That show had a heck of an ending.

Only works if the original media has multiple mixes. Some stuff made for the small screen does, but very few films go through the process of doing separate audio mixes.

Some TVs have a virtualization option that can help.

I had to use Channel 4. VCR was on 3.

Fun fact, my GameCube and my NES used the same RF adapter.

The problem is you can’t solve the problem by simply removing the car. There are 3 major phases to commuting: 1st mile, primary transit, and last mile. A car solves all 3 at once, which is why it’s very easy to design around cars.

And the frustrating thing is, you really do need all 3 in a lot of places. I live in Texas where it can be triple digit temperatures for 5 months of the year.

I haven’t thought about chucking explosive bananas in years.

Edit: And now I’m remembering “Nibbles”!

A nightmare is a kind of dream, I guess.

With photography it’s also a grey area. I’m a professional underwater photographer. I’ve got thousands of dollars of specialized housings, lighting, wet lenses, etc, but the color is still wrong because water. Meanwhile some open water student swam by 40 minutes ago and made the whole area hazy.

So for decades I’ve done various degrees of touch up and and color grading because what you see with your eyes looks nothing like what comes out of the camera because human eyes and brains do a lot of processing that camera sensors don’t.

And then there’s generative stuff that I don’t think impact the art of photography. If someone uses generative noise reduction I don’t think that’s a problem. The non-generative solution to that is spending an extra 10 grand on a better camera and lens, so it’s not as much of a skill issue as a money one. I’m absolutely fine with people using generative tools for that stuff.

So where’s the border between acceptable and unacceptable post-processing? There’s clearly bad stuff like wholesale fakes and such, but I don’t know if we have a clear line.

HL2 and Steam literally launched simultaneously.

The retail version of HL2 required you to log into Steam to activate it. It was a big deal at the time because lots of people’s gaming PCs weren’t hooked up to the internet at the time.

Lots of games of the time had verification processes along the lines of “look on page 48 of the manual, go down 6 lines and pick the 8th word” each time you started the game to verify that you had the disk and a copy of the manual - making piracy more inconvenient.

Games would even ship with red and black manuals that were more difficult to photocopy.

Steam was created specifically to kill any secondary sales of HL2.

All billionaires are the enemy. Valve is privately-owned, which means their evil is more long-term. You know the shit Sony’s getting flack for right now? Valve’s been doing it for over 20 years.

It doesn’t matter from a taxable income standpoint if you don’t give them the money, or if you give it and they donate. They owe the same either way. The only way they would owe the 30 dollars would be if you gave them the 30 bucks and they just kept it. Then it would be 100 dollars in additional income.

The real cheat isn’t on the taxation. It’s that they give to non-profits that align with their goals or list the company as a sponsor. When Bass Pro sponsors a high school fishing event it may be making a donation using that non-taxed income from round-ups and getting tax-free advertising.

I’ve actually managed not to agree with their new privacy policy for over a year now.

It keeps popping up on me. I kill the notification and don’t accept, and it pops up a few days later.

I hate how it was resolved so much.

Dude basically murdered her and in the end when given the chance to go back to her planned life she chooses to stay with him. It’s apparently okay for someone sentence you to death and deceive you into sleeping with them as long as they’re handsome.

What they used to get in trouble for was using an actual engineer’s seal without permission. We’d tell that engineer and they’d go nuclear on the developer. So now they fake a stamp to keep from getting sued.

I do it for 2 reasons:

1. Make sure everyone is supposed to be there. I’ve had people show up to meetings that weren’t supposed to be there and everyone else thought they were with one of the other groups in on the meeting.
2. Figure out if the other side tried sneaking in a lawyer. If they bring a lawyer, we need to bring ours.

Not really. We can refuse to issue the permits.

If it were to slip by us and the house fail, even then it’s difficult. Almost everything in my city is custom spec homes for the mega-rich, and the developers set up an LLC just for building the one house and dissolve the company as soon as the house sells.

What I’ve learned doing development review for houses being sold to billionaires is that contractors will try to do cheap, shitty, unsafe work no matter how rich the client is.

Write-offs aren’t magic. There’s no way to write off a donation in a way that will reduce your tax burden to lower than it would have been without the donation.

If you donate $100 to charity and write it off, it reduces your income by $100. If you pay 30% in taxes, it reduces your tax burden by 30 bucks, so you’re still losing $70 versus not mak8ng the donation.

The difference with these round-up measures is that the donation is only given if the customer pays for it, so it breaks even after the cost of implementation/overhead of the system.

I work for the city. Contractors are faking stamps to pretend there’s an engineer to get a permit.

Lots of municipalities are overloaded and they’ll just accept a stamp and approve the project. I do not. We review the engineering.

Increasingly, they’re trying to get it to design the building.

I’m having to double-check credentials in my plan reviews because contractors have started turning in plans with AI-generated architect and engineering stamps because they don’t want to pay a professional to prepare their plans.

When I was 22, I could get blackout drunk and be fully functional by noon the next day. The hangover was almost like a handy alarm clock.

Now if I get drunk I feel like shit for like 3 days.