This makes me sad. Not just because of what happened with reddit, but because I'm still missing that high-brow discussion. Most of my reddit comments were replies to other people, rather than top-level comments, and I spent more time reading comment sections than I did looking at the content they were discussing.

I like it here, but I don't feel like I come across the depth of content I did on reddit. I don't mind the lower quantity - that's expected on a small platform - but I'm definitely not enjoying the lower quality. Most of the activity seems to be around memes and American politics, neither of which particularly interest me, and most of the comments across most posts feel fairly unsubstantial. It's so much rarer for me to find something I want to reply to on here than it was on reddit.

It's not only about being tired enough to fall asleep early. If I stick to a 10pm-6am sleep schedule I feel exhausted during the day, and by early afternoon I'll be falling asleep. It's like being jetlagged permanently; my body simply doesn't want to keep to that schedule. It's not just an "oh, you need to stick to the schedule long enough to adapt and get into a proper routine" situation either - it's something I struggled with for years while I was in school and university, despite getting enough sleep.

It's amazing how much better and more energetic I feel - physically and mentally - now I'm able to keep to a sleep schedule that suits me. Obviously exercising is a good thing, but early/delayed sleep phase syndrome are real things.

The idea that only having a €15M budget is what caused this game's issues is ridiculous. It's not a game that had good ideas and just failed to execute them properly; it's fundamentally bad on a conceptual level.

The setting and story concept are bad. When the game was first announced, I don't think I heard or saw a single discussion where someone was excited to experience playing through the story of Gollum in that time period in the story. Or even playing as Gollum at all - he's a great secondary character in the books and films, but he's hardly a character you want to play as in a video game. There's no room for character development either.

The game design is bad. It's just bad. No amount of time, money or polish is going to fix the terrible basic design principles the game is built on. And even if they had 10x the budget and hired a world-class lead game designer from the start, it still would have the issues with the story and character.

The whole project is one that shouldn't have left the brainstorming session it was conceived in.

Honestly, most "ugly" people can be reasonably attractive if they get in shape, eat healthily (especially in a way that clears up their skin) and style themselves (clothes, hair, etc) in a way that suits them. Plus finding good angles and lighting for photos/videos, and building up some confidence and charisma for in-person interactions. Those things aren't necessarily easy and they take patience and commitment, but most people can easily go up a few points on an attractiveness/10 scale if they manage them.

They're both certainly people who know how to burn bridges when they see them.

"Landed gentry" was a social class of people who owned estates and, well, land. They didn't have to work; they made their income by profiting off the work of the farm hands, merchants, etc, who worked on their land. The estates these landed gentry owned, along with their wealth, would be passed down to their children when they died. It meant the gentry did very little to earn their station in life, but still had a fair amount of power and wealth.

How spez thinks it applies to Reddit mods, I'm not entirely sure. But he definitely meant it as an insult. His full quote was:

And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.

So I guess he was upset that mod teams get to select who else is a good fit to join the mod team? Of course, the issue is that he is the landed gentry - users didn't vote for him, nor can they remove him; and he's profiting off the work of the people who post content and the people who spend their time moderating.

Well I'm just glad Harry Mack managed to release his 100th episode of "Omegle Bars" this week. He decided to take a break from doing Omegle-based content at the right time, it seems.

For anyone who doesn't know, Harry Mack's a freestyle rapper. He has (had) a series where he'd ask strangers on Omegle to give him a handful of words and then create a full song out of them on the fly. And not just saying those words then immediately moving on like most freestyle rappers do; he actually creates entire verses on the topics he's given and really raps around them. Plus he'd be calling out things the people were doing as they react to him, responding to things they say, mentioning things he can see in the room, etc, as he raps.

Here's one of his freestyles that's really stuck with me ever since I first saw it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehcA4zCeaPI

He takes what are some fairly negative, "cry for help" words from the girls and turns them into a really beautiful, positive rap overall. He's a very positive guy in general, and I've watched him consistently since I discovered him. Binging his videos got me through a breakup, in fact.

My own experiences with Omegle have either been penises or just bland, and it's not something I've used for many years as a result. But videos like Harry Mack's show what wonderful things could come from it and I do think it's a huge shame it's gone. It feels like another part of the old internet's gone, and that we're moving even closer to the sanitised, heavily-monetised internet run by megacorporations. I hate that.

$14m seems far too low:

• 40 years at $350,000 per year
• 480 months at $29,170 per month
• 14,600 days at $960 per day

Those don't sound too bad until you get to:

• 350,400 hours at $40 per hour.

$40 an hour in exchange for losing most of your life - and the vast majority of your best years - is a fucking disgrace.

Nah, Scott Adams is a hateful bigot. He thinks black people are a "hate group" - he truly went off the rails.

I don't really think this comic reflects its author's personal views at all. C&H has always been filled with shock comedy, black comedy, deliberate insensitivity, and silly puns, and everything is a target. This one doesn't really stand out as any different to how the comic's always been.

I don't really feel like there's ever really been a right-wing slant to these comics either. And I say that as someone who's ardently left-wing.

It's not just a thing in fiction either; I've seen plenty of threads and discussions over the years where real-life sex workers have essentially been saying the same thing. A lot of men are lonely.

It's not just about AI in Firefox, but rather making an open-sourced AI in general. The world is absolutely heading towards AI integrations being normal; personally I'm glad we've got Mozilla working on an AI rather than being limited to closed-source AIs made by for-profit companies.

I don't think consumers were the target of the scam; if they were, I don't see a reason why they wouldn't have accepted pre-orders for the game. In fact, I think they know that accepting pre-orders would have left them open to false advertising lawsuits which is why they didn't go for them, and I think they were well aware that people could just refund the game so trying to scam consumers (in this instance) was probably not worth attempting.

Instead, I think the investors were the target. The brothers who own(ed?) the studio have been living off investor money for the last few years, and which how suspicious their finances are (their ludicrously high travel expenses, in particular) I'm sure they've hidden away a bunch more money.

The game that exists is a shameless, cheaply-made asset flip that I suspect only exists at all because it makes it much harder for investors to sue for fraud when there's an actual product. If they'd just tried to take the money and run without releasing anything it'd be obvious fraud, but now they can claim they tried their best, expectations were too high, etc, and it's difficult for the investors to prove otherwise.

Maybe it's not spotless, but rather all spot!

I mentioned this one to my friends the other day and it took so much convincing before they actually believed me! Definitely an interesting one. Venus also spins the opposite direction to all the other planets in the solar system, meaning the sun rises in the west and sets in the east.

My usual go-to is to ask what their latest/current obsession is. It works really well for a few reasons:

• it's nice and simple to ask - it doesn't require a monologue/wall of text to set up, and it doesn't require you to know anything about them to ask it;
• it's both as personal and as low-stakes as they want it to be. They can give very intimate, in-depth answers if they feel like it, or they can just mention something like the latest film they enjoyed. There's no risk of making them uncomfortable by asking it;
• it lets you filter out boring people who don't really take interest in anything;
• assuming they do have interests, it often gives you plenty of opportunities to dive into deeper conversation;
• it's often engaging for them because they get to talk about something they're passionate about;
• it's often interesting for you because people talking about things they're passionate about is awesome (and often attractive).
• it's pretty much always relevant and fresh because their latest obsession will change over time. This makes it particularly great for things like dating sites/apps because people's bios will often be out of date and/or they'll have talked about the things mentioned in their bio so much that they're kind of sick of them.

I've actually had multiple people on dating sites tell me how great a question they think it is, and that they're going to use it themselves in the future. So obviously it's not just me who thinks it's a great question!

They used "bullet" because the entire comic is setting up the joke about having "dodged a bullet".

After that, he says that energetic stellar-sized microwaves could also be the cause, though this is unlikely since microwaves typically are not stellar-sized and they do not float in space [citation needed].

I don't know why but that [citation needed] caught me so off guard and made me laugh far too much

From what I gather, he backed down because all his top men's families were being threatened. Prigozhin's family was kept safe, of course, but I don't think they expected Russia to threaten the families of those further down the ladder.

Last Epoch and Grim Dawn are probably most in line with Diablo, I think.

People have mentioned Path Of Exile, and I've played a lot of it, but I don't think it feels particularly like Diablo any more, even though it started out that way. It's quite unforgiving, and even a lot of experienced players feel like they need to follow build guides rather than work things out for themselves. Its learning curve is hundreds or thousands of hours long. Of course, the reason for that is that it has incredible depth, variety and complexity, which may be a selling point or a deterrent depending on what you like! I definitely like the complexity of it myself, but it's very overwhelming when you're new. The reason I don't think it's all that in line with Diablo these days, though, is simply the pacing of the gameplay. You blow up screens of enemies at a time, and your deaths are often so fast that you're not really sure what killed you.

Path Of Exile also heavily revolves around its trading economy. Item drop rates are balanced around players being able to trade for them, which makes trading somewhat mandatory (unless you're a bit of a masochist). The economy is fairly complex, with there being a lot of different currencies, and quite a lot of factors that can affect the value of an item. I'll let you decide whether you find this appealing or not - some people do, some people don't! I do think it causes some issues with the balance and progression of the game, but it's interesting to say the least, even if you wish you didn't have to engage with it.

Grim Dawn feels a little mechanically dated at this point but it's still solid. It's got some good builds, the dual-class system and constellations system make for some interesting variety. It's got an offline mode, as well as online co-op play. Its real selling point, though, at least for me, is it's absolutely soaked with atmosphere. It's very, well, grim, but the world is really immersive and it has a great setting in general with a solid story and some great lore. It also has quite a lot of mods available (including the Reign Of Terror mod I mentioned in another comment in the thread that adds the entire Diablo 2 campaign and all its classes to Grim Dawn).

Last Epoch is more mechanically interesting than Grim Dawn, I think, but it's lacking in the story and world-building. It's still in early access, although its full release is next week. It has quite a lot of depth and complexity, but it's all done in an intuitive way that means you can jump into the game blindly and work things out for yourself fairly easily. It has a good variety of skills, and the fact that each skill has its own fairly comprehensive skill tree means you can play the same skills in very different ways. It has a wonderful itemisation system that does a great job of making you actually engage with the loot you find on the floor (which is an issue in other loot games), and some of the best crafting I've ever seen in a game. The dev team also manages to come up with some really creative and somewhat intuitive solutions to things they perceive as issues in other ARPGs.

Last Epoch's biggest drawback is that its endgame is currently a little lacking in comparison to POE (which has a very rich and deep endgame, but is also a ten-year-old game that's been updated constantly). It's still far, far better than Diablo 4's, though, and will obviously only improve as more is added. Last Epoch has some truly brilliant systems in place for the devs to build off - and frankly, I still think it's great now - but it'll only get better as more content gets added over time.

I love all three games I've talked about for different reasons, and honestly, they're all well worth playing!

The last thing I saw regarding him was him being unable to comprehend how secret rooms in Metroid work. It was painful.