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Cake day: June 8th, 2026

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  • There’s a comedian (I can’t remember their name) that has a bit about how they refuse to give their cat any kinds of beef-based food or treats.

    Salmon? Cool. Chicken? Great. But my cat’s ego is already big enough. There’s no way my cat could take down a cow, and she’d be insufferable if she ever thought she could.

    I bring this up to say that a six foot cat probably could take down a cow. I say this as someone who has a cat: cats are only cute because they’re like fifteen pounds soaking wet. If they were the same size as us, they would 100% consider us prey.






  • You think they’d get to stay in Mexico? Nah, they’d get the Native American treatment. They’d be forcibly marched through hostile lands “peacefully relocated”, and forced to live in inhospitable and unworkable areas “given a reservation of land to live on.”

    Then when America wanted to expand again, America would repeatedly and unapologetically encroach on the reservations “renegotiate treaties” to claim more land. All the while, the government would be attempting to eliminate their culture by kidnapping their kids for white Americans to raise “generously re-homing needy children”




  • Yes, but they’ll be prohibitively expensive for most people. Companies need dumb TVs for things like lobby displays, digital menu boards, digital directories, meeting room displays, etc… Imagine corporate secrets leaking because a smart TV was sending screenshots back to LG on a boardroom meeting’s PowerPoint presentation. Or a hospital patient’s personal info showing up in data sales, because a hospital’s digital directory was listening in on conversations at the nurse’s station.

    Commercial Displays are truly dumb TVs, but they’re often thousands of dollars more expensive than a smart TV. Because their price isn’t being subsidized by the mind-boggling amounts of data snooping. They’re also designed with durability in mind, because a typical TV isn’t meant to run 24/7. But a 24/7 restaurant can’t just turn their menus off and continue to function. So their panel hour lifetime is typically rated much higher than a consumer-level panel. They also often won’t include a lot of the most cutting-edge options, because they’re designed for a good enough image over long periods of time.



  • Hah, I distinctly remember the first time I discovered the pressure sensitivity in MGS 3. I was hiding inside of a locker, and pressed a button to lean towards the grate and peek out. I lightly pressed it, and Snake barely leaned at all. I couldn’t really see what I needed to. So I mashed it harder. But I pressed it so hard that Snake slammed his face into the metal locker door with an audible thud. The noise alerted the guard and I was caught.

    The fact that they even thought to program in a “slam face into whatever you’re peeking out of” mechanic has me rolling now that I’m thinking about it. It really is peak Kojima.



  • Yeah, the old Napster/Limewire days were rife with people labeling any kind of parody or meme song as being written by Weird Al or SoaD. Probably because they had the name recognition and would actually show up in search results. And it was just plausible enough that they might make a song like this.

    Weird Al even went on the record to say that he absolutely hated the trend. Because a lot of the parody songs that were misattributed to him were very vulgar, and he historically avoided things like excess profanity so his music would be safe for kids.

    Also, I’m amazed OCRemix is still around. Pretty sure half of the music on my original iPod Shuffle came from that site.




  • That would honestly be a better representation, but it won’t happen. Once it is in progress and things have started going up, lawmakers will quietly keep the project funded so they don’t have to deal with the construction eyesore indefinitely. Dems will just see it as “we want to get it done before his term is over, so our guy doesn’t need to deal with finishing it when they’re in office next.”


  • And this is actually how I’ve said it should be done from the start, though those ages are too granular for my taste. Just allow the user to verify their age once, then it shares a broad (child/teen/adult) age range with whatever asks.

    We even have the technology to securely verify a person’s age without sharing any details, the same way we can share a password without actually storing it directly. It would require governments to actually pull their heads out of their asses and be technologically literate, but it could 100% be done:

    Step 1, the government sets up a public database query. This simply returns a “true/false” response for if a hash matches their database of people over 18. Have people set up a password or PIN directly with the government (probably when they’re applying for an ID, which they would need to verify their age anyways), to act as a salt for their personal info hash.

    Step 2, the user who wants to verify their age enters their data and password on their device. This info never leaves their device. It is hashed, and sent to whatever service their device is trying to verify. Google account, iCloud account, Microsoft account, etc… It can even be a local user account for things like Windows or Linux machines that don’t want to use cloud accounts. The important part is that the info is never directly sent, only the salted hash is. And simply using the info on a stolen ID won’t help, because you don’t have the password so the hash will be wrong.

    Step 3, this hash can then be used to query that database, to see if the user is over 18. Again, the government simply returns a basic true/false on whether the info matches something in their database. It doesn’t give any specific info about the person. The service (whatever it may be) never gets your personal info, because they only saw the salted hash. And the government doesn’t need to know what specific device or person is trying to verify, because they only saw Microsoft/Google/Apple/etc asking “hey, does {hash} match your hash database?”

    Step 4, once the query returns as true, the account is now flagged as age verified. This flag can be set directly on the account, so any device the user logs into can automatically be verified without needing to repeat the process.

    On the user’s end, they get a much smoother experience. They never need to deal with the “are you over 18” pages on porn sites. And they don’t need to verify each individual site. The site simply asks if the user is over 18 as part of the initial https handshake before the webpage even loads. And then it boots the user (or more realistically, redirects them to a SFW “your device isn’t age verified, here is how to do that” page) if the user isn’t verified. And once a user is verified, it can be logged directly on their account so that they don’t need to verify each individual device. Your iCloud/Google/Microsoft/etc accounts could simply have the age flag added to your account, so any device you log into is automatically verified.

    And importantly, parents protecting their kids is as simple as refusing to age-verify their kid’s accounts. By default, everything assumes you are a child until proven otherwise. Protect your password (which you should already be doing anyways) and your kid can’t sneak into your purse to use your ID to secretly verify themselves. Hell, you can even allow verified users to create specific child/teen accounts for their kids, which can be trusted without needing to re-verify anything. Because (again) that is simply a tool for parents to use if they feel like they should. By default, everything is assuming you’re a child anyways.

    But of course, this is all a pipe dream. It will never actually be implemented in a sane way, because the tech companies are the ones pushing for age verification. They want to be the ones to handle your data, which means they’ll actively rebel against anything that takes that away from them. They’d lobby governments to prevent the hash database system from being implemented, because it would prevent them from being able to collect your data directly.



  • While I agree, the way the article is worded makes me suspect that is the name of the crime they’re accused of.

    Sort of like how Trump was found liable for “sexual abuse”, because the jurisdiction it occurred in strictly defines rape as penis-in-vagina sex. And since he “only” (ugh) used his fingers, it wasn’t technically rape as far as the law was concerned. But the judge who oversaw the case later had to clarify that it would colloquially be referred to as rape, even though that wasn’t the technical term that the lawsuit used. Because Trump was trying to use the “well I wasn’t found liable for rape, so she can’t say I raped her” argument in his defamation lawsuit.