Gameplay can be patented. Namco patented the mechanics of Katamari Damacy, for example.

“why, not even God Himself could sink this ship!”

“Hey Elon, you might want to tone it down a little. Just sayin’”

He’s still got Kanye, Kid Rock and Nugent, right?

Hawk Tuah is Brat for people who watch Duck Dynasty

You just know that he has had a T-shirt printed with the “_ all the things!!!” meme, only captioned “Impregnate all the women”, for what he believes to be “epic lulz”

The polls are worrying (the Dems need a lead of 3 percentage points uniformly to win), though methodology is a sticking point. Phone polls are biased towards people who answer phone calls from strangers, which is said to skew older. And the Republicans’ war on women’s rights is likely to lose them the female vote in a way that twentysomething incel Tate fans are unlikely to compensate for.

It’s probably too late to change candidates to a new one, so they’re stuck with Vance. Their best hope would be to parachute in someone charismatic and with appeal to a plausible “silent majority” of conservative-leaning voters à la Reagan, or at least someone who can keep his skinsuit on properly when in public. Given the way that from 2016, if not the Tea Party era, onwards, Republicans have either been primaried out of politics for being “RINOs” or else drunk deeply of the Kool-Aid and embraced the spiral of radicalism to keep up, there aren’t many plausible candidates who haven’t abased themselves.

So the Republicans would be thoroughly screwed, at least if they didn’t have the Electoral College, the Supreme Court, gerrymandering, voter suppression, the backing of billionaires and all the dirty tricks Putin and Musk between them can muster. As it stands, they may have to fight dirtier than they planned, with uncertain results.

The popcorn factory has laid on extra shifts to meet demand

“Given sufficient force, pigs can fly just fine”

We’ll soon see what it looks like when billions of dollars of force are applied to propelling a thoroughly unaerodynamic pig into the air.

As Sun Tzu put it, never interrupt your enemy while he’s making a mistake.

In a sustainable world, energy can and should be cheaper than raw materials. We are only harvesting a tiny fraction of the solar energy hitting the earth, to say nothing of wind and geothermal power. Rolling out more renewables and energy storage and using some of the surplus power to switch from extracting new resources to recycling our waste would greatly lower our footprint.

What will happen: Harris will put in a fine performance, coolly parrying his attacks and laying out a coherent vision for her presidential term. The press will latch onto one thing—perhaps some ambiguity around tax policy or her correcting herself after starting to say the wrong word —and blow it up into existential doubts about the very basis of her campaign. Meanwhile, Trump will ramble semicoherently, spouting disjointed assertions about protecting the border or the children or whatever, segueing into stories about golfing with famous people or immigrants abducting and transing American children, calls for mass executions of bad guys and word salad with no discernible meaning. The media will helpfully gloss over that, pointing out that he “forcefully advocated American interests” and is “in tune with public concerns about security/the economy”. They’ll award it to him, judging that he had regained the initiative and Harris is now on the run, and the 99.9% of the public who didn’t watch the debate themselves will believe that.

I wonder who’ll end up buying the archive.org domain and what they’ll use it for

…and also, apparently, the Holocaust.

That looks like an Iain Banks non-sci-fi book jacket

That doesn’t sound like an unreasonable price for a missile interceptor; those things have to be fast and precise. If anything, it looks like they have reasonable economies of scale going for them.

So, like the screen in the PlayDate?

Both of these services appear to be dependent on BlueSky. I.e., if BlueSky ceased existing, or cut them off from its API, they’d die. In that way, they’re not that different from “Log in with Facebook” or similar.

One could theoretically make one’s own independent AT Protocol network, but not in a way that interoperates with BlueSky as a peer. You’re either a subsidiary part of its network or you don’t exist as far as it’s concerned, which is a much poorer value proposition than ActivityPub and related protocols.

No, because the AT Protocol is not designed for interoperability, but rather for entrenching the silo owned by the main node (BlueSky) whilst giving the illusion of being decentralised. It’s to decentralised social media what Microsoft’s OOXML file format (tl;dr: a memory dump of Microsoft Word’s internal data structures encoded in XML, and useless to anything that’s not Microsoft Word or a very precise emulation thereof) is to open document formats.