I can’t imagine my experience wold have been better online. The third year was almost all lab work and practical.

But aside from that, one of the best things about my offline experience was getting to spend time with people from other disciplines and honestly, some 20-odd years later, that has been almost as valuable as my degree in my career as well as my understanding of the world.

The only part that’s unique to gaming is that gamers are the most toxic community in the internet.

I wish this wasn’t as true as it is.

I don’t think this is a gaming problem.

It is a discourse problem.

People engage in absolutes. They either love a thing or hate a thing. There’s no nuance.

And it must be made to cater for them, there’s no expectation that it will contain choices they don’t approve of.

And this stance, this modern relationship with the world permeates everything, especially forms of media.

You see it in films and books… Fans and stans and folk trying to take it down. There is no nuance or middle ground.

People don’t accept that, perhaps, something isn’t just “not for them”. That’s why you get grown men complaining about the direction of children’s shows they used to watch.

And this is compounded with social media where polarisation, blunt takes and contradiction are the primary drivers of engagement.

Audience error.

That’s fair enough.

I recently started editing video in Resolve, but decades of using Premiere means my muscle memory is heavily biased.

I suspect that might be the same for you.

In what ways do you find it more convenient?

Yep. Cool. There’s a place for them, certainly.

Still don’t think that’s reading though.

I say unpopular because those that do think audiobook are “books” tend to be very, very vocal about how wrong I am when I express that opinion… As if I’m somehow undermining their enjoyment or the legitimacy of their consumption.

The 52% on my side are just sat quietly reading books and minding their own business.

I think you make some interesting points… Content is important.

Although I think there’s such a desperation to get people into the reading habit that anything is considered good enough.

Remember the Harry Potter book when they first came out. I seem to remember a lot of chat about how those books were low effort, but that they encouraged a lot of life-long readers.

I know that here, in the UK, our education system tends to make people resent reading. Furthermore it instills some awful habits… Like feeling you have to finish a book even if you aren’t enjoying it (which usually means you stop reading altogether).

Anyway. That’s a long way of saying I think you are right.

I know this is an unpopular opinion, but listening to audio books isn’t reading.

It is a different sensory experience. It uses different parts of the brain and imagination too.

It is far closer to listening to a radio play.

I’m not saying it is any worse or better, just different.

I’m not sure that conflating the two is useful, particularly when talking about reading habits.

Prompt to hallucinating?

Do you mean “Prone”?

That is the sort of mistake an Llm would make.

Thanks, that guy.

Nice listicle, but would have been better to write something inciteful as to why all these sequels failed so hard.

It wasn’t just the cash grab, but a fundamental misunderstanding of what made the previous film great.

Kids loved watching the original RoboCop because it was R rated. It was a comic book film with gore and guns. It was illicit.

Then they turned him into a cartoon character for kids.

Police academy became a paradox of itself. You could argue that the public perception of the police had changed significantly between the original and Mission to Moscow too. It was no longer funny to be entertained by the thought of inept police.

Anyway, that’s just off the top of my head.

But let’s not forget the time the US dragged the world into a horrible war on terror just so it could maintain oil prices too.

Yes, that was what I joking about.

By allies, this article is referring to Republicans.

As opposed to Zelenskyy’s allies who are pretty much every nation state other than Russia, USA and, the runt Hungary.

I bet the idiots have shares in the dental industry though.

I agree, it isn’t the same, but is still a fact that this rehetoric masks the damage to the little guy whilst fuelling the rights of big companies.

No one likes that, but it remains the truth.

And this is the same logic that big companies are using when they rip off small scale creators to feed their AI algorithms.

The argument is more nuanced than “it isn’t stealing because it is just copying”.

With the AI stuff, they are not just copying the work, they are stealing small creators livelihoods as well as the efforts of their labour.

I know, it’s cool to say the catch phrase, “of buying isn’t owning, pirating isn’t stealing”, but ultimately this benefits the massive mega corporation’s more than the little guys.

There’s such a prevailing vibe that the EU would want us back too… What if they don’t?

I mean, after events of this week, it’s probably more likely, but even then they’d be well within their rights to tell us to sod off.

You just know that Trump is going to have to say and do some batshit wild stuff to distract us from this.

What next?

My money is on claiming Antarctica as US land because of …uh… Ice prices or something.