O.G. San is such a good name.

I think it’s that category of essential employees who are working without pay that this would be most intended for.

I’m not a marine biologist, so I can’t speculate on what the best alternative is for these whales, but I would like to imagine there are more options than the binary of “kill them” or “throw them to the wolves sharks”.

Marineland is just parroting the euthanize option because they’re upset they couldn’t make a quick buck by selling them to China. It’s a hissy fit tactic to try to un-block the sale.

If the whales are not able to be released in to the wild, I’m sure there are plenty of other facilities out there that would be able to care for them. Marineland might need to pay them to take the animals in, but it should be their obligation to do so if they’re unable to support the quality of life they need themselves.

C’mon Ottawa, force them to rehabilitate and release them, even if it kills the park.

A lot of animals cannot be rehabilitated and released. If they were born and raised in captivity, they have effectively no chance of survival on their own. I don’t know what the situation is for these animals, but I’ve been to plenty of zoos and aquariums in the past that have rehabilitation programs and even they have a few “lifers” who will never leave.

Exactly.

When it comes to phones at least, I also try to keep mine for as long as possible because there’s honestly no point in upgrading just for the heck of it. Companies don’t release meaningful “must have” features anymore like they did back when people felt it was normal to upgrade every couple of years. No need to contribute to e-waste when it can be avoided.

I’ve been using my current phone for 4 years now, and the phone I had before that I used for 6. I upgraded only because I received the newer one for free from work, but I gave my previous phone away to a friend who needed one because I wasn’t going to throw away a perfectly good phone that I was happily using just fine a few months prior. Sure, the battery life was no longer quite as good, but I didn’t really care (nor did my friend) because we at least remember the days where you were lucky if your phone made it more than 8 hours on a single charge. You just learn to deal with it and bring a spare charger if you’re planning to be out for a while.

Almost all of the Links between different games are different characters, but they were all still left handed until the Wii era. That includes Wind Waker Link, Twilight Princess (GC) Link, Oracle Link, and even NES OG Link who are all distinct from OoT.

BotW Link is right handed either because they forgot he was originally left handed before the Wii era, or because it was a deliberate choice to break convention from older games (like also having BotW link wear blue instead of green).

I wouldn’t be surprised by either possibility, just given that BotW deliberately had relatively few series veterans working on it.

Weird that they never bothered to swap him back to left handed for the Switch games, though.

Isometric Link (Link’s Awakening remake) remains left handed at least, but Switch era 3D Link is right handed.

I’ll just chalk that up to the Switch games wanting to switch (heh) it up a bit, with his primary color association also switching from green to blue. Maybe if they decide to make an older style 3D Zelda again, they’ll go back to left handed Link.

This is what I do, along with a few other devices I’ve owned. Sometimes I’ve been able to give perfectly decent devices away to friends/coworkers/family who had a sudden problem with theirs and have a hard time affording a new one.

But unlike the old video game consoles that I do the same thing with, I am always a bit worried about long-term storage of devices that use lithium ion batteries. I know failure rates are rare but I’ve heard the horror stories and I know the risk increases each time I take another device and put them back in a box up on the shelf.

Hopefully some day, people will look back and laugh at us using lithium ion batteries like we laugh at lead paint, nitrate film, and asbestos.

Don’t forget that Crunchyroll is also owned by Sony, who have basically picked up a monopoly on anime streaming services by buying out all of the competition. Aniplex, Funimation, Crunchyroll, Kadokawa, all under the Sony umbrella.

Nintendo raised the price of the Switch 1 and most of their accessory products in the US and Canada in May for Canada and August for the US.

This was following price increases for Nintendo Switch Online in Latin American countries which started in January. Nintendo has not raised prices of the subscription globally, but in their press releases about increased costs of hardware, they state that “price adjustments may be necessary in the future” for NSO, presumably after evaluating trends when the free trial period of GameChat ends for Switch 2 early adopters in March 2026.

And I know you said you don’t care about Sony, but just to share sources, Sony has already increased the price of their hardware in Japan in August 2024; Europe, Australia, and New Zealand in March; and the US in August of this year.

This was following earlier price increases in 2022 for Canada, Japan, Europe, Australia, and Mexico.

Sony also increased the cost of PS+ in North America, Europe, and Japan back in 2023, more recently for Southeast Asia back in April, and there are rumors of another upcoming price increase to be announced at some point now that we’ve entered FY2026.

So all of this is just to illustrate that what Microsoft is doing isn’t really anything new—it’s just the latest development in a continuing industry-wide trend.

Raising the price of hardware twice since May and now raising the price of game pass by 50% is not something a company does if they’re interested in competing against Sony or Nintendo.

But when Sony and Nintendo are doing the same thing…?

Don’t worry, the games industry has you covered on that now. They just release games that are broken or half-finished without the day 1 patch, but then allowing it to update removes all of the licensed content.

That’s how I read the intent of the author, at least. Getting scientists out of their isolated bubbles and allowing them to actually experience the world drives innovation.

That, or the one physicist who figured it out was so traumatized by merely being outside that she figured it out as quickly as possible to make it all stop, haha.

Fair, I guess I’m just letting the world get to me!

I almost kinda dislike the messaging on this one because it implies authoritarianism is the key to discovery. Scientists are implied to be passive and unindustrious when left alone, so the government (FBI-type characters) declare a truth they want proven, force development of it through the threat of violence, and it eventually yields an answer they’re happy with.

I’m reminded of the film The Death of Stalin and it’s depiction of the USSR’s treatment of bourgeois intellectuals like doctors.

It was $15/mo before it’s first price hike, too.

And before that, a lot of people were taking advantage of the Xbox Live Gold conversion deal, where folks were getting access to GamePass Ultimate for $60/year.

I once spent $180 for 3 years of GamePass, and now that same amount only gets you 6 months.

I barely even buy 5 games a year, and often not at full price. And usually the games I want aren’t even on GamePass anyways.

$360/year is crazy. Only a good deal if you’re buying more than 6 full price games a year and plan to 100% beat them and never play again before they disappear from the catalog.

Mar-a-Lago Face

Better AI than humans. Humans have the potential to be gay and will end up shoving their corrupt ideology into the minds of our children.

Can’t find a link to the referenced comic

Got you covered, fam.

There’s other versions around as well and I have no idea which is the original. Just replace “Bioware” with any studio that EA has purchased and chances are there is a version of this comic that followed that news.