inspired by the epic cliffhanger from Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Project Borealis represents a fan-made effort to realize a cohesive story conclusion to the episodic series.

I wonder if this takes Half-Life: Alyx into account?

I’ve always taken it as they’re tabulating the gifts:

“Wow, today he gave me three french hens! Plus I have the two turtle doves from yesterday and the partridge in a pear tree from Christmas day!”

I showed up to vote. But not enough others were excited to do so.

Problem is that this legitimizes their belief that there are set characteristics that define people as “manly.”

Every 30 years or so we make some sort of social progress for women and/or LGBT people, and then a panic ensues that society is trying to destroy manliness. The Joe Rogans and Andrew Tates of the world suddenly pop up and start selling their nonsense that will magically make them the man’s men that their grandfathers were (while in fact their grandfathers were being told the same thing.)

The solution to this isn’t to tell the loud whiners that their exact fears are true. It’s to divorce ourselves from the notion that being a man is determined by penis/testicle size, or even by having them at all. By telling the bigots that their worst fears are true, we’re tacitly endorsing their bigotry as legitimate, when we should be doing the exact opposite of that.

In most of the games she’s racing against another group, but several times is alongside them or even ahead of them. For example, in the very first game she’s working with someone else who sends her in first to retrieve the treasure, and then steals it from her.

Plus, a good chunk of the time the items are hidden inside priceless ancient artifacts, and Croft has to dig into her British roots to destroy an ancient culture’s legacy so she can get a few bullets or whatever.

Monkeys are specifically non-ape simians.

Problem is on some calculators C is clear all and CE is clear entry, on some C is clear entry and AC is clear all, and some have a C/AC or CE/C button where it’s press once to clear entry and press twice to clear all.

So it’s safest to mash unless you really know your calculator, because the industry can’t get its shit together, and that’s the sole reason it died (I’m assuming.)

“Enrolled PCs will continue to receive Critical and Important security updates for Windows 10; however, new features, bug fixes, and technical support will no longer be available from Microsoft,” explains Yusuf Mehdi, executive vice president and consumer chief marketing officer at Microsoft.

Don’t threaten me with a good time.

What lies were people fed about Tuxcart?

Is it universal that pro-lifers only make exception if the life of the person carrying the pregnancy is in danger? I’ve seen pro-lifers who make exception for rape and incest, and others who would advocate banning it in all instances, even when the life of both is at risk.

It ultimately is religious belief.

Religious people believe the soul enters the body at conception, granting personhood, so abortion is murder. They also believe that people put to death will go before God, where they will be judged as evil and sent to Hell for eternal punishment.

Everything else is just window dressing.

Clear and simple makes things easy, but easy is not always better. Also, the “life begins at conception” position only seems clear on the surface, but if you look deep enough things get quite muddled.

For example, is a zygote a single person? What if it later divides and becomes twins or triplets: did the twin’s life begin at conception? Did one life become two? Is a zygote a ball of life that can become one or more people?

What about miscarriages? It’s thought as many as half of all pregnancies end in miscarriage, but most happen so early that the carrier is not even aware they’re pregnant. If you come across a family with four kids, do you assume they likely had another 3-4 lost lives via miscarriage and hold a funeral for them?

Should people start getting child tax benefits as soon as they have a positive pregnancy test? Or is “life starts at conception” only relevant when we’re talking about abortion, but conveniently ignored everywhere else?

And what if there is a complication with pregnancy, where if an abortion is not performed both the carrier and developing human will likely die, but if an abortion is performed only the developing human will likely die? Is it now permissible? What if the carrier is a 14 year old who was raped, is suicidal, and has a high chance of stabbing themselves in the abdomen to try to self-abort if they’re not able to get an abortion: should they be restrained in a padded room until the baby is born, forced to serve as an incubator for a baby that the state will then take?

Even when your cutoff is strict, it is not always “clear” because this is a complex issue without a clear answer.

But to answer your question specifically:

Pro-choice people generally recognize that abortion is not desirable, but disagree exactly what the rules should be. Abortion does the least harm when the pregnancy is a single cell (zygote,) and in the embryo stage where most abortions occur the developing human is essentially a collection of multiple cell lines becoming differentiated into tissue but not yet developing functional organs (you’ll often hear this called “a clump of cells.”)

As the embryo develops into a fetus, the heart and brain develop and start functioning, which is where some pro-choice people start to draw a line. Others point toward viability: at about 22 weeks, a few fetuses have been known to survive with extraordinary health measures. By 36 weeks, fetuses can be live born without any extra health issues from being born early. So starting about 20 weeks, we start to recognize that pregnancies become more and more viable: that’s where a lot of people draw the line.

A very small percentage of abortions are done late in pregnancy, typically for health reasons. Not all pro-choice people are in favor of legalizing this, but many feel that in these situations, abortion is a tough decision that is best made by a patient in a careful discussion with their doctor, not by a politician they will never meet. So while these pro-choice people may not wish to see an abortion performed within a week or two of natural birth, they do not want to outlaw it so that the option is there for people who truly need it.

What do you mean by that? You’re an anti-natalist?

Trump inherited a booming economy from Obama and it was starting to decline in 2019 even before COVID hit. Often the president’s policies have an indirect effect at best, but economists generally agree that Trump’s policies were accelerating the decline in 2019. Obviously, the pandemic muddled everything in 2020, but the short answer is “no:” Trump took a good economy and was slowly killing it.

80 years of economic data has shown that Republican economic policies simply don’t work:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._economic_performance_by_presidential_party

No, redundancy is fine. It’s the proprietary backend and Ubuntu forcing it on users that people don’t like.

LLM completely whiffed on this one:

• It’s not a poorly implemented app. It’s a well-implemented app that in the early stages is not monetized
• The issue is not that limitations and costs are becoming apparent. The issue is that after the honeymoon period ends, developers seeking return on investment start locking features critical for business behind a paywall, and charge a very high premium fee for services that used to be free.
• It’s not the restrictive nature of freemium software that becomes the issue. It’s the increasing enshittification of platforms to squeeze business customers for as much as they can before the platform collapses, betting on the established dependency making it too costly to switch to another platform.

Yes, and they’re encouraging people to throw it out. At least some users think to sell on the secondary market, but third party buyers can only get so much out of EOL Windows machines and there are only so many linux users with an interest in buying up old hardware.

I myself have a couple of used laptops, but don’t need any more hardware for a while, so it’s not like I’m able to buy up any. I fear much of it will rot in a landfill.

Big company recommends users turn functional hardware into e-waste so they can boost quarterly profits.

Sure if you’re like 90 years old and hate your spouse. I enjoy my wife’s company.

Luckily between Amazon and ESPN+ I can meet most of my sportsball needs. For those not on the apps, there are websites that can assist.