On the first point, I read the original paper. It was wild and shouldn’t be taken as fact. The authors modeled a 3d penis and vagina and showed that the penis is able to scoop out paste from the vagina. They then interpret it as that it’s “possible” for the penis to have evolved the way it has to scoop out rivals’ semen.

The obvious counter to the claim is that anything can be used as a shitty scooping spoon if you try hard enough.

Also, note that a woman would need to have some wild body counts if she’s having sex so often that she doesn’t even have the time to let the previous guy’s semen drip out

I don’t really have any good suggestions, but I just want to say that I feel second-hand frustration just by reading this

Strange - haven’t gotten any issues myself. Kubuntu 25.04 here

Millenial/GenZ borderline here. Perhaps not wise, but I have the modern dating experience and I can give advice about that.

Apps are completely useless. There are way too many guys and way too few girls who regularly use these apps, and that leads to awkward interpersonal dynamics, as though you’re interviewing for a job. You should never feel like you’re interviewing for a relationship. Even if you “pass,” it’s never a good sign that the start to a relationship is built upon checklists, transactions, and being the “best candidate.” I honestly expect that this is where a lot of incels get their strange dating worldviews from.

The hard truth is that there is no easy answer. There’s nothing you can do that will guarantee that you find someone nice. All I can say is that there are things you can do that will destroy your chances of finding someone. The best that you can do is to not do any of those things and hope for the best. Here’s a couple tips that might be helpful:

• Don’t spend your time online. As mentioned above, dating apps are worthless. Beyond that, though, it’s pointless to find anyone when everyone is anonymous. It’s ok to use the internet, but you also need to spend equal, if not more, time outside. Touching grass is a real, underrated advice. If you don’t have a reason to be outside, find a reason. Whether it’s a job, or a hobby, or a club, or some other commitment, you need to have a public presence. It was easier to be outside back when the internet wasn’t a thing, now you have to be intentional about it.
• Find in-person communities to be a part of. Goes hand-in-hand with the tip above. You need a public presence. Have in-person friends that you see regularly, have people whom you know well enough that they recognize you and know who you are. I was part of a for-fun orchestra group, but you can also find gardening groups, or sewing groups, or any other number of formal or informal groups that might host regular in-person meetings
• Know your neighbors. Your neighborhood is a community that you’re already a part of. It’s quite easy and low commitment.
• Find new hobbies and expand your horizons. You should have a wealth of experiences, not just an autistic-level depth of a single experience. If someone asks you what you do for fun, you better not have only a single thing to say. Not only does this make you a more interesting person, it increases the chance that you’ll encounter someone that you connect with. ie, you’ll be part of more communities and therefore encounter more people, but also for any one person, there’s a greater chance that you share at least one interest.
• Never stagnate. Builds off the previous tip. Always look for more things to do, more communities to join, more people to meet. There is too much to do in life for you to stagnate. Not only does this make you a more culturally rich person, it also gives you an excuse to be outside.
• Take some time to evaluate and reflect on what sorts of incel mindsets you have inadvertently adopted. A lot of internet and modern trends have fundamental roots in incel thought, and it’s very easy to get subtly influenced by those ideas. Having any sort of incel ideology is a major red flag, so you’ll need to self reflect on how you have been influenced by these ideas. Many people that I know who are single use incel or incel-like terminology or have expressed incel-like ideas. They’re not bad people, and they’re definitely not incels, but they have been subconsciously influenced by incel ideology from the internet. Meet enough of these people and you can start to see why it might be hard for certain people to find partners compared to others.
• Don’t approach someone who doesn’t actively indicate that they want to be approached. It’s rude and possibly creepy to do so. It’ll immediately destroy any chance of a connection with that person. It’s a false stereotype that people in the past got relationships through cold-approaches. At any given point in time, very few people want to be approached. There are only 2 solutions to this. First, meet more people so that you run into more people who want to be approached. Second, be more targeted with where you spend your time. If you are at a community meeting, the people there are significantly more likely to want to be approached than people that you find randomly on the street. Even so, read the room and determine if they want to be approached or not.

You don’t need to do all of these tips, but the more you do, the more appealing you become and the higher the chances are that you find someone. With a long enough time, you’ll get lucky and find someone that you connect with. I won’t lie, it’s hard. In a sense, it’s like losing weight or getting fit - you have to be intentional about doing things that you know are healthy. Except in this case, you’re building social health, not physical health.

Prey would be double A, I feel? I quite liked Resident Evil 4 remake, which should be AAA

The karma-to-post system was horrid on reddit and made it nearly impossible to get into reddit as a new user. I really hope it doesn’t come to the fediverse…

Impossible meat is close enough to meat that I genuinely wouldn’t be able to tell the difference without a side-by-side comparison, and it would be virtually impossible for me to tell if it were mixed in with other flavors (eg in a burrito). I’ve heard it’s got high sodium though, so you’ll still have to beware that it’s not much healthier (if at all) than normal meat. I don’t get Impossible often, though I get regular meat even less. I’d say I like Impossible more than normal meat, I just wish it’s a bit cheaper.

Beyond meat simply doesn’t taste quite right, like soy trying to imitate meat. It hits an awkward uncanny valley, so I don’t like it.

IMO lab grown meat feels a bit like a waste of time. With how incredibly uncanny Impossible is to actual meat, I don’t really see the need to grow meat in the lab. And it’ll probably be more expensive than Impossible meat too, if my lab experience is any indication

Surprised that people haven’t mentioned Yoru ni Kakeru (Racing into the Night) by Yoasobi. It’s a Japanese song about depression and commiting suicide.

Specifically, it follows a guy who falls in love with a depressed and suicidal girl. Over time, the guy himself becomes depressed and tired of life and they both decide to commit suicide together.

KDE Plasma’s default monitor is quite good, but you’ll need to edit the page to reveal all the hidden trackers that aren’t shown by default. Great if you already use Plasma.

I also tend to use CoreCtrl and Steam’s inbuilt monitor (which I think is based off Mangohud?). CoreCtrl has a nice UI (much better than LACT, IMO), but it’s no longer receiving active development, so it doesn’t support the current generation of GPU’s. Meanwhile, Steam’s monitor is convenient but, well, it only works on Steam

I did notice something similar. Presumably, selective breeding at work. I read that brussel sprouts used to taste different not too long ago - the flavor and texture changed due to selective breeding. It wouldn’t surprise me if something similar is happening with fruits.

That being said, whatever is going on, it’s definitely not happening with strawberries. Still sour as fuck.

There shouldn’t be a need to look through multiple folders. Check the path that I listed, it should be that one.

From what you describe, it sounds like you’ve already found it once on your own. That folder contains all the custom images (the default images are presumably stored somewhere else). Just put your custom image into that grid folder and name it the correct thing. It’ll work.

The path should be the same for non-steam games as well

2284631436 (the example id that I used) is the “game id” of Firefox on my steam deck, which I added as a non-steam game

That looks like the horizontal grid. All the custom images are in a folder in Steam (see below for the location). You should be able to copy an image into that folder, and as long as it’s using the correct name format, Steam should use that image just fine. You’ll need to know the game’s ID, but you should be able to figure that out by cross-referencing other custom images

• Image folder location: (steam directory)/userdata/(user id)/config/grid/

• horizontal grid format: (game id).(file format) (ex: 2284631436.png)

• vertical grid format: (game id)p.(file format) (ex: 2284631436p.png)

• hero (aka wallpaper) format: (game id)_hero.(file format) (ex: 2284631436_hero.png)

• logo format: (game id)_logo.(file format) (ex: 2284631436_logo.png)

• how to find game id: there’s no easy way to find it, but you can set a custom image for the game with any of the other options, then look into the folder to see what the custom image is called. You then should be able to figure out what the game id is by comparing it to the name format

Find a cup that is similarly shaped and sized, fill it with hazelnuts and then count it manually

It’s a project that’s designed to discourage AI scraping. The idea is that every time you access a website, your computer must solve a math problem before it can access the website. For a user, this is trivially easy and wouldn’t affect your browsing experience much at all. For a scraper, though, it accesses so many websites so quickly that the time spent doing the math problems starts to add up, and the scraper ends up spending most of the time just doing useless math problems.

As a side note, a similar protocol was apparently proposed in the past for emails to discourage spam emails. Clearly, it was not adopted

A jackal girl, I assume? Anubis (the god) is associated with jackals

Kubuntu 25.04 here. Did you edit the audio quantum setting? If not, you should. It may or may not be the same issue, but I would get occasional buzzing when playing games. It turns out the default audio buffer time is really small, so when you’re doing something CPU intensive (such as playing games), the CPU can’t consistently fill out the buffer on time, leading to occasional audio hiccups. Increasing the audio buffer time will slightly (ie, imperceptibly) increase audio delay and will give the CPU more time to fill out the audio buffer, which solved the audio issue for me. Try putting this line:

context.properties = {default.clock.min-quantum} = 1024

into /etc/pipewire/pipewire.conf.d/pipewire.conf

(you may have to create some folders and files).

Then restart and see if that fixes anything

I get why the ending to 2017 Prey might have been annoying, but I honestly thought it was very in line with the themes present in the rest of the game. The more time has passed, the more I’m satisfied with the ending. That being said, IMO the only right ending is

Headaches and extreme drowsiness suggests caffeine addiction. You may want to consider decreasing your caffeine intake slowly over time. As for working without caffeine, unfortunately, that’s a bit more complicated. I assume that you have difficulties with getting up in the morning, hence the need for caffeine. That might then imply that you are simply a night owl. These things are biologically hardwired into your DNA, and while night-owl-ness is known to change as you age, there’s genuinely nothing that you can do to make yourself into a morning bird.

You can try dimming the lights after sunset, that might help at least a bit with going to sleep/waking up earlier, which might help lower your need for caffeine

This used to be a pretty common practice. It’s called a forever soup