The Game Gear has an entire CFL bulb behind the screen. A popular mod is to swap it out for some LEDs, which consume an order of magnitude less power.

Oh it gets better.

The statue — which rises 15 feet atop a 7-foot base — was commissioned and bankrolled by a collective of crypto investors seeking to boost visibility for their memecoin, $PATRIOT, according to The Daily Beast.

Sculptor Alan Cottrill told The Times in February that he agreed to create the bronze figure for $300,000 but complained that the investors were slow in paying. In November he proposed coating it in gold leaf.

His suggestion went down like an offering of water “to a person dying of thirst,” he said. “Immediately everybody jumped on board.”

There is a British comic strip called Buster Gonad and his Unfeasibly Large Testicles. It is an absurd, immature joke about a man with ridiculously enormous spasmojesticles whose titanic sperm factories keep causing him trouble. It’s fun when Star Trek predicts the future; when Viz does so, it makes me want to start liking alcohol.

Here you go

I’m reading The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars, and Caliphs by Marc David Baer. One of the numerous things he talks about is attitudes to wine in the Ottoman court, which set the time for all of contemporary Türkiye. Baer compares Turkish attitudes toward wine with similarly positive attitudes in Iran and the Arab nations, also noting that the Ottomans and Safavids both condemned each other as being drunk as good Muslims must never be. (The Ottomans and Safabids were constantly calling each other blasphemous for indulging in the very things they themselves loved doing).

It’s well-known that TS Eliot is an anagram of toilets.

More fun s that his full name, Thomas Stearns Eliot, is an anagram of I am a lesson to the arts (and also loathsome train sets)

The idea that all alcohol is haram is actually pretty recent. Muslims in the medieval and early modern eras interpreted the Qu’ran as forbidding specific types of fermented beverages rather than banning alcohol altogether, let alone all intoxicants as is generally the case today. Arab, Iranic, and Turkish poets wrote epic paeans to the greatness of wine and waxed lyrical about how it brought one closer to God and so all Muslims should drink it. Christian European diplomats complained that Muslim Turkish dignitaries outdrank them hard, and nobody could put away wine as well as the sultan.

Ever since Muhammad, at least some Muslims have interpreted the Qu’ran as banning any consumption of alcohol, but it’s unclear when this position became the dominant one. I know that wine flowed freely in the Ottoman court into the 17th century, so it was probably only some time in the Modern era.

I’m an emacs -nw kind of guy.

But if I have to pick one of your options, nano

You can if you wish. I’m giving the reason why Nintendo in particular is unusually litigious.

We raise our cows in fields.

There’s a backstory!

The whole video is worth watching and the channel is great, but here’s the TL;DW.

When Nintendo released Donkey Kong in America in 1981, Universal Pictures sued them for copyright infringement on that grounds that Donkey Kong was too similar to Universal’s King Kong. Nintendo won because their lawyer, named Kirby, pointed out that back in 1933, RKO pictures successfully proved that the novel King Kong was public domain, so they didn’t have to pay the author any royalties or licensing rights.

While they won, the experience was traumatic for Nintendo of America at the time. They were not lawyers; they were mostly Japanese programmers and engineers, and they really didn’t want to go through such a costly legal case again. The solution was to aggressively defend their own brand so that nobody would ever be in any doubt as to who owns the copyright and trademarks.

Oh, and then there’s money. Nintendo have some of the most valuable IPs on Earth; other companies would kill for just one thing as popular and recognisable as Mario, Zelda, Animal Crossing, Splatoon, StarFox, or even Metroid, let alone Pokémon. People also bring up that they’re loaded, and that’s true, but Nintendo’s war chest isn’t anywhere near as big as the likes of Sony and Microsoft. In a protracted legal battle, Nintendo would run out of money first, so again, their solution is to aggressively attack anything that could remotely weaken their own brand so as to stave off bigger legal battles in the future.

Congratulations on being one of today’s lucky 10,000!

Attila is a pretty common name in Hungary and Türkiye.

The terms themselves are somewhat vague and slippery. Marx and Engels used them interchangeably. The USSR and China really tainted the word communism, which is why socialism is much more common nowadays.

As I understand it, communism is a form of socialism. Socialism is ultimately about worker control over the means of production, rather than private capital. As such, socialists inherently support strong unions, and the sensible ones also support social welfare, minimum wage, and basic income so that business owners have less leverage to exploit their workers.

If you just take workers’ rights to it logical conclusio, you get market socialism. This is an economic system in which all privately-owned (including publicly-traded) companies are replaced with worker-owned coöperatives, which still compete in a market.

Communism goes further. Self-identified communists will tell you that communism is a moneyless. classless, stateless society where the means of production are held in common by those who use them. If this sounds like anarchism, it basically is.

However, communists in the 20th century were mostly vamguardists. This idea, pioneered by Lenin, advocates for a vanguard of smarties who understand communism to overthrow the government and impose communism from the top down, fixing the system on behalf of those workers too stupid to join the revolution. Workers who did not support the revolution would see that everything was much better with the communist vanguard in charge, and would embrace communism. If a few insisted on being counterrevolutionary, they would just need to be reëducated.

The Russian Revolution was heavily criticised by anarchists at the time, on the grounds that if the revolution does not rise from below, it is simply a coup that makes Lenin an uncrowned tsar. They were correct, and thus the word communism was utterly tainted in the capitalist world to refer to oppressive dictatotships that are (nominally) anticapitalist.

For what it’s worth, Lenin himself described the USSR as state capitalist, whereby the state ran all industry on behalf of the workers until the workers came around to the glorious revolutionaries’ perspective. Because those in.power never want to relinquish it, the ruling soviet aggressively cracked down on and suppressed trade unions, because organised workers were a threat not only to capitalists, but also to the nominally communist government. To maintain a veneer of being about the workers, farms and factories were administered by soviets vetted and approved by the government, who could be guaranteed to operate as the government wanted.

And if everybody did that, society would utterly collapse as almost no necessary work got done.

I use Linux and I prefer GOG to Steam

Isn’t WOW a subscription?

It’s not a number and yet you can still do maths with it

That is completely untrue.

The second-biggest babies are blue whales, who are a bit over 1800kg at birth.

I remember back in secondary school in the early 2000s, this was the literal textbook example of how the media frames things. The teachers’ union was up to some industrial action at the time, which made it all the more relevant.

“The union firmly insisted on their original position” “The union stubbornly insisted on their original position”

Consider also confidence vs arrogance.

“The minister confidently stated the dispute will be over soon” “The minister arrogantly stated the dispute will be over soon”