You know America is well down the pan when people almost certainly in the pocket of the CCP are actually talking sense about it.

But then, this does make a convenient distraction from the similarly atrocious things they’re doing, and planning to do, in their own back yard.

Well, yes, but actually no. It’s more like MS-DOS’s EDIT.COM since it runs in a command line / “DOS” window.

In fact, since EDIT.COM went through a couple of distinct variants back in the day, you could say that this is the third variant of it.

The other two being 1) the BASIC-deactivated side of QBASIC.EXE which was an editor and programming language in one, and then 2) a stand-alone, from the ground up, version (with no BASIC to disable) which came along with Win9x / MS-DOS 7.

I keep a copy of the latter in my DOSBox config. It’s only 70kB.

There’s part of an area in Half Life: Opposing Force that has something like this. You later end up using the cannon yourself to open up the path forward.

You could also be thinking about a couple of parts of the original Half-Life as there are a couple of times with mortar fire (including the ability to use them yourself at one point), and there’s definitely at least one rocket launch silo in the game.

Depending on how strong your recollection or how muddled your memories these could be a match.

Brave of you to assume that humanity will exist in 600 years.

Actually, we might be, but the better-off ones will be back at sticks and stones and huddling around wood fires and the like.

There’s at least one supplier here in the UK that still sells free-to-air-only dumb TVs. Digital of course, because we turned off analogue TV signals years ago, but no smarter than that. Definitely no Internet connectivity.

If I decided I was going to become a regular TV watcher again, I’d probably get one of those.

I think at some point in the future, after the main storyline ends, maybe a thousand years hence, humanity gets flung back into the dark ages, meaning we have to re-learn how to be a technological race without assistance from the elder races. It has been a long, long time since I watched it and I might have misunderstood/misremembered what was going on though.

This could be what they’re talking about anyway.

That’s just a symptom of moral prescriptivism, which in turn is a symptom of otherwise impotent desire for control over a weird and scary world.

That doesn’t mean they’re making good choices, but it does explain why they’re making them.

Licence / license, and practice / practise. I have to look them up every single time because I forget which of each is the noun and which is the verb, and even then, there are situations where using the noun as a verb might actually be the right thing to do and I hate the whole thing. So I probably still get those wrong whenever I use them.

Barring brain farts (increasingly common) and muscle memory leading me astray on the keyboard, my spelling is otherwise fairly good, but those pairings I could do without.

The former is British, the latter is American. Noah Webster eliminated letter doubles in words where he thought the extra one didn’t add anything useful. Another word that did the same thing is “level(l)ing”.

If these twisted statements are provably false - even if they contain elements of truth - then this is a case of libel.

Creating accounts everywhere someone is in order to track what they do and say is stalking.

Making repeated efforts to ruin a person’s day is harassment.

Contact law enforcement and/or legal representation. I’m not either of those but it seems like there’s a strong case here.

I’m not sure memes in the original Dawkins sense can be art, so I suppose we must be talking about the modern sense of “funny images and short videos”.

Elitists will say that for something to be art it has to be produced by someone who is capable of producing traditional kinds of art, but who for artistic reasons has chosen to do otherwise (see: Cubism), and there’s the whole problem of, at least for images, certain meme templates being recycled over and over which diminishes the artistic value of any specific instance.

But for specific rare instances? Sure. Art is often in the eye of the beholder, regardless of the intent of the creator.

And as for videos. See any Vine compilation. There’s bound to be at least couple in there.

Finally, if you really want to turn an existing meme into art, use those elitist traditional methods to imitate one. An oil-painting triptych of “OMG they were roommates” without captions would be both art and lean into the meme incredibly heavily.

Would that be a comic strip writ large? Maybe. But there’d be nothing inherently funny about two frames of a woman walking and then a man’s face in close up. But if you know the meme, buddy, that’s art.

Adopting IPA would be wrong because it would require that everyone talk exactly the same way.

Tricky. Microsoft currently use two different executable formats and only one of them is compatible with WINE. That still doesn’t mean that a compatible one will work properly though.

On the other hand, people who make ads want their ads to be literally everywhere, so they might make it Windows 3.11 compatible with all library functions baked in just to be safe. WINE would almost certainly run that.

I thought Win2K was peak Windows, but I begrudgingly got comfortable with XP (using the classic Windows theme) then Win 7 after they ironed most of Vista’s kinks out.

Been on Linux since then.

But it would be unfair to say that masochist tendencies aren’t a requirement to be a Linux system owner.

All systems require some level of that. It’s just Linux has been rushing towards “less masochism” and Windows even quicker towards “more”, and we find ourselves at that sweet spot where they’ve the same level of requirement.

Frankly, I’d prefer this sweet spot to be more towards “less”, so I’m hoping Linux continues its trend.

This kind of already happens there though. Video view counts are visible and often way below a channel’s sub count.

Sure, there are exceptions (viral video views often far exceeding the sub count), but by and large they’re a good metric for seeing how a channel is actually doing.

Loosening the definition to “something I bought that I didn’t need, despite having thought about it for a while and waited for the price to come down”, probably the recent remaster of the original Quake. And I only wanted it because it was the only way to get the Dimension of the Machine level pack that it came with.

As it turns out, I’m not really much of a Quake-head any more, but at least I’m no longer wondering about those levels.

I’m not sure that counts, considering which subset of the population is the largest consumer of it. That in and of itself doesn’t make it fail*, but the fact that the makers of it know this and thus might be tailoring it for that audience does kind of make the the whole thing about men.

Basically, we’re just swapping one meaning of intercourse for another.

* in the same way a group of men watching a regular movie that passes the test wouldn’t change that fact.

For wackier definitions and slang, I like UrbanDictionary. I’d say Wiktionary, but someone already suggested that one.

I’ve also used dictionary.com and thesaurus.com in the past. Obvious names, but they’re not terrible.

But back to UrbanDictionary - there’s a lot of craziness and dross on there, but there are also plenty of diamonds in the rough.

Each definition has a discussion page for pointing out errors and the like. And if you’re complete certain of something and can back that up with a source, you could even edit the entry itself.

Option 1 is a potential cause of “lost” revenue.

Late stage capitalism absolutely forbids anything that could cause that, even if the cost of implementation outweighs any potential gain.