Remove the laugh track, and Ross is a full blown narcissistic sociopath… The only person he seems to genuinely care about is his son, Ben… But even Ben seems to vanish in the later seasons. There are fan theories that Ross completely abandoned Ben (or that Carol and Susan took full custody because Ross was always such a prick) after Emma was born.
Phoebe is a manipulative bitch who uses quirkiness as an excuse to toy with people.
Rachel is a spoiled disorganized mess, whose need for attention compelled her to constantly keep Ross on a leash without letting him get too close. She broke up with a dude, got her feelings hurt when he had a rebound, then constantly held it over his head after they got back together. When he got tired of it and found someone else, she crashed their wedding in the hopes that he would leave his fiancée at the altar.
Chandler regularly uses sarcasm to poke at his friends’ insecurities and belittle them, and masks all of his insecurities with self-deprecating humor instead of actually working to better himself.
Monica’s obsessive need for control regularly leads her to manipulate or bully others, and consistently overshadows her empathy.

Joey was too good for the rest of the characters. His only real emotional flaw was that he never really had any deep romantic connections. But that was largely because he was more into the hookup culture, and he reserved his attempts at deeper romance for the few partners he really got along with. He never tried to hide the fact that he was a playboy, even around the women he was sleeping with. He was an idiot, but he at least cared for and about the other main characters, in a way that none of them ever seemed to reciprocate.

Also, the show was ultimately about six rich white people, who occasionally cosplayed as relatable lower middle class folk. In a city as diverse as NYC, you would have to work to find a city block so completely deprived of melanin. The series was 10 seasons long, and black people only had speaking roles in like 25 episodes… And a lot of those were because Ross and Joey dated the same black woman for like 10 episodes in the last season. They also very clearly lived in a nice part of the city, (some have estimated that Monica’s apartment would run for ~$3-4M when the show was airing) and their financial struggles were only ever superficial to make them more relatable.

I’m calling it now: There will be a non-zero number of MAGAts who briefly go gay to own the libs.

I mean, this is a textbook example of statutory rape. He paid an underage girl $400 to show up to a party with the implication of sex, gave her cocaine and ecstasy, and then had sex with her. The state recognizes that rape can occur even if the victim was otherwise willing. The “statutory” part of statutory rape means the prosecutor is required by statute to assume a rape occurred, even if the victim does not agree with the prosecution.

The state acknowledges that there are circumstances where a reasonable person would determine that a victim wasn’t capable of consenting. To be able to prosecute these cases, the state passes statutes to assign a penalty on the assaulter for statutory rape. This statute allows the prosecution to charge for rape, even if the victim was enthusiastically consenting and/or does not feel like they have been assaulted.

For example, if a cop detains someone, then has sex with them in the back of their cruiser. A reasonable state would recognize the unfair power dynamic in this situation, and a reasonable jury member would acknowledge that the detainee was under duress when the sex occurred. Even if the detainee was enthusiastic and willing, they were legally unable to consent because of the power dynamic that was present during the sex. There’s no way of factually proving if the detainee was/is actually willing, or just playing along because the cop held an inordinate amount of power over them. And thus a reasonable state would assume the latter, and statutorily assign a penalty to the person who held the power (the cop, in this example). And this statutory penalty would be enforced by prosecuting the cop for statutory rape.

And “being too young” is one of the biggest and most (in)famous reasons that someone can’t consent. The state sets an age limit on when children can begin consenting to sex with adults. Otherwise willing children below that age are assumed to be groomed (like a 30 year old “dating” a 15 year old) or under some other kind of unfair power dynamic.

If you’re trying to say that it’s unfair that Gaetz was tricked into sex with a minor, that’s a separate discussion. He took that risk when he knowingly paid a homeless person for sex. He knew there was an inherent power imbalance. If he wanted to avoid the power imbalance, he could have used a legal brothel that has a hiring and vetting process designed to preclude underage children from being hired. Hell, he could have worked as a lawmaker to decriminalize sex work and make brothels legal in his area. He could have ensured that people (including himself) didn’t feel the need to pay streetwalkers for sex, because legal brothels were accessible.

But he didn’t do that. He sought out a sex worker who looked young, fully knowing and accepting that there were no systems in place to stop her from lying about her age, and he was willing to take on the risk of statutory rape by choosing to sleep with her.

Depends on the amount of compression you’re trying to achieve, the water’s temperature, and your definition of “easy”. Near freezing, ice is compressible. Because the increased pressure causes the freezing point to rise, which causes it to melt. And liquid water takes up less space than ice.

This was the very first thing I thought of when I saw the headline. I literally thought to myself “oh so she sounds like a pedophile.”

Yup, by step-dad is in the second group. It’s honestly wild what kinds of mental gymnastics he has gone through to justify his vote. We had a surprisingly calm discussion about it the other day, and he genuinely doesn’t believe Trump was involved in any of it.

He thinks Trump was, at worst, just running in some tangential social circles. He believes a lot of the revelatory stuff (like in this post) has been faked from other heads of state to try and discredit him. Like all of the “yeah the DOJ confirmed this is real. The FBI has been sitting on this for literal years or even decades now, as part of their international child trafficking investigations. Multiple news sources have also independently confirmed the validity of the sources” stuff doesn’t matter to him, because he simply chooses not to believe any of it.

God Himself could descend from the heavens with a choir of angels, bust through my parents’ living room window, and slap my step-dad around while screaming that Trump is a pedophile who raped children on Epstein’s island. And my step-dad would defiantly look God in the eyes and tell Him that He’s wrong. There is no threshold that will make the proof believable for him. The goalposts will always be moved to require some new criteria before proof can be valid. And anything that does manage to meet the strict criteria for proof is too perfect, and obviously had to be manufactured in some grand worldwide conspiracy to discredit Trump. As Orwell wrote, “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

But what if bias was not the reason? What if your face gave genuinely useful clues about your probable performance we just agreed to redefine “bias” as something else, despite this fitting the definition of the word perfectly, just so I can claim this isn’t biased?

Cool. Literal Nazi shit, still powered by IBM.

Yeah, the malicious compliance was what should have been regulated instead. Ban the annoying cookie popup and require sites to make it opt-in by default. At most, sites should be allowed to have an option in a burger menu to allow cookies, and clicking that button would open the popup to specify which cookies you wanted to allow.

I used to date a fairly popular camgirl. Like “she made more money in a 4 hour stream than I made in a month” popular. She eventually grew to hate the work, but the money was too good for her to pass up.

The “it’s not dating if you’re paying her” jokes got old pretty quick.

Yeah, the prosthetics have always been campy, but the miniature models are gorgeous even by today’s standards.

Yeah, the behind the scenes stuff for that movie is wild.

They had to keep reshooting the fire swamp scene, because Cary Elwes (Westley/Dread Pirate Roberts) kept panicking every time Robin Wright (Princess Buttercup) got lit on fire.

The R.O.U.S. scene had to be delayed, because they had to go bail the dude in the rat suit out of jail. He had apparently gotten too drunk the night before, and was in the drunk tank on the morning that they were supposed to shoot the R.O.U.S. scene.

Yup, it was lauded for its amazing CGI when it came out, but the vast majority of the movie was shot with puppets and practical effects. It’s also a great example of “less is more” in the sense that the movie is over two hours long, but only has like 15 minutes of actual dinosaur footage. That meant they were able to focus their time and resources effectively, to make the few bits of CGI as good as they could be.

I don’t have issues with local AIs, for things like searching your local immich instance, or controlling your local Home Assistant devices. That photo of a bird you took 3’ish years ago? Yeah, you can find it in like three seconds with a local AI search. Want to turn the lights on with a voice request? AI is one of the easiest ways for a layman to handle the language processing side of things. All of that is a drop in the ocean.

But corporations have been trying to cram it into everything, even when it’s not a good fit for what they want to do. And so far, their solution to making it fit hasn’t been to rethink their usage and consider whether or not it will actually improve a product. Instead, their approach has simply been to build more and bigger data centers, to throw increasing amounts of processing power at the problem.

The technology itself isn’t inherently harmful on the small scale. But it has followed the same pattern as climate change. Individual consumers are blamed for climate change, and are consistently urged to change their consumption habits… When it’s actually a handful of corporations producing the vast majority of greenhouse emissions. Even if every single person drastically changed their emission habits, it would barely make a dent in the overall production. It was all because of massive astroturfed PR campaigns to shift the blame away from those companies and onto individuals. And we’ve seen that same thing happen with AI, where individual users have been blamed for using AI, instead of the massive corporations.

There was actually a method discovered relatively recently, which allows you to skip her death sequence entirely. Or rather, you force the death sequence to happen out of order, so she isn’t actually removed from your party when she should be. It’s obviously not intended, but it is possible to keep her alive. She doesn’t have any dialogue or cutscenes for the rest of the game, but it’s interesting that it’s possible.

This screenshot just clawed a memory from the depths of my brain. I don’t even remember playing this game as a kid, but I vividly remember this character and art style.