My local Microprose

https://www.microprose.com/

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I hope it goes beyond social media. You have the "richest" guy on the planet going against the "most powerful" guy on the planet.

Musk could use his wealth to go after Trump's. Buying up his debts and calling them in. Manipulating his memecoin and crashing it, etc. Trump could retaliate by sending government departments after all of Musk's businesses. There's so much potential for two awful people to destroy each-other here.

What's interesting is that almost all the people involved with Epstein are people who suck, but probably most of them weren't really aware of the child sex trafficking. Epstein's "day job" was basically being the guy who introduced people to each-other. Rich and powerful people wanted to be part of his social circle so they could be introduced to other rich and powerful people. Because Epstein introduced people, he knew about deals early, which let him make money from them.

Sure, Epstein had young-looking women around him, but that's always true of rich guys. I'm sure he vetted the people he introduced to the really young ones carefully because he didn't want the whole thing to blow up.

Now, most people assume that everybody who had anything to do with Epstein is a pedophile. So, they're hating the right people for the wrong reasons... and I can live with that.

Yeah, I've run one for decades. I keep thinking it will get easier but it never does. I get better at the old stuff, then new stuff comes up which makes it difficult again. I always had the intention to offer it to friends and family, but I've never felt confident that I could guarantee that it would work. These days I know what I'm doing, but I can never guarantee that emails sent from my domain will arrive. Google or Yahoo or Microsoft will sometimes just automatically mark things from my domain as SPAM even if I'm following all the SPF, DMARC, DKIM, whatever rules.

And that's all aside from the constant, unending stream of SPAM I'm dealing with, in addition to the constant, unending attempts to hack my server.

No, I was on vacation on Earth, not Proxima Centari 6.

It's actually kind of liberating when you manage to do that.

It's not true, but if you pretend it is, it allows you to do all kinds of math. Follow the rules as if the spin were real and there were real momentum and it allows you to predict things that you can test. It's almost like looking at a really good magic trick, where you know that what you seem to be seeing isn't possible, but the magician is manipulating things so that your brain can anticipate what's coming next.

If there's one place you don't need to be armored, it's arresting someone on a plane. Everyone has already been screened by security and even their nail clippers have been confiscated.

Yeah, it's also one of the few remaining interoperable ways of communicating.

If your friend who used to use gmail is now using hotmail, you don't have to use a new app to communicate with that friend, you just update their email address and nothing else changes. If you used to be on gmail and you now want to run your own mail server you should check into a mental health clinic, but once you get out, you just tell your friends your new email address and for them nothing else changes. In fact, you can set gmail to forward emails, so any friends who forget will still communicate with you without difficulty.

If I was at home, I always knew where I had some backup glasses. But yeah, wake up at a friend's house or something and you're screwed.

1. I can wake up and glance at the time instead of having to lift something up and put it centimetres from my face to tell the time.
2. I can do sports without the glasses falling off, getting mashed into my face, etc.
3. I look a lot better, with a -13 prescription, my glasses were heavy and thick
4. My nose and ears aren't in pain from carrying the weight of my glasses all the time.
5. I'm not having to constantly adjust my glasses whenever my nose sweats a bit.
6. I'm not completely blind any time I have to take off the glasses, like when I take a shower or go in a pool, or especially swim in the ocean where there are big waves.
7. I'm not utterly helpless because I'm blind if I lose my glasses. If you're blind without your glasses, and your glasses aren't where you expect, you can't really use your eyesight to find them.
8. I don't have to deal with all the problems of using and potentially losing contacts.
9. ...

For me, before I got laser surgery, I was once swimming in the ocean at a very big and popular beach. I was wearing contacts because obviously wearing glasses in the water is next to impossible. I got hit by a big wave, tossed around, and lost my contacts. Now I was almost completely blind, in a foreign country where I knew almost nobody, and trying to find my beach towel and bag among thousands of others. I actually can't remember how I resolved that problem, but I do remember the massive stress and panic being blind like that caused. When I got back from the trip, I got my eyes fixed within a year.

Not just that, but you're absolutely blind without your glasses. Someone sexily takes them off to look at you sexily, you're now squinting and can barely see their face. You wake up in the morning and either put on your glasses or pick up your phone and put it right next to your face otherwise you can't see it.

There's a reason why any scene where an actor wears glasses they have essentially zero prescription, unless the goal is to make someone look nerdy. (Aside: Stephen Root is an incredible actor!) In fact, it gets even more ridiculous. There are pictures of Brad Pitt wearing glasses going all the way back to the 1990s. But, when he's in a movie role he's wearing contacts and then has zero-prescription glasses on.

| French | English | |

|

| | du | of the | | de l' | of the | | de la | of the | | des | of the | | au | to the / at the | | à l' | to the / at the | | à la | to the / at the | | aux | to the / at the |

French has multiple options because it has 2 genders for nouns "the chair" = "la chaise" (female), "the bench" = "le banc" (male), and it changes the article when you're talking about multiple things vs. single things "the benches" = "les bancs".

So, French really has 3 versions of "the": "le" (male, singular), "la" (female, singular), "les" (female or male, singular).

But German... ugh. There's a 4x4 matrix of German words for "the". German had the wisdom to come up with a neuter gender, but the insanity to not apply it to most common objects. Somehow a knife is sexless, a spoon is male and a fork is female. Making it worse, the version of "the" you use for an object depends on whether the object is the subject of a sentence, the object of a sentence, the indirect object of a sentence or possessive. I don't know if it's better or worse (but I'm leaning towards worse) that they re-use a lot of these articles at other spots in the matrix, so "der" is used for male objects in the nominative case, female in the dative case, and plural objects in the genitive case.

| Case | Masculine | Feminine | Neuter | Plural | |

|

|

|

|

| | nominative | der | die | das | die | | accusative | den | die | das | die | | dative | dem | der | dem | den | | genitive | des | der | des | der |

Take "Stein" which is stone, not beer glass. If you're an English speaker and are used to adding an "s" to make something plural, and you see "Der Stein" and "Des Steines", you might think that the version with the "es" is the plural, right? Nope, the plural of "Der Stein" is "Die Steine". "Des Steins" is for the possessive case. You'd use "Der Stein" for "The stone is heavy", but if you want to say "The weight of the stone is high" you have to switch to "Des Steins" -- and to add another twist, sometimes it's "Steines" because of reasons.