British beer too.
Watney's and a small number of other breweries had a stranglehold on the UK pub industry because they owned a lot of pubs and could exclusively force their own brands upon their locations. Their Red Barrel bitter pissed people off so much that it led to the creation of CAMRA, an organisation that campaigns for real ale.
CAMRA formed from four ale enthusiasts on holiday in Dublin who were lamenting about the dogshit state of British beer. It was a very successful movement...
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Enough to both flip almost every Senate seat in contention at Midterms blue, and counteract all the Republican attempts at gerrymandering and electoral interference that will inevitably come.
A gargantuan effort but not statistically impossible
I think things will have to get truly bad by November for that to happen...
Honestly, I think Trump is more likely to be replaced by the 25th Amendment than impeachment.
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I think thorium is the way to go when it comes to nuclear fission. It's debatably a far safer and more abundant material to work with.
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Belgium and Switzerland are the only two countries where the process of medically assisted suicide is alarmingly simple.
My best friend got cheated on and dumped after he got diagnosed with epilepsy. It took a year of fits (one in which he screwed up his back) to get the diagnosis, and it basically meant he had to abandon his career path of working in the police force as a detective and forensic analyst and switch to something different.
It also doesn't help that they both got sacked from a call centre whilst this was going on.
The industrial revolution created loads of new jobs in manufacturing, logistics, distribution, procurement and transport.
The digital revolution created loads of IT, cybersecurity and programming jobs.
AI removes most if not all the human labour from the equation if it functions properly. What new jobs has the AI revolution created or will create? Because last I checked, "prompt engineer" is not a job title. I can't even find any fucking jobs for it anywhere from a LinkedIn search.
(sigh)
I'd prefer tech-bros pushing crypto, Web3 and NFTs to something that can actually cause mass unemployment and societal collapse.
And AI may wipe out a huge number of the rest. I genuinely can't possibly fathom how it will do anything but exacerbate every single one of society's problems.
I can see things going one of two ways:
I think it's only a matter of time.
Waymo already exists in some parts of the US and is being trialled in Atlanta and London. Miso Robotics already can automate manual work in kitchens and have their bots rolled out in fast food chains like White Castle. Claude is miles ahead of competitors in terms of output quality, and there are probably a lot of AI slop content creators making absolute bank from YouTube, Instagram and TikTok.
Optimus 3 will be released soon and at a predicted price of $30,000 per robot, it could potentially lead to mass layoffs in warehouses. Because remember, robots don't get tired, don't need food, don't need water, don't need to piss, don't need to shit, won't complain about OSHA violations, and don't need a paycheck. All that matters is work quality and price
According to some accounts, China are apparently even further ahead than the US in terms of AI and robotics, but they're deliberately holding back their rollout of humanoid robots and self-driving vehicles because they know a wide rollout will lead to mass unemployment and civil unrest.
A big part of the reason AI spend is so expensive is because there's this huge arms race to throw gargantuan amounts of computing power in the hopes of achieving AGI that way. While I think AGI may be bullshit and unachievable, I think they'll eventually turn a profit once they stop focusing on throwing trillions at data centres.
At this point I'd prefer the Chinese routers.
Waterstones was on the brink of collapse, until a Russian billionaire bought the chain and put James Daunt in charge.
Daunt reversed years of enshittification. Publishers couldn't buy shelf space for their books anymore, local managers were given autonomy on what books they wanted to stock and each branch was run like its own individual book shop.
And to the surprise of the business world, his plan worked.
FDR American Badass.
It's a B-movie starring Barry Bostwick as Franklin D. Roosevelt, fighting against Nazi werewolves with a heavily weaponized wheelchair.
The trailer was hilarious. And then I actually watched it with a few friends for one of our monthly film nights.
You know when someone tries way too hard to be edgy and vulgar and it goes from funny to downright uncomfortable? This was like the film equivalent of that. Some scenes genuinely drag on way too long because Bostwick needs to crack another half-a-dozen sex jokes. He genuinely comes across as lecherous, creepy and giving me Chevy Chase vibes (not in a good way.)
We made it about 30 minutes through the film until we had to switch it off because it was just so bad. And I genuinely had to apologize to everyone for even nominating this movie.
I dunno, live-action Fullmetal Alchemist was pretty ass.
The only good thing about Dragonball Evolution was that it was so bad that it brought Akira Toriyama out of retirement.
I dunno if I even wanted to go into that subject.
I'm somewhere between women (at least in England) having incredibly stuck-up attitudes and dating apps being enshittified to the point where they're more like scams.
I legit get no matches apart from Coffee Meets Bagel and OkCupid.
99% of the profiles curated to me for matching on CMB are East or South East Asian women, and this isn't me not wanting to date Asian women. IDGAF about ethnicity when it comes to partners. I mean I'd rather not be used as the means to a spousal visa by someone who isn't even in the same continent. I met a previous ex on there, and she just wanted to use me for help learning English.
OkCupid is even worse. I get a lot of matches but it's all GPS spoofing SE-Asian and African women. Some are legit, many try to lull me into a crypto scam or ask me to Venmo them money for a passport application.
Part of the reason I got into my current hobby (singing, karaoke) was to meet people outside of apps. Apart from someone making out with me once, it's only otherwise led to gay men hitting on me.
Queued for an hour for the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Other than that, not really.
How unattractive the world has been making me feel. Haven't matched with anyone legit on a dating app for nearly a year. And I feel like whenever I open up about it (especially on Reddit) I get so much hostility and vitriol.
It didn't. The Game Over triggered as soon as I retreated and the flagship was nowhere near the Federation base. I actually engaged it at the earliest possible moment when entering the last sector.
Three I can think of
Rebel Flagship from FTL: Faster Than Light
I fucking hate FTL and everybody hails it as the best thing since sliced bread for effectively inventing the roguelike genre. It's an incredibly poorly balanced game that boils down to travelling across each sector, bouncing between beacons, fighting hostile ships, encountering random events and whether you choose to engage with these events, rolling the die and (more times than not) getting screwed over by dogshit RNG.
I've only reached the Last Stand twice. On the first time, I engaged the Rebel Flagship, had over half my health taken out in a few shots then decided to retreat. Retreating triggered an instant Game Over because the game was glitched. The second time around, I made it to the second phase before dying.
This is how rough the game is on Normal mode...
Xemnas from Kingdom Hearts 2
This is more like me not having the patience to learn the fight. Roxas had already worn me the fuck down, and the only way I got past him was to effectively cheese the fight with Megalixirs, Limit Form and Ars Arcanum spam, which is easier said than done. I not only had to grind my drive forms up significantly beforehand, but I also had to intentionally manipulate the game's RNG so as to not trigger Anti Form at any point in the fight.
Xemnas is like a far more bullshit version of Ansem from KH1, in the respect that both are lengthy multi-phase fights that can take 20 - 30 minutes under normal circumstances, but unlike Ansem, his Nobody counterpart now has the ability to drive you down to 1HP with an unavoidable QTE attack where he launches a flurry of combos which you have to perfect parry.
And I think generally, Kingdom Hearts 2 is an objectively worse game than the first one in almost every respect, aside from the fluidity of its combat system. It has serious difficulty spikes, some incredibly bullshit boss mechanics, lacks the interactive game world that the first game had, gave us a substantially worse version of Atlantica that plays like a cringe Little Mermaid sing-along rhythm game, has substantially worse gummi ship sections, and unlike the first game, and it generally began the point where the plot of the entire franchise would start turning into a confusing clusterfuck.
And it's not like I'm bad at Kingdom Hearts games either. Riku 2 took me a grand total of two attempts to beat in the first game, and the way I was able to beat both Riku fights so easily was because I learned quickly not to execute a full keyblade combo on him and cancel right before the last swing, because he will do an undodgeable counter. Also, Riku 2's ultimate attack can be easily dodged by just jumping up and gliding around the arena. Even Sephiroth (the game's bonus superboss) is pretty easy with healing items or Leaf Bracer/Curaga.
Elder Princess Shroob from Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time
Superstar Saga was a masterpiece. Its sequel on the other hand is linear as fuck, has bad writing, is ruined by the Baby Mario Bros who wear the same red and green outfits as their adult counterparts and therefore make Bros Moves substantially hard to pull off (as it's easy to get A/X and B/Y mixed up.)
For me it's the game that killed the Mario & Luigi series.
I could never get past the final boss and I'm convinced that my copy of the game is either glitched or she was designed to be a damage sponge. I genuinely gave up after one attempt took me well over half an hour only for me to die.
They're all Reddit alternatives that existed.
Karaoke enthusiasts are raging alcoholics. Partially true. I also know a lot of borderline or fully teetotal people who take part.