Khrux

Microsoft has absolutely been preparing for the end of traditional consoles more or less since the flop of the Xbox One. Their entire push a few years back to make “Everything Xbox” was a bit mistimed and disloyal to their console war cultists but they’re right that it’s the natural end point.

I think we’ll probably see streaming games from their servers reoccur in popularity pretty soon, as much as I’m not a fan of it, because it’s the total end point for non tech savvy consumers, they just pay a subscription, get a controller which can connect to the TV or phone and download an app, no hardware required. Meanwhile every consumer who is resisting the death of tech literacy (everyone else), is going in this direction. The physical console will reduce in popularity year by year as it fills a niche that nobody needs anymore.

That being said, the popularity of the switch and steam deck interests me, because it’s a third direction away from traditional consoles that I’d not have predicted.

I 90% agree, I swapped to wireless earbuds about a decade ago when my aux port on whatever phone I had then broke, and I immediately preferred it. I went from buying £10 wired earphones from a supermarket what sounded shit and broke every month to £25 wireless earphones that sounded shit and broke every 6 months, so for me it was am improvement. I was also a chronic “catch headphone cable on every handle” victim, to the point that I immediately preferred the wireless solution. Another thing is when my wireless headphones break, they fucking break; I go with one earbud for about a month then inevitably buy a new pair. When my wired headphones started to degrade, I always fought it, ending up in a losing battle of finding that perfect way to hold them to make them still work. The only downside I have nowadays is when I’m listening to music or a video and realise I’ve misplaced my phone, which isn’t really an issue, just that it was impossible when it was tethered to my ears.

But I’m probably part of a very small minority when it comes to my preference. I carry a compact camera any day I leave the house intending to take photos, so my ideal phone would have one rear camera that prioritises efficiency over quality. I’d have no headphone port, and to be honest, I could live with no ports and wireless charging and data transfer. I’ve had two smartphones in the last that had their USB-C ports fail as chargers (both galaxy S8s), and I could go years without needing to use the port for anything else. My dream phone would have no ports, one rear camera without a bump, no front camera, minimal tactile side buttons, be pretty slim, have a swappable battery and run a FOSS OS and mostly FOSS apps.

I respect the voices that want a smartphone equivalent to a ThinkPad a lot, but I don’t really think it’s anywhere near as necessary as a ThinkPad would be, because for most tasks that need something like that, I’d just use that.

That being said, there’s two reasons I don’t 100% agree. The first is to do with the fairphone specifically. More battery space and better waterproofing don’t really apply to a phone where I can swap the battery and it comes apart so much that it’s not really competitively waterproof. The second is larger, which is that I can just not use a headphone jack if I prefer wireless, while people who prefer wired are having increasingly few options available on the market.

Book your time travellers grand tour feast of flood beer, butter, cheese, whiskey, wine and chocolate.

For the cheaper package, there’s the toxic runoff, coal and radioactive material tour.

50% of the list is “The great chocolate and beer flood, where everyone got drunk and full.” And the other half is “The terrible toxic fossils fuel slip or ecological disaster and death”, except both have equal deaths.

In the countryside, we fucken too

I agree, knowing other people have sex is absolutely fine, in fact I assume it as default for basically any adult in a relationship. Not using protection may be unwise in almost all cases, but trying for a baby with a partner is the main exception, and it’s never been gross.

I understand that a lot of people have been raised with shame, and I feel a certain pity for them, but I’m not a fan of treating this shame as righteous.

The pentagon knew Israel was about to attack, they said so themselves, but denied any support or involvement. This seems to a valid reason for the pizza party, just to track, observe and be ready for any unexpected counter response.

I am in the camp where I believe the USA hasn’t actively been involved yet but fully intend to be in the coming days. We have a seen Israel do anything they weren’t already capable of, and the massive shift of US jets, missiles and an aircraft carrier to the middle east has largely happened after the initial attack.

This guy pops up everywhere online with screenshots of his silly tweets, and every time I think it’s Edward Snowden.

It takes me to the end of tweet to realise that’s a crazy post for him, and go back and read his name properly.

Gal Godot.

I’m very impressed with Lemmy here for not doing what Reddit would have and naming a long list of attractive women. That being said, if I didn’t feel a moral obligation to boycott Gal Godot, she is so talentless that she hasn’t made anyone else’s list because it’s such a low hanging fruit.

She’s very typecast, but she can act. If she actually got a role where she could show strong emotion, I think she could rise to it well. She’s good in Challengers and great in Euphoria.

He’s the only actor I can think of I actively boycott other than Gal Godot. Aside from his violent racism and American nationalism which is all well documented, I just absolutely loathe the type of character he likes to play; the macho snarky asshole who feels like he got kicked out of basic training and makes being a veteran his whole personality.

There’s few archetypes I hate more than the “former soldier who could kill a man, harbouring some deep unnerving instinct”, or the “American in a truck who loves the flag and is just a hard working guy”, and somehow he always plays and glamorises both, despite not actually being either.

This was my hometown’s team. It’s super strange having it put on the map, where basically everybody knows this story, and before then nothing at all.

It’s absolutely just a random investment in a potentially very lucrative industry. 21st century football is massively swayed by who can spend the most money, especially below the very top level where the money becomes too ridiculous. Wrexham had the oldest active ground in the UK and the ground itself is particularly goodnfkr the level of play. Wrexham had dropped from 3rd division to like 5th, near 6th when he bought it (I think). But Wrexham as a city isn’t small, it’s the largest population centre in North Wales, and before it gained city status in 2022, was a larger town than many of the cities near it. All it really needed to do well was investment, where it had the facilities to be tenfold more successful if anybody actually paid for it, it’s the same for probably a dozen other teams across the UK.

But the investment worked of course, and the team has done amazingly well since then. But don’t consider this anything but an investment where two celebrities used their image to aid it’s success.

He is very involved in the branding that results in his typecasting, so I have no pitty for it.

He wanted the weird image. He implied he was intending to start some sort of harem cult a few years back, which was really a hippie holiday for millionaire women in a very LA way. He absolutely played up his image as a self obsessed creep looking to be worshipped to sell this experience. I honestly feel everything kinda gross about how Jared Leto feels is marketing, although God knows why, as it must hurt his career.

I agree about Palestine, where there was a huge, disheartening cry from America in October - December 2023, when the general attitude was that this was all a terrorist attack, and not the beginning of a genocide. I am definitely wary of celebrities who made pro Israel statements then, but I feel many felt expected to, or were just grossly misinformed.

He does sort of just suck though. I feel the internet’s perception of his soured so fast in the 2020s, from beloved to loathed, and all he did was keep doing what he always does, just with a tiny amount more selling out, which was enough to snowball the hate.

The internet made him his darling and then turned on him pretty quickly, a similar thing to what most female stars face, such as Jennifer Lawrence hugely had to deal with in the 2010s. Not that I’m fond of the guy, but this his internet attitude stinks and I think has coloured his image since. However:

He’s had a really strange rise to fame. He was in Parks and Rec as the lovable goofball type, then the US army literally put him in Zero Dark Thirty (a film with unbelievable rewriting and military control) to be a recruiting tool, “Even Andy from Parks and Rec can Kill Bin Laden.” Even though he was put on the map by nationalist military propaganda, I don’t blame him for that.

He also attends a church (Zoe Church) which was modelled of an openly homophobic church (Hillsong), and founded by a former pastor of the homophobic church, although this church specifically has no open statement on LGBTQ+ people. This church and it’s pastor are absolutely suspiciously absent on this stance, to the point many assume it’s homophobic and transphobic but in LA and not wanting the backlash, particularly as the pastor has funded a Christian film, The heart of Man, that has an openly homophobic messages.

There was also a controversy with his wife and ex-wife that I think was more of a fuck up than anything else. He parted with his first wife who he’d been with since before his fame, not long after she had a baby that was born premature. He then married again and announced his gratitude for a healthy child. Obviously people didn’t like this, but I don’t think he meant it how it comes across. People also feel he showed disloyalty to his first wife in leaving her once famous, but even if fame did change him, that’s still a forgivable reason for parting ways with someone.

Although I don’t avoid movies with Pratt, I feel he wants to be funny like Robin Williams, and a hero like Harrison Ford, without the charm or wit to come close to either. What we’re left with is a bland, typecast actor who feels he’d abandon any tolerance and compassion in his image if it stopped being in vogue, but maybe we just want to see him fall from grace.

I feel that’s old enough not to be in the Tom Cruise produced issue area. In the 2000s, he was in War of the worlds, Collateral, The Last Samurai and even showed he still had range in Magnolia, Vanilla Sky and even Tropic Thunder. It wasn’t quite the same as the 90s where he was cast in a huge range of great roles, and it definitely became less common over the 00s.

I’d say from 2010 onwards, he’s stared in 0 films that don’t feel warped to be an advert for his specific style of masculinity. Even if one was good, Edge of Tomorrow, it’s still a Tom Cruise movie.

I 100% agree with this. He’s already behaving badly, and overall it’s a huge red flag of a comment.

But his male friends are presumably his friends from either prior to the relationship or with no regards to his partner. They would be betraying a friend they’re fond of to act on this attraction.

Her male friends do not care about hurting his feelings anywhere near as much, and may even have delusions of replacing him. Many of them may have become her friends directly because of their attraction to her.

I don’t believe that this inherent means that he intends to cheat on his partner with a female friends of his own, and therefore believes men are like this, to be clear. I am lucky enough to have a beautiful partner, and have close female friend who I have platonic friendships with while aware those women are very attractive. But I wholeheartedly trust myself not to act on any attraction to anyone else, which is the bare minimum of course. There are men my partner is friends with who I can tell are attracted to her, but largely I don’t care, because I wholeheartedly trust her to rebuff them too. But I’d also expect that if one of them made a move on her, she would distance herself from them.

To me, his comment means “I don’t trust you around people who find you attractive.” That means one of two things. Either he is behaving possessively and exerting authority over her, or there actually is basis in his comment. I’d assume the former, largely because personally, I’ve known more possessive men than women who would cheat but we don’t really know enough about the situation.

Overall I hate the entire post and absolutely do not believe these two people are going to have a happy relationship.

Edit: I support her in maintaining those friendships. If he truly believes she’s not trustworthy to be around those friends, and does not want to remain in a relationship if something were to happen there, he should leave her. If it’s in his head and he’s behaving possessively, she’s better for it anyway.

It’s going to suck. There’s no getting away from the fact it’s going to suck. You are going to have a lot of pain ahead, and so is he. You’re going to see people who know you both, and need to choose between which of you they’re seeing, you’ll drift away from some people who he was closer to, and he’ll drift away from people you were closer to. Eventually you’ll date someone else and he will too. You’ll have photos, trinkets and many other things that are bound to him as memories. You likely will never get closure, and just have to let the pain fade.

When I reflect on memories, I often feel that the good ones change how they feel to think about after six weeks; they start to feel that they happened to someone else, a very long time ago. Maybe this is how memories feel when they change from short term to long term, I have no idea. The bad memories take longer, it’s different for each one. You are in mourning, in a manner of speaking, and that’s okay to acknowledge. Give yourself a time to mourn, to leave those items up that make you think of him. Get rid of the photos now, put the digital ones in a folder to be forgotten, change your lock screen, if it’s him, to something you love, a friend, pet, parent etc. Let yourself otherwise have a mourning period and let yourself feel the emotions. Set a date, perhaps a month from today, or a month from the breakup. On this day, clear away those little trinkets you bought together. If they’re valuable or you’ll miss them for another reason, don’t bin them. Don’t go overboard, just because that dress was his favourite, or he bought your favourite book or whatever doesn’t make it his, it’s yours. But some things will only bring pain to dwell on.

A poet, Richard Silken once said “Someone has to leave first. This is a very old story. There is no other version of this story.” You are going through something that is nearly a universal pain that every adult faces. Mourning, without closure, about someone who is still out there, who you may see at parties, in the street or with your shared friends. This is a pain we all have experienced, that colours so much of our happy memories with pain and despair. There are people I wish I could hold when they cry who I’ll never speak to again, and there’s people I wish could hold me who I’ll never see too. They may hate me more than the last time I saw them or have forgiven me and wish things went differently, but they definitely have not forgotten me, as I haven’t them.

These memories need to fade into that back part of your mind, and that takes time, and every memory that reignites that pain, perhaps the better word is trauma, will delay it. But eventually those memories together will feel like they’re not wrapped in the same emotion, but the memory of emotion. Until that point comes, it’s okay to let the feelings in, to mourn.

I hope you read every comment, even the worse ones about finding someone else quickly, to rebound. That is a tool to move these memories into a more distant part of your mind faster, but you won’t get to process them. You may never get closure but you’ll get even less if you don’t let the emotions in. Turn to positive distractions, do exciting things, do things with friends and family. Reach out to those friends you’ve seen less because you made so much time for him, they will be happy to have you back. Don’t mask the pain with drugs, weed or alcohol; nothing good comes of that. I had to avoid drinking when I had similar experiences. Seek process therapy, it’s not always too cheap, but this is a terrible pain that deserves professional check in, being young doesn’t make it easier, and most of us can empathize with the pain, and know not much is worse. Let yourself spiral today, this week, this month, but don’t make decisions that close you off from the world. Don’t stop seeing friends and family, do more activities, take up a hobby like the gym that you didn’t find time for when your hobby was time with him. Make your guiding light who you want to be next month, next year. You don’t have to be them now.

In a few months, this pain will be sadness, and nothing more. Let it in now but prepare for that day. Forgive yourself, you’re going to be okay.

In my own opinion, it’s Disney good.

Early Simpsons was slightly edgy, not in a shock factor way, but in a way where it could explore mature themes without any tonal whiplash, while still being entertaining for kids and adults.

As Fox deteriorated, so did the Simpsons, presumably from bad producing and low funding. Pretty much as soon as the Disney acquisition happened, quality began to climb again, and people have been saying it’s good for a few years.

But I can’t shake the feeling that the real feeling isn’t that it’s good, just that it isn’t bad anymore. It’s as inoffensive and bland as many Disney IPs, but doesn’t carry the true badness of Fox. I don’t trust that Disney is able to give it the ingredients for it to be great again.