if he hadn't posted in the Fediverse through fucking Facebook. I would have been more impressed if he had done it directly on Mastodon or Lemmy.

This is sending all the wrong messages. Thanks whoever-runs-Biden's-internet-PR :(

Amazon can suck my balls.

Anybody who thinks this new normal is normal ain't normal in the head.

but I don't brag about it.

Dude... A website that costs nothing makes you the product. That's what they need cookies for: you-the-product aren't allowed to refuse tracking.

But more prosaically, cookies are also used by websites to tracks the state of your sessions. Cookies were literally designed for this genuine, legit purpose, and they're still used for that when they're not used to invade your privacy.

If they want to make Pluto the state's planet, and the Sun the state's official black hole, I don't really care.

What I do care about however is that my tax dollars pay for those bozos to work on idiocies like this instead of on real issues.

I did mention Patrick Stewart didn't I?

Although you never know, I might actually like the theater. Because Patrick Stewart is a superb thespian.

He's not a very good actor. He's not a particularly interesting person. His only claim to fame is having been Captain Kirk - something Patrick Stewart was orders of magnitude better at - and as Shatner himself says, it was only 3 years of his life.

But at least he's not obnoxious.

You should try Lemmy.

He's never made any money in his entire life. He means well, but he's a bit of a hippy, he doesn't like to work much and he has two left hands.

One day he bought an old minivan and told us - my sisters and I - that he'd start a small business delivering groceries to old people in remote villages, and would we like to invest in his company.

Can you guess how much we gave him?

We love our brother, but we'll never see our money back. Been there, done that. So we passed up this investment opportunity.

Well guess what: we ain't big shot Wall Street investors, but Reddit seems just about as adept as my brother at making money - and just about as likely to turn a profit for anybody investing in it.

Nah... Only regular people and billionaires who scam other billionaires go to jail. All the other super-rich criminals just put on a 3-piece suit to go apologize and promise it won't happen again in front of a senate hearing committees.

but I watched Dune I and I found it really awful: Timothy Chalamet is to Paul Atreides what tofu is to meat, Jessica Ferguson has about as much acting range as a lettuce and Oscar Isaac - the only Star Wars character ever to manage the feat of making Jar Jar not so annoying after all - is as convincing a Duke Leto as Cheech Marin would have been.

It's truly a mystery to me how Villeneuve managed to make such a meh Dune after his absolute Blade Runner 2049 masterpiece. I expected so much of him after Blade Runner - because really, THAT was the challenge of the century and he pulled it off brilliantly - and all I got out of his Dune was an urgent need to rewatch the godawful Lynch movie from 1984. That's how bad it was for me.

So I'm very happy to give Dune II a pass.

Politicians don't do anything that won't re-elect them. They don't need to understand the consequences of the laws they pass, they only need to know if it makes them more popular.

Meaning you have to remember that if politicians pass ridiculous and dangerous laws in the bible belt states, you can squarely put the blame on the voters in those states, because if they didn't want that shit, the politicians wouldn't do it.

We already are in the dark ages of the internet.

The golden age was the mid-nineties to mid-2000s. Today it's all privacy violation, surveillance and dystopia. The age verification thing is just more of the same.

You could also go to town and find yourself real boobies in glorious 3D and touch-o-vision.

Making porn hard to access makes it all the more attractive to kids.

When I was a kid, sometimes we found a raunchy magazine with naked girls in it. As soon as we'd leave school, we'd hide in the woods to gaze at the ladies - and delight in the forbidden nature of what we had in our hands as much as the content itself. Because it was rare. Now porn is everywhere and it's just "meh..."

It's the same reason why neo-nazis in the US are a fringe phenomenon that most people look at thinking "What a bunch of idiots", whereas neo-nazism is gaining ground in Germany where it's actively repressed: make it illegal and it becomes attractive. In the US, it's totally legal and people can see just how much they don't want any part of it.

Requiring age verification to keep minors off porn will achieve the exact opposite.