No it was definitely the child slave bit. Thanks for the deets.

The palantíri were created by elves and weren’t inherently evil. It was only when Sauron captured them and exerted his will over them to make it difficult for anyone to use them without sending straight to him that they became evil.

Oh, well then “seriously, OP?” Though in this case the grammar issues are not as bad, because I expect professional media organisations to hold themselves to higher standards than randoms on the Internet.

Though it adds a layer because I hate when people editorialise headlines without it being clear that that’s what was done. It’s misleading and in this case was totally unnecessary, since the un-editorialised headline got the message across just fine.

I know this isn’t the point, but ffs The Verge. “Add age verification to it is consoles”? Seriously?

I suspect that the thinking when he was appointed was that logistics was going to be key to Apple’s future success. And at the time, they also had a number of high profile creative people in other roles, though they have pretty much all moved on since. And if you look at their financial performance in the years since Cook took over—which is the board actually cares about—it’s hard to say that this was a bad approach.

Cook’s expertise was in the logistics. He’s definitely not been a great leader for them putting out exciting products, but he’s the reason they’re so much less affected by things like global shipping crises or RAM prices exploding than many other companies are.

Maybe sometimes, especially among the bigger and more infamously privacy-invasive sites.

A lot of the time, though, it’s just that it’s the easiest way to write a website. Particularly if you’re using modern frameworks, you have to go quite a way out of your way to send static HTML that works well without JS enabled.

Oh dang, mad respect for owning up to it!

But uhh, would you mind sharing the gist of what you were saying? I’m too late to have seen it.

Too much pollution? Release wolves in factories in boardrooms

FTFY

What was her response?

Edit: and what was the cheer?

Oh good point. I didn’t notice it before.

I would lean towards human, because it’s clearly stylised and not meant to be a photo. But it also certainly could possibly be AI.

Since you like D&D, my rec goes to Erin M Evans’ Brimstone Angels series. It’s set in the Forgotten Realms, the default setting for 5th edition and the setting used in both the recent D&D movie and the Baldur’s Gate video game series. Brimstone Angels stars two tiefling twins and their dragonborn adoptive father. One of the twins accidentally stumbles into a warlock pact with a devil, and the series is largely about dealing with the consequences of that.

It’s so well written with excellent characters. And when the final two books (five and six) go to the dragonborn kingdom of Tymanther, an area and culture comparatively unexplored by FR canon, Evans gets to really bust out her worldbuilding chops and put her background in anthropology background to good use.

The good thing is, IMO you don’t need a very big investment to decide if it’s right for you. If you get through the prologue of book one and aren’t interested, it’s not for you. Evans does an amazing job of condensing her style, tone, and themes into the prologue of her books specifically for that reason (and because the first few actual chapters are often slightly different in tone).

If you’ve read the 2014 PHB, you’ve already read some of it. The quotes in the tiefling section and dragonborn section come from the prologue to the first book and from the 4th book, respectively.

Brimstone Angels is a lot tighter than some of the sprawling epic fantasy recommended elsewhere. It’s comparatively easy reading compared to some of the great recommendations others have made like Wheel of Time, A Song of Ice and Fire, or Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere. It could make a good palatte cleanser between books like those, if you’re so inclined. Though I found myself wanting to binge the whole thing.

Only downside is, last time I looked, you literally cannot get the first book in paper. It’s ebook or audiobook only, since it’s been out of print for a long time and second-hand copies go for instance amounts. When I looked, the rest of the series was easy, but that may have changed; it’s been like 8 years.

Just please don’t make a grimdark Drizzt clone at your next D&D game!

My rec goes to Erin M Evans’ Brimstone Angels series. Another set in the Forgotten Realms starring two tiefling twins and their dragonborn adoptive father. One of the twins accidentally stumbles into a warlock pact with a devil, and the series is largely about dealing with the consequences of that.

It’s so well written with excellent characters. And when the final two books go to the dragonborn kingdom of Tymanther, an area and culture comparatively unexplored by FR canon, Evans gets to really bust out her worldbuilding chops and put her background in anthropology background to good use.

The good thing is, IMO you don’t need a very big investment to decide if it’s right for you. If you get through the prologue of book one and aren’t interested, it’s not for you. Evans does an amazing job of condensing her style, tone, and themes into the prologue of her books specifically for that reason (and because the first few actual chapters are often slightly different in tone).

If you’ve read the 2014 PHB, you’ve already read some of it. The quotes in the tiefling section and dragonborn section come from the prologue to the first book and from the 4th book, respectively.

Only downside is, last time I looked, you literally cannot get the first book in paper. It’s ebook or audiobook only, since it’s been out of print for a long time and second-hand copies go for instance amounts. When I looked, the rest of the series was easy, but that may have changed; it’s been like 8 years.

Nah, that seems pretty unlikely.

That story she tells about wanting to be a boy is basically tailor-made to drum up sympathy for her while shooting down a carefully-constructed strawman that doesn’t actually resemble the real experiences of body dismorphia, but superficially appears as though it could.

Revanced (or possible Morphe, which I’ve just learnt may have supplanted Revanced) gets you all the benefits of both YouTube Premium and YouTube Music completely free. Plus it gives you Return YouTube Dislikes and Sponsor Block along with blocking the base YouTube ads.

On your Windows, Mac, and Linux PCs, you should also have an ad blocker and the Sponsor Block extension. I’d also recommend an extension to at a bare minimum redirect YouTube Shorts to the regular player (which Revanced also can do), or possibly block them entirely.

Wait, what’s the drama? I’ve just installed Revanced on a new device in the past month and it seemed fine?

Says the guy who still has an Amazon account :/

I mean, I still have an Amazon account. I even used it, less than two weeks ago. But that was the first time I actually used it to buy anything for nearly a decade.

People shouldn’t hold themselves too strictly to any sort of puritanism. Avoid the worst options as much as you can, but when it becomes infeasible for you, make an exception. That’s much better than just always going with the bad option.

I thought it hypocritical to crucify YouTube and have a Spotify or Netflix or Hulu subscription

Revanced. Or YouTube with an ad blocker. While supporting creators by directly buying albums/merch.

But I don’t think it hypocritical, necessarily. People can inherently only care about so much. For a long time I stopped shopping at Coles and went to Woolworths instead, because I was pissed more at Coles than at Woolworths over a couple of specific things. Then more recently Woolworths did even more to piss me off, so now I mostly shop at Aldi. At no point in this was it not accurate to say that both Coles and Woolworths are horrible duopolists that screw over their suppliers. But one had at least not been so blatant about its gross hypercapitalism bullshit by marketing the idea of brand loyalty and consumerism explicitly to children. So while both were always bad, one seemed the slightly less bad option. Until it didn’t.

That means Linux chose to stop updating those devices. If Linux somehow stopped you from being able to use your existing Linux version on you i486 chipset, the analogy would work. But your analogy in the real world just supports my point even further.

They are not required to “support” products in the form of updates. They are required, ethically, to support them continuing the functionality they were sold with for as long as the device is in use.

If they don’t want to continue operating a backend that’s necessary for it to work, they should put out a patch so the same functionality can be obtained through local-only behaviours. This is really no different from the “stop killing games” movement, except that it deals with actual hardware that is sold under the promise of certain behaviour, rather than a purely-software game.

Han Solo hates snakes?