I live in an opulent old Victorian with all the associated trappings you’d expect from the era

It’s glorious

Ehh if you are on a reputable tracker that has scene releases it’s generally downloading a torrent, copying a crack into the game directory or running some crack software, and play. It’s not in the least bit difficult.

Realistically most people don’t care about things like automatic updates enough to justify spending money on it.

Many games are trivially easy to pirate and this has been the case for decades. It’s literally as easy as downloading it from Place B.

People still buy the games.

Yeah that’s not an option for many people.

Not everyone’s parents are reliable, still alive, willing to watch the kids, and conveniently nearby. You kinda need all four.

Also you can’t just leave your toddler at home when you go out for dinner, or drop your kid off with a boarding facility when you want to go on vacation

I hope so too

We stopped talking after she got herself stranded in a different city to manufacture a big crisis where people had to rescue her from south central LA at 2AM. She said it was a mistake but we later overheard her bragging about how she did it on purpose to get attention.

I had a friend who would watch this movie over and over. She said it was her “favorite movie”

I later found she was a little messed up in the head.

The fact of the matter is that people will happily pay for content if it is made available in a convenient and affordable way. Hell, many people will voluntarily pay artists for content that is available completely for free. That’s how patreon works, and there are self published authors approaching $1M/year in income due to readers choosing to support the author for their hard work.

People have no issue paying content creators.

Piracy rose to prominence in the 2000s because a few executives were funneling massive amounts of money into their pockets by the sale of CDs and cable services that were simultaneously expensive and inconvenient. The studios attacked pirates directly to little effect because you simply can’t stop the free dissemination of information among the public.

Piracy almost completely died when streaming made the alternatives affordable, user friendly and convenient. In a world where the proliferation of streaming services is making content just as expensive and inconvenient as in the old days of cable, it’s only natural that piracy will once again rise to prominence.

If they want to get paid, they simply need to stop fucking with the customer and offer a service people want to pay for.

If you are in a cosmopolitan area there’s plenty of access to tea houses serving loose leaf Japanese and Chinese tea that would satisfy the most demanding tea enthusiast. That doesn’t begin to count the non-traditional items like boba, tisanes, etc.

The USA doesn’t have much of a British style tea tradition, but that’s mostly because it’s a diverse nation and British tea and food is mostly crap to begin with. Why would the US drink British tea when there are so many alternatives that are actually good?

It makes you less jittery because it does not, in fact, have a lot of caffeine in it.

It’s absolutely guaranteed you won’t have the same feelings. People change and the new relationship dopamine wears off after a few years.

However, building a life together is a special thing in its own right and that takes commitment to stay together and work on the relationship when times get tough.

Yeah, I did some googling after I commented and apparently amorphous silica gel is actually a safe food additive according to the FDA

I knew a guy in high school that would do self destructive stunts for attention.

I saw him eat silica gel on several occasions. I’m sure it’s not good for you but it’s not like he died or anything.

Yes, when I was a kid in CA people would describe taxidermied animals as being “stuffed”

I distinctly remember the parks department bringing in “stuffed” owls and cougars and stuff into class during first grade to teach us about the local wildlife. It was rad.

You know those equatorial martians aren’t sending their best, right?

Make Martian Poles Great Again

It’s just junk food for birds

Honestly I think the hate for bread is a little out of hand. Is it nutritious? No, but it’s not poison either. As long as it’s only a small part of their diet it’s not hurting anything.

I have a pet bird and 90% of her diet is nutritionally dense foods, but she still gets nibbles of bread and tortillas and so forth because small amounts of treats are perfectly fine. Same concept.

Same. I like the whole engagement ring ritual but I’ll be damned if our marriage is going to hinge on my “proving my love” with some overpriced trinket that costs a couple months’ salary and loses 95% of its value when it leaves the store. If that’s what it takes for us to get married it’s not the type of relationship I want in my life.

Moissanite is by far a better buy. It has more fire for 1/100th the price than a natural diamond.

But I feel like the people saying clear stones like diamond and moissanite aren’t pretty have never seen a clear, well cut, multi karat, example in the sun. The rainbow colors and brilliance from a clear high refraction stone like a diamond is frankly insane. You can see the rainbow colors shooting off of it from like 100 yards away if the lighting is right. No colored stone has quite the same wow factor as a good diamond or moissanite in the right light. That’s why diamonds have historically been in such high demand.

Opal, Alexandrite, and many other stones are equally beautiful in their own way. But it’s weird to make that point by putting down clear stones that are absolutely spectacular.

I agree diamonds are dumb and overpriced when you can get a better result from moissanite or lab grown.

That said, I’m curious why you assume it’s a blood diamond? Conflict diamonds only account for ~5% of all diamonds in the trade. Russia and Canada combined account for >50% of all rough diamonds in the industry.

Do you not understand how ads work? It’s about making sure that IBM is the first company that comes to mind when you think about potential suppliers for an upcoming project.

It’s no different than ads for Coca Cola. You know what Coke tastes like. An ad isn’t going to materially influence whether you like it or not. However, it attempts to keep the name present in your mind so the first thing that pops into your head on a hot day is a nice cold Coke.