As a kid, Sonic and his friends were my favorite video game characters. I had all the Genesis games, and Sonic CD, and I collected merch and read the comics and watched the TV shows and drew bad fanart. (I didn't have an OC, I just made Sonic cross over with other characters I liked, like Mega Man.)

Sonic Adventure 2 Battle for Gamecube was the last official Sonic game that I thought was really good all the way up until Mania released, which was a LONG drought. I have a complicated relationship with mascot characters these days because I resent that they're owned by corporations and primarily exist to weaponize my nostalgia, but the honest truth is that it works. I can't help but still love Sonic and his friends, even though I'm acutely aware that they mostly exist to sell me stuff I don't need.

I'm not really part of the target audience. I already have a laptop that's slightly more powerful and I could hook it up to my TV if that was a thing I wanted to do. I don't need a separate gaming PC for my living room.

Mine takes less than a minute.

If you search for "poker" on PEGI's site, it seems that many games which are actually about simulated gambling are rated 12 or 16. They seem to think Balatro is more likely to expose children to realistic gambling than, say, Prominence Poker or Pure Hold'em World Poker Championship, which seems completely bizarre, given that those games are about playing poker and Balatro is a fancy kind of solitaire with no betting.

Also, because this isn’t anywhere near the first time Emiru has been attacked in public, she points out that she’s spent tens of thousands of dollars for her own private security, and wasn’t even allowed to bring her preferred bodyguard with her because he’s permanently banned from Twitch events due to restraining a stalker during a previous event.

What the fuck? They banned her bodyguard for protecting her and then asked her to come back without him? It's like they wanted her to get assaulted.

Is all bad online behavior "trolling" now? Isn't "shill" a better word for someone who is paid to surreptitiously promote something?

This "fact sheet" looks like Lockheed Martin marketing material. I feel like an enthusiast's fact sheet would be more likely to focus on the plane itself instead of the programs and partnerships.

The first screen is sort of a tutorial, though. If you go right first because you've played Super Mario Bros. or some other platformer and you think going right might be the way to win, you're presented with a narrow passage you can't crawl through. At this point, you'll discover that you can also go left. There's another rock formation with a narrow passage, but from this side you can jump on top of it to get over it, and you'll find the Morph Ball. From the Morph Ball side, you can't jump back over, so you have to figure out how to get through the narrow passage by pressing down to enter Morph Ball mode. Now you understand the game: find obstacles, acquire the corresponding upgrades, use them to bypass the obstacles.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said he voted against the reauthorization "because it failed to include the most important requirement to protect Americans' civil rights: that law enforcement get a warrant before targeting a US citizen."

Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point

The $250/month plan supposedly includes unlimited traffic. If there's actually a limit where you're supposed to switch to a more expensive plan with no standardized price, maybe CF should say what the limit is?

The context for this is that Jesus was telling his disciples about the consequences of spreading the Gospel: that they and any who followed them would be persecuted. That is, the implication is that his followers will be put to the sword, rather than living in peace; he's not encouraging them to use swords on other people.

He does, separately, assure them that terrible things will happen to people who were mean to them when he comes back, but that's not this verse, lol.

What does she mean there was a "generational shift" that led to people burning CDs? Back in the floppy disk days, everyone was copying floppies—I remember when my grandfather bought a Mac to use at home, and immediately his friends at work loaded him up with copied disks. Which generation is she thinking of that wasn't pirating a ton of software?

I wash graphic tees and other printed clothing inside out because I was told it does less damage to the image. No idea if it actually helps.

Coming fresh off BG3, the quality of the writing and the amount of character expression in dialog is like night and day. Honestly there was even one moment fairly early on when I said to myself "Fallout 4 would have let me extort this guy" and then I realized how egregious it was that I felt I had less agency in this quest than in FO4.

Is it just me, or is announcing this before you are ready to announce the replacement a very weird thing to do? They could keep selling these right up until they're ready for the new system, but instead they're just going to have a dead month (or however long) where people can't throw money at them. Aren't they trying to make money, to raise their valuation for their IPO?

There seems to be something contradictory about the idea that letting people elect judges endangers democracy. If you don't trust the people to elect judges, how can you trust them to elect the people who appoint judges?

Silverstein said Hughes also violated the policy earlier in the year, when she signed an open letter protesting the Times’s coverage of transgender issues. “She and I discussed that her desire to stake out this kind of public position and join in public protests isn’t compatible with being a journalist at The Times, and we both came to the conclusion that she should resign,” he wrote in the email.

It seems having a spine isn't compatible with being a journalist at the Times.

My college workflow was to copy the prompt and then "paste without formatting" in Word and leave that copy of the prompt at the top while I worked, I would absolutely have fallen for this. :P

YouTube eventually responded, intending to leave a message in two tweets. However, it only sent one tweet, and just... forgot to send the next part, I suppose.

"Upon careful review, we've confirmed that your channel was suspended for violating Google's Terms of Service," says YouTube support. "While it didn't violate any YouTube channel monetization policies, it's linked to a Google acct that has an issue."

Since we never got the second part of that message, we have no idea what caused the channel's ban, and why it kicked in shortly after Wiles shared a VOD of her Baldur's Gate 3 stream. In any case, her Twitch channel is still up, if you're hoping to tune in to her next Baldur's Gate session.

Absolutely bizarre. What kind of Google Account issue can get you banned from YouTube? They already killed all their other social platforms, so it can't be something she did on Groups or Chat. (Did these get merged into + and Hangouts before being killed off? They've had so many of these.) Maybe she did a chargeback on a Play Store purchase or something? I feel like that would be pretty obvious to her, though, and she seems as confused as everyone else.