Really? If you told me you spent more than $2 on a checkers set, my eyebrows would raise. I reckon most people get theirs from their parents' attic.

Disney's only real aim is to maximize profits on every project. That means every possible audience segment should have an entry point to the project, from every possible angle. You can't achieve that if you automatically alienate half of the entire world.

However, the idea that Disney promotes "strong female characters" is pretty amusing. I haven't seen any. Rey isn't "strong," she's a classic Disney princess; she wishes and her wishes come true. Padme marries Anakin and even gets pregnant, yet the actors have zero chemistry and we never see Padme so much as kiss Anakin, because that would conflict with the laughable idea that doing that would make her less "strong" and "a Senator."

See, the problem with modern Star Wars hasn't really been Kathleen Kennedy. It's that Disney slop sucks, and the more franchise entertainment it gobbles up, the more of it will suck.

Some may remember that Matthew McConaughey also licensed his voice to Eleven Labs for AI usage.

At the time, I was a little perplexed, but then I figured it must have been an exclusive license. Nothing can stop some clever AI from faking your voice. But if a company has exclusive rights to it, not only do you have detailed accounting (and likely, veto power) over when and where it is used, but if someone is using it in an unauthorized, unlicensed way, the company can file the lawsuits for you. You and your attorneys don't have to do it on your own.

I reckon it's hard to preserve the "commercial appeal" of a game you could play on a desert island with a bunch of rocks.

It's been theorized that Canada's import decline has a lot to do with why Jim Beam, which has a hand in pretty much all bourbon distilling, is shutting down its main distillery in Kentucky for all of 2026.

The nonprofit TFA mentions is "loosely affiliated with the Effective Altruism movement," which is a dubious concept most closely associated with and promoted by uber-crypto-bro (and crook) Sam Bankman-Fried. This affiliation should give you some idea about this organization's motives and operating principles.

I'm sure that serving you a lot of ads is the point of the excessive length of internet recipes, but there's another reason, too. A simple list of ingredients, or a list of instructions (like how to build Ikea furniture) cannot be copyrighted. I think many of these overly verbose recipe authors really do want to make it appear that their own takes on the recipes are distinct and innovative, and that helps them secure their own content from being scraped wholesale. But of course, AI just says, "fuck it, I can summarize," and it's pretty hard to prove it was your recipe it summarized..

It's true, seifs are for ease of reading ... but so is Calibri. However, I believe Calibri was created for ease of reading on screens, while this article talks about documents on letterhead. So it's possible the choice of Calibri was misguided to begin with. Furthermore, according to the article, the number of “accessibility-based document remediation cases” – which I take to mean instances where somebody requests a document be reformatted for accessibility reasons – has not declined. So he's saying that, while this is a purely subjective aesthetic choice, the original change to Calibri never helped anything anyway.

Everything is gambling now.

Meanwhile, the most preventable of diseases are becoming commonplace.

Yeah, no doubt. But for all the good they do me, right?

I use Bing, and I get Microsoft Rewards points for that. Each month, the points I earn are automatically donated to the Wikimedia Foundation. Just sayin'.

Welllll, a bunch of countries use VAT, where you pay whatever is on the label. In the US, what you pay for a product will depend on where you buy it, despite it having the same price on the tag..

"Use" is relative, unless you mean "figure out how to cancel it."

I don't know. From what I can tell, Tizen seems OK. I just don't know how much "software" you really need in a television.