The timing is… Odd. We know that Aang died somewhere in his 30’s. Maybe in his 40’s. And Korra was born when he died. TLOK starts when she is 18. So yeah, TLA’s cast definitely looks way too old for the timing.

God I hate when apps don’t have properly marked fields. You can mark your fields as username/password/street address/phone number/etc and browsers will automatically be able to detect them. So they can suggest autofill for the respective fields. But so many sites just… Refuse to properly mark their fields?

I know autofill hijacking was a problem for a while. For instance, a malicious ad could have off-screen autofill fields. So your browser would autofill them and the ad would capture the data. It was super scummy, and is why browsers moved towards prompting for autofill instead of just doing it automatically. But this is no excuse for sites to break paste on their own fields. It adds nothing to security, and only encourages weak passwords.

Nope, it takes place with the main cast from The Last Airbender in their 20’s. So ~10 years after the end of The Last Airbender, and probably 25-30 years before the start of The Legend of Korra.

Yes, it is real. The “first” movie was the live action version that was universally hated. It was an attempt to retell the first season to The Last Airbender, but it absolutely failed in that regard. This new movie has absolutely nothing to do with it.

This new one is a sort of bridge between the end of The Last Airbender and the start of The Legend of Korra. It’s with the main cast in their 20’s. So ~10 years after the end of ATLA, and probably 25-30 years before the start of TLOK.

The new movie is… Alright? The animation is gorgeous, and the fight choreography definitely feels more modern and fluid. It proves that The Last Airbender would have done really well in HD+widescreen, instead of the 4:3 SD that it originally aired in. The cast is more experienced in combat, and their teamwork is much more natural. My biggest complaint is the lack of substance. The big finale fight feels fun to watch, but there is very little substance because the individual characters simply haven’t had enough screen time. It would likely work better as an extended/director’s cut, because at only 90 minutes it feels a little too short for what they were trying to accomplish. Certain parts feel rushed, and I was left wondering where the rest of the movie was when it finished.

There’s also the whole “we already basically know how it ends, because we know how TLOK starts” problem. Since it’s a tie-in between the two series, we already know which characters come out of it and which don’t. So the stakes never really felt particularly high.

I think it’s just poor wording. It says they released tracks that were scraped from Spotify via BitTorrent. I think the punctuation and sentence structure is awkward. I think what they were trying to say was more along the lines of “they scraped millions of tracks from Spotify, and released them via BitTorrent.”

Still not technically correct, because you don’t release things via BitTorrent. But it at least clarifies that the songs were first scraped, and then released via torrent.

Why did they offer no contest at all?

Likely because contesting it would require doxxing themselves. The site’s admins survive on anonymity. And you can’t exactly be anonymous in court filings.

I mean, with lotto numbers you could just start trying to count. Once you can say the number, you move on to the next one. Depending on how the wish works, you could even try just sounding things out.

The meaning of life is mmmmmmmmaaaaaaaaaasssssssssstuuuuurrrrrrrrrrb-“ Hmm… What would come after the B? “The meaning of life is masturbaaaa-“… Oh. OH.

Alternatively, “was” is past tense. Meaning everything you’ve said in the past was correct. But that has no bearing on the future. The wish would undoubtedly fuck up a lot of things in the past from little daily white lies compounding (or even bigger childhood lies that could have drastically altered the world) but wouldn’t have any impact on things going forwards.

A genie would find a way to twist the wish for maximum suffering. And having your 4 year old “watch me, I can fly” lie be true would have some long lasting implications. Likely even leading up to a paradox where you were never even able to make the wish in the first place, because some childhood lie ended up getting you maimed or killed before you ever rubbed the lamp.

I think they meant that even when you have AI disabled, the top search results are still mostly AI slop.

I’d disagree with that definition. It’s a little like saying that a pedestrian who got hit and dragged by a car was “driving”. At best, it’s someone else forcing their usage upon you. In the cases you mentioned, it is someone else (usually a company looking to save on customer service) who is using AI. The users are the pedestrians in this case, and the companies using AI are the car.

I’m not setting that up for my aunt who lives 4 hours away. We did manage to get Plex running on her TV over the phone though.

I’ve said this exact same thing in the past and got flamed for it. The “grandma factor” is a very real consideration. My grandma lives almost 5 hours away. I’m not going to walk my grandma through side-loading the Jellyfin app onto her TV, because no native app exists on its App Store. She won’t understand what a Developer Mode for her TV is, let alone how to enable it. And even if it had a native app, the moment she has to input a custom URL for my server, she’ll shut down and say it’s too hard. But she already has a Netflix account, and understands the concept behind a login page. So I can easily walk her through Plex’s sign-in.

It’s also hard to understate how bad some of the Jellyfin vulnerabilities are. They’re straight up “people can completely bypass the login page to stream media from your server” bad. Sure, it requires knowing the file path ahead of time. And that might be a level of security… Except for the fact that basically everyone uses the Trash Guides to set their *arr’s up, which means they all have the same file structure and automatic naming schemes. And the Jellyfin devs have stated that they likely won’t ever fix many of the biggest vulnerabilities, because it would require completely divesting from the Emby fork that the entire project is built on. Jellyfin is wonderful for LAN viewing. But holy shit please don’t expose it to the internet.

Bean Soup Theory in full swing. I fully believe that algorithmic feeds have heavily contributed to the rapid decline in reading comprehension. One of the biggest parts of reading comprehension is being able to identify the target audience for a piece of work. And most of the time, the answer is not “me”. In previous decades, if you saw something that didn’t pertain to you, you would move the fuck on.

But algorithms changed that. People got used to having feeds that are laser-focused on their personal interests. And this has led to a decline in reading comprehension, as people simply aren’t using that part of the skill anymore. So now when they encounter something that isn’t meant for them, they have a tendency to try to make it about them.

The phrase “bean soup theory” comes from a recipe for bean soup, which was full of angry commenters asking things like “but what if I don’t like beans” and “what would you replace the beans with if you don’t like eating them?” The obvious answer is that if you don’t like beans, don’t make bean soup. This recipe is clearly not meant for you. You should move the fuck on to find a recipe you’ll like. But those commenters are so used to algorithmic feeds that they have lost the ability to recognize when something is not aimed at them. So instead of going “oh, this isn’t about me” they got angry and tried to make it about them.

To bring it back to the main post, there are several incredible games on this list. Many of them are absolutely worth playing. But the above commenter had to make it about them, instead of going “eh, not interested” and just moving on.

I have a catch-all email domain, and this is exactly what I do. Walmart gets “[email protected]”, Target gets “[email protected]”, etc… All of them go to the same inbox, so I always know which email address they think I have. If I start getting spam addressed to [email protected], I know Walmart sold my info. I can just filter anything addressed to that account straight into my spam folder.

Yeah, that shit would get auto-filtered straight into the spam folder.

It’s more than that. I’m friends with a diagnosed sociopath. Zero empathy whatsoever. And he is 100% without a doubt the most dependable and moral person I know. He always keeps his word, is always willing to lend a hand if needed, and is a champion for things like harm reduction as public policy - Gun laws, drug reform, police reform, bodily autonomy, etc… As a teen, he went through a satanist moral philosophy kick, and basically came to terms with the fact that empathy isn’t required for objective morality. Each person can choose to do good, simply because it is the right thing to do. I fully believe that he’d be a serial killer (or at least some high powered CEO who ruins lives for the people that work in his company) without that philosophy.

It actually makes him angry when conservatives do and say shit like this… Because he sees it as a complete moral failing on their part, not a lack of empathy. Basically the difference between “you’re doing bad things because you can’t understand others” and “you’re doing bad things because you refuse to do better.”

The former could be used as a crutch to explain bad actions, but he absolutely rejects that possibility because his lived experience has taught him that understanding or empathizing with others isn’t a requirement for morality. So he basically falls back to the opposite of Hanlon’s Razor, where he refuses to accept stupidity as a blanket excuse for malicious actions.

Stupidity can be used as an excuse for individual actions. “Oops, sorry I bumped into you. I wasn’t watching where I was going.” But it doesn’t work for explaining a long term pattern of behavior where the person has had opportunities to learn and improve. The headline statement is not an isolated incident where it can be explained away with stupidity or a lack of empathy. It’s more like “I go out of my way to shoulder-check people.” And that’s an intentional pattern of behavior, not an accident.

I like both for different reasons. The older SOTN style ones are great for small detailed movement. Dodges are measured in individual pixels, not perfectly timed I-frames.

But I also love the faster paced movement on display here. Ori and the Blind Forest, Afterimage, Metroid Dread, etc are all great examples of solid movement-based games. Where if you’re sitting still, you’re not playing the game right. Fights are determined by your ability to time attacks and abuse counters/i-frames, quickly closing to striking distance and retreating before the enemy can counter.

Navigating in the latter games often feels much better. Simply walking from A to B tends to feel like a chore in earlier metroidvanias, because it’s a pretty simple thing to move around. At most, you usually have a double jump or dash, but that’s about as far as your movement options go. But with more movement options (and faster, more fluid movement,) going from A to B feels like its own part of the game. The Spider-Man games are a good example of how simply navigating can be entertaining.

It’s both. Governments have started subpoenaing the push notification servers for data, instead of targeting individual devices. That little pop-in that says who the message was from, and maybe a little bit of the body of the text? Yeah, the push notification server handled that, and the government has access to that server. So any notification you see on your screen, you can be pretty positive that the government has also seen.

But this is about the notification data being stored in a part of the phone that isn’t encrypted. Signal is (or at least claims to be) E2E encrypted, so it shouldn’t be possible for a warrant to get access to the messages in the app. But since the phone is storing those notifications in a separate area (which isn’t encrypted), the warrant was able to read them.

The point is that there are two different attack vectors, and you should harden your device against both.

They only understand when it personally affects them in some capacity.

I keep this image saved on my phone, because it is relevant way too often:

The study asked participants to mark the farthest region from center that they cared about. For instance, marking 4 means you also care about 3, 2, and 1. Liberals largely marked high numbers near the perimeter. Things like “all sentient life” or “all life, including non-sentient”… While conservatives tended towards marking low numbers near the center. Things like “my extended family” or “my closest friends”. So yes, in fact, many of them genuinely don’t care unless it affects them (their family or closest friends) directly.

She was studying Japanese at Uni, and I am 90% sure she was writing fan subs for Death Note, as it was coming out.

Another solid data point for my “horse girl to elder emo pipeline” theory. My working theory is that all horse girls eventually evolve into (at least) one of the following two groups: Elder emo girls, or tail girls.

Umamusume is a gotcha game

Small nitpick, but it’s actually “gatcha” or “gasha” because it comes from the Japanese word “gatchapon/gashapon”. The word is derived from two different Japanese onomatopoeias:
Gasha - The sound of a toy capsule dispenser handle being cranked/turned.
Pon - The sound of a toy capsule landing in the output slot of the machine.

Basically, you know those little coin-operated toy capsule dispensers that you can find in arcades? The ones that have little toys, stickers, candy, etc. inside? They usually look something like this:

Yeah, these things are wildly popular in Japan. They’re colloquially referred to as “gatchapon”. There are massive stores full of these gatchapon machines. Brands will do promos for new anime, TV shows, band album releases, etc… Collectors spend a lot of money to get the rare collectibles from these machines, because not all the toys are the same rarity.

And a gatchapon game is the same basic concept, but in a digital format. You get pulls/draws/{whatever the game calls them} via some method (usually purchasing them, because that is usually how the game makes money), and then those pulls are used to get new things. Sometimes characters, sometimes equipment, sometimes new outfits, etc… It’s literally gambling, because the best stuff is virtually always gated behind some hilariously small jackpot odds.

Again, small nitpick. I just think it’s interesting (and horrifying, because it’s literally slot machine style “keep rolling cuz the next one may be a jackpot” style gambling) how much the mobile game market has come to rely on gatcha mechanics in recent years. There is a lot of (well deserved) condemnation of loot boxes in kids games, but somehow gatcha games have managed to skirt around it.