fwiw I’m nearly 30 and I’ve never heard that phrase in my life. Maybe a regional thing?

Ohhh, that’s where “dime you out” comes from.

Installing GrapheneOS on my pixel was easy, but I had to go through hoops to get my old Motorola G7 running iirc PostmarketOS (now called Nura).

Had to install some program on my desktop so I could ask my connected phone for a series of unique character strings through the terminal, then enter them in a specific order on Motorola’s website where they check if your phone is applicable for unlocking bootloading. It says no, so I look around and find a list of carrier codes that indicate whether or not it should be, and mine should. I ended up finding some forum posts from years ago talking about how the website is wrong and lies to you, and that if you change the url that it gives for applicable devices to include your phone’s strings then it’ll correctly identify the device as applicable for bootloader unlocking. Finally got then to send me an email with the unique code for my phone, and I was able to follow the instructions to install PostmarketOS.

The British Navy fired mortars — whose projectiles can explode midair — from bomb ships to bombard Fort McHenry, along with using Congreve rockets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Baltimore

Lol I looked the post up after seeing the meme a couple days ago. The user has been made aware that they’re now somewhat internet famous.

Literally the same thing happened to me with a cousin who convinced me to try some online version of the game. Played two games where he steamrolled me without explaining how and why everything was happening and I was like “yeah I’m good thanks”.

Funnily enough, someone else online convinced me to play the Digimon TCG on tabletop simulator with them, and it went well enough that we continued a couple times a week for months. He did a much better job of explaining every step of the game, and I was winning maybe a third of the games towards the end. Commandramons, my beloveds.

I haven’t heard that term before, but I have noticed “hipster” being used less in recent years.

I’ve had maybe a dozen drinks since my first one 7 years ago, and most of those were bagged fruity frozen drinks that, yeah, helped hide the alcohol flavor. Would have been better as just nonalcoholic frozen fruity drinks. Mocktails can be good but imo most of the ones I’ve had were overpriced for juice and soda water.

Outside of those, I had some sips of an IPA and a pilsner on a food tour, tried a couple cocktails my folks made after they got back from a cruise (which was weird because I never saw them drink before), tried whatever drink has a salt rim at a restaurant (it was terrible). Haven’t had anything this year. Never been buzzed.

But some of them don’t tell you that when you first set it, so you have to call tech support and, after sending you a temporary password to log in and set a new password which then also doesn’t work, they’re like “wait, you can’t have & or ! in the password — try it without,” and it works because it accepted the password but removed all special characters without telling you 🙃

Of note are mirror ambigrams. Particularly vertical axis mirror ambigrams, in this instance. That is, words that could be read by reflecting the design. Basile Morin has a list of ambigrams – mirror and otherwise – that they’ve designed on their website here.

I’ve been listening to The Dawn of Everything, a New History of Humanity the past couple weeks and it’s been quite interesting. Particularly relevant to this topic is how many societies we have evidence for — through actual contact and documentation or through archaeological findings and anthropological research — that either consciously did not develop or later abolished a ruling class, whether as devolved cultural groups or even in cities of tens of thousands. Examples are given for cities in Mesopotamia, Yucatan, iirc north of the Black Sea, and other areas.

Lots of interesting stuff on personal freedom, collective decision-making, community care, agriculture and conscious lack thereof, etc.

All equines originated from North America, at that, though yes they went extinct and were later reintroduced by Europeans.

Similarly, camelids like dromedaries, bactrians, llamas, alpacas, vicuñas, and guanacos also all originate from North America, their genetic ancestors crossing the Bering strait and moving west or moving south into South America. Those still in NA died in the mid-Pleistocene.

And ducks. I’ve had a couple generations of ducks and they’re so adorable as ducklings, including the newborns. The adults are pretty, though; got one whose black feathers look plain from a distance but are an iridescent sort of deep purple and green closer up.

I wrote a reply earlier but my app was being futzy and it looks like it didn’t send. Apologies if this double-posts.

I wasn’t making an absolutist statement on folks’ tastes in games (or any media). I don’t believe that most Hearts of Iron players are fascists any more than I believe that most Crusader Kings players want to bang their sisters and play eugenics, or that Factorio players want to terraform an alien planet into a concrete and steel wasteland and kill all native life.

You don’t need to be a fascist to enjoy playing as a historical “bad guy”, but, especially as it concerns real-world politics then and now, media centered or themed around the time during which fascism evolved will naturally attract a greater audience of that leaning than media that doesn’t. I personally have a greater interest in the mid 19th-mid 20th centuries than many other points in history due to the rapid sociological, political, and technological advancements of the era – particularly labor theory and uprisings – so I get drawn to games like Victoria for those systems.

I think they’re referring to the observed propensity for those who are “really into” world war II history to be right-wing, so 1930s-1940s-ish. This obviously isn’t ubiquitous, but having a particular interest in the second world war has definitely taken on a reputation.

Anecdotally, playing Paradox’s grand strategy games, Hearts of Iron has more noticeable fascists, or at least players who near-exclusively play fascist nations “because it’s just so interesting”. I have some cousins who mostly play fascist Germany.

Reminds me that a couple years ago I went back to Morrowind for the first time since I was a kid. Lot of nostalgia built up, and I still like it for what it is.

I hit some enemy (one of them little bugs on the trail to Balmorra) and the game’s like “you missed”. Excuse me? No, I didn’t. I modded that out because that system only makes sense in turn-based RPGs or Disco-esque dialog that can easily and visually account for it; not in an action RPG. Damage resistance (or even immunity) can be fine, but attacks that visually hit but the game says miss never feel fair. Definitely a quirk of early games in the genre.

I do overall prefer its expanded skill and gear system over later entries’ more simplified ones, though.

Uranus is Greek; the Roman equivalent would be Caelus.

Okay, so obviously conch shells had to come from somewhere, but I’d never considered what a conch was until right this second.

Yeah, there’s a few subs that I miss — particularly the ones for my city and my state — but r/twobestfriendsplay is top of the list. It was by far the sub that I most enjoyed interacting with since I joined years ago. Lots of power users who I’d immediately recognize by pfp.

The actual group that it’s named after broke up a decade ago — they’ve been disbanded longer than they were a thing — but it was still loosely connected to a couple of the guys’ ongoing careers, particularly two of them who host a podcast and stream separately. More importantly, it was a hub for discussion on games, movies, shows, comics, whatever, niche or popular, even if the relevance to the group was tenuous; the mods tried to block some topics but lost the battle on vtubers after the guys had Mori Calliope on the podcast, lol. I imagine it’s even more lifted now that one of them streams with several vtubers.

tl;dr yeah I really miss some niche communities I’d been subbed to for years.

E