I think my teacher knew not to do a song with a horn solo; none of us actually bothered to learn the notes to the songs. The concert probably sounded marginally better without me.

Ni.ce

In middle school I played the (French) horn, and one time I lost my mouthpiece right before a concert. I spent the entire thing just pretending to play my mouthpieceless instrument.

Americans were who did this, and literally millions more would've loved to be there. We can cry out "How was this not the end of it!?" as much as we want, but that's just ignoring the huge amount of people in our midst who were hoping it was the beginning.

My own mother lamented her poor health preventing her from attending Jan 6th, and that same woman cried in horror when Trump was first elected; 4 years was all it took for her to go from lifelong democrat to hardcore republican conspiracy theorist.

Trump's entire political career has been based in use of misinformation to trick people into believing he should be president. He's essentially the presidential candidate version of an IRS gift card phone scam.

It's never been about what we want, not with EA, and not with any company ever. It's always been about what raises the most amount of profits.

Usually making a profit means making a good product that people want to buy, but as we learn more about marketing and its influence on human behavior, companies can move more and more into a scenario where artificially inflated desire for the product through advertising impacts your decision to buy a product much more than its quality, making products cheaper to make and more profitable to sell.

It used to be that if EA didn't make a good game for a fair price, they didn't make money. But then they realized that they didn't need to do that anymore, and stopped making games with the same level of quality. Then they realized that they can start charging for individual pieces of the game, and boy has that been a profitable decision for them.

I grew up almost exclusively hearing "pop," and use it in casual situations, but I prefer to use "soda" in public. Asking a server what kind of "pop" they have seems odd to me, but at the same time asking a friend if I can grab a "soda" seems odd as well.

When you accidentally grab a blank slide and panic for a little bit.

Would you want to enter a legal battle with Nintendo? This system is broken in a lot of different ways, one of which is the incredible expense of legal fees even if you're in such an open-and-shut case as someone clearly using your intellectual property without your consent. The one with deeper pockets wins regardless of what the law says.

I hope we eventually get a season 2 for Spider. It was definitely one of the more fun and interesting isekais.

That sucks, bud. I hope your future love makes their way to your living room eventually!

I dunno how you went about it, but I've given some pointers to friends who weren't having any luck with online dating, and a lot of them were being too passive about it, basing their potential match choices mainly off of "vibes" and sending mostly generic opening messages - the quantity-over-quality approach.

While I was on the site, I spent hours a day going through every single person's profile - looking it over to really get as best of an understanding of the person as I could - and if I took interest in a few points, I'd send a message personalized to them based on what I saw on their profile. I also made sure that my own profile was well fleshed out, filling every field with well thought out responses, and putting up pictures of me hanging out with friends and doing activities like cooking and going to an amusement park.

Some, though not all, of the people who followed my advice eventually found success through dating sites. If you haven't tried all this, I'd suggest giving it a shot. If you have, sorry for being presumptuous, and I hope that you find who you're looking for eventually.

But they DO have the exclusive right. People want to be told the world is different - that it's better - but if we want to change it we need to see it for what it is. If we say "They don't have the right!" before we've done the work necessary to strip them of the right, then we'll never even understand how to start fixing this broken system.

They're a company - their only purpose is to make money. They don't hate emulation, they hate not making the absolute maximum amount of money they possibly can. Public use of emulation lowers their profits, while their own use of emulation helps increase their profits. It's not some weird enigma or hypocrisy - money is the singular driving factor for every company; every action they take traces back to making more money. This is why we need much tighter regulation instead of trusting companies to "be reasonable" or "do the right thing."

Well yeah, as the owners they have the exclusive right to determine what's okay. They're just following the rules as they've been laid out by centuries of corporate lobbying for more exploitable copyright laws. Those are what we need to focus on if we want more fair use of intellectual property that the rights holder has already sufficiently profited from - the thing that such protections were initially meant to ensure to a much more reasonable extent.

A buddy of mine got his first girlfriend in college after a family friend noticed that his single niece also liked manga and anime and introduced the two. I was very jealous of his attractive, nerdy girlfriend-turned-wife for several years until I finally got on a dating site and found love for myself.

Anyone still living in Florida at this point thinks they've still got decades before things get really bad. These people think they're the "smart" ones getting ahead of the curve and selling before the prices drop. I hope they're wrong, but honestly, there are probably a decent amount of wealthy idiots that believe climate change is a hoax and are looking to grab some nice beachside property while the "suckers" are leaving.

3, but yeah. I'd have them on while I was working since the pacing is pretty easy to follow. Plus I'd read the manga back in the early 2000's, so I could remember the major plot points well enough without needing to devote my full attention.

This works out perfectly for me. I started watching the anime a few months ago, but I lost steam around halfway through, so this gives me some time to take a break before catching up!

I liked sneaking up on them and stabbing them before they even started getting up.

Even my introverted friends were getting stir crazy in 2020. By the end of that year I was the only one I knew who was still perfectly content to be snuggled under a blanket putzing around online all day... I mean working from home.