some boards, it’s not much in terms of actual obligations. There’s definitely tasks to do but it’s also definitely not a job. So, a bit like being a landlord.

Many paleontologists and sim-citizens now believe Titanus Gojira or “Godzillas” had developed proto-feathers and increased in size in response to a cooling period in the middle Jurassic. Adult males shed their feathers and attack cities during mating season as part of a demonstration to both court females and warn off other males.

I grew up poor and I think a good measure of whether someone is poor or lower middle class is “Did your parents help you financially or did you help them?”

Maybe the Technology Connections guy is an heir to the General Electric fortune. He certainly has a lot of access to old toasters. 🤔🧐

/s

Incandescent light bulbs burned out at the speed they did because of an agreement between light bulb manufacturers to not make them better. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel

When I was a kid in the 80’s and 90’s, you only owned a few games if you had an NES or SNES (or Sega equivalent) even if you rented/played a lot of them. So, I got insanely good at the few games I owned. After I beat Street Fighter II with every character on the highest difficulty, I decided to beat the game using only one button (plus the D pad, obviously). Finally did it with Chun Li and X button.

With Super Mario World, the hardest personal challenge I did was beating every level except the switch blocks. There’s a bunch of secret exits where switch blocks are supposed to be the way. It took a lot of cape+blue Yoshi shenanigans to get that one done.

Now that I’m old (or least older) and games are way longer, my biggest accomplishment is actually finding time to play a game all the way through, much less do side quests. I made time for BoTW, Horizon Zero Dawn, Nier: Automata, and Hades. But if I stop playing a game for awhile, I forget all the controls and that’s the end of that game.

NFTs are digital POGs with no slammer to gamble them with. That’s way, way more stupid.

Because the library won’t stop e-mailing my wife.

For a technological civilization like ours, I think it’s just that Earth/humans are weird and we’re past the main ones (like going from single-cell to multi-cellular organisms).

Having to overcome the physical obstacles on other planets rules out the type of spacefaring technological civilizations like ours. No matter how intelligent a civilization on a water world is, it’s not starting fires, much less building rockets. Just getting out of the water would be their space program. Even a totally Earth-like planet that’s a bit bigger and has an intelligent species wouldn’t be able to get to space with chemical rockets.

And also, humans are weird. It could be as basic as “we have hands for building complex tools.” We have a seemingly insatiable need to compete and explore, even beyond all logic—maybe no other intelligent species wants to strap someone to a rocket and send them to space because it sucks up there. We’re violent: without WWII and the Cold War, do we even have a space program?

So many things had to come together to create an intelligent, tool-building species with hands that lives on a planet with the right balance of land and water. As far as we know, it never even happened on Earth before and even then, we had thousands of years of civilizations before anyone was dumb enough to strap themselves to a rocket just to see what would happen.

You can go back as far as you want but I think the current situation is because they got routed in the 2008 election and decided that openly courting the worst people in society was their only option. There’s always been racists and conspiracy theorists in America — see The John Birch Society, for one of many examples — but parties didn’t openly court them, at least without plausible deniability. Maybe a wink and a nod but not open courtship.

So, after 2008, Republicans started saying the quiet parts out loud because they were desperate. They — especially Mitch McConnell, in my opinion — thought they could control the beast they unleashed but, it turns out, that isn’t how unleashing beasts works. It started with the Tea Party and pretty quickly escalated into a situation where “moderate Republican” became an oxymoron. And then Trump came along yelling the formerly quiet parts and that was that.

This is set to change in the next iOS version. (In developer beta now; to be released in early September, typically, when the next iPhones drop). So, if you’re otherwise happy with the keyboard, I’d say just use Text Replacement rules (Settings → General → Keyboard → Text Replacement) for a few months.

One piece of advice I can offer (as someone with a similar wide range of interests) is that you should sometimes treat life like a field trip. If you meet an expert in something, ask questions and show enthusiasm. Experts (usually) love talking about their favorite topic. I know a gearhead who restores old cars who doesn’t talk much. But if I ask about any car, he will put his beer down and talk about different cars until the sun comes up. Chefs love talking about food. Most people like telling people about their life’s work (as long as you aren’t the type of asshole who tries to tell a Ph D they’re wrong because someone on the internet said something else).

Also, people say life is short. It’s actually simultaneously too short and too long. You won’t have time to be a Ph D level expert in all your interests but you’ll (hopefully) have decades to learn about whatever floats your boat. Life can get in the way but if you find hobbies you like, it’s restorative. Work and family responsibilities exist, to be sure, and lots of people feel too drained for hobbies but doing something fun isn’t draining.

Nah, Zelda games don’t typically save once you beat them. You get a little star on your save file, I think, but otherwise, it drops you back to the save right before you fought Ganon so you can do all the side quests if you want. (If you’re a completionist, good luck finding all 1000 Korok seeds.)

I found the first half of master mode to be really fun too. Eventually, you level up enough that it’s not that much harder but at first, you have to basically play in stealth mode and avoid fights or use trickery. (Eventually, you level up enough that it’s almost easier because the monsters are all stronger and it’s easier to get good weapons/shields.)

Honestly, the point of BoTW isn’t the ending. It’s much more about the adventure and exploration. I turned off all the HUD stuff and just enjoyed exploring the world. By the time I fought Gannon, it was trivial because of how powerful Link had become.

But it was worth beating it because

News Corp. and The Daily Mail and General Trust seem pretty evil. (In fact, let’s just say every company that owns a UK tabloid is at least 80% evil.)

Sinclair Broadcasting in the U.S. is scum too. They own a bunch of local TV channels and also their corresponding web sites. A lot of places in the U.S. have seen their local newspaper disappear (or shrink to where it might as well have) and Sinclair filled the void and pushes right wing tabloid crap.

Local TV news in the U.S. is low key one of the worst offenders at creating false narratives. I live in a city and half my older relatives think I live in a war zone because of how local news is now structured: violent crime, a story about the moral panic du jour (like “Is your teen eating Tide Pods?”) followed by sports, traffic, and weather. I’m probably a million times more likely to be killed by a car than murdered but they only cover car accidents if it’s like, “Prom queen dies in accident.”

I barely ever eat beef since I live in a coastal area with productive waters where the seafood is cheaper, better, and fresher. But I do think the focus on individual contributions to climate change is somewhat misguided. We need to stop digging up carbon and lighting it on fire.

I’m not against individual efforts. I drive an electric car — well, a PHEV that’s got more electric range than I need for my daily life so I only need gas for road trips — and have solar panels and am very much an environmentalist. I get that every little bit counts. But shifting the blame to consumers rather than producers — especially oil/mining companies — seems like a distraction.

It’s like when oil companies promoted plastic recycling, which is a joke 90% of the time, to distract from plastic production. There’s definitely not a shortage of fresh water where I live but people in the southwestern US constantly get told to take shorter showers when the bulk of the water goes agriculture. (We obviously need food but there’s plenty of water-hungry cash crops grown in places where droughts are frequent.)

Soaring above the dinosaurs, flying reptiles described as “demonic pelicans” once navigated their way above a vast inland sea

Looks like someone has never seen a pelican. They’re still demonic.

80%: gun running

15%: Insurance programs

4%: Subsidies for Elon Musk

1%: Sandwiches from Così that aren’t even good

I tell you what I’d do, man. Four chicks at the same time.