I’m still on Pandora and honestly have no idea how they stack up. I just use it as a radio station on long drives.

I’m not saying they definitely weren’t cheating, but I have definitely hit some shots in my time that seemed impossible. If you fire enough rockets at corners that you think someone might come around, or in games with snipers that penetrate cover, take blind guesses through walls, you’re going to get lucky eventually.

Edit to add: just saying, the line is blurry indeed. But I think if I got kicked over it, I’d be a good sport about it! “Got kicked for cheating because I was too l33t” would be such a good story. I’m sure some people have had it happen.

I learned up through 12 x 12 in 2nd grade. Some of them were easier than others. I remember drilling with my grandfather for hours to memorize the ones I was having trouble with. The incentive was that if I learned them, he’d buy me a GameBoy game I wanted. I did in fact get the game when I managed to master multiplication—it was Mole Mania, a sokoban-style puzzle game with the gimmick that there is an underground layer you can move through that also has its own obstacles.

He absolutely would have sold your data if there were any buyers for it. Microsoft was still a terrible company in the Clippy era, there just were fewer opportunities to be terrible in this particular way at the time.

You can only invite the vampire in if you’re inside the house. If the judge signed the warrant while inside the house for some reason, the vampire could enter. But in the usual case where they were anywhere else, it wouldn’t count.

I suspect that for people who spend a large amount of time in the house, the quality of “inside-ness” rubs off on them: you can probably text your vampire friend the location of your spare key and ask them to check on your cat, even if you’re not there. But someone who has never been inside can’t reasonably offer an “invitation.”

One guy tried and was told that he wasn’t owed any money, because the statute of limitations had expired… while he was being imprisoned without access to counsel.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/08/ice-detained-a-u-s-citizen-named-davino-watson-for-three-years.html

Last year [in 2016], a district judge in New York awarded him $82,500 in damages, citing “regrettable failures of the government.” On Monday, an appeals court ruled that Watson, now 32, is not eligible for any of that money — because while his case is “disturbing,” the statute of limitations actually expired while he was still in ICE custody without a lawyer.

These lists of red flags make me feel like I must be a replicant. I wrote a comment just like that one, em dash and all, on a different site just the other day, with my own organic brain!

My first instinct was to use an em dash instead of that last comma, but it seemed too on the nose.

I don’t think therapists should be turning in their clients, either. Criminals deserve effective therapy as much as anyone else.

And if everyone voted, his popular vote margin would have been larger. According to the latest analysis, non-voters leaned toward Trump.

When asked how they would have voted, people eligible to vote who did not do so were fairly evenly split in their preferences: 44% said they would have supported Trump, while 40% said they would have backed Harris.

I love learning new rules. It’s honestly almost as much fun to me as actually playing the game.

I feel SO free right now. :P

It sounds like they wanted to run someone but had trouble recruiting a candidate:

But Bloom thinks that would-be Democratic candidates were disinclined to challenge a sheriff’s office power structure that tends to be dominated by conservatives, saying, “The people that [party leadership] asked to run were scared; given how conservative law enforcement can be, they didn’t want to blow up their careers.” Unlike other states, Virginia does not require that sheriff candidates have a background in law enforcement.

And later in the article:

That no Democrat filed to run in Chesapeake does not surprise Liam Watson, director of Bluegrass PAC, a Virginia group working to fund and elect downballot Democratic candidates in rural areas of the state. Watson, who is also an elected council member in the city of Blacksburg, knows the dynamic well: His own community, Montgomery County, leans blue but has a Republican sheriff.

“The challenge is finding people who are both qualified and interested,” he told Bolts.

He and many others noted that the most obvious path to being a sheriff is to work as a sheriff’s deputy, and that there are clear disincentives to challenging an incumbent who could then make your life difficult or fire you if you lose. “Nobody wants to run against their boss,” Watson said.

I think she has to act through the Board of Police Commissioners, and I’m not sure she can fire them before their terms are up. She could definitely threaten to not re-appoint them, but I don’t know how much leverage that really buys her.

Nah man, the older I get the less I trust adults. They let me be one and I’m the biggest fuckup I’ve ever met!

OP already accounted for social situations where you would expect to meet people, though, and his parents seem to think that he should be approaching people in other situations—like in a store, or on the street. I’d be very cautious about that.

Not quite the same but I used to work at a local, family owned supermarket chain that is now out of business. I started at one of the busiest locations, but after I moved apartments I transferred to another location that was out in the 'burbs. At the first location I worked at, all our equipment was well maintained, stock was reasonable, stuff seemed normal.

At the suburban location, our equipment was all falling apart. The roof leaked. The other stores sent us their overstock and charged it to our departments. I was in the deli, and one day the contracted maintenance guy was there and I asked if he could take a look at one of the meat slicers. He said sorry, corporate told him not to do any work at this location that they hadn’t pre-approved.

My first hypothesis was that this location didn’t make any money, and that’s why they didn’t want to spend to fix it. One day I decided to ask the store manager about it—he was pretty chill and we talked sometimes, so I figured he wouldn’t mind. I said “Does this store actually make any money?” and he said “Well, let me put it this way: the numbers I report to corporate show that every department here, except floral, makes a profit every month. And then the numbers they put out in the quarterly reports show that we’ve never made a profit since we opened.”

“Where does the money go?” I asked.

“That’s above my pay grade,” he said.

I’m convinced someone was embezzling funds. A couple years after I left, the whole chain closed one day with no notice to the employees.

The problem with “body type” is that it is actually a gender selector too, but they don’t tell you that. If you’re body type 1 NPCs refer to you as she/her, and if you’re body type 2 NPCs refer to you as he/him. They needed to add a separate pronoun option, but didn’t, so right now the body type option is just the gender option but pretending not to be.

Inspire allies to perform better or push their limits, bolster them against mental damage and heal mental damage they’ve sustained, raise the morale of a group (especially if that group shares my religion). Bonuses to public speaking, negotiation, religious knowledge, etc.

If I belong to a more fire-and-brimstone type religion, perhaps I can intimidate sinners, make my allies more effective against heretics, etc.

What does she mean there was a “generational shift” that led to people burning CDs? Back in the floppy disk days, everyone was copying floppies—I remember when my grandfather bought a Mac to use at home, and immediately his friends at work loaded him up with copied disks. Which generation is she thinking of that wasn’t pirating a ton of software?

Visit Granddad.