I played the bejeezus out of Runescape until I picked up Minecraft as a teenager. The free to play section certainly had its limits (only like 30 quests, about a dozen skills and only like 1/4 of the map) but you could absolutely access many, many hours of content purely in free to play. Compare that to another title from around the same era, Disney’s Pirates Online, which gave you an initial 3 days of free premium membership on account creation, you’d largely run out of free content and find everything gated to membership within a couple of days so it was hard to enjoy past those first 3 days unless you could convince your parents to buy you membership.

Of course, both have extremely healthy community-run revival projects in 2009Scape and The Legend of Pirates Online respectively.

There’s also other projects like 2004scape, 2007scape, Darkan, Open RSC etc. depending on your preferred era of Runescape to relive, but ORSC and 2009scape seem to both have the most active development and most active communities by far (and ORSC is early enough to be hard to enjoy if you aren’t deep into vintage gaming)

he’s been banned from pretty much all streaming platforms, including Twitch, Kick, Rumble, and Parti.

When you manage to get banned from both Kick and Rumble you really should be re-evaluating your life choices…

I was helping another team at work a couple of years ago, and during the pandemic shortages they had ordered pallets of computers at a time rather than just ordering as needed like they usually did before and after the shortages. I was tasked with babysitting 5 of those laptops which had been sitting in storage for over a year while they applied updates and whatnot.

I kid you not, babysitting those 5 laptops took the entire business day to get up to date (they for whatever reason did not have any flash drives so I couldn’t simply install the latest ISO) and one of the laptops managed to delete all of the keyboard drivers from itself so I had to use the onscreen softkeyboard to attempt to fix it, and ultimately used the manufacturer restore partition to reset it and restart the update process as the cleanest solution

I also got minimal other work done that day as every step of course required some manual intervention on the laptops. I shudder to imagine the scale of lost productivity across the entire world at the hands of Microslop

Hirens Boot CD might have sufficient utilities to perform a bios update? I’ve not tried because I usually don’t bother updating the BIOS unless there’s an actual problem I’m hoping to fix

There is absolutely a stereotype of dads not being involved in the child raising process outside of “teaching the kid to play ball” or teaching the kid repair skills around the house/car.

I know at least one friend who’s husband refuses to change any diapers and generally leaves the entire child raising process to his wife. But it’s also rapidly becoming far more normal for dads to actually be involved in their kids lives and take their kids places and taking an active part in raising their kids

You joke but my youngest learned to jump from Laura Croft.

Mid-2020 my wife was playing through the Tomb Raider remakes and left the computer to go fo something and my youngest walked up and pressed the biggest button that they could reach, the space bar, then was amazed to see the button caused something to happen on screen, so they kept doing it. Then the mimicry kicked in and they started trying to copy what they saw on screen and proceeded to jump for the very first time

Dude you badly need to spend some time offline and touch some grass and talk to some new people. Go have some fun in the real world!

That line of thinking only comes from being in an echo chamber for too long

Y’know if you’re so jealous of streamers there’s nothing stopping you from downloading an app on your phone and trying it out.

Every job and every career has aspects that suck, and different people excel at handling those different types of suck. At my work I support people who do industrial sanitation. Literally the stuff you’d see on the TV show Dirty Jobs, while I sit in my cushy home office working about 6 projects at a time keeping the servers and databases happy and secure. Just about every day I have a conversation with the folks I support where they say something about how they could never do my job, and I reply with the exact same sentiment.

Hasan preaches against capitalism, but he literally runs a for profit clothing brand where he sells clothes at ridiculously high prices.

“How come you, a communist own an iPhone. Checkmate communists”

Also in the present race to the bottom if you have standards that you expect your comparatively small run of clothing to meet (such as that the clothing is made by union laborers in decent working conditions) compared to say whatever clothing is being sold in big box stores, you have to expect that it will cost more.

Now if it came out that his merch was made in a sweatshop in Bangladesh and of lousy quality that would be a completely different story

he is notorious for bragging about he spends thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars, on designer brand outfits and jewelry

Buying better quality stuff can improve one’s quality of life compared to whatever’s cheapest in the constant race to the bottom that this world is going through. If you can afford to buy something nice for yourself that you like, why not?

He preaches against wealth hoarding, but again, he’s a multimillionaire who used money he earned from ads, sales, and hard earned dollars from fans to buy a $200k sports car and $3 million mansion in Hollywood.

Soooo he’s hoarding his wealth? Or he’s spending it all and flashing it around? Which is it? Also $3 million for property in Hollywood only buys you a smallish house by the rest of the country’s standards. Seriously.

Like, clearly your problem is the classic “why do you a communist own an iPhone” but at the scale of a relatively wealthy person. People can have different opinions but I don’t think it’s unfair for someone who was able to get themselves into a position where they have some wealth to spend and enjoy that wealth, especially one who actively campaigns and lobbies in the interest of the working class and against their own interests.

The difference between a millionaire and a billionaire is about a billion dollars. There’s about 24 million millionaires in the US, there’s only about 3,000 billionaires in the entire world. There’s a world of difference between being wealthy and literally having wealth that exceeds that of entire countries

People are allowed to complain about their jobs regardless of their short/medium term plans

I mean, it’s okay to complain about your job regardless of whether or not you plan on leaving it. Especially when you have what is literally many kids’ stated dream jobs, it’s kinda important to give those kids some perspective when they’re at an age that it’s easiest to shift gears into a different career

Let me get this straight, you’re saying that because some people hate their jobs, nobody is allowed to say a different job sucks? Or is it that nobody is allowed to enjoy their job?

And you’re saying that because some people are struggling financially nobody else is allowed to be doing okay financially and enjoying the fruits of their labor?

Get some perspective bro. Read the room!

Hey, Ferb, I know what we’re gonna do today!

I only have more questions now than before seeing this image…

My local library system went fine-free around 2020, reintroduced some fines around 2023ish and now they’re somewhere between fine-free and not? I’m honestly confused and also I so rarely incur fines that I’ve not been able to fully figure out the current fine structure

Part of this is because for someone in the process of obtaining citizenship in the US it’s actually much easier to legally start a business than it is to legally get a job. And with the decade or so that it can take to become a fully naturalized citizen in the US, folks have to make ends meet somehow so they’ll naturally start a business since that’s the one way they can legally make money until they get a work permit.

This is part of why there’s such a thriving restaurant scene for foreign foods across the entire US, a family will come and pool their time and money to open a small restaurant, and that will be how they survive until everyone gets work permits and eventually naturalized. There’s even a sub-industry of immigrants teaching other immigrants how to start a successful restaurant and what recipes work well for the American pallete. This is where some of the staples of Americanized Mexican and Chinese menus come from for example.

Those mansions and bunkers and yachts and private jets all require a surprising amount of working class labor to maintain. Often dozens of employees. The distribution center in the OP only had 8 employees at the time of the fire, so it would be comparably safer!

I think the point they’re trying to make is that racism is a state of mind, and opening oneself up to being racist against a non-human or imaginary thing can open the floodgates to more “real” forms of racism against fellow humans.

Basically the difference between anthropomorphizing bots while one expresses their dislike for interacting with them vs. expressing one’s dislike of being forced to interact with a machine that is made to feel like interacting with a person but isn’t.

I’m not sure how I feel about this sentiment I’ve described, but it’s one I’m open to arguments on since as a white dude I come into it with a mountain of privilege that likely blinds my view of things

Driving under the influence is not cool in any situation though

I’m just gonna leave this here and move on…