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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • Those amounts aren’t USD yeah, probably habit when writing down money. The 170k and 360k figures are the WoW virtual currency aka “gold”.

    There is a floor to WoW token’s gold value from what I recall (it’s been years since I interacted with Blizzard and WoW) but no ceiling.

    Dunno how hard it curbed bots/unsanctioned gold sellers/fascist scum grassroots campaigns (no, really, look into Stephen Bannon and WoW gold it’s so fucking stupid) but!

    Blizzard absolutely realized and then moved to take all the money that was being left on the table from 3rd party virtual currency sales, and they apply every measure and analytical tool to maximize that profit because of course.

    This mount’s release is literally them inflating the price of the virtual currency ahead of real life earnings calls, because it absolutely will sell and give them the revenue infusion that the WoW token’s rise in value is meant to provide for as long as they want until it’s time to pump the numbers again with another mount/high sought store item.

    A very similar variant in form and function to this mount was once available in-game and trade able with a rarity tuned that it ended up being sold for the WoW Token equivalent of ~$500 at the prices at the time, as there was no store version or similar option elsewhere.

    It’s no accident that when the price of the WoW Token is at its lowest, here comes a slightly updated and dolled up version of that same highly sought mount version.

    WoW is where real economics, car ownership culture, hoarding, and dopamine treadmills collide and Blizzard doesn’t just know this but have it charted on 5 year plans.



  • Not all.

    Carriers tend to have internal hangar spaces, repair/loadout spaces, machining capability, assisted takeoff/landing systems on the flight deck, etc.

    To “carry” the aircraft and expect them to perform their roles, the carrier has to be a mobile light airfield and not just a deck to land and take off from.

    Edit: Not to say they can’t sail or don’t with any of them on the flight deck of course, but that’s maintaining a certain level of readiness that has some posturing inherent. I guess that’s true for all military readiness doctrines.


  • Software has been leveraged to do mass arbitrations against companies that insist on enforcing it, somewhat leveling the playing field in the power imbalance, at no less a cost than courts ultimately for the corps. Tricky enough they’ve found it hard to make language against them too.

    So in a sense, it is de-enshitification but it is more likely borne from Steam throwing in the towel against a losing proposition (preventing costly mass-arbitration) than doing so because they want every user to have the maximum legal recourse.

    A W is a W though, imo.




  • I think I can relate, somewhat. It’s not easy, constantly being rational in the face of evil depravity. A just mind seeking a clean pattern of cause and effect can’t be blamed when it starts asking “where is the sword of the innocent”, and I personally get how that morphs to “Ok, will somebody give me the sword?”.

    I’m there myself today, on other news. Beware the thoughts, however. There’s a difference between wanting to wield a sword to protect and one to punish; one is swift and necessary, the other opens the window to festering and becoming the abyss.

    I wouldn’t weep at a swift and ignominious end now, and I certainly would personally swing down that figurative blade and go to sleep soundly but never with the idea the monster could be made to comprehend if I taint myself to the same level of depravity, best remain a monster-lite. Because even that course of action I’d take is not without its own brand of reprehensible in the just world I’d rather live in.


  • There’s many answers but I genuinely fear they’re too lost in the weeds of abstraction.

    The truth is still simple; Power is useless to the common* (read: average and averagely distributed) person. It doesn’t grow crops, shoe horses, or help your fellow man, inherently.

    The common person has real concerns to worry about, leaving the search of the trappings of power for the uncommon.

    Uncommonly good* (read: beneficial for the doer and the common person) is harder than uncommonly evil* (read: beneficial for the doer but detrimental to the common person); this is simply entropy, and it readily maps to humankind’s so called capacity for thought.

    That it only takes a bit of shared effort to make lasting structures to help others and fight off sociological entropy is an uncommonly good realization:

    The common man has labors to do, the uncommonly good servant a statistical rarity and the uncommonly evil servants and the structures they engender to keep them in support (entropy begets entropy) a hurdle that by the point of realization takes an uncommonly amount of uncommon good to overcome.

    TL;DR: Human nature + time + compounding apathy in those in a position to nudge things when they were easier to nudge = a need for collective awakening to course correct. We’ve gilded the lily on our sociological underpinnings but have yet to truly revolutionize, only iterate.



  • Part of Fiction writing 101. The more things you need to 'effing name, the stupider the wordplay gets.

    Lots of visual references to make those puns work on Pokemon designs usually.

    Kanghaskhan (Garura in Japanese), is a giant Kangaroo thing with built-in laminar armor reminiscent of Mongolian make.

    At least Kanghaskhan made it to the list of B-tier sound puns to go with the visuals (and Genghis was a ruler, keeping the pun from the Japanese name that is “Kangaroo Ruler”).

    Not all Pokemon get the same wit applied to their puns, some get really groan worthy if examined haha.




  • The dictionary is…literally (hello self-evidence) full of words for which there has long existed an ‘Objective Definition’ but which usage has brought a consensus based ‘Subjective Definition’. Etymology is the study of a shifting process, and both you and them are correct:

    Them in the expected usage a publication should use to apply it to a discreet entity, and you in the fact that the subjective shift in meaning gives us words that map anecdotally to our lives.

    Truly…language is awe-some.


  • You’re missing the vital forest you started on by getting stuck defining trees it looks like, but I get it.

    Minorities are treated by a separate physical rubric by law enforcement and even the court of public opinion. The biases abound, yes. And those absolutely involve secondary physical characteristics, of which biologically speaking are…things that exist. Like skin color is one.

    I get what you’re saying and while I don’t know why other folks are uncomfortable with that, but if I clocked things right, your original point (paraphrased below) is damn right imo:

    Whether a 16 year old child is American Samoan, Black, Hispanic, or White, they are still a child, however large or mature the specific kid’s genetics may have rolled them to appear. Further, it is fucked up for cops to default to feeling more threatened by the bigger/more developed ones, to have more bombastic reactions, as does tend to happen.

    This is reality for minorities; my large colored ass doesn’t get away with certain behaviors even as the affronted party, unfairly as it is.



  • I thought I had a problem with taking a point or two and stretching them across a handful of paragraphs. I no longer think I have a problem and indeed have learned a few things to limber up and aim for greater mental gymnastic heights.

    You’re not just a fly in history’s wall, to hear you retell it, you can read hearts and minds better’n than most deities too. A graph tells a shaky story but your certainty of the intent of every actor involved is inviolate?

    Please don’t write back at me, for the first time in my life, I comprehend the fear of my acquaintanceships and the long rambling.


  • In 1998, Baker, Ruoff, and Madoff that the organism is most likely a species of Mycoplasma called Mycoplasma phocacerebrale.[7] This Mycoplasma was isolated in an epidemic of seal disease occurring in the Baltic Sea.[8]

    It’s not that we don’t know what causes it, and it can be cultured from seals and has been. It’s that in order to empirically and categorically say in any way that matters that the organism is definitely the cause of seal finger…

    You would need to be culturing a person infected with the disease from whom treatment is being withheld. Either against their will or with their “consent” wouldn’t matter. As we know what the disease can lead to, the ethical course of treatment is clear: a bunch of culture ruining antibiotics injected into you. Right away, without delay.

    Because asking or even taking advantage of someone declining treatment to assess and write the confirmation study that says “Mycoplasma phocacerebrale definite cause of seal finger” goes against a lot of ethical science limitations.

    This is what makes the donating the affected limb of someone who never got care for science post-mortem also work as both a neat joke and ethical loophole. Researchers could accept that gift, ethically.


  • I wonder if any of the sycophants remaining to stare at the dangling keys to power like mesmerized toddlers would even retain the presence and ability to scheme.

    That’s one long cultivated and pruned garden of shitbaggery with a history of rich men whose abilities extend to amassing stolen wealth and an inability to handle windows. How many Kingmakers could possibly remain?

    The whole house of cards may fall after time’s dues are paid and Putin finally runs out of track to run away from his pedestrian mortality.

    Not willing to entertain bets on whether that will be the time of changes or more “and then it got worse” though.