My mother watches Fallout. She's 71, and has tried playing games a couple times. I think she tried Super Mario Bros. on the NES (when it was brand new and none of us could get the hang of jumping while running, like yeah, the idea of holding B while moving to run and, while still holding B, hitting A to jump) and gave up for years. She tried a game like Tomb Raider on PS2. I remember what it looked like but not what it was. It was one of those type of games though. And I think my brother got her to try something on Xbox (the OG one) once. Halo maybe? Anyway, she hates games and can't get the hang of them. Even games that run on the tablet she has, like match-3 types (Candy Crush or Royal Match) or something like Subway Surfers or Jetpack Joyride (an endless runner). She could probably do solitaire, poker, something like that. (Maybe Balatro?) I wonder if she could do Animal Crossing. Well, at least until the spiders and tarantulas show up — serious arachnophobia there.

But yes, my mother watches Fallout. She thinks parts of it are weird (the Vaults, the Brotherhood of Steel) but she thinks it's a fun fantasy adventure that kind of reminds her of Mad Max a little. She knows my brother and I play the games (not the turn-based ones and not 76), but has no interest in the games at all.

It’s like memes go back in time. I first heard this as a Nickelback joke.

Don't get why the one on the left was kicked out. Makes no sense regardless of your political leaning.

The one on the right... it begs the question, if a cis woman can be kicked out of a women's bathroom for not looking feminine enough, rude and wrong as that is... is she supposed to go in the men's room?

The real question being begged is, can we just get individual bathrooms in public? That's the real answer. As a man, I don't want to share a bathroom with other guys. Not because I'm threatened by them, but because bathroom time is private time.

Alternatively, we could just have coed communal bathrooms everyone uses, everyone uses a stall, everyone washes their hands in the same line. Fathers of daughters might be upset, but they could go in with them.

All this bathroom shit is dumb as hell. Focus on the addicts shooting up in bathrooms, get them the help they need, leave everyone else the hell alone.

Hope they get millions. Would be better if it happened in the Deep South but we know they wouldn't get shit.

I know this is just a meme, but I have the answer to this, if anyone cares to hear it.

Most people probably think writing is like reading, linear, chapter one, then chapter two, and so on. And some writers do write like this. Stephen King writes like that. He also strongly believes if the story doesn’t hold up, it wasn’t good enough to write. And then he drops it. His bibliography speaks for itself.

It doesn’t have to be like that, though. There are two kinds of writers. Pantsers — as in, they write by the seat of their pants — is the first kind. Then you have plotters. A lot of what they write isn’t for the story. They plot their course in advance. They write a story bible about the characters and setting — this is easier to stick to than the actual story because it’s just notes, no pressure. They also write out an outline, like a table of contents.

The most interesting thing about plotters is, they don’t start the story at the beginning. They write their favorite scenes first, then they connect them. As they write more, divine more context, they rewrite their favorite scenes, shaping them as they go. The connecting parts might only get written once, but those memorable scenes? They keep coming back to them, refining them so they’re just right, so the reader never forgets them.

There are programs designed for plotters. Pantsers can just use Word, Google Docs, or even Notepad/TextEdit or the like. Plotters can use those (Vonnegut used note cards!), but there are dedicated tools. Scrivener is one of them. It lets you write scenes, write about characters, build an outline, and at the end you can put it all together. I think the software is kind of confusing, so I didn’t buy a license, but it has a generous 60 day trial.

Android being open is a myth designed to entice low level techs who don't know any better. AOSP is open, but nobody's trying to run that. The thing that ran on Nexus phones before and Pixel phones now is not open source, but it was forked from open source. Just like the relationship between chromium and Chrome.

Android can't keep open because it isn't open. What you want is for bootloaders to remain unlockable so you can flash custom firmware. A close second is for a common hardware platform so custom ROMs can be ported from device to device with relative ease.

Android is not your friend. If your camera needs to spy on you, then it's not your camera.

I use iPhone myself — though I was an Android user longer, and I enjoy both mobile platforms for their various strengths — but we really do need a third option. So Android is kind of like Windows now, it leans heavy into AI (especially on the Pixel side), and it's on everything (except the iPhone), and iPhone has always just been a pocket Mac, but with the walled app garden. Apple says you can trust them with your personal data, but you don't know that and Apple is big enough that they can basically do whatever they want — and they've been cosying up to fascists in the US. So that's unsettling. Mobiles need a Linux option. A totally open source option that serves the user exclusively, or can be made to do so. GrapheneOS is a fine choice, but it's limited to Pixels. If you have anything else, you're out of luck, and if you have a Pixel, you or someone else has paid Google iPhone money for a device that's at least a few generations behind performance-wise. So not ideal.

Of course, most Android users and certainly most Android fans won't care about this — I'm coming from the privacy perspective. And Google's always been pretty clear that they are not there for your privacy.

False, and deliberately misleading headline: ChatGPT, as yet, has no hardware component. It's just gonna be able to talk dirty like the others (Facebook's and Twitter's) have already done.

Though I have no doubt, when AI-powered maid bots start coming out (Japan has prototyped them) that there will be a sex module that can be added (an input version and an output version) and the bot will be able to be modified to use either one.

Isn't that the guy from The Bear and Shameless?

I recognise it as being used by Pink Floyd, but I don't recognise it as a symbol of Pink Floyd fandom — that's more commonly the prism, or any of the album covers.

Could just be a symbol they thought looked cool without any real meaning behind it. Something like that, I'd just ask. And play dumb in case they're dangerous. Like "isn't that from Pink Floyd or something?" If they shy away from the question or say something like "nah it means something else" it's probably exactly what you think it is. Then again, if it is Pink Floyd, expect a lecture. Just tell them A Momentary Lapse of Reason was better than Dark Side of the Moon and see if they write you off as crazy rather than try to correct you. (I do personally think Momentary Lapse was the better album, but I'm not about to tell a Pink Floyd fan that. The hot take I will share with one is that the one with the stupidly long title on Ummagumma (they'll tell you the whole name) is one of their most ambitious tracks. That, I think, might at least get some respect. (The title is something like "Several Species of Small Furry Animals Grooving With a Pict." But I think there's more to it.)

That baby is still chasing the dollar 30-odd years later!

Dude just wants to get paid without having to lift a finger. I don’t blame him, I blame the system that enables him and the society that failed to instill within him a work ethic.

When it went up from $15 to $20 I stopped paying automatically, figured I'd just sub some months. Like when Blue Prince came out, I paid for a month.

Now it's doubled? I'll never re-up. I have a Series X — I'll never buy a game new for Xbox at this point.

When my last computers went out, I replaced them with Macs. They doubled the price of Microsoft 365 so I dropped that too. iWork is fine (and there's LibreOffice for non-Mac users (and for us as well) and that looks like it's gotten better than last time I tried it). For free, I'm not complaining. If I were, I'd have decent options.

I feel like Microsoft is taking a nose-dive in more than just gaming.

Anything by Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp). Facebook literally got people killed by volunteering their location data to a tyrannical government in a third world country. Don't think they won't do that to Americans.

Android (the mobile OS) kind of is. The only reason Google bought the hobby project to put Linux on smartphones was because they could collect more data with it than they could with Gmail. You can get a Pixel device and install GrapheneOS on it, but not even 1% of Android users are turning off telemetry (which only anonymises it), let alone installing custom firmware that doesn't have it. I'm not saying iOS isn't — because it's not open source, we don't know — but I am saying Android definitely is. And I don't just mean Pixels — to use the Android brand, Google requires certain things of OEMs like Samsung, from having Gmail and/or Chrome on the main home screen, to having Google Play Services, which does the data collecting, installed. (I'm pretty sure the Play Store actually requires it. Forks that don't use the Android branding, like Amazon's Fire OS, don't have this restriction, but Amazon probably has plenty of other crap in theirs.)

Now, I never said Android was a honeypot, and it may not be. But Google was just sued for antitrust, and they made a deal to keep Chrome and Android under their banner. We don't know what the terms of that deal are. I would consider both of them to be compromised by bad actors (potentially they always were since Google was selling the data). Don't think so much about who you call (though that can be valuable) but like, your Maps data, anything you put in Health (like if you're female, like if you miss two or more periods but not eight or nine and then start back up again, I'm sure the GOP would love to know that — for the dense fellas, it could mean she got pregnant and then terminated it, or the pregnancy failed somehow). Tim Cook's advice of "get your mom an iPhone" doesn't sound so far fetched now. Your sister, too. Heck, specifically regarding Health, Samsung put out an update last year, maybe the year before — that is, before the current administration — saying if you keep using Health, they can sell your information to whoever they want. Either agree and keep using it, or disagree and they delete your data. At this point, no stock Android phone can be trusted to keep your information private. It's different if you use GrapheneOS, but that requires buying a Pixel, putting money in Google's pocket. The Pixel 10 is what, about as powerful as an iPhone 11? A 12 maybe? And it costs the same as an iPhone 16. You decide. Personally I don't think it looks like a very good deal.