Listening to audio would be the least effective and most expensive method of data collection for advertisers. It’s not happening. They already have literally over a million data points on you, there’s nothing useful for them to glean from your audio that they don’t already have ad nauseum.

You see thousands of ads and recommendations every day. You finally found one that was relevant to you. It’s not that deep.

Watchdog groups have been monitoring these services for years now and have yet to find the “your phone is listening 24/7” smoking gun.

The Cerberus mission was so good! I usually don’t like when games do the “hide from the invincible monster” trope, but they managed to do this really well. Making the doors extra slow turned that mission into one of the tensest moments I’ve ever experienced with a game. My watch gave me a high heart rate alarm halfway through it lmao

Just 11 for me, all spambots. Luckily, I’ve not had many problems with real people around here.

I am absolutely not advocating rudeness to the cashier.

IMO, lying to somebody, specifically with malicious intent (as opposed to a white lie to avoid hurting somebody) is rudeness. Just because they might not catch onto it doesn’t change anything; you’re being a bad actor in this scenario, and taking out your frustration on somebody who had nothing to do with your ire.

People do have that phone number, you know. It’s not reserved or blocked.

I’m a gamer myself, and therefore I know what I’m talking about.

Except the person you just signed up for unwanted spam texts.

Q: “Why is journalism dying?”

A:

Yeah, that’ll teach a lesson the minimum wage employee who didn’t make the rules.

I’ve been in that situation. At first it’s kinda nice being able to sleep in without worry for a little bit. But after a while it really starts to drive you crazy just not having anything to do with your time. That restlessness quickly turns into depression.

A big complaint I saw about the live-action Cowboy Bebop adaptation for Netflix was that the acting was too cartoony/over-the-top.

Personally, I thought the acting was spot-on for what they were trying to accomplish. It was meant to be a live-action anime, so it was never intended to be 100% tethered to reality to begin with. The characters are meant to be characters, and I thought they did a great job with it. Spike, Faye, and Jet were all perfectly-cast, IMO, and they all felt like their original characters felt from the animated series. There are so many times where you can just close your eyes and listen to them talk to each other, and it feels exactly like it felt watching the anime on Adult Swim back in the early 2000s as a kid.

I honestly loved the live-action adaptation and thought it was amazing. I’m still immensely disappointed that the reception was so poor that Netflix decided to cancel it halfway through the story. There are so many characters I wanted to see that didn’t appear until later in the original series. I would’ve loved to see a live-action Toys In The Attic or Heavy Metal Queen.

I think we all know the “preservation” argument is bullshit. I don’t know why we keep pretending. 99% of people copying games are not “preserving” them, they’re playing games they didn’t pay for.

Whether or not you think it’s wrong to do so is another argument. But can we just start being honest with ourselves? You’re not opening a museum, and you know it.

When I ran out of storage space.

While all those things are likely true, Bethesda also does have a pretty consistent track record of releasing the exact same game over and over, so it’s not exactly an unreasonable prediction that they’ll do it again.

I’m just so glad that they did a great job with SH2. After playing The Medium, I had plenty of faith in them to make a great Silent Hill game, and they lived up to my expectations. I really hope Konami has the wisdom to keep Bloober around for a while; it’d be the best business decision they’ve made in over a decade.

Now that I’m thinking about it, I’m kinda surprised that there hasn’t already been a Skyrim mod that does exactly this.

I’d honestly love to see them try a different take on Diablo. It won’t happen since Blizzard is all about live service games these days, but I’d love to see a single-player, traditional RPG version of Diablo. Imagine if Larian got the rights to make a Diablo game.

I had a 2006 Ford Taurus that would’ve been stronger if it was built with Legos. Water pump fell off one day - like… just… fell off. The brackets weren’t broken or misshapen or anything like that, it just fell. None of the bolts were loose or unthreaded or anything. I know that doesn’t make sense. I KNOW. It makes even less sense that it happened twice.

There was also some kind of electrical issue that I could never isolate, but it was causing fuses to blow out every couple months, and would burn out the starter about once a year. I had to replace that starter so many times that I stopped needing to refer to my Chilton book for the steps. Sometimes the power steering would just stop working and then start working again with no warning.

From what I’ve seen, the SH2 remake looks really good. Honestly, it’s a fine starting point if you want to get into the series as SH1 is pretty inconsequential to the rest of the games, so you can definitely just skip it and not really miss out on much.

I really hope that Bloober gets the greenlight to continue remaking the rest of the series. I’d love to see a modernized SH3.