Maybe I’m basic, but I love exposition over pretty much all else. I watched the entirety of Adventure Time despite not really being a fan of the humor or the main characters just because I craved more information about the history of Ooo.

Makes sense. I’ve always been disappointed that instead of using better processing power to make bigger, more complex games, we used it to make the same games with more complex animations and details. I don’t want a game that only differs from its predecessors through use of graphical upgrades like individual blades of grass swaying in the wind, or the character starting to sweat in relation to their exertion; I want games with PS1-PS2 graphics and animation quality, but with complex gameplay that the consoles of that era could only dream of being able to handle.

This looks really cool - I put in my beta tester registration!

You’d think so, right?

Negative change worms it’s way in through small defeats. The first DLC’s were a small price for a lot of content, the first YouTube ads were only a single ad that was just a few seconds long, the first video game preorders came with amazing rewards, etc. When you allow for 2 seconds, then what’s 3 seconds? What’s 4, 5, 6? What’s 30 seconds? What’s 2 minutes? We’ve seen examples of this all throughout capitalism’s history; to ignore them is, well, ignorant.

Oh, cool! You make saxophones?

They’ve never needed pictures before, and they don’t need pictures now. Hell, even the iconic meme picture is taken from a video of a woman speaking normally - they just used an unflattering frame to discredit her. This isn’t a ploy to get a photo op of the left being mad, it’s another small push of the republican boundaries. Enough “joke” bills about overbearing punishments for minor offenses made by people their party doesn’t like, and they’ll be primed enough to fully support the real thing. We’re already there for a large portion of the republican base.

Yeah, I went looking for any source of information outlining Arnaldo Cavallari’s political views, and couldn’t find anything at all. The closest I got were a couple sources saying he invented ciabatta specifically because he hated the French, but the only reasoning they gave for that assumption was that he said he disliked the rising popularity of baguettes. Hardly seems like enough information to nonchalantly call him a fascist. We’ve got enough extremists running around - we don’t need to be vilifying regular people when major world leaders are displaying fascistic tendencies right now.

This is a great point. The results of an IQ test aren’t really measuring a person, they’re measuring a byproduct of that person, which is significantly less informative.

It’s important to define was “equal” is in this context. Some people hear “equal” and think they must measure exactly the same in every test, but that’s not how the word is being used in this context. It’s more that people are so varied from one person to another that no test can truly judge them well enough to differentiate them when it comes to inherent worth.

One person might measure above another in one test, but there are surely many others where the results would be flipped. There are so many different things you could test a person on that in the end none of them really matter; any one measurement is like trying to figure out what an extinct animal looked like from a single tiny piece of a fossil.

That’s what the IQ test is doing - it’s taking one tiny piece of human intelligence, which itself is one tiny piece of what might be said to make up a person’s value, and trying to use that to extrapolate information about them that simply can’t be taken from such a 1-dimensional test. It’s not worthless, but it needs to be paired with a bunch of other tests before it can really say anything, and even then it wouldn’t say much.

The public hate definitely got worse in the later 2000’s, but it was definitely still popular among middle/high schoolers to tell everyone they hated songs like Yellow and Fix You to show how “sophisticated” their tastes were. It was the same for any band that got too popular, but I remember that when Facebook opened up to people without .edu emails in 2006 I saw the Coldplay hate all over the place. One of the first online arguments I ever had was because someone said that the song The Scientist sucked, and I was really into it at the time. It’s part of why I chose my username, along with my love of biology.

Coldplay was one of the big popular bands back in the 2000’s, and like any popular band, there were plenty of people eager to prove how cool they were by telling everyone that they hate their music. Social media was starting to get popular at the time, so people would take to Facebook to make their “Coldplay sucks” proclamations. As social media took off, the sentiment kinda got swept up with it, and so now even as Coldplay isn’t anywhere near as relevant as they were back then, it’s still a pretty common thing to see people say they suck online. From what I saw, Nickelback’s wave came afterward, and while that sentiment reached higher popularity in its heyday, it hasn’t stuck around as well.

Hmm, I’m not sure I agree with that.

By teaching kids that pushing against the “natural order” of the world gets you killed, and that you should just stay in your preassigned life designation, you’re not hardening them, you’re teaching them that rising up and fighting back is useless, and will only get you killed. The original story was meant to keep kids in line, and I think we’ve got enough propaganda keeping people in line at the moment.

Maybe the Disney version only made the ending nicer to be more palatable to a modern audience, but the lesson that a better life can be attained by persevering through challenges is a sentiment that I can definitely support instilling in the younger generation.

The original story was written to convince children to settle for the life they have, rather than risk their livelihood searching for something different. The Disney version was modified to fit a more stereotypical “American Dream” lesson that believes making your own life can be rewarding.

The same story, but with differing endings for differing lessons following the differing mindsets of differing places at differing times. It’s fun to think about how much a children’s story can be changed to reflect the lesson its teller means to teach.

I’m not saying to get overly bright lights. I have no idea why you keep talking about overly bright lights. When I’m not driving for work, I drive a '94 corolla with stock headlights. But even with those, I can see dark obstacles that are way ahead of me on the road. I’ve encountered deer, turtles, pedestrians, and all sorts of random stuff that fell off of people’s cars. There’s so much on the road that needs to be illuminated, even if all the other cars have working lights. The fact that you can so nonchalantly bring up a scenario in which you can’t even see another car, much less all the other stuff that might show up on the roads, makes me highly concerned for the state of your vehicle. That scenario is so insanely rare and dangerous that I can’t understand how you can just throw it out there like it’s no big deal.

It’s NOT NORMAL to be unable to see a car on the road that’s close enough to you where you need to see where their blinker are. Please, if you drive in that scenario often enough to bring it up like it’s a realistic thing that someone could reasonably encounter more than once in a lifetime, bring your car to a mechanic before you cause a huge accident.

You’re absolutely right that circumstances aren’t always perfect… Which is exactly why you need a vehicle that can maximize safety in all situations. A union jack blinker is dumb, but if you’re EVER in a situation where you can’t tell what side of a car a blinker is going off on, you’re in a situation where you need to pull off to the side of the road, turn off your car, and call for someone to pick you up.

I’ve driven for tens of thousands of hours in my lifetime so far, and I’ve never even been close to a situation like what you’ve described. Even in a snow squall or dense fog I’ve always been able to see where other nearby cars on the road are, and where their blinkers are. Not being able to do so goes well beyond “not ideal;” that’s well past the line of too dangerous. And the fact that THAT is how extreme your scenario has to get before the union jack becomes a considerable issue shows how much more concerning your scenario is than that one.

You think that headlights that can illuminate cars ahead of you are the equivalent to those shitty aftermarket LED floodlights? Really? If your car can’t see a dark car on the road with its lights off, you’re a much, MUCH bigger idiot than someone with a union jack blinker…

Dude, if your headlights aren’t enough to illuminate what’s in front of you, then it’s not that an upgrade would be too much, it’s that an upgrade would get you to the bare minimum… You literally NEED to be able to see what else is on the road with you at ALL TIMES. You’re complaining about the risk that a vaguely arrow-shaped blinker causes in the specific case where you literally can’t see the car it’s attached to. There’s a much bigger risk there, and while it’s not your fault, it’s definitely something your vehicle needs to have the tools to deal with.

There have been times where I was driving near someone who forgot to turn their headlights on at night. But that’s the thing - I knew they were there; I could see their car with the light from my headlights, and even in that dangerously-low vision, I could easy tell which side of their car a blinker came on from. Yes, I got off the road and waited a bit to make sure they weren’t near me anymore, but even in the time that I had to drive with them, I had the tools to resolve the situation safely for me.

If you’re driving in the dark with someone whose entire taillight system is out to the point where you can’t immediately tell if his blinker is on the left or the right, you need to hit the brakes and put as much distance between you and them as you can… Then get better headlights, because even in that situation you should still be able to see them pretty well just with your own lights.

Yeah, I could see it being an issue for some less-common type of indicator, but everyone who drives knows what a blinker looks like. Nobody would mistake it for anything other than the right hand turn signal.

Hell, I wouldn’t even notice the shape of the light; all you need to notice while driving is the presence of a flashing light on the right side of the vehicle - if you’re looking intently enough to notice the shape of the light, you’re not paying enough attention to everything else on the road.