People know the ‘I only read Playboy for the articles’ joke but it’s genuinely why the magazine lasted as long as it has. Playboy certainly wasn’t the only one doing nude photography nor was it the most extreme.

But the magazine has had some genuinely great writers over the years. Notable ones like Roald Dahl, Jack Kerouac, Ian Fleming, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Hunter S. Thompson and a whole slew of journalists and columnists who went on to write great stuff.

Playboy tended to give their writers a lot of freedom and published things others wouldn’t. After all, if you’re already controversial, you might as well publish controversial writing.

“Oh you’re looking for a red KitchenAid blender type # 5KSB2073EER? Great! Here’s that 4 CD set of traditional Turkmenistan folk music you wanted.”

I took typing lessons back in the mid ‘90’s, which was VERY uncommon for teens to do. When we got the first online multiplayer games, they only had text chat. I certainly had the fastest, foulest mouth in chat 😂

Never experienced bugs myself with 5, but I know others did. 6 has been a perfectly smooth game for the 11 hours I’ve played it so far 👍

I tend to be lucky that way. And I always play games on proper within-spec hardware with updated drivers and such, which does help.

To clarify: it’s not ‘early access’ as in an unfinished mess.

It’s early access, because the premium edition lets you play four days earlier. The base version of the game releases monday, but if you bought the premium version with the future DLC, you got to play it on friday as an added bonus.

But yes, agreed, ‘early access’ as in selling unfinished games needs to stop. It’s an incentive for devs to take the money and run.

This shit reads like an Onion article. Good god.

It really is infuriating. Especially when you get threatening reminders like ‘be sure to be here exactly on time or we’ll bill you/yell at you’.

I show up for everything at least 20 minutes early at the latest. Meanwhile I’ve had scheduled appointments run 45 minutes late.

Clearly they expect me respect THEIR time, while completely disrespecting mine.

In the Netherlands and a few other countries we have the Nutri-Score

https://www.rivm.nl/en/food-and-nutrition/nutri-score

This ranks a food from A (best) to E (worst) based on how well it fits into the dietary guidelines.

Important thing to note: it’s a ranking that compares foods in that same group. So it’s not ‘vegetables are A, pizza is E’, but rather ‘this Doritos has less salt than this bag of Lay’s’.

Now, this effectively caused companies to make their products blander in order to avoid a worse score. It also happened to save them money - you use fewer ingredients.

End result: chips now appear healthier because they have a better score… while also tasting like cardboard.

And how did that go over with consumers? See article. And you can read numerous complain about it on social media.

Ironically, this also means that the Nutri-Score sorta works. Why eat chips when they are tasteless? 😂

The article doesn’t mention it, but at least here in Europe, one big issue is that they changed all their products to be tasteless.

Because of the ‘healthy foods’ grading we have here, they took out a lot of what made their chips tasty. Resulting in very bland products. We personally haven’t bought any of those brands for a few years now because of it. Because I don’t want a ‘healthy’ chip - I want a tasty snack.

It’s definitely noticeable in Dutch supermarkets that many people are ditching those brands because of the lack of taste. And the price increases just accelerate that.

Fucking finally. That guy is an utter turd.

Well duh. Most of those AAA’s launch in broken states with lots of bugs and performance issues. And a lot of titles don’t even run well on the best hardware you can buy. Borderlands 4 ran atrocious on even the absolute best GPU you could buy.

And with the whole season pass, day one DLC, preorder bullshit, shit is more expensive than ever.

The industry only has themselves to blame for this.

Sounds great. Because nothing will get kids away faster from organised religion than being forced into reading about it 😂

I’d love to have the right to work from home. Unfortunately our shitty Dutch government failed to make that an actual right, despite popular support.

So if Brussels really wants that, make it a proper EU mandate YOU USELESS TWATS.

It’s so silly. Those were made to be used ‘surgically’: to hit specific high value targets at extended range while minimising collateral damage. If you feel the need to use 850 of them, you’ve chosen the wrong weapon system: at that point, you should be flying B52’s over whatever you want to hit. Or turn Tehran into a glass parking lot.

Searched for ‘is Death Stranding 2 on Geforce Now’ (streaming games service).

Answer it gave ie ‘yes, absolutely’. With a link.

The link? An Nvidia post about GPU drivers that had been updated to work with the game since it just launched on PC. Basically, because there was SOME mention of the game on the Nvidia site, it just went ‘yep’ without actually understanding the question.

Basically, if I’d bought the game based on that answer, I wouldn’t be able to play it…

Well, I do imagine there’s some caveats as to the efficacy of welfare programs, but we’ll stick to this topic :D

There’s been hundreds of food programs over the decades, but there really isn’t a good way to do it. If you just sent aid to a government or group, it tends to either destabilise the local economy or empowers people you don’t want to empower, like armed groups who can just take that aid for themselves.

But if you send individual aid, there’s issues too. For example, let’s say you set up a ‘work for food’ program. Sounds great, right? But what that ends up doing is that the WFF option is more attractive than tending your own farm or doing work with future benefits. Basically, WFF pays now - a farm doesn’t.

The best way to help is to give people tools and knowledge. Teach a man to fish and all that. But when faced with kids starving now, that’s obviously a hard sell.

I work for a newspaper and actually spoke to a gentleman a couple days ago whose student group helped set up a school in Ghana 30 years ago. Kids who grew up in the literal gutter got free schooling there. And it works! The reason we spoke was because the school is now setting up a music program and they’re collecting used musical instruments. He told me that during his last visit, he met a girl who went to that school and was now graduating from university. Isn’t that amazing?

Problem is, that takes 20 years to do. And that’s a mighty difficult thing to accomplish in places that are actively in conflict like Sudan.

The article is not wrong. But the reality is, we’ve tried to help places like a Sudan a lot over the decades. I’d say we helped TOO MUCH.

We sent food aid which made them dependent on us. It didn’t incentivise them to fix their issues, it just made them reliant on outside help. Meanwhile, the population skyrocketed. There’s more mouths to feed, more famine, more conflict.

At some point, a country needs to fix whatever’s broken. And it won’t be pretty; it never is. But I don’t think interfering in an internal conflict like this will do any good to anyone. Can we as the west even reasonably figure out who the ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ are in this conflict? Is there even a good or bad side to begin with?

Exactly. There’s a huge gap between ‘feeling cold’ and ‘being cold’. The human body is perfectly capable of operating for extended periods at temperatures that we deem ‘uncomfortable’. After all, our species survived to the present day, and proper clothing and central heating are relatively new inventions.

The human body itself produces a tremendous amount of heat. Go sit in a cold room with a few friends and it’ll soon get toasty.

I’ve spent a good amount of hours outdoors in cold and rainy weather. If you give in to ‘feeling cold’, the body doesn’t really learn to adapt to it. I know exactly when my body goes from ‘this feels cold’ to actually being cold and at risk of hypothermia.

“Mr President, there are aliens…”

“Yes, I know, that’s why we’re building the fence. It’s going to be fhe best, tallest fence anyone’s seen in the history of fences. And Mexico is going to pay for it!”

“… sigh…”

Same thing here in the Netherlands: cheap, poorly made Chinese fatbikes that were incredibly easy to unlock flooded the market. The result: teens are riding around at 40kph and stunting on a bike that has no brakes. Because those wear down rapidly if you overclock the motor, and nobody does maintenance on those shitty bikes.

So now they’re trying to regulate it, much too late. When honestly, they should just ban the fucking things for anyone under 25 without a disability…