Are there any instances of a 3rd party making digital copies of games available and paying some licensing fee back to the copyright holders? Something akin to how book libraries handle ebooks?

Maybe Steam falls in this category a bit, but I’m thinking something more exhaustive and focused on games that are otherwise out of production.

Klan.

I don’t care the intent or the season or the laws or the lulz. You wear a white fucking sheet to a polling place in a southern state, it looks like the fucking Klan. Fuck them.

Sphygmomanometer

I’m just guessing here, but I imagine it’s for “marketing purposes”. People sometimes (perhaps often) move around without changing their phone number, so area code alone wouldn’t be enough to pinpoint where you live.

Knowing where you live probably helps with micro-targeting ads.

The warriors of the resistance to the AI-pocalypse will wear red sneakers and wisecrack like it’s 1994.

Red Bull commercials confused me so much in my younger years. Obviously it can’t make you fly, so what does it do?

Even into my adult years, I’ve found myself avoiding energy drinks, not just because they usually taste awful, but also because they trigger this subconscious feeling that they’re trying to scam me.

Ah yes, that thing that sites mention on those annoying popups before making us sign away our privacy anyway.

Just logged in, just found it, just opted out. Thanks for the heads-up OP.

But fucking fuck. Can we put a stop to this? Legally? We could call it sometime like… The National Opt-out Policy Elimination (NOPE) Act or something.

I guess cuz it sounds enough like the much more common saying “as the crow flies”.

I have also never heard it used to describe direction, only distance.

Get a load of this!! Get a load of this!!

A bus pass maybe, that way you can just get on and not have to fumble around paying the fare when you board.

Side note: do I have this right? You can actually picture a time in the foreseeable future where you never have to use Excel again?

If so, I am soooo deeply envious of you :P

Already lots of great answers, but I’ll add a note about intentional barriers to exit.

Many services tend to make it easy to sign up and comparably more difficult to quit. So while people always can leave and take their business elsewhere, they might not have the motivation to do it. I imagine each additional click in a form deters more and more people. OP mentioned being unmotivated, and these barriers play into that.

It’s like wandering around in Ikea. You could use a map and chart out the fastest route to find what you need and get out. But it’s so much easier to follow the little path they draw out on the floor and look at everything, which makes you way more likely to impulsively buy something extra.

As far as I know, I have 2 main allergies: pollen and metals (some metals, not sure which exactly).

Pollen

• It feels like my nose is a leaky faucet. It will run and run and I’ll have sneezing fits for hours. If I blow my nose, it makes the inside feel super-dry and itchy, which just kicks off more running and sneezing. So it basically feels pointless to blow my nose at all, and I usually settle for sniffling instead. But if I do that too much, I start getting mini-sinus headaches.
• Flare-ups. Sometimes I’ll see the plants that trigger it and I’ll start sneezing within 10-20 minutes. Other times I’ll go outside and it’ll start out of nowhere. It’ll last for hours.
• Meds do not seem to help at all. Maybe they shorten what would be a 6-hour episode into a 3-hour episode but who tf knows. I have yet to find anything that kicks in faster than a couple hours after use.

Metals

• I break out in a highly localized rash. It’s red, bumpy, and itches like mosquito bites.
• Flare-ups after prolonged contact (several hours) with a metal. It’ll last anywhere from a couple hours to a couple days.
• No meds. It’s pretty easy to ignore when it flares up, and it’s easy enough to avoid exposure.

Me and my gf way back in the day trapped a stray kitten once.

It was living under a car. We put little piles of dry food out for it for a few days, gradually moving the pile further and further away from his hiding place. Then one day we made a little trail of food leading to a carry box that we filled with food. Once we heard it chomping away inside, we crept up and slammed the door shut. It felt like a scene out of a cartoon lol

Little thing freaked out and clawed at the door and cried for a while. But once we took it into the house and out of the summer heat, it was very happy.

Note, I am neither an experienced pet owner nor a trapper. I just like telling this story hehe

Edit: …what pronouns do you use for a kitten from decades ago whose sex you don’t remember?

My sense is it’s getting at “what’s an overated candy flavor”

I thought most hoes would be quite easy to plow

When referring to a difficult task: “That’s a tough road to hold”, or “a tough road to hoe”, or “a tough road to [travel on]” or “a tough road to… [trails off awkwardly…]”, or just “a tough road”.

It’s a tough row to hoe.

It’s an agricultural metaphor. The row is a line of dirt in a field where you plant seeds. You use a hoe to dig the lines, remove weeds, and create little holes where you drop the seeds. Hoeing may be difficult if the soil is too hard or too full of rocks and weeds. Such a row would be a tough one to hoe.

To me, this says that your workplace has acknowledged and accepted that the way they do business is leading to burnout, at least for some people. But rather than using that as evidence that their business practices need to change, they’ve instead opted to individualize the problem. Our growth projections aren’t unreasonably ambitious, you just need to do more deep breathing.

It’s like how I’m told to take a vacation to relax, only to return to the same (or an even larger) pile of to-dos that I left behind.

Edit: If this resonates with you, check out the book “McMindfulness” by Ronald Purser.

Whatever it was, I forgot what it was today