The cast of Blacklist was amazing. The writers, less so. They spent so much time telling us how brilliant Elizabeth was, but barely ever showed us. What they showed us most often is that the only way they knew to create conflict was to have her do the absolute stupidist thing possible in nearly every situation.

“I, Daniel Quinn, neither the first nor the last of a line of such Quinns, set eyes on Maud the wondrous on a late December day in 1849 on the banks of the river of aristocrats and paupers, just as the great courtesan, Magdalena Colon, also known as La Ultima, a woman whose presence turned men into spittling, masturbating pigs, boarded a skiff to carry her across the river’s icy water from Albany to Greenbush, her first stop en route to the city of Troy, a community of iron, where later that evening she was scheduled to enact, yet again, her role as the lascivious Lais, that fabled prostitute who spurned Demosthenes’ gold and yielded without fee to Diogenes the virtuous, impecunious tub-dweller.”

Quinn’s Book by William Kennedy

When my previous independent pharmacist went out of business, they transfered all of my prescriptions to the nearest Walgreens. I switched to another “independent” that was part of Rite-aid’s network. The staff were poorly trained in customer service communications, passive aggressively taking control of every conversation and then not listening. I had multiple instances of prescriptions being lost or delayed, in one case for weeks. The owners didn’t care why I as a customer found these experiences frustrating and eventually told me I should just go to Walgreen’s. I did and the customer service has been so much better. Independent isn’t always better.

The beauty of open source is that Google can’t take it back. The worst they can do is close source their own future development. Meanwhile, the community can fork the last open source release of AOSP. Look at what open source devs did with Audacity, for example.

The real fly in the ointment here is Google already did with device trees and driver binaries for Pixel phones; no longer sharing these with AOSP will have a very chilling effect on custom ROM developers who must now reverse engineer needed configs and drivers.

You can also get extended service updates from Microsoft for at least a year. $30 for up to 15 computers, although there are also a couple of ways to get then free. 1000 bing rewards points, or enabling Backup to sync your settings to OneDrive are supposed to both means to get them that will become available soon.

I like that both “toasters” and “clankers” are hard “r” slurs.

That’s fair, because AI is biased against them.

We already have “clankers” thanks to Clone Wars. What more do we need?

In this case there are no competing domestic products though, or few enough as makes little difference. This is just taxation with extra steps.

“There was a button. I pushed it.” Where’s Holden when you need him?

You forgot Alka Seltzer’s “Mama mia, that’s a spicy meatball!”

This is a common misconception but they are not the same. Among other differences, their basic ingredients differ. Crumpets are made with milk and baking soda, while English muffins are made with dough and yeast or sourdough.

Yeah, I can’t work up much existential dread at this prospect. Given the immensity of the universe, the odds of this happening anywhere that it will affect the human race anytime soon are pretty damn slim.

The Mercury Eight was a runner in its day.

Yeah, that’s a new one on me too. Where I’m from, “Merc” is usually gearhead speak for a Mercury not a Mercedes. Then again, I’m old and out of it, so what do I know.

John Carter: 1970 Death Dealer: 1973

And neither is from the 1980s.

That’s just not so. J.M. Barrie’s book popularized Wendy as a girls name, but it predates the book by centuries.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendy

Good points all. Blizzard never has prioritized communication.

Too late. Someone at Blizzard should have remembered that “You never get a second chance to make amfirst impression.” No amount of FOMO will bring me back to this tedious grind disguised as an event.