Not the main issue of course, but I found this fun:

Both YouTubers said the exposed database records indicated significantly lower customer interest than previously reported. According to Coffeezilla, internal order identifiers suggested roughly 30,000 total orders associated with around 10,000 unique customers, far below earlier public estimates claiming nearly 600,000 reservations.

So this grift will only net them ~$3M, not sixty. My heart weeps for them.

At this point, I think its most lasting cultural impact is everyone’s opinion on how little cultural impact it had.

This is definitely the right community, LOL. I am absolutely a dogs>cats person, but this junior-high school-paper article has me questioning 20 years of a catless house.

There are a lot of very valid criticisms of American football. I love it, sometimes in spite of myself, but I won’t fault anyone who thinks it’s an overly-managed made-for-TV snoozefest with no rhythm whatsoever. For better or worse, though, those helmets and pads do not make it any less of a violent “manly” sport. Far from it: they are the way Americans make ourselves feel better about watching a literal bloodsport with a ball.

The way the game moves and the ruleset reward explosive impacts, and the unlimited substitutions mean players are selected and trained to optimize delivering and enduring that violence instead of, say, actually running for 80 minutes. The result is a dozen hits a game that would make a “biggest hits of the season” compilation video for rugby or Aussie rules. Also chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

America: No.

So many rainbow explosions…

Shows what you know! In most parts of the US, there is no train!

The DeBeers-ish sentimental marketing is also a bit of a scam, which ends up working nicely with the cost being a scam. I am very happy with my 25 year old English Lit degree; it was was what I was able to get through with where I was discipline-wise, and I did learn all those critical thinking and life skills, and it even opened adequate doors, career-wise. I reckon my grades were inflated somewhat by my professors’ sheer relief that I was engaging with the material and, for all their flaws, my papers were obviously my own work. Still, I think my memories would be very different if I had graduated with $180k of student loan debt from a bucolic college somewhere in the New England hills instead of a $2k balance on a Discover Card, incurred over 4.25 years of nonsense at local state U.

I’m all for college, and not just STEM and business. Frankly some our current generation of tech leaders could use to have taken a few more philosophy classes (except for Peter Thiel… oh my) or at least smoked a few more bowls with the liberal arts kids. Still, people need to be clear-eyed about what a degree will and won’t do, and they need to understand that you absolutely can and should put a price-tag on the experiences.

Bloemfontein, I think.

I don’t know if they still do, but for a long while IKEA was selling tabletops and shelves that were a honeycomb of cardboard with a very thin frame of some softwood or manufactured wood product, and then a synthetic woodgrain veneer. Super light, and pretty strong… for their weight.

And the need for “progressives” for the nerds who already had their distance vision murdered by genetics and books.

For the Z’ers, “books” are stacks of paper, typically glued together on one side, with a single audiobook or podcast transcribed onto them and displayed in a fixed font.

LOL, fair enough.

I use a fintech for my little glorified garage sale ecommerce site (literally hundreds of dollars of sales so far!). I have no idea how you burn through all that runway to do a slightly better banking app for some random regional bank, plus some agreements with the Credit Card companies and a crypto wallet.

The Eternals was a documentary.

nowlookhereaintnoneogothicpeninknonsenseahtellyoowhut justsumdangoletexashillbilliessippindangolecocktailsknowhudimean andwearinbowlerhatsandtiesandwatchindeadtreesandguesswhat well… dang.

dangoledwardgoreymaniguessthat’sboutright.

Theorizing about and then venting about Ocean Gate is one of my formative Fediverse memories. God what an ass Stockton Rush was.

I also love that this version of flat earth theory is perfectly okay with our living on the surface of a huge spherical object floating in space.

Only Steam refund I ever got was for a Pool of Radiance re-package. Spent WAY longer than the testing period just generating the party, because JFC was it tedious on early gold-box games, and by the time I started running into bugs (introduced in the update? original? Who even knows?) barely outside the gates to Old Phlan, it was theoretically way too late. I had to explain a forty-year-old game to the poor customer service rep, but I got my 8 bucks back.

I could, but that feels like way too much work.

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