Sorry to hear about your friend, it sounds like you meant a lot to each other. I second that our friends all deserve to know how much we love them.

One of my favorite gaming memories is playing MW4: Mercenaries with roommates circa 2002, where I won the grand championship piloting a Cougar.

EDIT: Just remembered my “Daishi Pepperbox”: assault-class Daishi fitted with nothing but machine guns and as much frontal armor as it could carry. My strat was to charge straight at opponents, let the armor soak up incoming fire, then drop an alpha strike as soon as I got into machine gun range. Watching their mech turn from green to red to black on my HUD in just a handful of seconds was glorious.

Because fedoras are optimized for low overhead. 🥁

Some of my favs are:
Feminazgûl
Ancst (more crust than DM, but still a good time)
Panopticon (black metal that likes to assimilate other genres, like bluegrass and jazz)
White Ward (Ukrainian; not exactly leftist, but one of my favs. They like to blend black metal with dark/doom jazz)
Sankara
Zealotry

Here’s a simple way to think about how email address lines work for business emails:

To: The main audience. These are the people the message is intended for and who may need to respond or take action.

Cc (Carbon copy): People who should stay informed but are not the main audience. Think of this as an FYI list. If someone in Cc has information that would help everyone, they can use Reply All and join the conversation.

Bcc (Blind carbon copy): People who should receive the email without other recipients knowing they were included. Recipients in Bcc are hidden from everyone else and are not included in future replies unless someone adds them again. For instance, if you’re sending an announcement to a large group, you might put everyone in Bcc to keep their email addresses private and ensure that replies are sent to the original sender only. Another common use is keeping a manager informed without making them part of the ongoing email discussion.

Sure, please do. I’m just a cog in the industrial machine and life insurance payouts will get my family out of debt.

YT Music also has an AI impostor problem.

I was listening to Crimson Veil (melodic grey metal, woman vocalist) when it started playing songs of a completely different genre, but the ‘band’ was still “Crimson Veil”; but this other music was drone-y industrial with flat, uninspired lyrics that felt AI generated. I poked around a few other streaming platforms and found the same thing on Spotify and Tidal. I think the band was eventually able to get the impostor removed, but they were up there for at least a couple weeks.

Lots of musicians are getting their discographies infiltrated this way. The last time I listened to Primus on Tidal, there was an AI generated rap group, and an AI generated blue/jazz act listed in their discography. The streaming services must know that this is an issue by now, as labels are having to spend a lot of time finding and squashing these impostors. Hopefully they implement some way of validating artist uploads to prevent playlist hijacking like this.

This is probably the right answer, and I can’t fully describe the ennui it provokes. It’s like the neighbor’s kid you watched build a treehouse with his dad grow up to be repeatedly arrested for drunk and disorderly.

Newer EVs use NACS, which opens up a huge number of fast DC chargers all across the interstate system. Unfortunately those chargers are almost all Tesla superchargers, and we all wish there was a less musky alternative out there.

I’ve taken a road trip in the new NIssan Leaf, which has NACS. It wasn’t bad; we had to stop for ~30 minutes every ~300 miles, which lines up with just about how often my aging body needs to go pee these days…

Wait until you find out what they put in the food does to you.

I wasn’t able to start saving for retirement until my 30s, so I’ve joked for a while that my retirement plan is to die early. It’s not so much of a joke anymore.

It has been an age since I last saw the 'mongler posted in the wild.

evil pelvic sorcery

Awww DARN that’s awesome. That’s *really *awesome.

I also like some religious music, I think the key is that the music needs to be interesting with zero pandering.
At the risk of turning this into a “not religious, but…” music recommendation thread: I’ve enjoyed mewithoutYou for a long time now. They have a subdued art-rock sound, and I even enjoy a lot of their more overtly religious songs like “In a Sweater Poorly Knit” and “The King Beetle On A Coconut Estate.”
Mewithoutyou - “Cattail Down”

I get you. Thanks for the call out and clarifying. Decades of being on the internet has turned me into a grumpy pessimist🫥

EDIT: one of my best friends has a ~15 year old Toyota Yaris. He just replaced the clutch in it last year, and that was the first major work that it’s needed. That thing is going to outlive his kids. I think it’s great he (and you) are driving old cars that still work; it really is the most economical and ecologically sound thing to do.

The OP’s position is reasonable given their circumstances, and several people, including you, have clearly said as much. Even industry and financial experts acknowledge that if someone already owns a functioning vehicle, the most economical and environmentally responsible choice is often to continue driving it until replacement becomes necessary, regardless of whether it is ICE or EV.

OP seems less interested in discussing practicality than repeated reaffirmation of “I do not want an EV.”

My parents didn’t yell or scream or threaten. They explained. Even as a child I understood why smoking was bad and what damage it did to lungs. By the time I was old enough to consider smoking or have any opportunity to do so, I understood lung cancer, and addiction, and that it’s much easier to start something addictive than to stop.

I also told all that stuff when I was kid, but don’t underestimate the power of youthful arrogance and the influence of an older girl who smokes and is interested in you… I ended up being a smoker for over ten years before I finally quit. Shared my own experiences with my daughter, educated her on all the reasons not to smoke. She still ended up vaping because of youthful arrogance and the influence of an older girl that was interested in her.

You can teach a horse to water but you can’t force it to not vape. Or something.

I chose my username because when I was young I desperately wanted to be the smartest person in the room. While I did devour knowledge (encyclopedias were bedtime reading; thank you, undiagnosed autism), I was stubborn, overly certain of myself, and far less self-aware than I believed.

Getting older humbled me. I began to see how small and defensive my certainty really was, and I made a conscious effort to grow beyond it. Real knowledge, as you said, breeds doubt rather than arrogance. Learning to be more intellectual is learning to live comfortably beside what we do not know, to accept being wrong as an invitation to learn, and to not take criticism personally.

I am still working on that last one. Criticism is easier to learn from when it is not passive-aggressive, but that seems to be most people’s preferred communication style.

Have you seen coffee prices these days? My coffeemate and I would prefer our own, but we have no choice but to “Lady and the Tramp” a grande caramel macchiato every morning.

It’s reasonable for most people to hit the Carlin-4 twice a day. If not for social reasons, then for health and hygiene.

Dentists say we ought to brush twice a day, morning and night. My dentist once told me that if I’m only going to brush once a day, then it should be at night. You don’t produce as much saliva while sleeping, and that creates a better environment for the bacteria that cause tooth decay. Brushing at night removes the tiny food particles that bacteria feed on, reducing the likelihood of developing tooth decay and gingivitis.

We then brush again in the morning because the lack of flowing saliva overnight causes a buildup of other bacteria that feeds on mucus, which is the cause of “morning breath”.