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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Despite never owning one (we were a Nintendo house) I’d argue it’s the PS2. An easy thing to forget is that the PS2 was one of the cheapest DVD players for a very long time and that got video games into a lot of houses that wouldn’t have had them. Add to that some of the best games of tent pole franchises GTA3, FFX and FFXII, Kingdom Hearts, God of War, MGS3, Guitar Hero, and Tony Hawk. That generation also cemented the twin stick controller design as the standard. I really think the PS2 defined the rubric for consoles to come

    JK, it’s the Wii. I helped install one in a nursing home when it came out, what other video game console had that kind of appeal? /s (but only kinda)



  • American tax forms have an “other income” field. That’s where you can report any money you’ve made not covered by the other fields including any ill gotten gains. That section doesn’t require you to list a source, and even if it did nobody expects you to list “$7,800 - meth sales, $32,200 - crack sales, $50,000 - robberies”. You’d just say “Other income - $90,000”

    The logic being that if the government never gives you the opportunity to pay taxes on something, then they can’t charge you with tax evasion. Plus there’s a lot of money in crime! If the US can get a piece of that pie they will!

    Finally, the IRS is an already underfunded organization and contrary to the popular narrative, is very easy to work with. If you make a genuine good faith effort to pay your taxes and they find issues, an agent will work with you to resolve it. They’ll set up payment plans, defer payments, and more if you’re cooperative. All this is to say that reporting people for crimes besides tax ones and terrorism (the only one they’re legally required to report to outside agencies) just makes their job harder, so they don’t



  • In the early days of Rift there was a mage build that used a bunch of attacks to target what the tank was targeting and would build your crit chance to 85%+ and then crit heal the tank for their entire bar. The tanks absolutely hated it, but it was the most fun healing I’ve done across 10+ MMOs, MOBAs, and arena shooters




  • The short answer is that we don’t know. It has long been a legal grey area when depicting porn of underage characters that are clearly not real. There’s the classic “she’s actually 1000 she just looks 6 years old” and “all characters depicted are at least 18 [despite all of them being in various stages of high school]”. American politicans are by and large way out of date with modern technology and cannot be expected to rule competently on the subject. Is the AI nude of a real person “revenge porn” or constitutionally protected free speech? People have been drawing fan art of underage celebs having sex with high detail for a long time (see Harry Potter/Twilight rule 34). Ultimately congress will need to make laws about this or courts will have to interpret a previous ruling as applying to these images. Unfortunately due to the Streisand Effect whomever is at the unfortunate center of this shitstorm will be forever made into pornographic material so we understand the general hesitation to get involved


  • I kinda agree. Sure there’s observable/measurable phenomena out there, but past a certain point it’s like a toddler asking why? You just have to say "because that’s the way it is:

    Why did that apple hit me in the head? Because of gravity

    Why does gravity make things fall? Objects of larger mass attract objects of smaller mass

    Why do they do that? Well the more massive something is the more it warps space around it

    Why do massive objects warp space around them? Well there’s some theories that certain sub-atomic particles interact in a way that causes these forces

    Why do those particles do that? Well that’s just what they do

    (yes, I know these are overly simplified)

    Eventually you reach our furthest level of understanding and we just have to say “that’s just what we have observed happening, we don’t have a root cause or explanation yet.” That bottom level is basically magic in our universe until we learn more about it



  • means “days” are no longer the same as “days”

    Who gets to pick when “noon” is when the sun is usually above their head? Let’s assume Greenwich for posterity sake. That means a bunch of the world will spend most of their “daytime” in traditionally nighttime hours. Thus spending your day (time when the sun is up) and your day (the time when you do your work) will not intuitively mean the same thing

    complicates both secular and religious law

    Islam requires regular prayer in the direction of mecca and plenty of nations have Islamic law. At a minimum they’d have to rewrite those laws, at most it’d cause a literal schism

    is a staggering inconvenience for a minimum of five billion people

    “We changed how clocks work for almost everyone on the planet to make some nerds’ lives easier. Please go change your planners, clocks, schedules, applications, signs, etc to adjust”

    makes it near-impossible to reason about time in other parts of the world

    In most of the world, you can reasonably assume the sun goes up around 7 am and sets around 7. Obviously that changes but you can pretty reasonably assume when people will be around and doing stuff by looking at their time. In this new system you’ll need to figure out what times people do most of their activities based off of geological segments of the planet and checking what their “daytime” is. Which is already a problem timezones address

    is not simpler at all

    On a base level maybe, but after fixing all the other problems it causes the resulting system would likely be just as if not more complicated than our current time system