Those all actually came from a variety of GMs and players, since I’ve been playing for years and have amassed quite a list. Feel free to create your own content if you don’t like what’s already there.

“Effect” is a noun, while “affect” is a verb. You can cause effects, by affecting something. “Affecting” is the act of causing effects, while “effects” are the actual causes of an affliction.

As an example, let’s say you get drunk. There are two different ways to phrase the same scenario: you are feeling the effects of the drinking, or you are being affected by the drinks. The end result is the same, but you need separate words for them.

In the former, you are feeling the effects. Feeling is the verb, effects is a noun. The same way you would feel the clothes against your skin, or the ground beneath your feet. But with the latter phrasing, the drink is acting upon you, so you need a verb; You are being affected by it. The same way you would be affected by someone else in the bar pushing you. Falling over is the effect, because you were affected by the push.

Honestly, if you ask for someone’s date of birth and they just give you the month and day, that’s about as useful as saying it was a Wednesday.

Which is honestly all you should feel obligated to give them, since it’s illegal to discriminate based on age. The only potential reason an employer would need to ask for birthday during hiring is to be able to distinguish between applicants with identical names.

Same. There are a lot of sites that just outright refuse to accept my email address that I’ve had for years, because it’s not a .com TLD.

Because you can control exactly what is on your server. I do the same thing via Plex. I want to watch a movie and it got pulled from the half dozen streaming services I have access to? Fuck it, just download it and add it to my own personal server. Now I have it forever and ever until I decide I’m done watching it.

My two smart TV’s are the most blocked devices by my network’s pihole. It’s not even close.

The first two are my two TVs, (one is a Samsung, the other is a Roku,) and the third is my phone that I’ve been doomscrolling on all day. The “better” TV has almost 3x as many blocked requests as my phone, even though I only used my TV for about an hour today.

Yes. Many of the chimps in the animal trials died horribly excruciating deaths, and Neuralink tried to bury the studies.

That’s largely a corporate decision that is out of the hands of the programmers. Generally speaking, security specialists would agree with you. But running anticheat on the server costs server resources, which means you need more servers to accommodate the same number of players. Running it client-side is a cost cutting measure mandated by the corporate bean counters who did the math and concluded it’d be cheaper for the company to spend the users’ computer resources instead.

While I agree that client-side security isn’t the best solution, it’s certainly better than no solution. It’s the same argument people have against self-driving cars. The self-driving cars don’t need to be perfect; They just need to be better than the average driver. If they can reduce the number and severity of accidents that are currently happening without them, then they should be implemented. Even if the solution isn’t perfect. Because an imperfect solution is better than doing nothing at all.

And that definition depends on how you define “benefitting the user”. If someone has an online match ruined by a hacker, I’d argue that they would have benefitted from the game running some kind of anticheat.

Do we define user as the singular individual person? Or do we consider the user as a collective, and factor in the larger benefit to the masses? It could even be argued that the people running cheats are the ones running malware (specifically, malware that targets the other users in the match) and should therefore be treated the same way we treat people who use more traditional viruses and trojans at the detriment to others. The same way you wouldn’t want some virus-ridden machine connecting to your home network, (you’d probably want everyone to at least be running a basic virus scanner and have common sense when browsing,) you would want everyone in the game running anticheat to ensure there is no malware.

Very few people would say that it’s okay to waste others’ time and computer resources on a bitcoin miner trojan… Most people would (correctly) determine that it is theft. But then when it comes to online games, the same people feel entitled to waste other peoples’ time and computer resources by ruining their matches.

It doesn’t help that the “both sides are bad” argument is commonly used by right wing trolls. Lots of liberals have the immediate reaction to get defensive because they’ve seen how quickly the “ugh this specific thing I don’t like sucks” argument devolves into “nothing has changed with Joe so it doesn’t make a difference,” which leads into “might as well not vote at all, or vote red because it doesn’t make a difference.”

Yup. Every time I feed it my code, I find some new trick or method I hadn’t thought of before. Being self-taught, it really is a remarkable tool for seeing what efficient code looks like.

I actually have used it to debug code before. Not an entire program (yet) but it’s great for snippets where you’re just missing a semicolon or bracket, or need advice on how to properly call a weird function. It also writes small things like batch files incredibly well. Just like with regular language, it’s great for a few paragraphs, then begins to drift as it struggles to parse longer conversations. So if you only need it for a few “paragraphs” of code, it’s great.

IIRC, South Korea charges an import tax for foreign media. It’s part of why Korea has become a sort of media powerhouse, with K-pop, K-dramas, K-comics, etc… Those things are much cheaper in SK because they’re all local and aren’t being charged that extra tax. So they’re naturally very popular in SK because they’re much cheaper. Sort of a positive feedback loop where the media is cheaper so people consume more of it, which makes the media popular enough to survive on its own outside of Korea as well.

I’m just going to leave this handy dandy FCC complaint form here. Don’t mind me.

Reject modernity; Return to MS-DOS

Yup. I work in media, and there are a lot of media programs that are Mac exclusive. Even worse, Apple insists on breaking lots of them with every update. So at work, we always have to decline updates for a week or two until all of our programs have a chance to update and unfuck everything Apple did.

The worst case was when Apple came out with the M1 Mac’s. One of our programs took almost a year and a half to finally get updated to work on M1 processors. And of course, this was right around the time that we were looking into upgrading our Macs, because our existing ones were starting to show their age. So we just had to sit on our hands (and put the funding towards something else) until the mission-critical programs we needed all got their proper updates.

The original GameBoy went for ~$90 retail when it first launched, which is worth ~$220 once you adjust for inflation from 1989. All things considered, a $250 price point is about on par with what people are willing to pay for a handheld.

Especially once you consider the fact that this is a relatively small business commissioning bespoke parts, and not the gaming powerhouse that Nintendo was when they launched the GameBoy; Nintendo was coming fresh off the massive successes of the NES and SNES. Nintendo had way more negotiating power against manufacturers, because they knew that they’d be selling hundreds of thousands of units, not just a few thousand. Manufacturers would be willing to retool entire production lines for Nintendo.

The top cavity-forming snack is actually Goldfish cheese crackers, IIRC. Because the snack sticks to your teeth really well and carbs get broken down into sugar anyways. Plus kids are worse about picking their teeth clean with their tongue; Adults will absentmindedly pick at their teeth much longer, but kids tend to lose interest quickly and just leave stuff stuck to their teeth. And since goldfish is a common snack for kids, all of that combines into Goldfish being really horrible for causing cavities, particularly in kids.

25 is still young. You’ve got plenty of time. I’m in my 30’s and only recently got engaged. Stop comparing yourself to all your friends who paired up in high school and got married at 20 years old; They’re the exception, not the norm. Even college is young to get married. And besides, chances are good that the early marriages won’t last more than a few years. Then they’ll be right where you are now, but with alimony payments to make.

Hell, remember that most characters in zillennial sitcoms like Friends, HIMYM, New Girl, etc were in their late 20’s and early 30’s. And those sitcoms revolve around dating.

Plex and Jellyfin are two ways to host your own content. Basically, instead of streaming from a Netflix server, you’re streaming from your own server.

Plex was the original, and Jellyfin is the FOSS alternative. In short, you run the program on a computer somewhere, and tell that program where all of your media is stored. It’ll scan your media depending on the library type (movies, TV shows, music, etc,) automatically pair it with the appropriate metadata, and make it available for streaming via the computer.

You can combine this with the *arr suite (Radarr, Sonarr, etc) to have your torrent client automatically download new content as it comes out. Basically, the appropriate *arr program listens for when new content gets released, then automatically tells your torrent client to search for that content (based on specific rules like language, bitrate, capture method, etc) and download it automatically. This pairs nicely with Plex/Jellyfin because you can use automatic torrent management to drop the files directly into the right folders for your server to scan and make available.

It does have a few drawbacks. One of the most annoying is port forwarding. Lots of VPNs have stopped offering port forwarding, because some creeps figured out how to use it to share/trade CSAM anonymously. But Plex and Jellyfin require an open port in order to be made available outside of your network, and you don’t want to run the server+torrents without a VPN. Some VPNs allow port forwarding, but randomly assign the port every time you connect. So it may work fine for a while, but will require occasional attention when that port changes.

There’s also the issue with needing a computer that’s turned on all the time. Some people (like myself) just run it on their home desktop. But that means I needed to set up Wake On LAN to be able to boot my computer up remotely, or just be okay with letting it idle all the time and never sleep. Personally, I chose to enable WOL, so I just remote into my network and send a magic packet before trying to stream. But that’s an extra step some people won’t want to do every time. If you have an old computer sitting around gathering dust, it can be a great weekend project.