Hideo Kojima games may be interactive movies and not to your taste but “poorly made” they aren’t.

There are plenty of people who sincerely believe in Roko’s basilisk.

The big predators live in the water.

I’d also be more worried about crossing paths with a moose than any predator (other than a polar bear), they’ll stomp you to death for existing too close and can’t be reasoned with.

I was quite near a black bear once but with a group of people so I felt pretty secure. It actually followed us for like a mile walking late at night, middle of winter along a mountain road. Technically I don’t know it was a black bear because we didn’t see it, but we heard it keeping pace in the darkness maybe fifty feet away and it’s the only thing (other than Bigfoot) that checks all the boxes for that behavior. A deer wouldn’t be doing that and if it had been a mountain lion we wouldn’t have heard it.

I’ve seen brown bears from a distance and from inside a car. I’ve been close to coyotes, swam near sharks, always with people or with some kind of barrier.

The one that freaked me out was different. I was living in California and regularly hiked the nearby trails, my favorite being up Cerro San Luis. One day I decided I wanted to watch the sunset from the peak so I grabbed my water bottle and walking stick (tall and pointy) and set out in the evening. It was gorgeous! Fog rolled in right as the horizon lit up all shades of red, really breathtaking. I watched until it got dark and that’s when I realized I had neglected to bring a light of any kind. (This would have been ~2012. Whatever phone I had was not particularly useful for illumination.) The night was moonless, and the trail was now blanketed in thick fog.

I got lost.

I took the wrong turn at a fork and didn’t realize until I was clear under the fog a mile or two the wrong direction. While contemplating my situation I happened to glance a dark shape just barely silhouetted against the clouds. Something on four legs that watched me for a few moments then silently melted away. In that moment I remembered seeing “mountain lion sighting” warning signs at the trailhead earlier that month and felt an intense, primal sensation I’ve not experienced before or since. Being stalked, being hunted, in such a precarious position… I picked up a large stone and waited in silence for at least ten minutes, grateful the whole time that I always hiked with my stick, before I decided it was safe to pick my way back up to where I got turned around. Slowly, cautiously, nauseous from the adrenaline, until on the main trail I ran into a family of four merrily returning from the top with headlamps and I rather sheepishly asked to join them. (They were nice about it). I don’t night-hike solo anymore.

In the light of a new day I went back and looked around and I’m pretty sure what I saw was a large bobcat rather than a mountain lion, which would have still been worrying given the circumstance of being nearly blind, so I wasn’t in as much mortal danger as I felt. In the moment I’m not sure if “afraid” is the right word. Yes there was fear but it was tempered by other instincts. I was prepared to fight that animal with a rock and a pointy stick just like our distant ancestors would have, and everything in my mind and body was shifted into that very specific gear. No coherent “I could die here” thoughts or anything like that.

What do you think of them in general?

I’m glad they’re out there. Even if I had been attacked I wouldn’t bear them any ill will, that’s just carnivores being carnivores. I was more careful after that to avoid a similar situation but I don’t want wild spaces to lose their large predators. It’s pretty easy to be safe and share the planet.

Same, I spent like $200 on stuff and none of it to people with AI banners.

Medical industry is the only place I can see the justification. There’s so much plastic waste in food production, delivery, and storage.

I saw Dethklok and Babymetal together, your old coworker would have hated it.

It’s not as angry and energetic as Fush Yu Mang but I think it’s a solid album.

Hey, they’re the worst thing about America too!

Can’t buy liquor on Sunday, weed is still strictly illegal, no public-driven initiatives, this bullshit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Senate_Bill_12 , the “bathroom bill”, there’s a real pattern of enforcing a very particular cultural identity through legislation and selective enforcement. It’s almost like the state that liked slavery so much it seceded from two different countries to keep doing it has long-standing issues with respecting anyone but wealthy white Christian men.

Texas, perversely, actually has a ton of nanny state bullshit laws to control the population.

Excited for the Robin Hood cyberpunk future of server farm heists to redistribute that precious RAM to the commonfolk.

Agreeing with you. Pointing out that it’s not “only Americans” supporting (and voting for) these shitheads. Focusing on one country is a mistake when the hyper-wealthy exist and influence internationally. Frustrated with how so much anger is misplaced at American citizens by others. There’s a lot of context I didn’t think needed to be explained.

Gotta distract from the growing far-right in Germany somehow.

What’s the moral there?

Don’t worry about vote score and just block obvious assholes.

(To be clear, I wasn’t trying to be snarky to you specifically. There’s just a lot of people in this thread acting like literally the only reason the Mercator projection is used is because of racism.)

Google does a ton of things that are kinda cool but mostly pointless and then they stop supporting it randomly.

Imagine ridiculing the skill of reading a map instead of offloading your entire cognitive self to a phone app.

Moral of the story: pretty much every decision is made for logical reasons. Sometimes the reasons are unclear, motivations are selfish, or circumstances later change such that the decision is no longer sound, but it’s very rare that “they’re just stupid” is the cause.

(I think that was the joke)