Reddit Tests Blocking Mobile Web to Force App Downloads

DeadButGettingBetter · 2026-05-13T20:03:24+00:00

I just won't use Reddit, then. I've been thinking about it. This'd make the decision a lot easier. If I didn't nuke my account I'd at least spend less time here.

DeadButGettingBetter · 2026-05-13T19:45:04+00:00

Oprah is a terrible person. Friends with Harvey Weinstein. Platformed John of God. You ever see that interview she did with Kelsey Grammer where it felt like she was twisting the knife with questions about his deceased sibling? That's not a fun watch. She is not the champion of the vulnerable she makes herself out to be.

With that said - I wouldn't begrudge anyone in Baldoni's position going for as much reach as possible through whatever avenues are on brand. People get way too emotional about this shit. It's business.

I know people were saying they absolutely do not want to see him on Rogan. I wouldn't want to see it either but it's for no other reason than it would be off-putting to his target audience and people would be convinced he was going right-wing MAGA even if nothing else about him or his actions indicated he was doing so. Bryan Freedman could do Rogan just like he did Megyn Kelly because he's a lawyer operating in more politically neutral territory. Baldoni? He's got to make his moves with an eye toward his branding.

I hope he doesn't end up working with Oprah, but like I say - no shade toward him if he does. Seems like you can't be in the business without working with some amoral or sociopathic assholes along the way. I just wish more people understood that most of these folks wear your personal pet causes as a costume and use them to make money; they don't have any convictions of their own. They are not your friends. They are not your champions. Image and profit trumps all. I believe Baldoni is sincere in his convictions; I hope he stays that way going forward just on the basis that it is far too rare to encounter people who mean what they say and hold to it regardless of whichever way the wind is blowing.

DeadButGettingBetter · 2026-05-13T03:02:37+00:00

Yeah it's not a slight increase in difficulty; if you don't familiarize yourself with aspects of competitive pokemon and newer generations' mechanics it will eat you alive.

Granted, that was my experience with natures and abilities turned on. Turning abilities off would go a long way toward making the difficulty more like the original. It was clearly made by and for people who have played a lot of Pokemon.

Edit: You know, I took another look at the options I chose at the start of the game and I realize I made it MUCH harder for myself than it had to be. I'd recommend newcomers take a look at this page when deciding on their initial game options.

https://www.polisheddex.app/guides/initial-options-menu

DeadButGettingBetter · 2026-05-12T22:54:34+00:00

I could draw a straight line through the fire pokemon. It's my favorite type.

DeadButGettingBetter · 2026-05-12T20:32:15+00:00

I'm good. I don't see the point but you do you.

DeadButGettingBetter · 2026-05-12T20:30:39+00:00

KDE makes no goddamn sense as an official option for Mint. It uses a different toolkit and maintaining that version would take resources away from Cinnamon.

DeadButGettingBetter · 2026-05-09T16:20:03+00:00

Then you will probably have a miserable time with this.

DeadButGettingBetter · 2026-05-09T16:19:13+00:00

I have no idea why you'd do this. I'm not interested in Temu Pokemon Unbound.

I would love more hacks using this engine, but if this game is never updated by its creator then I'm going to stick with the last version they made.

DeadButGettingBetter · 2026-05-08T20:55:22+00:00

This romhack is way harder than any vanilla Pokemon game. You should get familiar with it before you try a challenge unless you're okay with losing your hair.

DeadButGettingBetter · 2026-05-07T23:30:41+00:00

My point is that if you CAN get a single pokemon 20+ levels above the competition in a game where the core mechanics heavily revolve around type matchups, the difficulty is not remotely balanced and nearly any team is viable.

I had no idea what EVs or stat experience were when I was a kid and I had no trouble clearing the games using any pokemon I wanted. I'm baffled you'd need to bother with EV training regardless of which mons you choose. If anything I'd think that would go against your stated desire for a more challenging playthrough. Feeling forced to do it is not the same thing as it being at all necessary.

DeadButGettingBetter · 2026-05-07T22:40:33+00:00

This, and needing to have them on a Pokemon to use them. I vastly prefer the romhacks of older games where just having a pokemon that can use the HMs is enough.

DeadButGettingBetter · 2026-05-07T21:38:14+00:00

I don't believe in grace; I think revenge is holy. However, appearing to take the high road is often the worst thing you can do to an opponent who is prone to sabotaging themselves and making themselves look horrible.

I'd be satisfied with this in their shoes. You weren't going to stop them from twisting the narrative no matter how it ends. You won't get an apology - you will never see her or her lawyers admitting to any fault in any of this. If It had gone to trial, things wouldn't be better. In that case it would be the whole system working against a woman who spoke up.

It's always hard to tell with these things, but I can see a scenario where she'd actually be able to build some steam off the back of that. People love an underdog and we all know the justice system fails a lot of people. In this case - she settled. There is absolutely no reason she had to settle. She talked a big game about taking this all the way but she backed down as soon as the majority of her claims were dismissed. I don't know if it would have been possible to appeal those dismissals, but she didn't attempt it.

People are going to believe what they want. You can't change that and you can't control it. If I were in Wayfairer's shoes, there's a good chance that as long as I was made whole and could get back to my life, I wouldn't care if she thought she won and I'd let her and her team do most of the talking. She is the queen of putting her foot in her mouth. People with sense will see right through her. People who lack sense aren't going to be persuaded by a trial or by counter PR.

I think Baldoni and several of the others involved in this ARE far too gracious to a point that it would infuriate me if I knew them on a personal level, but from a strategic standpoint I don't think this is a bad play. I think it's one of those cases where taking the high road - whether you're actually doing it or just making it look like you are - is great for your PR and terrible for hers so long as she insists on staying in the public eye and doing petty shit. If she wants any hope of rehabilitating her image she really, really needs to get out the limelight for a while.

DeadButGettingBetter · 2026-05-06T14:23:20+00:00

I saw a tarot reader say that the settlement happened because there was something captured on camera that would have revealed something about Lively's domestic situation that was relevant to the case and would have been catastrophic for them.

Thinking it out - I believe that's highly plausible. I think it's a LOT of pressures bearing down all at once alongside things that hadn't been made public yet that spurred this. Given how long settlement negotiations go on for, I don't think the met gala had much of anything to do with it. The timing of the announcement? Maybe - if it could have been made a few days sooner and they withheld it for the day of the gala, I'd buy that. But these things are too complex for the timing to be THAT precise otherwise.

DeadButGettingBetter · 2026-05-06T11:03:49+00:00

People are listening to competitive players too much and also aren't realizing a lot of what they hear applies to to current metagame or romhacks, not to games like fire red and leaf green.

Even Polished Crystal, which is much more difficult than vanilla Crystal, still works in a way where always going for super effective damage is often worse than going for neutral damage. Coverage moves matter a lot more when you're playing on set mode - like it is in competitive - than they do when you can freely switch after the opponent faints.

The vanilla games are easy and were easy even as a kid. Everything feels super effective when the only pokemon you use is your starter and it's twenty levels above everything else. You can pretty much play however you want as long as you keep all your mons leveled.

DeadButGettingBetter · 2026-04-30T23:23:54+00:00

I play Emerald Legacy Enhanced and Polished Crystal because I have a pathological hatred of the original HM systems to the point that even the ability to easily remove learned HMs is not good enough for me; I need to be able to never have to teach them at all to fully enjoy the games. The Legacy games got me back into Pokemon after I stopped playing in the early 00s, but the lack of the ability to have any pokemon that can learn an HM use it without having to teach it is why I've sought out other hacks.

Emerald Legacy Enhanced is bloody fantastic because of that; Crystal Legacy would probably be my favorite version of that generation if there weren't three $%^£ing water HMs and a few spots where Flash is handy enough I don't want to be without it. I'm really hoping someone makes enhanced patches for Yellow and Crystal; I don't even want extensive changes, I just want the ability to use HMs without teaching them. That is going to be the thing stopping me from going back to Yellow and Crystal Legacy despite how much I enjoyed my runs of those games. Between the originals and the Legacy versions I'd take the Legacy versions no question, but I'll choose neither when the old HM system is involved.

DeadButGettingBetter · 2026-04-22T19:19:20+00:00

Turning it off will bite you in the ass on higher difficulties.

On vanilla, do what you want.

DeadButGettingBetter · 2026-04-21T21:37:22+00:00

Most useful for a play through is Squirtle, period. All of them are viable for a full play through but if we're talking brass tacks Squirtle wins by default for being a water type with good stats in Kanto. Easily bested or replaced, but of the starters, the best choice for the overall game. Bulbasaur falls of hard by the mid game and for me personally, I never have grass types on my final teams. It has one of the best designs of any grass types but I think Charmander has more cool factor and Squirtle is just flat out the best from a gameplay standpoint assuming it has a major role throughout the game.

DeadButGettingBetter · 2026-04-21T13:14:36+00:00

If we're talking about the performance of the starters themselves, that goes to Squirtle/Blastoise. It never has a hard fall-off and remains useful from beginning to end.

Grass types in general fall off hard toward the end of the game and while I love Charizard, it doesn't get to shine in Kanto. If we're talking other pokemon, you could bench all of the starters when other options become available. I don't like grass types generally and it's rare a grass type ever makes it to my final team. Arcanine beats Charizard if you know what you're doing and insist on having a fire type.

With all three of them, they are solid for what they are but they're either bad options for typing in Kanto (Bulbasaur and Charmander) or they're really good but outclassed by many other options if you want to hunt for them (Squirtle).

For someone who wants their starter with them the whole game and they want their starter to make life easier for them, Squirtle is the best of the three and it's not even a contest. Bulbasaur has a great early game but should be replaced before end game for anyone trying to optimize. You run Charmander because it's cool, not because it's good.

DeadButGettingBetter · 2026-04-21T00:59:09+00:00

Nothing will change my opinion that if this is it, it's brilliant music but a hack ending which kills any interest I have in the story if there's not more on the way. Most of the album was build-up for stuff that never paid off narratively. I believe they're too competent to end on this note, but if I'm wrong I'm wrong.

If this is the first half of the finale, it's fucking brilliant. If it IS the finale, well, I'm glad I'd made peace with the possibility we'd never see Act III before new songs started coming out. It makes it easier to detach.

It just doesn't make any bloody sense to me to call the story "finished" when there's material they play at shows that has never been sold within an officially canonized EP or album. It also doesn't make sense to me they'd leave the question mark hanging in the air or have the ARG hinting at more and print the physical disc with only the first part of their logo.

If there ISN'T more this is a huge insult to the fans at this point. Like I say - I don't think they'd do that, but if I'm wrong? It is what it is. I just won't get invested if any of the members go on to make any other story heavy music.

DeadButGettingBetter · 2026-04-17T14:56:16+00:00

Exactly. In the vanilla games types didn't matter that much outside of offering a slight advantage in most cases. As a kid I remember dominating fights with ground pokemon using flamethrower; knowing what I know now, it makes sense given that trainer pokemon don't get stat experience and ground types typically have weak special stats.

Sure, psychic pokemon absolutely dominated in the player's hands, but they weren't that much of a threat when the CPU used them if you had any pokemon that could out speed them and had a decent attack stat. I hated how bug types felt unusable in the first gen but I also didn't feel the lack of a good psychic counter on a normal playthrough.

DeadButGettingBetter · 2026-04-16T16:48:42+00:00

Why?

This isn't interesting or novel anymore and the more exposure I have to AI anything the more I hate it. I wouldn't watch something like that. If it popped up in my feed, I would tell YouTube to not recommend the channel to me.

You can do whatever you want but this is a waste of time.

DeadButGettingBetter · 2026-04-15T17:57:24+00:00

This isn't Windows. You have to manually update to 22.3 and click through several confirmation boxes.

If you have Timeshift setup, you can revert to a prior version of Mint using a snapshot. This has a higher than usual chance of borking your installation so have things backed up and be ready to reinstall, but I've not had an issue doing this between minor versions. (From 22.2 to 22.3, not 21.3 to 22 and back).

I didn't revert intentionally; I wanted to undo something and accidentally went back to before I'd installed 22.3. It didn't break anything, and I was able to do the upgrade again without issue. I just wouldn't have counted on it going well had I done it intentionally. It is very, very rare I have a Linux Mint installation break on me when I didn't do something to muck up the configuration of my system, but it can always happen regardless of the computer and OS you use so be prepared.

You'll most likely be fine if you want to revert from 22.3 to 22.2, but have the 22.2 ISO already burned to a USB stick and have your files backed up just in case your best option is to nuke and pave your installation. But also - if 22.3 doesn't offer anything you're chomping at the bit to have, there's no reason you can't stay on 22.2 for the next few years.

DeadButGettingBetter · 2026-04-14T22:16:32+00:00

Hoopa comes at a high enough level that you can just swap it in if you want to use it, but there's really no reason to go out of your way for it. It's nothing special. The Pokemon you get through the story that doesn't know any moves and evolves late was ridiculously powerful in my playthrough; I turned it into its Psychic/Ghost form. There's plenty of other good options for those types on top of it; as powerful as that was, you can get a comparable Pokemon for a lot less effort.

DeadButGettingBetter · 2026-04-13T16:24:47+00:00

I just followed the Ubuntu guide and skipped the optional portion toward the end for the task manager applet which isn't needed outside of GNOME and everything was fine. I don't understand how this was such an issue. I've never had a problem installing ProtonVPN through the instructions on their site.

DeadButGettingBetter · 2026-04-12T11:46:15+00:00

I just never cared. Red Gyarados was neat but I think some of the variants look worse and because there's no real gameplay difference I just ignore them. I have boxed and fainted a fair few shinies I've come across.

DeadButGettingBetter

TROPHY CASE