MrMember

I'm not against legal sports betting, but the way its advertising has seeped into every aspect of professional sports is sickening.

Commercials, in stadium advertising, on jersey advertising, it's everywhere. Trying to watch the UFC now is insane. There are constant mid broadcast interruptions, they'll throw up live odds in the middle of fights, they'll display tweets from betting companies when someone makes a big bet, they'll bring in a betting company employee to tell you how you can win $3000 on a $100 bet if you just parlay every underdog on the main card. With the amount of money involved I would be shocked if there isn't some form of match fixing going on in at least one professional sport right now.

In my opinion it should be treated like tobacco, legal but with the advertising heavily regulated.

An "update" to my TV made it so if it's on an input channel with no detected input for 10 seconds it will automatically switch back to the "smart" TV channel. Now if for some reason an input source isn't working correctly and I'm trying to figure out why I have to keep switching back to the correct input channel. Which of course lags for like ten seconds whenever it switches.

I'm never buying another "smart" TV.

>Tosa, Marjanovic and Pilisi returned to the Ritz at 10 that night, as promised. This time they were led to a private room where a squad from the London Metropolitan Police was waiting. An officer politely informed them they were under arrest on suspicion of “deception” and led them away to be interviewed at a nearby police station. Once the gamblers were out of earshot, Wootten urged the cops to check their shoes and clothes for hidden devices.

I haven't finished the whole article yet but this part stood out to me. The casino had no real evidence they were cheating, just a vague suspicion that since they were winning at roulette the only possible explanation was that they were using some electronic device to cheat. With that vague suspicion they had the gamblers arrested and all of their electronic devices searched. After nothing was found their winnings were seized and payouts from the casino frozen. Again, at this point there is no evidence that they cheated.

I built an HTPC three or four years ago and I could never go back.

It's gotten ridiculous. I log into my bank and click on my checking account and instead of taking me to a page with all my recent transactions it instead takes me to some page to set up savings buckets or something that I'll never use.

My internet was down the other day so for something to do (I didn't think it would actually work, and it didn't) I logged into Comcast's site on my phone to see if there was an outage or something I could troubleshoot from there. I had to click through maybe half a dozen notifications of things I don't care about in the slightest just to get to the "home" page of my account.

And that's just the first two things I thought of. That sort of miserable design where they try to get me to look at things I don't care about and will never care about just because it might make them money is so pervasive, it's everywhere.

I showed vulnerability in a relationship and it was one of the biggest mistakes of my life. Not something I'll ever repeat.

How long until all appliances come with an integrated cell modem and connect whether you want them to or not?

A man can dream.

Until you can't. /r/star_trek was created by people unhappy with /r/startrek and was recently banned.

60% of college graduates are women and the gap widens every year. It's going to get a lot worse before (if) it gets better.

Replace all human interaction with personalized AI chatbots. At the end of the day you get a summary of all the conversations you had.

It would be a pretty boring article. Who wants to read about someone getting 0-1 matches per week and getting ghosted by 95% of them?

I'd be curious to see if it's persistent or goes away with use. AH-64 pilots have all sorts of issues starting out with the "monocle" (headaches, nausea, dizziness, etc) but it goes away eventually and the they consider the benefits to outweigh the cons.

Yep, I lost a relationship because I thought it would be alright to open up to her and be vulnerable. I won't make that mistake again.

In my opinion EVE is the greatest MMO ever created. I've played and enjoyed other MMOs like World of Warcraft, Guild Wars, a few others, but nothing else even comes close to the experience of playing EVE. The very real stakes of losing your ship, cargo, implants, changes the game entirely. Venturing into low/null sec can be genuinely terrifying when you don't know what's on the other side of that warp gate.

And then there's the enormous breadth of gameplay options. You can be a high sec carebear and happily farm asteroids in relative safety or play the market and never even undock. You can live out your fantasy of being a space trucker and pick up contracts in your freighter. You can join a nullsec corp in player controlled space and participate in the absolutely ludicrous (in a good way) nullsec PvP. You can stalk other players in wormholes in your stealth bomber for literal days, popping out and killing them right when they finally think it's safe. The stories that are generated from its sandbox gameplay make it very unique in gaming.

Unfortunately it's also an enormous time sink and I don't play it anymore. If I could play EVE 18 hours a day I probably would, but it's a very difficult game (for me anyway) to play for maybe an hour a day and feel like I made any real progress.

>Kotick and additional investors bought Mediagenic for approximately $500,000 in 1991.

Wow,that's one hell of a successful investment.

If you don't have self esteem issues you definitely will after a week of trying online dating.

They have a billion dollar endowment. They'll be fine.

Ha, no kidding. Probably half of the matches I get on Bumble (which are few and far between) open with "hey" and then barely seem interested in having a conversation at all.

The solo roleplaying subreddit is a great resource too.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Solo_Roleplaying/

And I second Me, Myself, and Die. Starting out solo roleplaying can be daunting and watching someone entertaining who has a lot of experience doing it helps a lot in the beginning until you figure out your own flow that works for you. As an example figuring out how to use GMEs isn't exactly obvious (what sort of questions should I be asking, and when?) but it quickly makes sense watching Trevor do it.

My dad buying Flight Simulator 95 and a joystick instilled in me a lifelong joy for aviation. I'll never forget taking off from Meigs Field and cruising around an accurate representation (for the time) of Chicago. Buzzing Sears Tower. Running through the tutorials and learning how to properly take off and land in everything from a Cessna to a 737.

>Known as sensitivity readers, or sometimes authenticity readers, consultants like Sally are a growing part of publishing, hired to correct the pre-publication missteps of authors who don't share the same traits—or "lived experience," to use a favored buzzword—as their characters.

Sounds like a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. Write what you know and you'll get crucified for a lack of diversity. Write outside your race, gender, or lived experienced and you'll get crucified for it too.

Audible lost me as a customer forever because of unnecessary promotional notifications. In general I disable notifications on my phone for everything other than what I actually would want to be interrupted by. For me that's things like texts, phone calls, a few messaging apps, and I get a notification whenever my credit card is used. Everything else gets blocked (side note but I really wish Android had a way to block all notifications by default except for whitelisted apps instead of allowing everything by default and making you block them on an app by app basis). I was a happy paying Audible customer for years until they sent an advertisement through notification. The Audible app is a bit unique in that audiobook controls for pause, play, etc are done through a notification so I couldn't just disable them entirely.

It really made me salty that I was getting advertisements for a service I was already paying $15 a month for. I even went through customer service and they told me there was no way to disable just those notifications. I would probably still be a subscriber today and that was maybe 6-7 years ago so they missed out on more than a thousand dollars from me because they couldn't resist sending stupid advertisements to paying customers and I doubt anyone at Amazon even cares.

That doesn't mean it isn't true. OkCupid used to publish all sorts of interesting data before they were bought by Match, including similar statistics to those.

If you're a man and you don't have self esteem issues trying online dating is an excellent way to develop them. I tried it for maybe half a year. I'm decent looking, I have a good career, I'm tall enough that I get through most of the filters a lot of women put on height, I put effort into my profile and pictures. After all that I was ecstatic if I got even one match a week (and this was across three different apps). Maybe 25% of those resulted in conversations, none of those resulted in meeting up in real life.

Outside of online dating where are you even supposed to meet women now? I see women saying all the time they don't want to be approached in public. COVID decimated my already fairly meager pool of friends that I see regularly so opportunities to meet people through friends are few and far between. On top of that most women near my age (mid 30s) are already in long term relationships. At this point I've mostly given up, now I'm trying to accept that I'll likely spend the rest of my life alone. It sucks.

Even worse he was the only person volunteering for that position. They didn't choose someone more "diverse" instead of him, they chose nobody.

The card is mostly nonsense but "it gets +1/+1/+1 until end of turn" really threw me for a loop.

>More white dudes interviewing white dudes. Yayyyyyy.

I'm not sure I get the implication of this tweet. Are white men not supposed to be able to get jobs, or be in a position to hire people?

I guess it depends on the developers' definition of "successful." If the goal was to ship a completed game than Star Citizen is an abject failure. If the goal was to make hundreds of millions of dollars working on an overly ambitious passion project than it has been wildly successful.

Senna was something else.