A lot of people conflate “knowledge” and “intelligence.” Not the guy you replied to, they seem like a troll; but still, a lot of people.

Our ancestors had intelligence in spades. They figured out an insane amount of stuff just to survive; and it’s not too far back in the grand scheme of things that they had to remember it all because they had no way to record it. The first caveman to make a handaxe had absolutely no idea what he was doing, but they figured it out. Wheels, bows, fire, the entire concept of agriculture… They figured out how all of that worked from scratch, with no reference material.

Modern humanity builds on that with knowledge. We’ve figured out how to record everything our ancestors discovered, and all of our new discoveries as well. We’ve put men on the moon, figured out how to make electricity from things like waterfalls and glowing rocks, and almost everyone has a tiny computer in their pocket.

None of that means that we’re more intelligent now, though. All of that knowledge is iterative, so we’ve just been applying that same intelligence at a continually higher level throughout history.

I’m pretty sure it’s implied that Doom & Doom II weren’t fully removed from the continuity, though.

IIRC, the original games end with the Doom Marine stuck in hell… Which is also where they found the Doom Slayer. Additionally, despite his background with the Argenta, the Slayer is confirmed to be human in an audio recording; and his Praetor armor is similar enough to the UAC Elite Guard armor that he can upgrade his armor with tokens taken from dead guards.

So… In short, the Slayer might still be the Marine, but with a ton of interstitial backstory that kind of renders his actual origin irrelevant.

maybe a little less sweet

I see what you did there

I grew up rural too, but in a less conservative area, and… Honestly, it made for some hilarious moments in sex ed.

I think the crowning moment was in high school health class - at the start of the sex ed unit, they split us up by gender, and had both groups try to draw both reproductive systems as a baseline for what we knew. Both groups did pretry well with the male stuff, but there was a stark (and unexpected) difference in the diagrams of the female reproductive system:

The girls group did an excellent job of drawing and labeling a vagina, but almost none of the internal bits.

The boys group, though… One dude had noticed something about the general shape of female reproductive system in an earlier class, and came up with a his own mnemonic for it: turns out, you can sketch oit the general layout of the ovaries, fallopian tubes, uterus, and birth canal pretty neatly over the dodge ram logo.

I think the issue started a little over a decade ago, when the Boy Scouts got in some hot water for discriminating against gay kids and they actually tried to be better.

Up until right now, I always thought Coachella was just the name of the festival, not a place - sort of like Burning Man.

I’ve never been more confused by a headline in my life.

They also usually use some weasel words like “up to.” That way, if it doesn’t last the full 72 hours (which it won’t), they can claim that they stated “72 hours MAXIMUM” rather than just “72 hours.” It’s basically shifts the statement from “lasts three days” to “definitely won’t last four days.”

I let out a long sigh.

This has to be a joke. Something they tell the new guys to jerk them around. “Collect taxes from cryptids” my ass, this is straight up workplace hazing. They even sent Jim along to keep me company - he’s probably going to film this for the office christmas party or something. Well… I guess I may as well play along. “So, how am I supposed to contact Bigfoot? Just shout into the woods?”

“Yes, actually. This is where we’ve found him the past few years, so he’s probably still living here. And he prefers ‘Mister Squatch.’” Jim’s advice doesn’t make this feel any less like a prank.

“Mister Squatch? You have to be kidding me… EXCUSE ME? MISTER SQUATCH?” I bellow, “WE’VE BEEN SENT TO CONTACT YOU ON BEHALF OF THE IRS!” I can’t believe I’m out here making a complete fool of myself.

And then it happens.

A rustle in the bushes, followed by snapping twigs and shaking branches moving fast through the underbrush. Jim bends down and opens his briefcase - why? Why did he even bring a briefcase to the middle of the woods? Suddenly, the movement in the bushes stops as it reaches a clearing, and I see something massive race towards the trees on the far side. Suddenly, it stumbles, tripping and tumbling as it falls, wrapped in a net.

A net? Where did a net come from in the middle of the woods? And then I see Jim’s empty briefcase, and the empty net gun in his hand. Laying in the middle of the clearing is the Bigfoot, and now I have to treat this like it’s normal and actually collect his taxes. Before I can even react, though, Jim is starting to untangle Bigfoot. “Look, Mister Squatch, I keep telling you, if you just pay your taxes, we won’t have to keep hunting you down like this. You know the drill, pay up or we’ll start telling the tabloids about where you live. You remember how annoying that was last time, right?”

“Yeah…” Bigfoot talks!? I’m not even sure if I’m at work right now, or if the CIA guys in the next office over slipped LSD into our coffee again. “I still keep it in the cave by the creek, just take what I owe you and leave me alone.”

“Glad we could settle this easily.” Jim cuts him free, and turns to me. “Let’s go get the money. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover… Our next stop is in West Virginia. Say, how do you feel about bridges?”

I feel like I need a new job.

I’ve worked in retail, and… That’s not an actual RFID alarm sticker, and it’s not just there for the potential theives.

Some manufacturers will actually put an RFID tag on the inside of the box. These tags work exactly like the RFID stickers, and they’re deactivated the same way (usually a magnet underneath the store’s counter).

This sticker is actually a “chip away” anti-theft sticker. They frequently go on the same products that get RFID stickers, but all they do is tear apart instead of peeling off. They’re mostly an internal tool for LP to try to link thefts and fraudulent returns (that number is the store number that it came from). This one just happens to conveniently have “ALARM” printed on it as a secondary feature, letting thieves know that the item will set off the alarm without showing where the RFID tag is.

Edit: I should probably add that they also put them on high-theft non-alarmed items, but they probably didn’t get separate sets of stickers.

It’s either a typo, or a lot or sass for a PopSci article.

“Look at this huge, unparalleled rise in carbon levels millions of years ago, it’s so huge… Psych! We do that every five years! Buckle in, buckaroo, things are about to get bad!”

Wait… Y’all are talking about X-Wing: Rogue Squadron and Star Wars Episode 1: Battle for Naboo, right?

I owned those windows ports!

They worked great back in the day - I had such a blast with them that I begged my parents to get me a shitty Logitech joystick! If you want to check them out, it looks like Rogue Squadron is only $10 on Steam; and Battle for Naboo seems to be abandonware, but it seems to be hosted on a lot of “better spread than dead” game sites.

I think there may have been a tragic misunderstanding… It looks like they were using X as a placeholder, rather than the noun that Elon wants it to be; but the sentence construction could have been clearer.

Something like “I think X is wrong, but I want it to be legal for me to do wrong things Y and Z” might be a bit closer to what they were going for.

If you’re into hard sci-fi and you’re looking for a good read, they actually dropped a pretty good recommendation with that reference at the end - Larry Niven does a great job of blending real-world theories like Dyson spheres and advanced propulsion drives, with some of the more far-flung standards of the genre like an intra-planetary teleportation grid.

IIRC, the reasoning was that spawn rates were lower than they had intended, and they were bringing them up to the intended values - I think they said that a solo player was actually getting 1/6 the spawns of a four player group, instead of a quarter.

After the “kill two billion bugs” order got finished in a few hours, I was genuinely surprised to log in a couple of hours ago and find only a few percentage points on both planets… But that won’t last long, there were about 10x as many players on the airburst launcher planet as there were on the anti-tank mine planet.

I like the idea of having it as a ship upgrade, but even as a fairly new player, being able to see the lanes seems like it would be helpful in deciding what planets to drop on.

Maybe that upgrade could sort of be a part of the tutorial? Like, you learn what samples are, pick up a few (maybe five-ish), and then the first time you open the ship upgrades, it walks you through buying your first module with the conveniently low-priced “Galactic Positioning System Premium Subscription” or something of that ilk. That way, it could sort of kill two birds with one stone, teaching newbies how to do ship upgrades while giving the map a bit more functionality.

(Edited for grammar)

That makes a lot of sense, actually. I also saw “fully electric” and immediately thought of electric/hybrid/ICE cars, and my brain went straight to “hold up, did I miss the fully functional diesel-powered humanoid robot?”

Nah, it looks like it was sarcasm. “Unalive” and “commit sodoku” are both sort of combination meme/euphemisms, in the same way that we might have said that someone “an heroed” a little over a decade ago.

Ah, that makes sense. I read “below” as being relative to the blade, not the photo, and I was looking in entirely the wrong place.

Those divots you weren’t sure about - you’re talking about the ones around that little nub at the bottom of the blade (does that count as a tang?) that get hidden within the knife when it’s open, right? It looks like they might be there to give the zen pins a little bit of extra clearance when it’s latched in the open position, while the nub keeps it from over-rotating.