Owl

I'd rather see one of the major AI perpetrators get got, but Oracle has always sucked shit so I'm still happy to see them fail.

Theoretical physics has a problem where the most famous scientist ever was a theoretical physicist, so people have high expectations for it to churn out new mind-bending ideas to write pop sci articles about, but mainstream theoretical physics has come to some deeply unsatisfying answers, so only weirdo fringe theories like string theory get pop sci attention.

The real thing is still the standard model, which is a catalog of sub-atomic particles that everything is made of, and their interactions.

One of the main things they're up to now is figuring out dark matter. There's a dozen ways you can measure how much mass there is out there in space, and they all agree that there's way more than we can account for with stars. We really don't know wtf the other stuff is, and all the candidates have problems. More gravity measurements will probably help. The actual work-end of that is telescopes.

When they go after random fan projects, it's almost always things named like "Zelda 4" or "Mario Odyssey 2" or some other title that Nintendo might hypothetically make. Often they bill themselves as "official" for some damn reason. Meanwhile, smwcentral has a billion hacks named like "Storks & Apes & Crocodiles" and Nintendo doesn't give a shit.

It's pretty clearly them trying to defend their trademarks, and the unofficial rules are "don't make it look official." And yeah it sucks that Nintendo enforces this by sending a scary cease and desist letter instead of being like "hey change the name of that before we have to do something," but fuck is it easy to avoid their ire.

I assumed Dr. Pepper was a genderless sentient liquid assuming a humanoid shape, who ironically doesn't look or taste much like the drink at all.

idk where that puts me wrt feminism tbh

Fuck me, this is the explanation for the last few months of US foreign policy that makes the most sense.

Somebody let me know if he actually sends escorts there. I need at least a week to buy enough booze for an "end of US hegemony" party.

I'd argue that what characterized the world wars was direct conflict between major industrial powers. They all have nukes now, so we wouldn't get World War 3, we'd get Nuclear Armageddon 1.

What we've got instead is conflicts between proxies and allies of major industrial powers - Cold War 2. And not only are we already there, it's already scarier than the first one, since it's not just proxy vs proxy, but nuclear powers vs proxies.

I don't think this particular societal ill is capitalism (I know, I know, they usually are), but rather a symptom of tree-shaped hierarchical management structures. I saw the same shit working for the government.

Middle managers are judged by how important the stuff they manage is, which their bosses guess from reports and how many headcount they have, neither of which are actual work. The further you are from the executive board (who are directly exposed to the whims of capital) and the line-level workers (who are exposed to, you know, the material reality underpinning actually getting anything done), the further you are from any sort of grounding in fact, and all you have is reports by people trying to make themselves look important.

Blatant, mask-off imperialism.

Honestly I don't even know what the imperialist reason for this war is.

Never saw the other two.

Oh the second one is so much worse.

Never saw the third.

You've gotta make it awkward until they step up and improve, or they get fed up and leave. Make a fuss when they do something bad so everyone knows. Tell new people whatever's wrong with that prson (and that they're working on it (they are, right?)) AND tell the person in question that you said something (how is this supposed to get better if they don't know they're a problem). Don't be a bunch of conflict-averse nerds who will let anything fester to avoid a fight.

Help! Get me out of this coal mine!

Which XMPP things did you use?

I think the XMPP-based attempts at replacing Discord are the best bet. Movim is working on Spaces (the XMPP extension for being Slack/Discord) and making good progress.

The peak of gamergate sucked, but that was a long time ago, and now it's an increasingly irrelevant fraction of weirdos screeching about an increasingly tiny subset of games. Meanwhile, in every cool section of games (retro, indie, modding, speedruns, every niche with ultra dedicated fans), half the players have come out as trans.

Shit, I bet his approval finally fell below 50% because the anti-ICE protests made the libs look cool instead of owned.

Chickens eat rocks. What are you, weaker than a chicken?

Can you really call someone who uses Facebook in 2026 alive in the first place?