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Today is my 18,627th day of boycotting Bud Lite. Not because I care who they have deals with. Simply because it sucks. But considering breaking the streak to avoid being associated with stupid.

Feeling pretty good today. Rode the stationary bike for 20 minutes. Been a while since I could do that!

Somebody's pregnant wife was rampaging through my kitchen this morning complaining there was nothing to eat and just being generally not chill. As an offering to appease the angry person, I made them an avocado toast with whatever we had. Toasted a large slice of bread in a pan and fried some Mexican cheese blend on one side, plated that cheese side down and spread avocado mixture (avocado, lemon juice, salt) on top. Chopped up some cherry tomats, squeezed out most of the juice, and sprinkled that all over the avocado then made a green onion-tajin sour cream in the blender and drizzled it over the maters. to finish I shredded a hard-boiled egg in a pile on top and then hit it with a dash of chipotle chili powder.

You mean this?

Yeah, that's faulty logic for allowing more surveillance and control. I'm willing to bet that most people have at least 1 or 2 skeletons in their closet. I, myself, may need a bigger closet in the future. For the sake of argument, let's just assume that Janet, a 17 year old student I just created out of thin air, is squeaky clean. She gets good grades, she doesn't smoke or do drugs, she's friendly to everyone, and she goes to church every Sunday. Janet has no problem with people snooping on her data and having control of her money, plus the current administration legitimately has our best intentions at heart (a likely story ). Their goal for snooping on data and installing systems to control money is to find suspicious activity, for example people buying lots of weapons, ammo, and chemicals that could be used to make explosives, that could be an indicator of a terrorist group. Janet supports centralized digital currency and the measure is pushed through legislature and instituted. Fast forward 10 years. Janet has made some mistakes in her life, this is a thing that people do. She got in with a bad crowd went down a dark road and did some things she now regrets. She's mostly back on the up and up, but she now has some things in her past that don't exactly portray her in the best light. More importantly, the administration has changed and this new administration has different views and is much more authoritarian. Janet is not a fan of this new administration and is part of a group speaking out against them. Said new administration now has the ammunition (mistakes in her past) to paint Janet as a dangerous individual and the tools (CDC) to freeze her bank account, the very tools she supported a decade earlier. This authoritarian administration has no qualms whatsoever with using flimsy arguments, or even fabricating "evidence" as an excuse to use the tools they inherited to their full extent to stamp out political dissidents. People don't think these things through. They're fine with giving the government tools of control when people they like and agree with are in control because those nasty people from the other side can be silenced with them. What happens when the people from the other side come into power and inherit said tools? Oops. Anyway, sorry to get political in this thread. I'm going to a baseball game today.

This is another fun channel to watch, he seems to be fairly objective and does some interesting topics.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65271302 The leaker was arrested, he's an unbelievable moron and this whole incident one day will provide comic relief for far future TV series about this war. In present time it's a bit less funny; here's hoping people leaking russia's secrets won't get exposed.

Picard 3.9 The Federation gazes into the abyss and gets what it deserves. And we see a ship that is not dark for the first time in nuTrek. What a contrast! Never thought I would envy (big spoiler below)

I'm the one taking most of those pictures I pretty much spent most of my time out of kit, serving as a wrangler for the folks in armour. If you watch through the series of Death March videos I'm lurking around the outskirts at various parts in my civvies and MMCC handler gear. However, I did manage to make time to take the throne for a time...

am incapable o' complaining while am a guest, save for when am paying for the guest-right such as staying at a hotel. have endured countless terrible meals, freezing temps, extreme heat and ill-trained pets/children with silent resolve 'cause the alternative is so antithetical to the way we were raised. HA! Good Fun!

am having no idea what the bud light story is 'bout as am only having seen it mentioned via on-line sources we don't consider to be newsworthy. has not been covered to any degree at npr/pbs, wapo or even cnn, so am not able to be bothered to educate our self further beyond a bare minimum. however... did a quick search for dylan mulvaney, a name we did not recognize until @Hurlshotmentioned, and am seeing mostly nypost and newsweek articles... nyt has one story posted one hour ago, but am nevertheless not curious enough to indulge in what am guessing is some kinda faux outrage if is getting mentions from nypost and the national review. as to clarence thomas, am thinking the new reveals run into some o' the same problems as does the old in that many readers, particular if they is liberal, is gonna see a wrong w/o being able to specific articulate a meaningful legal or ethical mistake. admitted, when we hear o' harlan crow we immediate think o' justified with a name like harlan crow, is difficult not to think appalachia royalty, eh? the thing is, mr. crow(e) (dewey or harlan) never had a case or controversy before the Court. mr. crow did not receive any specific legal benefit from his gifts to justice thomas. so... on a gut level most o' us is feeling it is wrong for a Justice to be accepting massive gifts from billionaires. admitted when is liberal billionaires making donations or gifts some boardies likely find a way to distinguish the wrong from what clarence did, but am nevertheless thinking the majority o' reasonable people see a problem with public servants receiving gifts particular if those individuals invested with the public trust is taking efforts to hide such gifting. why hide if it ain't wrong, eh? the thing is, while is not difficult to see what thomas did wrong, it is gonna be far more difficult to articulate a specific ethical or legal wrong. even if thomas didn't report proper, the rationale for judges reporting gifts is not to prevent the accepting o' gifts but rather to prevent unknown conflicts o' interest from escaping scrutiny. the thing is, harlan crow does not appear to have benefited from the failures to report and Justices is functional free o' such burdens in any event as SCOTUS is different as stated previous. should not be so challenging to articulate an actionable wrong by thomas, but it is. HA! Good Fun!

There's a good chance at least one of the "anti-woke" light beers, "Conservative Dad's Ultra Right Beer", is a white label Anheuser-Busch.

I had no idea who Dylan Mulvaney was until some very dumb people got obsessively mad at her. I still do not really know who she is. Good luck, the stupid has bought all the bud lite to film themselves shooting it. One upmanship and algorithmic incentives. A lot of these things are stunts by people competing for the attention of increasingly unhinged people whose audience constantly expects more. Also they will start getting scammed into paying 30 bucks for a six-pack of piss water.

Every like five to ten minutes I need to take a break because I just can't. It's... painful. Still not done, 20 minutes into the episode, and I started watching a day ago.

Unsurprisingly, I've not met many people at work and such that seem to mind. Most common logical error being "I've got nothing to hide". Most people also don't have a basic comprehension that putting backdoors into encryption makes encryption practically irrelevant. Oh well.

As far as conspiracy theories go, I think this is a rather plausible one, give that data has become one of the top, if not THE TOP, commodities of the internet era. The data doesn't necessarily have to be used for nefarious purposes, it could just be companies trying to asses spending patterns for sales strategies. Still, I'm not cool with it.

@majestic good news, he is not part of the radical left but is apparently linked to right-wing extremist ideology He is clearly naughty

They need to throw the book at him and I hope he spends at least 20 years in jail This cavalier attitude towards national security from people responsible for protecting that national security needs to end

This isn't Overwatch, Rainbow Six or Fortnite. It's a survival crafting game, by the end of the game things should be easier, its called progression. So stop nerfing builds that make the game easier, the only people who seem to be bothered by strong builds are you, because anyone else who plays the game doesn't like them can just not use it. Like the Unarmed build, it got nerfed into the ground, why? I don't think anyone complained. I don't think anyone suggested nerfing it. And it's not like the players are being forced to use it, it's entirely optional. So I really don't see what the point in nerfing it is, other than you guys wanting to maintain an iron grip on the fun experience that this game has the potential to be.

I have. The teleporters do have their drawbacks, which I've spoiler tagged in case you want to find out for yourself: I'd say that the locations the Map Room connects to generally are still useful, especially since some you can't build close to (like the Archives), but having only Map Room that can be reached with a teleport is probably sufficient. They also just allow for much freer base location choice since being near an Obelisk doesn't really matter at all anymore. Especially nice for those among us that don't really use mounts... Obviously, they're absolutely fantastic on Siptah because no map room there at all, and rare materials are anything but on Siptah

I honestly didn't know there was a Trine 2. https://www.pcgamer.com/eve-online-player-uses-obscure-rule-to-pull-off-the-biggest-heist-in-the-games-history/ Why paranoia is your friend in EVE (although if you play the game, you probably already had it)

There's that, plus the conspiracy theory angle is that digital purchases are easy to track whereas cash purchases are much harder to track. So if somebody wants to know what people are buying, when, and how often, whether it's the government doing the snooping, corporations, or whoever, that's easy to do if everybody buys everything digitally.

idk, when I see pictures of giant huntsman spiders just chilling out on walls, I think "eh, at least she actually earns her keep around the house unlike my stupid cat" oh who's a good spider, who's a good spider? youse a good spider! -spider expert

A little bit more about Russian military recruitment

https://www.ktvu.com/news/emeryville-man-arrested-in-connection-with-stabbing-death-of-cash-app-exec-bob-lee Apparently it was a very personal attack and they were traveling together. People have been holding this up as an example about how dangerous and lawless San Francisco is, so I'm sure they will all be chagrined to know it wasn't a random act of violence or a mugging by a homeless person. Yes, I'm sure all the people slandering SF will retract their statements. :(

Nice and it makes sense, once the war is over some of the $300 billion of frozen Russian foreign reserve can be used to help rebuild Ukraine especially considering how the Ruskies have deliberately targeted civilian infrastructure

Assetto Corsa Competizione will have new DLC released next week. Three new GT3 Cars (Ferrari, Lamborghini and Porsche) and a new track in Valencia. It’s track number 23

Been swapping between Conan Exiles, and Elite Dangerous (since Star Citizen 3.18 is still a disaster area). In Elite I made the dumb decision to fly to Colonia, the furthest out inhabited system, as a rookie. It was a learning experience, to be sure, made a lot of bank too, but really dreading flying back to the Bubble... The universe is big, it turns out. Who'd a' thunk? I've also started flying with HOSAS. Just soooo much more enjoyable, and I got used to movement surprisingly quickly. Star Citizen uses the 6DoF a lot more actively though, so it will be interesting to see how I manage there. Also, manual landings in SC... In Conan Exiles I've picked up a character I created a long time ago but didn't do much with[*]. Decided to build in the Savannah as starting location and started building a main base on the volcano (near the hidden exit), linking both with a portal. Bit of a shame that even though you can build up pretty darn high you literally have no view due to all the clouds Also the size of the map room is getting really annoying (only took, errr, all these years for me to get annoyed by it? ), creates some annoying constraints if you're trying to build in weird spaces. I wonder if there's any mods that just shrink it down a bit. The in-game store is also starting to really annoy me. Funcom always claimed DLC were locked down for modders so the assets don't get stolen (which is why there's no mods to improve/extend Siptah, for example), but now they're selling extension building pieces to the already very expensive DLC at absurd prices on their in-game store At least they finally fixed most of the snap points on the DLC building pieces. Really, I love Conan Exiles, but I'm not touching that new Dune survival game from Funcom due to how absolutely disgusting their treatment of CE has been. Anyway, goal-wise I've been going through the new Journey steps. It seems they completely dropped guiding players through the storyline of the Exiled Lands, which is a real shame. The new system is just a bunch of tutorials and doesn't really guide people towards any of the story stuff at all, omitting some of the really important parts for the plot entirely (eg. some story-related dungeons aren't in any of the steps). Really hope they revise these, uncovering the story was one of the main things I liked about CE compared to most of these types of games (like Ark, for example), but some of the steps are really...obtuse so the guidance of the Journal was helpful at quite a few points. [*] I created a little tool to be able to switch between chars on the same save db, or create a new char even. There's tools that do the same out there as well, but the ones I found weren't updated in ages, or not FLOSS. Regardless it can quite easily be done manually if you know some SQL.

Europe is about to launch one of its most ambitious missions ever | Ars Technica 8 year journey!

Just so I don't fill up the "what you did today" thread as SWC was going on, I thought I'd do a bit of a picture bomb here:

Playing around with Steam Link. Pale spider on hardcore is still kinda tough.

https://nypost.com/2023/04/13/conservative-dad-has-ultra-right-beer-amid-bud-light-dylan-mulvaney/ $20 for a six pack ?

I like that people are buying Bud Light to film themselves destroying it. The Internet was a mistake.

Dune (1984) It's really dumb and silly, like a Star Wars knockoff with an R rating made by people doing too much mind altering substances. Easily the worst David Lynch film, but it works for me as a campy sci-fantasy romp.

That would fit very well into the EU/Swedish plan to mass surveil everything, like "Chat Control 2.0"