These lift kits are getting out of hand.

No sources noted, no complainant identified, and most of the stories seem to come out of outlets financially supported by RM or their backers. Anything is possible in football, but let’s just say more should be on offer before we feel too bad for Real Madrid.

I’ve had a fairly decent one with a Canon small-office B&W laser. It needs to be reset every so often, and it doesn’t seem to like my wife (though no printer ever does), but its apps and drivers are mostly business related, so while they are more than happy to help you buy supplies, they don’t force the issue, and the printer doesn’t care what brand of toner you shove in it. 99% of the time it’s just sitting there quietly on its LAN address, ready to print something successfully.

She just got an HP multi-function from work, and dear god that thing is annoying. It kept claiming that its own demo ink was counterfeit. Also fairly mediocre color prints.

Space: Above & Beyond

I was enjoying the hell out of that show until they ran out of money and decided that since they were “Marines” they didn’t have to fly their ships anymore.

That was the classic “Oh Fuck! No Budget! Time travel to LA!” move. See also, Picard, season two, though I wonder if that was more to do with the cast not wanting to deal with sci-fi shit.

That’s his preferred coffee taste and that’s what he demands the company makes.

I’m sure it’s also completely coincidental that burnt coffee tastes mostly same no matter where and when the beans came from. :-)

I normally use that same coffee in an Ikea French Press and while I won’t say it’s gourmet, it meets my needs for “not particularly bitter caffeine juice”. Honestly, I slowed it down the next time I did a single cup pourover and that took most of the battery acid notes out of it.

I don’t have a particularly sophisticated palate and still want some sugar and milk in there; I just don’t like Starbucks very much and hate paying a premium for a product that I like less than my homemade half-assery. :-)

If you need drinkable brewed coffee from SB, you have to order the blonde roast. They scorch the everliving fuck out of their regular stuff to ensure consistency regardless of source, so even if you normally don’t, if you want “black” coffee from SB, you’ll be better off with the blonde. If you’re brewing by volume of grounds, lighter roast will have more caffeine anyway (they’re the same if you brew by weight).

So it’s not a lawsuit (yet), it’s a complaint to the state attorney general of Washington accusing Starbucks of unfriendly consumer practices related to their gift cards, in part because they can recognize unspent gift cards as revenue, and also because it’s instant cashflow for them even if the accounting revenue lags behind. The need to come up with a calculation for how much deferred revenue to recognize can be abused by execs to nudge the revenue higher (and with no additional costs associated with it, profit as well) and thereby improve stock price and trigger bonuses and whatnot.

The actual complaint reads as a bit of pearl-clutching (“involuntary subscription” because customers don’t want to leave a balance OR talk to a real human at their local Starbucks!) , but on a the “death by a thousand cuts” model, yeah, I suppose Starbucks is being kinda dickish. The app doesn’t give you as many rewards if you pay with CC, buries the other payment options a couple of layers deep in a menu, doesn’t let you reload gift cards in increments equal to a purchase, doesn’t let you split payment methods, and sets a high default reload so (on iOS at least) it isn’t immediately visible that you even could scroll up to reload in smaller amounts.

It’s sort of garden variety asshole app design meant to soft-lock customers in, but it’s not really fraud in any meaningful way if someone is motivated. You add money, you get bitter overpriced coffee that your partner really likes for some reason. I prefer CHEAP, ACIDIC coffee because I did the pourover too fast on mediocre store-bought grounds that are too fine, LOL. Still, maybe worth a public scolding or some fines to get them to modify it so people can save a few bucks without diving into the finer nuances of their coffee app.

Somewhere in the corner, Joseph Smith is scribbling furiously…

Maybe I’m a little pollyannaish, but I tend to think that the generations growing up with this stuff will grow around it and configure their social expectations and will settle into rhythms that work as well for them as older generations’ environments did for them. It will look weird to olds, but I always wonder if we’re looking back at the “good ol’ days,” and projecting our own reactions to the changes onto the generations that will take them in stride and make sarcastic wanking gestures at us when we complain.

Pamphlets/Newpapers/Films/Radio/TV/Video Games/Internet/Social Media will all rot your brain and subject you to misinformation and leave you depressed at how you must interact with the world, depending on when you were born and when you are speaking. Not to say there are not unique challenges to each in turn, or that some periods don’t end up worse than others, but I just don’t think our kids are going to treat the world and each other THAT much worse than all their ancestors have, and if they do I’m not sure it is uniquely social media’s fault. There are many things worth knowing about the social impact of new tech, and perspectives that the experienced can offer, especially in transitional eras while it’s new. I just don’t think think doomer handwringing or trying to put genies back into bottles is a good use of anyone’s collective time.

I get that OP is almost more thinking of people’s “comfort food” works that serve that need for them personally, but Becky Chambers is very specifically writing to inspire that kind of feeling from the get-go. Life can get hard, bad things can happen, but good things too, and people (including pan-sexual bird aliens) are just living in the future the same way they do now and most of them are trying to be decent.

Having read some software developers’ attempts at writing, or, god help me, contract drafting, I agree completely.

Doctors are the worst about this though, and everybody WebMD’ing themselves before coming in is simply collective karma.

I loved anything with James Burke when I was younger.

Now, too, but also when I was younger.

Jesus. The details are damning. This is not white Gen-Z’ers thinking they’re post-racial so they can repeat the stuff they hear from black content creators (and of course, they’re not and they shouldn’t). This is pretty much old-school racism.

Also apparently not the first issue, or the second.

What (or who?) could create a corporate culture where racists would feel empowered to say anything they want without fear of repercussion?

I almost think it works well that he was in a completely different headspace than the rest of the actors. It made him effortlessly bizarre when he could have come off more as mailing it in.

It’s fairly subtle on my monitor, but I can definitely see some cell-shading, almost resembled Don Bluth rotoscoping.

Gotta admit, it felt like a half measure, and I didn’t love what little I saw. Looked more like saving money than innovating. Willing to be convinced otherwise though.

Good catch! I’d never heard of him. Looks like his patreon subscribers could get a hard copy sent to them.

I think this is the source.

This is a pretty funny little deal, on several levels. At one level it’s obviously sending up the suburbanites lifestyle, but it also has a subtext gently teasing New Yorkers about how they see the rest of the country, like the old “View of the World from 9th Avenue” magazine cover. Probably depends on the audience, I reckon.

My favorite is probably the fake address. 24th street cuts across Manhattan, at roughly 900 feet per long block, each of which corresponds to a building number 100 higher than the previous block. Extending it out to the fake address, you end up about 90-100 miles away, in the suburbs of Scranton, Pennsylvania, the far hinterlands where people practice weird religions, play with “Toy Men,” and pursue their hobby of “Car Engines” with their shoe-collecting wives who are either teen mothers, being cutely faux-29 forever, or probably both. They live in huge houses on isolated plots of land like an eighth of an acre or more, and they never talk to each other. It’s all really pretty much the same as Michigan or Minnesota or Montana, I think.