ITT:

Win 10 user not realizing they are self-reporting how unenthusiastic / unimpressed they are by their OS, to the extent that they literally cannot even imagine being excited by any OS.

I’d say fuzzball there has some pretty lips, but… nah, not really.

She got confused and misspelled ‘poser’.

Or, or… hear me out:

Every big box shopping center?

Just put an axe throwing / darts / cornhole ‘store’ on one side, and a VR arcade on the other side.

The whole ‘male daycare/playpen zone’ thing? For dudes who just don’t wanna be shopping any more?

Give them an actual male daycare zone, that is actually enjoyable.

Ancillary bonus: wtf, does that kinda seem like a ‘third place’ where social interactions with randos can happen?

Yeah its still capitalistic, but presuming we’re talking about America/Americans… baby steps, baby steps.

Well maybe not epigenetic, but look up the so called ‘Mouse Utopia Experiment’.

Basically, when you entirely remove the ability of social mammals to feel like they are actively doing something to succeed in that society… social dynamics invert and social instincts basically now work in an ultimately destructive way.

The mice become territorial despite there being enough resources for all of them.

Extreme mating selection pressure basically causes incels, weaker mice that aren’t allowed to mate, that stronger male mice just basically attack for sport.

Then you get looksmaxxers, ‘the beautiful ones’, some of the incel male mice switch to just preening themselves all the time, never breed, but never try to, so they don’t get attacked.

Female mice stop caring for their children, become more polyamorous.

More male become gay or bi. Sometimes consensually, sometimes not, as part of an assault.

As more generations come into being, they learn the behaviors of their parents, of the mice in their environment, and thus basically stop acting like ‘normal’ mice.

… this all results in an extremely hostile social dynamic that ultimately leads to basically what would be called a slew of mental/behavioral disorders compared to your Gen 0 starter mice, and this leads to population collapse. Tons of unneccessary aggression, way way lower birth rates.

So … in a situation of abundance, in a species that is evolutionarily hardwired to compete for dominance over scarce resources, thus creating a kind of hierarchy… well the instincts for that do not go away, despite them not actually being needed, strictly speaking.

And those instincts are what causes the population to… correct its overshoot, sort of, but in a catastrophic way.

I would posit that this is not perfectly analagous to humans… but broadly similar.

Theoretically, we have the sentience and sapience to truly realize that we have outgrown some of our instincts, and intentionally replace them with better ones.

In practice?

… TBD, I guess.

Like, imagine trying to explain the concept of a parasocial relationship a human nowadays may have with a streamer, or a massive super fan or brand loyalist to whatever company… try to explain that to a person from 1810.

You could explain it to them. People from 200 years ago are not ‘stupider’ than people now.

But they would still likely find the entire thing completely insane.

Yeah! It was a bunch of different gifs! Maybe … 128x128 px at 12 or 24 fps, something like that?

He’d make ‘facial expressions’, and move around… looked kinda like Veggie Tales style animation.

And there was more than just Clippy, he was just the default. There was like… an Einstein look a like… a dog… I think there were at least 8 different little mascot type things, to go along with the actual ‘speech bubble’ style, actual user interface.

I remember just fucking around with this shit in the early 00s, in the computer lab.

EDIT

Ok, here’s the Office 97 version:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=-QBlKo6o4Ec

By the time I was using Office, a few years later, they’d figured out how to hide the ‘window’ that Clippy appears in, and basically alpha mask the gifs, make the backgrounds of them transparent.

So, not a true ‘desktop buddy’, as you had to have Word open, but … yeah Clippy basically ‘lived in’ Word, if that makes any sense.

Woops, entire store is a mimic.

…sorry for your loss.

TBH she wouldn’t have even needed big booba.

Just… even just an animated face mesh.

Like really, they fumbled that whole concept so hard… a competent marketing department could made Cortana in basically the professional version of Hatsune Miku.

Even clippy had fucking animations.

Look into MiniPCs!

I’m not sure what will have availability in your country, but MinisForum, GMKTec, AOOSTAR would be where I’d start looking.

If you go for a MiniPC with an OcuLink external port… well, then you can get a GPU cradle and a small PSU for it, plug that in to MiniPC when you need the graphical power.

Its hard to find exact numbers on this, but basically, OcuLink appears to perform better than Thunderbolt 4 as a kind of eGPU data transfer method… there is some efficiency loss as compared to directly slotting it into a MoBo, but in practice, its often 10% or less.

And, now that FSR 4 works on 7000 series AMD GPUs, you may be able to find such a GPU that is cheaper, yet still performs somewhere between a Steam Machine and a more powerful PC.

This kind of setup is about as spatially small as a Steam Machine, and allows you the ability to upgrade to either a new GPU or MiniPC when you want to.

The MiniPC will be the CPU and storage memory and RAM.

MiniPCs often use laptop style SODIMM RAM and M.2 SSDs… so… if prices for those remain high, you can at least take those out of your old MiniPC, and then get a new ‘barebones’ MiniPC based around a newer CPU, and slot them into it.

Could also be epigenetic effects that we currently do not well understand.

Turns out that you actually can and do sort of pass on the cumulative effects of what has happened to you before you reproduce. And this does seem to include testosterone production.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11010-025-05366-0

Now that’s paywalled, but the abstract seems to me to indicate that at least broadly… this is probably part of the puzzle.

Stress, your metabolic state due to your diet (of ultra processed foods), environmental pollutants, things like that… may significantly contribute to how much T your offspring are gonna be making.

jordanlund is only getting my ID and DNA if he finds me, shoots me and mugs me.

Ok, we need a moth porn comm, that’s just different lightbulbs rated by lux output and emission spectra range.

And then vintage moth porn for the particular connisuers of various filaments.

I mean, I, for one, have no problem ‘swordfighting’ with anybody sufficient equipped for the engagement.

Universal Gender Neutral Piss Troughs, NOW!

Which means the new paradigm will be ‘every piece of hardware is a supply chain attack.’

Flare guns tend to be a lot more… disposable, basically?

Like unironically the Pyro’s flare gun from TF2, made of plastic mostly.

I dunno, maybe there are much studier built flare guns, but I’ve not heard of em… unless you’re just talking about a grenade launcher firing a flare round or something?

Like I said elsewhere… I think that’s a 50 BMG round.

… there are reasons why you almost never see break action / top break revolvers and pistols these days.

Mainly, they do not tend to do well with high chamber pressure.

A break action 50 BMG pistol?

That’s an overly expensive hand grenade, with an unreliable arming mechanksm, imo

If this is a smooth bore barrel… then you’re loosing a fucking 50 cal that is not spin stabilized.

Oh god what a bad idea.

A 45 70 derringer?

I mean… that is basically pretty close to what this appears to be…

But why? Who dared you to do that? They’re an asshole!

Aw, don’t be shy…

Cortana just wants to get to know you!

We swear she hasn’t been locked in an airgapped cluster underneath Kirkland for about a decade now!

Pinky Promise!

A lot of people are more irresponsible than you can possibly imagine, and, if you point that out to them, you are harming them.