Same with The Mysterious Benedict Society. I did find a site that would sell it to me on a disc, but once I received it, it became clear to me they didn’t actually have a license to do so and just sold me a bootleg. Oh well. I dunno why Disney just didn’t want my money in the first place.

It’s the “with which we are okay” that sounds a little stilted. Most speakers would probably phrase that part of the sentence as “which we’re okay with.” It’s just because “okay with” is so common that it almost feels like a transitive form of the verb “to be okay,” so splitting apart sounds odd.

Note that there’s already a different transitive verb “okay” which means “approve” or “authorize,” as in “the boss okayed your plan to use the forklift,” implying that the person doing this has authority or control over whether the thing happens. “I’m okay with it” by contrast typically means something like “I have no control over it but it also doesn’t trouble me.” “Unfazed by” (spelled in this way, not related to “phase”) would be a similar expression.

Capitalism is already a superintelligence, and its goals are misaligned with those of humanity.

Kinda feels like moving out of America ought to be covered by my health insurance, really

“No, I am not going with you to a concert in the park! There’s a zombie horde out there! We’ll get bitten!”

“Hey, even the WHO says it’s not an apocalypse anymore. The zombies are endemic now. You can’t live your life in fear.”

“Your mom was eaten by zombies literally last week.”

“Yeah but she had diabetes. There’s always gonna be people with preexisting conditions who are gonna be more vulnerable.”

“At least wear your denim jacket to make it harder for them to bite you!”

“There was a study in the Lancet that said heavy clothes don’t work.”

“You know full well that what they found was that requiring heavy clothes didn’t work because people just got bitten at the times when they weren’t wearing them.”

“The author himself said jackets don’t work.”

“He said that after he was bitten and just before demanding our brains!”

“Okay, sheeple. Oh, hey Mom. We’re just heading out to the concert.”

“Wait, your mom is here? I thought she was…”

“BRAAAAIINSSS…”

“You LET HER BACK IN after she died and came back as a zombie!?”

“Dude, she’s not infectious anymore. She caught it like four days ago.”

“That is NOT how this works! What… DON’T HUG HER!”

“Bye Mom, love you…ow!”

“She just bit you, didn’t she.”

“Nah, I’m fine. Let’s go to the concert.”

The code name of the first Steam Box, before it was released, was Piston, which fits the theme pretty well. e.g. https://www.polygon.com/2013/1/7/3849284/piston-valve-steam-box-xi3

Maybe they should patent it, to protect their TCP IP.

Switching my phone screen to black and white actually does help, but the temptation to switch back is powerful.

I don’t think it’s most yet, but it’s improving fast thanks to the Valve Steam Deck. Bazzite is probably the distro to look at for a machine that’s primarily for gaming; it’s based on the Steam Deck OS, but works on more machines. There are some high-profile games like Fortnite that won’t run on it, but a lot of stuff will, especially if it doesn’t rely on any fancy anti-cheat stuff.

I believe they were already required to use reflectors. Back in the 80’s when I was sometimes in Ohio with my parents we used to pass Amish buggies sometimes, and they always had an orange triangle retroreflector thing on the back.

Honestly it just reminds me of the moral panic over “cock ring Ken.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earring_Magic_Ken

(also amusing in this context to note that his earring is in his left ear, so I’m not sure even the homophobes were consistent about this)

No, because the map is showing how many reports they got. So it’s red where they got a lot of reports, and that correlates very tightly with where there are a lot of people, making the visualization kind of worthless.

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/heatmap_2x.png

One issue is that it can be leveraged to maintain a monopoly. Microsoft famously made a bunch of small modifications to the HTML standard, so that web sites that wanted to work with MS Internet Explorer had to write custom versions to be compatible. But because so many people just used IE because it was bundled with Windows, those “extensions” started to become their own standard, so that then other browsers had to adopt MS’s idiosyncrasies in order to be compatible with the sites, which in turn harmed standardization itself. They even had a term for this technique: “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.” It nearly worked for them until Google pushed them out with Chrome. Microsoft tried to do the same thing again with Java until the government got involved.

It’s complicated, certainly, but there are legitimate cases where “just a little tweak” can be quite a big problem for a standard.