My thought is that it’s revealing the construction and weak points of the death star. It may have been constructed in two hemispheres that were joined together, and that seam might have been the failure point where gassed were released when the internal pressure got too high.

Except then we should see the two hemispheres blow out from each other a bit, which they don’t.

Scarlet and Violet may only run at 10FPS and there are plenty of other flaws, but it’s still a ton of fun. And those are sequels, not remakes. The gameplay is a dramatic shift from everything the mainline series has done before.

Legends Arceus has performance issues too, but was was critically acclaimed.

As for the remakes, they’re generally pretty good upgrades. Gen 1 has really aged poorly, but FRLG are fantastic. I never liked Diamond or Pearl, but BDSP were really solid and fixed almost everything they could without making fundamental changes to the game. I’m really hoping they re-make Gen 5 because those are my favorite and they are stuck on the DS- my adult hands can’t handle holding something that small for hours on end.

Or… Maybe for most of human history we re-told the same stories over and over again for thousands of years until the relatively recent concept of “intellectual property” has forbidden us individuals from doing what comes naturally, forming this sort of weird resentment for when corporations do it?

Yeah it sounds like something mainstream media would accuse TST of doing. Like, I strongly suspect that most of the “movements” to include pedophiles in diversity conversations are really just bigots astroturfing because that just makes more sense.

And I still think it’s worth supporting TST just for the legal work they do alone.

I’ll admit I’ve never been a member of either organization, but I have friends who were TST members and last year a good chunk of that congregation split off to join GoS. And they’ve since helped others so the same. So this is basically how they’ve described it to me.

From Wikipedia, it looks like GoS started in 2018 as a UK split-off for various concerns. Wikipedia focused on specific issues the UK branch had, but I was also told a huge factor was the logistics and goals. TST is a very US-focused organization that puts a lot of resources into US legal battles. They also had strict controls over branding, policies, and structures that just didn’t suit them.

The main reason for the schism in my local chapter was more specific. TST regularly streams online services and last year had a leader from a chapter who advocated for welcoming, accepting, and celebrating people regardless of sexual preference. Which sounds great…, except he also explicitly called for the inclusion of pedophiles as part of LQBTQ+. Despite pedophilia being in direct opposition to tenents 1 and 3. The local chapter (and several other chapter) complained to their national representatives and the response was… Nothing. No statement from the national organization, no consequences for that leader. Just swept under the rug.

Also of significance was allegedly there was some sort of documentary released in 2023 called “The Lies of the Satanic Temple” by Dead Domain that claims to expose fraud and abuse from TST leadership. I have not watched it (although coincidentally I have watched a couple of her videos on videogames- she had a really interesting interview with the creators of Paradise Killer), but I heard that it caused several other congregations across the country to split off of TST.

GOS is much less centralized. It’s more of a collection of guidelines, resources, and suggestions. Some chapters keep their own branding, like the House of Heretics in Seattle.

From an outsider’s perspective, it seems to me like GOS is more focused on replacing the role of the church in an individual’s life with a secular alternative. They do charity work like adopt-a-highway, food drives, clothing drives, etc. A lot of the members are young, queer, alternative people, and if their families disowned them they don’t have a support system. They have support for things like non-religious sobriety programs. I almost get the impression it’s like a religious rehab for people who grew up in very restrictive or abusive churches. At Pride this year the local chapter was doing “un-baptisms”. They have potlucks and parties and other social events. I think some of these things they might have carried over from TST.

They keep a much lower profile than TST. They don’t engage in the legal battles that TST does, and a lot of the people I know who left TST still respect the organization for fighting that fight. Personally… I’m really confused as to why GOS still keeps the “satanic” imagery of TST because I thought the point of that was to serve as a counterpoint to Christians in those legal battles.

Personally I’m just introverted and not interested in all that “community” and “networking”. But I’ve donated to both organizations for the work they do.

Edit: in the interest of fairness I’ve seen claims that the Dead Domain documentary has been debunked.

Oh yes of course there’s very good reasons for the different organizations. Personally I’ve been a bit turned off by some of the stuff TST has been doing and more interested in the Global Order of Satan (GOS).

I just think it’s funny how Christians don’t seem to have any problems separating (and feuding against) the hundreds of thousands of different denominations, many of which have nearly identical names. But two different organizations with 0 words in their name in common is apparently too confusing for them to handle.

But it’s really weird and sinister to even bring up the Church of Satan. The Church of Satan purposefully does not publish numbers, but the best estimates I can find have them peaking at 300 members. They haven’t been relevant since the 80’s when LaVey got in front of the media during Satanic Panic. TST might have more congregations than CoS has members.

It would be like saying “the Roman Catholic Church, which is different from Christian Scientists”.

Despite its name, TST is not affiliated with the Church of Satan

I find it really funny that they need to call this out given the thousands of different Christian churches that all have varying degrees of affiliation or animosity with each other and often nearly indistinguishable names.

“Armed settlers”

Incredibly soft language

So fight mud with mud and make it harder to recognize the true intent.

Or better yet, make it so that the symbols are just way more commonly associated with non-asshole meanings.

This may be controversial, but I think the way to combat dog whistles like this is to overuse them and muddy the waters. Make it so the Nazi’s aren sure whether the “pattern noticer” they are interacting with are antisemitic or not.

ISIS went from being an Egyptian goddess and a great band to a poorly translated acronym for a terrorist organization because everyone let the terrorists win on that one. The swastika has been a neat and simple symbol used by a variety of cultures with a variety of meanings ranging from positive to neutral until it was taken by the Nazi’s. 88 is a really neat looking number that’s done nothing wrong.

Society keeps on ceding cultural ground to assholes and the rest of us have to tiptoe through every piece of communication in fear of being associated with them.

What’s next? How long until some fascists start to use the “cool s” that we all doodled in our notebooks in school? Are we going to have to stop using any numbers with less than 3 digits? Will Allah, Jupiter, and Thor join Isis as symbols of fear?

Just recently I finally convinced my wife to watch Venture Bros. I watched it on Max a couple years ago and enjoyed it, but I hadn’t gotten the chance to watch the movie. So I was hoping we could watch the series together and finish off with the movie.

The movie is on Max, but the show is not anymore. The first 3 seasons are on Netflix. Seasons 4-7… They don’t seem to be available anywhere. Well, I think Adult Swim’s website might have it but their website sucks for binging shows even on a desktop, and either worse or literally not possible to use on other devices. I could “buy” them digitally on Amazon. Instead I just bought the DVD collection and added it to my Jellyfin server.

It used to be that a show had to be really special for me to shell out money and dedicate digital and physical storage space for me to buy a physical copy. But more and more I find myself buying the DVD’s and Blu-Rays even for shows like Venture Bros that I like, but may not love. Streaming just keeps getting worse.

I kept on checking throughout the day yesterday- Verizon’s website said no outages, but istheservicedown showed most of the east coast of the US was down.

I also heard from friends with business class Internet that they were fine.

Technically it was never released on PS5. It was released on PS4 and later received an upgrade patch for the PS4 Pro.

But yeah it works with backwards compatibility on the PS5. I would expect the PS4 Pro patch to work but I haven’t tried it myself.

That’s over 7 years old. Roughly the length of a generation. I think re-mastering console games from 2017 is reasonable in general.

Not for HZD though. It was already one of the best-looking games on the PS4, and then they added a free upgrade for the PS4 Pro to get checkerboard 4k. Like… What’s left to improve?

Maybe upgrade from checkerboard to full 4k? The FPS seemed fine for me playing on a base PS4, but perhaps there’s room for improvement there. The initial load time to open the game is pretty bad, but if you don’t switch between games often that’s not really a problem. I haven’t tried the PC version yet, but perhaps there were some UI improvements there they could apply to consoles?

My main complaints with the game that I’d like to see fixed would probably be beyond the scope of the term “remaster”. The facial animations during dialogue were pretty uncanny in the base game, but they’re good in the DLC and sequel. Also the itemization system was clunky and felt like it was trying to be similar to an online multiplayer experience for some reason.

But only a small fraction of the plastic gets recycled.

If 9/10ths of the plastic ends up in a landfill or the Pacific garbage patch, having 1/10th of that plastic recycled into another bottle (which then will eventually have 9/10ths tossed in a landfill anyways) isn’t doing much. It’s better than not recycling at all, but it’s green washing to say that it’s “eco friendly”, which Capri-Sun allegedly did at this trade show.

Those bottles in the image look like plastic. I can’t find anything indicating they are using glass or stainless steel.

It also includes flavoring (of which the orange juice is one). They come in more flavors than just orange.

I invited myself because it’s an interesting article, nothing to do with nostalgia.

“Sometimes” feels a bit generous. From a quick search I can find estimates that 5-9% of all plastic is recycled. It might be higher or lower depending on the specific kinds of plastic these bottles use, but most of it is probably ending up in a landfill anyways.

You think the bottles are going to be any better? They’re going to end up in the ocean with all of the other plastic bottles from other drinks.