A lot of people here are missing the "actual" point of this app. It's not about any dopamine of petting an animal, it's literally about the trophies.

PlayStation has a trophy system that they use as their achievements. These trophies are categorized by bronze, silver, gold, and platinum, with the platinum trophy usually being the "you got all the other trophies" trophy. People brag about how many games they "have Platinumed" and look for games that are "easy to plat"

So, $4 for a platinum trophy you can get in less than 30 minutes is a bargain. Sure beats having to spend 80+ hours "getting good" in a game to get a platinum.

Minoxidil is generic for Rogaine. Not very new. (Although using it not topically is new)

One of the overlooked reasons people buy physical is because of the state of their internet and the size of AAA games nowadays. I like buying physical versions of games because of my monthly data cap - I have a 1.2TB/mo data cap from the only provider to my address. (My provider is most likely the one you're thinking of.) A game the size of Call of Duty would eat up 1/10th of my monthly allotment, and since both me and my wife work from home and she watches a lot of streaming TV, downloading that much puts us at risk at going over, especially if there are multiple good AAA titles I want that month.

That being said, even that benefit doesn't work out much anymore. Thanks to "Smart Delivery" on Xbox, the disc only contains the base Xbox One code. If I put it in my Xbox Series X, it just goes out to the internet and downloads the XSX version of the game instead of patching the Xbox One version with what needs updated. And if I try to put the disc in while my Xbox is unplugged from the internet, it will install but won't actually play because the disc told the console it needs an update.

Or, by the time I get the game, there has been a huge day one patch that magically needs to redownload the entire game so buying the physical disc is useless other than to act as a hardware key to unlock the game.

Smaller filesize games I have no problem downloading digitally, it's just the huge behemoths with huge behemoth patches that worry me. It's also why I resisted Game Pass for the first few years. What I've had to settle for now is I look at my remaining data cap on the last night of the month and start mass downloading Game Pass games with whatever room I have left.

They eliminated the data cap for a few months in 2020, and service didn't suffer for me during that time, so obviously my local infrastructure doesn't NEED data caps...

(I had originally replaced the S in that last word with the symbol that you get when you hit shift-4 but the filter said it looked too much like ascii art so it wouldn't let me post it.)

This is not "code encoded as pixels" as some comments here describe it. Its much better. Its actually recreating basic logic gates using the pixels + a single pass of the JBIG2 decompression algorithm, recreating basic assembly operations including registers. Its kind of like Conway's Game of Life, just by flipping bits off & on it results in something Turing complete. From the article:

Yes, we can get surround or even DTS directly to our speakers (5.1 or 7.1) however the games do not take advantage of any atmospheric speakers, such as my 5.1.2 setup where I have two speakers in the ceiling.

Playing a 4K Blu-Ray on PS5 does has a passthrough audio setting so movies with Atmos do get sent correctly to the entire system as just raw data. The PS5 has been able to do this since launch day - but we'd love to have all of our speakers used during gameplay - which is something even the Xbox One X did.

This comes off as if they're trying to appear to help out with all the ransomware and hacking BS, but they are actually going to use laws like this to crack down on critics or blame other countries for stuff.

Great Well of China contains Great Human Skull Fossil

I got my vaccine 4 weeks ago at Walgreens (big, common pharmacy in CA). I don't remember if I put down my phone number or email when I did, so I tried registering first with my email and then with my phone number, in both cases I got a response that they weren't able to find my vaccine record.

I mean...if this is on your commute to work, and it takes 18kW instead of 20kW and costs you nothing, then you'd prefer that. (It doesn't have to be 0kW vs 20kW to be desirable.)

I just paid $213.88 for the privilege of owning an EV in Georgia for another year. (This is mandatory and separate from the optional $55 Alternative Fuel License Plate fee that allows me to use a small number of our HOV lanes.)

Taking into account my driving habits and converting them into MPG for the Mustang I had before my EV, I calculated my annual gas tax to be about $75.

Even just the potato would be a blessing. God bless.

Well based on Wikipedia, it ended up not selling it because of pressure from the US: > Israel was ready to sell China the Phalcon, an Israeli airborne early-warning radar system (AWACS), until the United States forced it to cancel the deal but the next sentence did surprise me: > Some estimate that Israel sold arms worth US$4 billion to China in this period. However reading through the article gives it more context, China was one of the first to recognize Israel's right to exist, they both opposed the Russian-Afghanistan war and partnered in helping Afghanistan back in the day. Man international relations are crazy complicated. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Recently, yes. A lot of the sports games nowadays feature a career mode that plays out like an RPG with your specific player that include conversations between games that affect stats. Madden features a full-blown narrative taking you from college up to the pros complete with fully-voiced characters and cutscenes chronicling your journey.

They're not flagged in the US because the US won't allow them to be flagged in the US. In order to have a cruise ship flagged in the US, it must be built in the US and have 75% of its onboard crew staffed by US citizens. Unfortunately, there's no shipyard large enough to build a cruise ship in the US, and it turns out a lot of US citizens don't like the idea of doing a 6-8 month tour on a boat just to be a cabin steward.

So, they register in "flag of convenience" countries that don't have those strict standards like the Bahamas.

One cruise line did attempt to build two ships in America. Half way through construction of the first ship in Mississippi, the company went bankrupt. NCL bought the partially finished ship and towed it to Germany where it was outfitted and then sent to Hawaii. NCL now operates the Pride of America as a US flagged ship (since the hull was built in the US) with a mostly American crew. Its sister ship was never built. That shipyard in Mississippi went back to only doing military projects for the US Navy and never looked at making a passenger ship again.

They leaked the addresses and phone numbers of people with media credentials. A number of gamers don't like what these people who get media credentials say about games on the internet, so these gamers were able to give those with media credentials a piece of their mind directly, and try to convince them to not say such things in the future, "or else".