What’re you talking about? That’s clearly an RX-7 and a Dodge Challenger.

As someone who doesn’t use TikTok and was under the impression that it was a young person’s game, I did not expect the “trend” involving a notoriously phallic vegetable to be a recipe.

The Witcher and Cyberpunk I’ll give you, but Mass Effect definitely fades to black before getting to actual sex, the other two are mods. I wasn’t saying sex in games doesn’t exist, but if we’ve gotta go back several decades for a handful examples, that doesn’t feel like something that’s “common.”

Accurate, but one series does not make something common.

Sex scenes are common in modern games - and are often made by filming human actors who are then digitised into game characters.

Is “common” referring to cringey low budget Steam games? I don’t think I’ve seen any sort of on screen simulated sex in a game, ever. Granted I tend to only play well publicized indie games and larger releases. But how common is this? Am I out of the loop?

TL;DR: mine is $660/month for health, $42/month for dental

Most folks in the US aren’t aware of how much they pay for health insurance. I live in California, where law requires full time employees (>30 hrs a week, >130 hrs month) be provided some amount of health insurance. The type of coverage varies not just from job to job, but also within the same job the employee must often choose their own plan from several company selected options at varying price tiers and types/amount of coverage. Usually the employee only sees the amount of the monthly cost that THEY are responsible for, which is then automatically removed from their paycheck. What most folks are unaware of is that the employer is also paying some of the cost (which is the part that the law makes them do). The part that makes it extra frustrating to deal with an already broken and overly expensive system, is that the rate paid by employers is negotiated in bulk with the insurance providers. Larger employers (national corporations with hundreds of thousands of employees) are paying much less than an individual or small employer would. This is the one of the largest reasons becoming unemployed is so dangerous in the US. In addition to not having income for food or housing, people often forego health insurance due to the expense. If you lose (or leave) your job you’re eligible to keep your current insurance plan for 18-36 months with COBRA (Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, which is such a ridiculous backronym that I had to google it just now). This is often the only time people realize the true cost of their insurance as the entirety of it is then passed on to them directly (at the employer negotiated rate) and it shows up as a new monthly bill.

I recently left my employer to start my own business and discovered that my true cost of insurance is ~$700/month ($660 Health/$42 Dental). Keep in mind, this doesn’t mean that I have zero medical bills should I actually visit a doctor or hospital. This is pretty good health insurance, but I still have to pay $5,000 out pocket (annually) before it kicks in at the full coverage amount. Since I had ear surgery earlier in the year and hit that limit, and wanted to be able to continue seeing the same doctors I had for already scheduled follow ups, I decided to keep the same insurance. That $5,000 isn’t the only expense that landed on my shoulders, there’s a bunch of rules that I honestly don’t fully understand and I’ve probably ended up paying somewhere between $7,500-$10,000 for the surgery I had (in addition to the monthly premium).

The main reason I keep paying insurance (in addition to the fact that you’ll now be charged a penalty on your taxes if you go uninsured for a month), is my fear that you mentioned in the original post. Having a car hit me while I’m walking down the street and ending up with a $50,000 visit to the emergency room is a very real possibility without health insurance. California recently limited ambulance rides to a maximum cost of $1,200, so that’s… good?

This lesbian has big dad energy.

Came here to say this

After reading that entire post, I wish I had used AI to summarize it.

I am not in the equally unserious camp that generative AI does not have the potential to drastically change the world. It clearly does. When I saw the early demos of GPT-2, while I was still at university, I was half-convinced that they were faked somehow. I remember being wrong about that, and that is why I’m no longer as confident that I know what’s going on.

This pull quote feels like it’s antithetical to their entire argument and makes me feel like all they’re doing is whinging about the fact that people who don’t know what they’re talking about have loud voices. Which has always been true and has little to do with AI.

There’s a dodge meter now that shows you how many dodges each character has left

So the assumption is that they took the game down for almost a year, changed nothing, and are putting it back up?

The fact that it is gonna be live action is what concerns me the most. I hope it’s live action in the style of the Netflix One Piece series and not the Bob Hoskin’s Super Mario Bros film.

This has been happening for a while now and the results of which are the voting populace of the anti-intellectual movement that is explained in the documentary film, Idiocracy.

The content made it seem that way. No worries.

Definitely a tribal rite of passage in need of updating to remain relevant. I do take umbrage with the chanting at a magical fairy. That’s far more a chrisitian thing. But what are the horrendous implications?

And turns men into wolves

While every religion has its crazies (GTFO, orthodox & hassids), I found judaism to be far more critical and questioning than other religions that I’ve been exposed to. Literally the opposite of black & white thinking, a bunch of the religious texts are actually just arguments of different scholars (contemporaries of christ) offering opposing viewpoints and interpretations of older doctrines. (I’ve got an unfounded theory that this is why so many jewish people go into the study of law.)

That being said, I am not a religious person and despite being raised jewish, I now consider myself an atheist. Technically a satanist if we’re talking about giving my money to some kind of church.