“Guys stop being mean to the Nazi’s husband! We have no way of knowing what his personal views are! He only married a Nazi, supports the Nazi’s actions, and continues to be married to a Nazi even though he could file for divorce whenever he wants! He didn’t actually say he was a Nazi himself, so we can’t assume he is one!”

Fair warning, the series lives or dies based on whether or not you like the main character. He’s very divisive, so you’ll either love the series or hate it.

Also, the books make a point of listing relevant skills and abilities before they’re used. In a written format, this isn’t bad. It acts as a sort of quick reference. But in the audiobooks, (especially the early ones) it means you end up listening to the same skill descriptions like a dozen times throughout the course of the book. Later audiobooks shifted the descriptions to an index, instead of having them inline with the rest of the text. This dramatically cleared things up for the listener.

If you enjoy references, you should check out the He Who Fights With Monsters series. There have been a few unexpected references that had me full blown belly laughing.

A literal pumpkin. There’s a running niche joke that trans girls like fucking pumpkins. I don’t know where it started. Probably Twitter or Tumblr.

It went from ~450 to ~700 cases. So it’s not like there are thousands, but it is still a significant increase. And still enough to argue that it’s not just a small numbers issue.

They just track billionaires’ jet transponders. Apparently they’ve spent a lot of time in France after the island was shut down.

Seriously though, you’re pretty much correct. It’s akin to the “cancer rates are rising dramatically” headlines, when the only thing that changed is our early detection methods got better. So now it is being caught more, and the number of known cases is rising.

The point of legalizing it is that it can be regulated. With legalization comes standardization. You can have legal employers who are legally required to verify employees’ ages, using established systems.

It would also allow the government to confirm that the employees are legally allowed to work in the country. Either citizens or on a valid working visa. This would add substantial roadblocks to trafficking, where one of the primary means of control is moving the victim to another country illegally and then taking their passport away. Limit their mobility, and you limit their ability to flee. But by requiring that all employees are legally allowed to work, it adds a significant roadblock to the traffickers’ MO.

When I was in high school, finding drugs was easier than finding alcohol. Why? Because drug dealers didn’t ask for ID. With alcohol, you had to know someone with a cool older sibling, or know a cashier who would be willing to sell if you slipped them a twenty. But since the latter was under constant surveillance from their employer (because cash registers are almost always video recorded for security purposes) that wasn’t very easy to find. But with drugs, you could walk up to any skater or stoner and ask if they had a connect. You’d have drugs in hand in less than 10 minutes.

Starting at his asshole. Don’t let him go too quick by starting at his chest.

Because it is cheapening your worth.

How much do you make per hour at your current job? Because I can almost guarantee that if you’re working class, a good cam model makes more per hour than you do. So why are you cheapening your worth by continuing to work at a job where you’re making less than a sex worker? You’re worth more than that, right? If it’s all about worth, you should be demanding more from your employer.

Cool, some coomer will save pics of your body for extensive jack off material.

Some people get off to that thought, just FYI. Exhibitionism is a thing.

Do you want your legacy like that?

Your legacy, like all of ours, will be a stone slab in the ground with your birth and death date engraved on it. If you’re lucky, it might still be there in a hundred years. More likely, it’ll be paved over by a highway, to facilitate the ever-growing urban sprawl. If you genuinely think your legacy will outlive you, then I have a statue surrounded by lone and level sands to sell you.

I dated a cam girl for a while, (insert the obligatory “it’s not dating if you’re paying her lul” joke here), and she smoked a quarter per day. It was the only way she could tolerate the work.

Given, she was damned good at her job. She made more in 4 hours of streaming than my roommate and I made in a week combined. She literally made enough to cover her rent and bills in like three or four hours of work. So she could definitely afford to smoke that much, because basically everything after that first stream was disposable income for her. But she would get done with her stream and immediately hit a bowl to try and forget the work. And she’d basically be stoned until her next stream was scheduled to start.

If she had ever graduated to harder drugs, she 100% would have OD’ed. However, it’s also a little disingenuous to compare streamers/OnlyFans models with in-person sex workers. There’s a level of compartmentalization that online sex work creates. It’s definitely still reliant on building a parasocial relationship, but you’re not actually sleeping with Johns in person. Unless you’re doxxed, there’s very little personal risk involved. But with in-person sex work, all of that is inverted. Online sex work is obviously still sex work, but it’s definitely a different type of sex work.

It’s like comparing retail work with an Amazon warehouse. Both jobs suck in their own way, and they’re both fulfilling the same basic purpose of getting products to customers. But very few people would say that they’re the same job, and the stressors associated with each are unique.

I’m not setting that up for my aunt who lives 4 hours away. We did manage to get Plex running on her TV over the phone though.

I’ve said this exact same thing in the past and got flamed for it. The “grandma factor” is a very real consideration. My grandma lives almost 5 hours away. I’m not going to walk my grandma through side-loading the Jellyfin app onto her TV, because no native app exists on its App Store. She won’t understand what a Developer Mode for her TV is, let alone how to enable it. And even if it had a native app, the moment she has to input a custom URL for my server, she’ll shut down and say it’s too hard. But she already has a Netflix account, and understands the concept behind a login page. So I can easily walk her through Plex’s sign-in.

It’s also hard to understate how bad some of the Jellyfin vulnerabilities are. They’re straight up “people can completely bypass the login page to stream media from your server” bad. Sure, it requires knowing the file path ahead of time. And that might be a level of security… Except for the fact that basically everyone uses the Trash Guides to set their *arr’s up, which means they all have the same file structure and automatic naming schemes. And the Jellyfin devs have stated that they likely won’t ever fix many of the biggest vulnerabilities, because it would require completely divesting from the Emby fork that the entire project is built on. Jellyfin is wonderful for LAN viewing. But holy shit please don’t expose it to the internet.

Chargers have the wattage ratings printed directly on them. And the rating will simply be the maximum that the charger can provide. Wattage is pulled, not pushed. So if you plug your phone into an oversized charger, the phone will only draw what it needs.

Just grab the highest wattage you see, and the phone will pull what it needs.

I’m downvoting specifically because you took the time to return to your comment and ping users with a mention, just to complain about downvotes.

Those are typically paid by weight. Several spammers have gotten envelopes full of gravel because of me.

This is called the corporate carpet bomb. And yes, it is often very effective because the upper management doesn’t like being bugged by small things like this. So they’ll often acquiesce just to get you to go away. And it usually only takes one upper manager to bother. Even if nine of them ignore you, the tenth will tell their underlings “hey, what’s the problem here? Why am I being CC’ed? Just fix whatever it is so I can stop getting emails about it.”

Need a phone charger? Walk into any hotel, say you stayed here a while ago, and accidentally left your phone charger in your room. You’re finally back in town, and decided to swing by to see if they have a lost-and-found box. 99% of the time, they’ll just pull out a cardboard box full of chargers and let you pick one. No questions asked, no follow-up, no verification. They get left behind in hotel rooms all the time, so the hotel’s lost-and-found is almost always full of them.

I used to freelance, and used this all the time when I was between gigs and just needed to chill for a few hours. If I had taken the train downtown and didn’t have my car charger, I’d just find whatever hotel was closest after my gig, and stop there. They’d let me grab a charger, and I’d pop over to a cafe to sit and watch TV/YouTube on my phone for a while. And then when it was time to leave for my next gig, I’d just leave the charger at the cafe for someone else to find later. I didn’t worry about keeping track of them, because I never intended to hold onto them in the first place. My car charging cable is from a hotel. My bedside charging cable is from a hotel. My desk charging cable is from a hotel. I haven’t actually purchased a USB-C cable in literal years.

Bean Soup Theory in full swing. I fully believe that algorithmic feeds have heavily contributed to the rapid decline in reading comprehension. One of the biggest parts of reading comprehension is being able to identify the target audience for a piece of work. And most of the time, the answer is not “me”. In previous decades, if you saw something that didn’t pertain to you, you would move the fuck on.

But algorithms changed that. People got used to having feeds that are laser-focused on their personal interests. And this has led to a decline in reading comprehension, as people simply aren’t using that part of the skill anymore. So now when they encounter something that isn’t meant for them, they have a tendency to try to make it about them.

The phrase “bean soup theory” comes from a recipe for bean soup, which was full of angry commenters asking things like “but what if I don’t like beans” and “what would you replace the beans with if you don’t like eating them?” The obvious answer is that if you don’t like beans, don’t make bean soup. This recipe is clearly not meant for you. You should move the fuck on to find a recipe you’ll like. But those commenters are so used to algorithmic feeds that they have lost the ability to recognize when something is not aimed at them. So instead of going “oh, this isn’t about me” they got angry and tried to make it about them.

To bring it back to the main post, there are several incredible games on this list. Many of them are absolutely worth playing. But the above commenter had to make it about them, instead of going “eh, not interested” and just moving on.

I love my Kobo Libra Color. I got it to replace my Kindle Oasis, and it has the same basic form factor. I wanted the KLC because I read a lot of manga and webcomics, and can sync them directly from my Calibre server.

My only real complaint is the lack of expandability. 32GB is fine for ebooks, because text takes basically no storage space. But comics (basically images organized together in a zip archive) and audiobooks quickly eat that storage space. If it included a microSD slot, that would greatly expand how long I can go between syncs. For a device that released in 2024, only including 32GB of on-board storage is an interesting choice.

My only guess is that it doesn’t have an SD card slot because it is IPX8 rated. I know it’s technically possible to IP rate an SD card slot, but I have no idea how easy it is. Older (black and white) Libra models used an internal SD card reader. You could crack the case open with a few screws and upgrade the storage very easily. But the Libra Color uses soldered eMMC, so upgrading the storage is a no-go.

There’s an old joke about quantum mechanics professors starting their first lecture with something along the lines of “right now, some of you probably understand quantum mechanics. By the end of the semester, if I did my job right, none of us will understand it.”

I have a catch-all email domain, and this is exactly what I do. Walmart gets “walmart@example.com”, Target gets “target@example.com”, etc… All of them go to the same inbox, so I always know which email address they think I have. If I start getting spam addressed to walmart@example.com, I know Walmart sold my info. I can just filter anything addressed to that account straight into my spam folder.