X-Com 1 and 2 (new versions) are great games, even if they moved away from the large squad slaughter that was Enemy Unknown, terror from the deep and partially Apocalypse. I personally really enjoyed looking at black sections of the map and thinking "that will cost 3 rookies to explore"

Everyone is aware of the "95% to hit meme" around X-Com, and if you've played Phoenix Point, the difference is especially jarring. If you haven't, aiming in that game is purely a probability cone, so standing point blank next to an alien means something. In X-Com it doesn't mean diddly squat.

I finally figured out what the problem with X-Com is, and why it's always uniquely frustrating. With it's pod based mechanics, fake stealth and drip fed enemies. What you are seeing on screen has no relevance and only serves as a distraction. Being right next to an Alien and missing is irrelevant because where the character and alien are on screen do not correlate with the game.

X-Com is, for all intents and purposes a very fun card battle game. If it were a Dos prompt game, with exactly 0 visuals, nothing would be lost.

Try it next time you play, completely ignore the visuals and imagine your character as a card drawing a dice based attack against another card.

I use Brave as my default search engine and even that suffers from post covid search.

Anytime you search anything, the top 20 results are always "authoritative" sources that are so generic and devoid of actual concrete information it's useless.

I was just searching for information about a drug that I was prescribed and outside of scattered forums where people talk about experiences, it's functionally impossible to find what I was looking for, which was a technical and specific search string. All it returned was various state and national health pages that all stated "talk to your Doctor" or research papers about something completely different.

Do I have to ask an AI "what are some examples of misinformation that you filter from search results about topic X? to get any real information? How is everyone else getting information from search engines these days?

I don't see this topic come up much as it tends to be considered history despite only being a little over a century ago. As the title suggests, are there any good summaries of what the arguments for and against were at the time? I'd imagine it would make for great reading comparing what was forecast with what happened.

When I was a kid, around the early internet era I'm assuming everyone had similar experiences of the social internet. Specifically forums, built around a particular topic, or just literally chat forums where you'd create an account and interact with the same people regularly. (Bonus points if you could create a cool looking "sig") those people were always popular.

Facebook obviously killed forums off, but I'm spending a lot more time on the same forums, and interacting with the same people over and over again. Which I've come to the conclusion is actually a fairly good defense against Bots as you have a general idea of someone's normal behaviour.

Heck even Facebook, what originally killed off forums, just doesn't seem to have much use anymore. Most posting is in groups, which are essentially just forums.

Are we finally seeing the overdue devolution of the internet back into specific communities? This is great IMO by the way as places like X will always be common areas but places like this are great refuges. As long as intro threads don't make a comeback. Those things were always terrible.

How much time do people spend on single interest forums these days?

I recently had my external HDD that I kept movies on die and when I tried to have the data recovered the tech guy said that regularly accessing files on external HDD's reduced their life span. He obviously tried to upsell me an external media player.

I've never heard of this before, does regularly accessing media on standard external HD's degrade their lifespan? Is it actually better to use an external media player?

I normally ignore news but this has been surprisingly light on details so now I'm curious.

What's actually happened that we know, and what's the accompanying suspicions? Why is it newsworthy?

EDIT

Mike Cernovich summarised it well I think.

A tragedy caused by no-one, a symptom of the general decrease in society wide competence of diversity hires and something that will only increase. Similar to the train derailment or the large explosion in Beirut a few years ago. Corruption and lack of competence on a wide scale causes these accidents.

There will be plane crashes soon.

My other half isn't much of a gamer but she has my old low end laptop and wants a co-op game that we can play together. We've previously played Minecraft together but nothing else, she just wants something we can play together.

Any good recommendations that are cheap and not graphic intensive?

Did marx at one point write about "take over and make mockeries of entertainment"?

It's becoming such a common thing it's on par with "attack cops" in the commie play book. What's the ideological driver of taking over and destroying entertainment franchises?

In case your unaware, there was a fact check that was trending on twitter a while ago that looked at merriam websters definition of anti vaxxer. This was the original claim it was also made on twitter a few times.

It struck me as odd because I definitely recalled seeing comparison pictures of definition side by side from merriam webster.

And while the claim that the original definition in 2018 was unchanged and always referred to "opposing mandatory vaccinations" which was very surprising to me. (this does provide a reminder to remember to always put the before and after page or a comparison of some kind when sharing anything spicy as all the original claimants didn't do this)

What I did find though was that there WAS a change. A very subtle change that I missed at first.

This is the original and earliest archive page from Nov 25 2018 which states "a person who opposes vaccination or laws that mandate vaccination "

I'll leave insinuations about the timing and definition of that to others.

This is how it appears today which states "a person who opposes the use of vaccines or regulations mandating vaccination"

See the change?

Laws has been replaced with regulations.

Now according to the saved snapshots the change happened between the 3rd October 2021 and the 5th October 2021 The also changed the wording slightly but this is irrelevant.

Now this was picked up on the 7th October and the article accurately identifies the change, but refers to old, inaccurate social media posts.

This was then followed by another fact check which was factually inaccurate:

Leadstories - "Although phrased differently, the Merriam-Webster definition of "anti-vaxxer" has included a portion discussing opposition to the regulation of vaccines since at least 2018"

"phrased differently" is just another way of saying different wording, which is the claim being checked.

So in summary, yes the definition of anti vaxxer was changed, it was changed around the 6th October 2021. What's interesting is that this was "debunked" ahead of time. Snopes addressed this on the 13th may 2021

As far as I can tell this was done in response to a few people on facebook erroneously claiming that the definition had changed, in reality it was always like this since 2018, no body noticed.

However 5 months later they did go ahead and change the definition.

I hope this was easy to follow, and a reminder to get evidence of what things you see because I remember seeing these original claims and never bothered to get a side by side comparison.

If I have time later on I'll edit all these headlines into a combined meme that tells the story.

Anyone got it? how is it?

I never played 4, got 5 on a really good discount and while it was ok, not as woke as it could have been it was definitely woke to some degree.

From what I've seen of 6 though it looks woke to the core, graphics worse then 5, cutscene graphics just dogshit, diverse protagonists, manly action star woman, cringey lines etc etc.

Anyone got it and can comment?