I don’t see how that refutes what I said about why people don’t want to pay for it…?

lol ok, sure.

In what way? Give examples plz.

Nobody wants to pay for all the little individual piecemeal services and shit, because it’s wildly expensive and inconvenient, and because they keep adding ads to the paid stuff anyway because greed, so what benefit is there to paying?

Idk if it’s still a thing or how widespread it is, but they sell/sold live fish and small reptiles/amphibians as keychains… basically a small soft plastic pouch filled with oxygenated water so they can get crushed or suffocate in a week (turtles can probably survive a bit longer but… regardless it’s gross). First article I found was from 2015, this one is from 2023…

https://thoughtnova.com/animals-trapped-alive-in-keychains-sold-for-1-50-in-china

I have a local burger joint at which I can still get a $2 cheeseburger. It’s plain and everything is an up charge but that’s fine. A whopper or Big Mac clone is some $4.50, so like, it’s still pretty cheap.

However, they have no seating, and it’s an old ice cream shop so just a big kitchen and a tiny indoor order/pickup window and 2 benches. And there’s always a massively long line. Takes easily an hour to get fast food there during peak, cuz nobody goes to the local depressed millennial McDonald’s (one of those sad gray ones)

Meh, I use the same super-weak password for tons of sites I don’t give a flying fuck about.

I took all the military opsec and infosec courses, because I was in intel, and my partner is currently an IT security professional, but some accounts just don’t warrant giving a damn.

I don’t use it for anything important, I let my password manager handle those, but bullshit “create an account to checkout” stuff that I use another payment system for? Meh.

This doesn’t seem like news, beyond looking for something to report on.

Inappropriately as always ;)

Indeed, it’s never about you.

I know, I was joking in sort of a not-jokey-very-dry sort of way.

I wish there was a universal (lawl I’m unserious but being very dry about it) tag. Because that stuff doesn’t translate to text well at all.

Such a layer of emotion and presentation behind communication to get around! So difficult! And I have a degree based around doing exactly that…

On a side note, we have dry humor which implies a wet humor and… I’m curious what that is but I sort of don’t want to know…?

Well sure, there used to be a lot more horses that died annually, back when they were a primary means of transport.

Is I/O in this context input/output? I’ve seen it used this way before but I’m not super techie so no clue.

In no particular order, here are my thoughts:

• most languages need to reform in large ways due to being at least partially tonal/inflection based (such as a rise in inflection to indicate a question). All languages need to add an additional conveyance mechanism to account for the loss of tone and inflection to indicate feeling, and anything else speech patterns normally convey, as suddenly all language works like texting
• people suddenly suck at talking in exactly the same ways they suck at writing, because they have to pick the right conjunction or homophone. Good luck two us all
• directional blinder hats would be a thing almost immediately (something that shields the light but has a covered hole in front to selectively open however wide you need, probably with hand controls and color filters and shit)
• light pollution dies down to facilitate conversation, but dark sky areas have to shutter their projects due to conversational twinkling (sad outcome :( )
• indoor light gets dimmer to facilitate conversation. 60 more stubbed toes happen every month
• sunglasses become the new unplugged headphones
• someone develops filtering goggles that cut the specific human communication wavelengths for people with epilepsy. They are a big hit with commuters and parents
• since people can no longer talk but it sounds like all else remains the same, someone would develop a translation device that does “blinks to speech” for blind and epileptic people, who could maintain use of the auditory old language and still function fine in society (good outcome, yay!) (I considered how they communicate back, but there’s no reason their light thing wouldn’t work so this is fine)
• more people opt to have their outer eyelids removed so they can eavesdrop on conversation while looking like they are sleeping (weird outcome, but it is a surgery that exists and divers sometimes elect to get it done to avoid wearing a mask. Inner eyelid is left in place, can’t tell from outside, but you can see through it apparently)
• private conversations become much more difficult, which forces everyone to act nicer in public, which reduces the amount of time people can be shitty, which in turn makes everyone nicer (yay happy outcomes!)
• it gets a lot harder to hide that you are watching porn or kinky boning when the blinking light gives away the… dialogue. Blackout curtain and door light stopper sales skyrocket literally overnight
• people rarely go missing in the woods or in wrecks. Everyone has a beacon every night, and there are huge social awareness campaigns to use your light this way. An international help pulse is developed so no matter where a person gets lost, they can blink for aid. 1km is quite far, meaning they would light up the area around them, especially multiple people blinking in unison. A project is launched to have satellites scan the night-facing surface looking for the pulse pattern, and is wildly successful. There is a brief trend among young teens to cry wolf, until the bills for wasting global resources start rolling in
• lots of famous people suddenly find themselves jobless, as singing is no longer a career. Since light pulses are completely sensually unrelated to music, instrumental music makes a big comeback, as do poetry recitations and stage plays. All the weirdo instruments from over the course of history are resurrected (best attempt) to add variety to the cultural landscape once filled with voices
• television and movies lose cultural significance as they lose the ability to tell many of the stories they do now (blinky light gives away your location in horror, ruins ambiance for romance, interrupts action sequences, etc. it’s just not amazing for the current form of visual entertainment)
• translation becomes a lot easier, as the effects of accents and dialects diminish. The light pulses can easily be read by software and translated to a different pattern (human speech sounds are so so much harder to parse)
• people have an easier time learning other languages now that everyone shares the same blinks framework; no pronunciation difficulties, just new patterns
• animals mostly very much dislike humans, and find us quite alarming. The blinking doesn’t help. Animals trained to respond to verbal cues have to be retrained to understand the blinks are an attempt to communicate something to them. Many animals now have problems in their homes due to the change (very sad outcome :( )

I think they already do that with the corpse tour, no?

They make noise, but it’s a verrry different sort of noise.

The third pandemic is a good book about a variety of diseases, including bird flu, mingling in a host (bird) body, morphing into a superbug, and wiping out huge swaths of the population.

If you like to read, it’s quite good, if a bit long. (but notably I read it in 5th grade and hauled around a dictionary for a lot of it… it sticks hard in my memory, because my step dad gave it to me after finishing it himself, and it was a challenge. One of our few shared positive things from the era where he almost killed me multiple times… but I haven’t read it in a hot minute; just shy of 30 years…)

I’ve been doing these for years… they don’t work as intended for more than a year or two, and then become pretty unstable. Even the lady who created it went back to low-maintenance (as opposed to zero input) systems after a few years. Still with the dirt and all but not without water movement and stuff.

The most likely way it got there is he rubbed his eye and transferred an egg he picked up touching something.

For example (tho probably not the exact method), some species lay their eggs on the coat of horses, kid pets a horse and picks up an egg, rubs eye and transfers it. It hatches and burrows in and the rest you saw.

I would hope that by the time something like this launched to the general public, it would be a service rather than an expected purchase. Like self-driving-flying taxis.

It doesn’t make sense to have everyone owning their own when they will probably be largely autonomous to avoid issues with individuals driving them (not that everyone owning a car makes sense either, but I digress), so the maintenance shouldn’t be an issue either.

Easily the rest of your life!

I’m going to watch it anyway, so there.

But as a brain cleanse, try little Emma. It’s not amazing, but it’s cute as hell. Itty bitty humans smaller than sentient racist livestock.

I wish I’d known… it was on my birthday, so I’m sure I could have convinced at least a half dozen people to come protest with me…

I had that many willing to go out with me after work despite being a Sunday so… (which is amazing at almost 40 as a non-social sort)