Libra

I think Nicholas Cage is a fine actor, but he's not a great actor IMO. Especially in the last 10-20 years, I feel like he's developed some subtlety but the roles he's taken have all been fuckin' weird. Mostly I like his older work like Raising Arizona, Con Air, Face/Off, etc.

I loved him in Moon but haven't seen anything else he's been in. Got any recs?

Dude, seriously. For the longest time I only knew him as the vampire in Twilight (which I'd never even seen) and wrote him off immediately. Then I saw him in High Life and was like 'Oh wait a minute, this guy is pretty good actually'. I even liked him in Batman. I'm glad he's outgrowing his Twilight association.

Jon Bernthal, of late. I first saw him in the Walking Dead where I kind of hated him, but then saw him in a couple other things (especially Punisher) and realized what a good actor he is. That's happened a few times actually, I really hated Brad Pitt in Se7en (that wasn't wrath, that was a fucking bad hair day), but then saw him in 12 Monkeys and was like 'Oh wait'.

What's odd is that it's not in the Wired headline either, this is a direct copy of their headline.

Also because that lump sum is all there is. If you take the annuity they put the lump sum into an investment account and then pay you out of the proceeds (from which they take a cut, of course), and you can get the same returns they get, without losing their cut, doing it yourself.

So, your bog-standard 'we're improving the company by making everyone do the work of 2 people on the salary of 1' routine. :P

it makes sense to guide the customer through the most common solutions first, as that will likely solve the problem.

And this why you have to suffer through those lengthy recordings that tell you about a bunch of shit that generally doesn't apply to your situation before you can even use the menu, much less talk to a person. I am disabled, I have had to be on the phone with the Social Security Administration, Medicare, my insurance company, and various state benefits agencies probably 15-20 times a year for the past ~14 years, and I can count on one hand the number of times those 'common solutions' were even remotely applicable. I don't even need fingers to count the number of times they have actually contained the solution to my issue, because it has literally never happened.

Once you get to a person who can make an assessment about what's going on it makes sense for them to cover a few basics (I used to do tech support, I know how much time a simple, 'Are you sure it's plugged in?' can save), but replacing customer service with AI means you're pretty much stuck in those recordings for your entire call. Now to be fair this can be done better than most places do it. I shop on amazon a fair bit (can't drive so I order most things online) and when I have issues I honestly prefer dealing with the livechat AI than calling because it's a much faster and smoother experience and they can quickly bump you over to an actual agent when there's a weird thing going on that's outside of its scope. But most companies don't have Amazon's customer service budget to do shit like that well, so usually what I get is 'If you're calling about XYZ, hang up and dial this number. Did you know that if your birthday is on an odd-numbered day blahblah-ad-blahblah? If the crescent moon is waning and the distant hills are draining and the watchful eye is straining...' etc.

They had to invest how much money into AI to realize this thing that literally anyone on the street would've happily told them for free? And they probably paid some consultant even more money to tell them it was a good idea. sigh.

You lost me at this:

For this transmutation Transmutex proposes using a particle accelerator, probably because the promoter of the idea is a former engineer at CERN,

Yeah it's definitely not that the only reliable method we have of knocking protons off of atoms involves either a nuclear reactor or particle accelerator, dude is just bringing his old job with him cause he doesn't know any better. Right.

This is a long one. I used to have very frequent, intense, vivid dreams when I was younger, and this one stands out even among those. I had this dream when I was in my mid-20s, and 30 years later I still remember it like it was yesterday.

I dreamed about these monsters called blood-bats that were ~3’ tall, squat, red-skinned, winged monsters with 3 big black claws on each hand. They would claw people and leave long, white lines on their flesh, draining them of blood and also the will to live. I dreamed I had gone to Marrakesh (for some reason) and the streets were filled with people who all had these marks on their arms or chest or whatever, and they were all just shuffling around like they were zombies, staring at the ground, etc. They were all kind of moving in one direction, so I pushed through the crowd in that direction and eventually discovered a palace that appeared to be their destination. Inside the palace was this long, wide great hall that was lined by these little booths that each had a priest of some religion or other in it. The people were all lining up to go into the booth of their choosing where they would kneel on a small carpet, the priest would bless them, and they would collapse and a pair of orderlies would put them in a body bag and carry them away.

I was determined to find out what was really going on here, why all these people appeared to be grimly shuffling off to their ultimate demise, so I skipped out of the line and found myself in an elevator. As the elevator started going down one of the creatures came in through the hatch in the ceiling and attacked me, but I managed to fight it off without getting clawed and it fled. Pretty soon the elevator stopped and the door opened and I found myself in this vast open warehouse-like structure filled with thousands of hospital beds, each one with one of these creatures on it. There was an old man pushing a cart around from bed to bed checking on them. I approached and asked him what the shit was going on and he explained that these creatures were from another dimension, that they traveled between dimensions hunting sapient life to drain as a food source. The way they hop dimensions is they make someone where they want to go dream about them - usually only a few at most - and then when that person wakes up the ones they dreamed of would exist in that reality.

As soon as the old man finished telling me this I realized that I was dreaming and was about to wake up, only I wasn’t dreaming about 3-4 of these guys, I was dreaming about the entire race. In those hazy few seconds between being fully engaged in the dream and fully awake I was frantically searching around both the dreamscape and my bedroom for anything sharp that I could use to kill myself before I woke up and brought all of them here. Fortunately reality reasserted itself in pretty short order, but that handful of seconds might’ve been the most scared I’ve ever been.

Even weirder, several years after I had this dream a friend of mine described, without having heard about mine, a dream he had once had that featured virtually identical creatures, but in his dream they were torturing people in dentist's offices and shit. Kinda freaked me out.

Shiiit, I really don't want to go back to Google and all their sponsored/AI/tracking bullshit. Any other privacy-focused search engines out there that don't rely on this?