I think people are placing too much on this. Being registered is just sending a piece of mail with a checkbox checked, I think. You don't even have to donate or anything. I registered as a Republican to vote in their primaries a long time ago, and I have literally never voted for a Republican candidate for any office.

If we're doing a betting pool, I'm putting my money on Ketanji Brown Jackson.

I'm about a year in. One interesting thing is that older games seem to work better with Proton than they do on Windows. For example, after installing Psychonauts on Windows I had to Google why it wouldn't load and try a few ini changes until I found what worked. On Linux, I just started it and it worked with no issues.

I started in IT before switching to development. I have CCNA, A+, and Apple Pro certifications. I run Arch at home, btw. But when I have to contact IT, usually for something that needs elevated permissions or bad hardware, I'm just another user. It's mildly infuriating to go through all the steps again, even after explaining what I did. I get it, I really do, but it's not fun at all.

Video games. Don't get me wrong, there are still some great games, but the entire experience has degraded on average.

• The inclusion of obnoxiously long, often unskippable, intro sequences with studio credits and such. There used to be maybe a logo, maybe a very short sequence at worst, and almost always skippable.
• Most of the big budget games are intended to be a grindy slog, often to get you to spend more money on micro transactions. Fun takes a back seat to intentionally addictive but objectively less enjoyable experiences.
• Others are intended to be cinematic experience. Some of that can be fun, but sometimes I just want something like the old Sonic or Mario games that I can just pick up, play for a bit, and put down.
• Enjoy a game? You could talk to friends about it at school, or buy a magazine that talks about it. The experience now is largely an unregulated online wasteland... If you find a community, it may quickly be beset by people that you really don't want to associate with, posting crap that no magazine ever would have published. Except for some of the funnier magazines, which may have published it just to rightfully mock the person.

The graphics have improved. In some cases the gameplay has improved. I don't want to downplay those. I'm just annoyed with how the overall experience has gotten worse on average.

The thing about all the doom and gloom is that I don't think anyone is seriously expecting the end of humanity. We're not talking extinction, at least not yet and probably not for a very long time. We're talking really hard times for people, though. Some previously habitable areas becoming uninhabitable, reduction in how much food we can produce and therefore how many people can be fed, things like that.

There's this idea that we're making Earth unlivable but, short of large-scale nuclear war, I don't think we're really capable of that. And humans are smart, when they have to be, and very adaptable. As a species, we'll survive. But how many of us, and in what conditions, is very much up in the air.

The "I got a big tip on a small bill" part suggests America, but the "three ten year old boys in public without anyone calling the cops" suggests Europe. Hmmm

I have a similar one! I did house calls. I got called out on a warranty call, someone said a coworker of mine didn't fix the problem. I look in the notes and the coworker says he did a standard virus removal, suggested virus protection but was turned down.

I get there and sure enough it's riddled with viruses again. Coworker was legit, notes all in order, I tell the client that this isn't a warranty issue, the work was done, and it has now been reinfected and will need another removal. He seems fine with this, but his wife flips out and demands I prove it got reinfected.

I suggest that we can check the web history. Since it was popping up ads, we'd see when the pop-ups started, and more importantly we'd see if they had stopped after coworker left. Guy says that's unnecessary, it definitely got reinfected, and this time he'll buy an antivirus. Wife is having none of it, says go ahead and check and I'll see the problem was never fixed. I ask if they're sure, guy kind of resignedly says to do it.

I'm not one to kink shame, but when all the trans porn site titles came up, the dude was clearly mortified. I didn't get very far into trying to figure out if I can prove it's related before the wife says "just fix the damn thing" and stormed out. I hope it wasn't too bad for him, she seemed a bit difficult to deal with.

The true mildly infuriating is the comments. Whether this is rage bait or not, we should all be about to agree on some basic things:

• Domestic violence sucks regardless of who the victim is and who the perpetrator is.

• Helping one group of victims, like males, does not have to and should not take away from helping another group.

• The number of victims should not be the deciding factor on whether victims deserve empathy and support.

People in here are going out of their way to defend what is clearly a biased oversight, treating women like an automatic victim and treating men like an automatic perpetrator. Why? Just acknowledge that it's dumb, shows bias, and move on.

Of these, I'd like to point out that unironically Uber is the obvious choice for Best. Hear me out...

• Outside of the really big cities, taxi service was trash. You had to find a number and a phone, the price was almost impossible to figure out in advance, and none that I am aware of were doing anything to keep up with the times or improve anything. The competition that it hurt deserved some pain.

• People can now paw drunkenly at their phone and generally arrive home safe. Easy access to rides has almost certainly saved lives. I don't think you can say that about any of the others on the list.

But wait! I'm not saying that Uber is good. I'm just saying that, theoretically, you could start a service like Uber that isn't hot garbage, that has employees or at least better paid contractors that take home a more reasonable share of the money. Hell, a local government could create a ride hailing app that passes the entire amount back to the driver, and it would be a net benefit to society. Though at that point, maybe they should have just been looking into better public transportation and planning instead.

Unless I'm mistaken, the most popular fiction in which VR is wildly popular is.. Ready Player One, Snow Crash, and Neuromancer. And in all of them, VR is only popular because people are trying to escape the hellscape that unrestrained capitalism has turned the planet into.

I dunno. Give it a few more years, maybe.

At first my brain only saw nightmares. It took me a while but... It's an earbud in an ear surrounded by some blonde hair.