If you really want “beast of Satan” territory (imo, Poltys are just very cryptic):

• For behavior, I’m going to appeal to the Brazilian wandering spider which is extremely aggressive, likes to hide in human living spaces, is mobile, and is severely venomous (including causing a painful priapism).
• For prey, going with the Goliath birdeater. I think tarantulas are cute, but this one has the legspan of a fucking dinner plate, weighs up to like a 1/5 of a kilo, has a massive body, has 4 cm fangs, and is large enough to prey on small terrestrial vertebrates.
• For sheer vibes, going with the giant huntsman spider. It lives in caves in Laos, has a legspan of up to 30 cm like the Goliath birdeater (but proportionally smaller body, amplifying the creepiness), was only discovered in 2001 despite being so huge, and as a huntsman is probably fast as fuck. Unsure about the venom; I’ve never researched it.
• See also: trapdoor spiders.

Not putting any of these images here in case anyone’s arachnophobic. Exposure therapy only works if you build yourself up to it, and I don’t want anybody to miss out on a chance to come to appreciate spiders.

Looks like a species from the genus Poltys.

King Dragon sends his regards.

Nah, the Lysandreoth archetype is more like “Me on my first playthrough and realizing most of his lines are hints” territory. I genuinely thought Pokémon X and Y would have a twist that Lysandre isn’t the villain because his dialogue is so agonizingly unsubtle. I was trying to parse it for subtle hints that he was secretly good.

Edit: Apparently TV Tropes calls this trope “obvious Judas” (which is much more immediately understood but way less funny than “Lysandreoth”).

Not only that, but the operative word is “killed”. Wongbandue had dementia and went to the train station, and it’s profoundly disgusting that Facebook has a product that would deceive a senile old man into going to New York to meet someone who doesn’t exist, but he died after falling while jogging. Clearly not at all what’s being implied by the OP and really stretching the proximate cause for being “killed”.

It’s a joke about how “JPEG” is literally the name of the organization; it was under their nose the entire time.

https://lmddgtfy.net/?q=what+does+the+acronym+jpeg+stand+for

between two men

lacks ambition

“Pro tip: stop getting cum in your food at We Cum in Your Food by specifically asking to have your food prepared cum-free.”

“Wow, these lies are so obvious. Why would you even cover them?”

An alternate reality:

“Of course the mainstream media is silent about Trump’s lies.”

I have little sympathy for the NYT over e.g. their deliberate whitewashing of Israel’s genocide, but holy fuck can they just not win on this front. It’s the press’ job to report when the president is lying to the public, regardless of how obvious it is.

ICE agents getting an interesting mix of Vietnam and Iraq.

Here’s the relevant Nature article about specimens from the early vertebrate genera Haikouichthys and Myllokunmingia (and the corresponding Nature news article).

Full preprint published on ResearchGate. Credit for the image is persistently given to Xiangtong Lei and Sihang Zhang, the first two authors listed on the paper.

The post is just an ad disguised as a guide

That said:

its obvious they want to be like google but with “privacy” as a gimmic because its only private until they get a government order telling them to do something to unmask a user or monitor an email.

Besides the fact that Proton is based in Switzerland where government warrants aren’t issued willy-nilly, please learn how the mathematics behind encryption works – or, if not, at least trust that it does. For emails that are sent E2EE, Proton can only have garbled data that requires a key they don’t have.

You’re just constantly talking out your ass, and I have no idea why; it’s so unearned. Like I’m not going to debate you on whether ads or corporations are good because a) I broadly agree and b) that’s just, like, our opinions, man, but then you just say shit that’s so demonstrably untrue that all I can think is: “I fucking hate what this decade has done to people.”

Before I address the substance: that’s not what an ad hominem is in the context of an argument. I’d already 100% finished attacking the substance of their argument. An ad hominem would be if I fallaciously appealed to a personal characteristic (real or otherwise) to attack an argument of theirs. “You’re wrong because you’re a dipshit”.

Anyway: man, I dunno. It’s 2026, and I’ve gotten really fucking sick of being unilaterally bound by etiquette when the bullshit asymmetry principle and the Dunning–Kruger effect are being stretched to their limits by insufferable, insolent shitheads who’ve unburdened themselves of critical thinking and assume having a platform to the entire world makes them qualified to say anything about everything (I can fall into this trap too, but holy shit sometimes).

I was still more polite than they were, still exercised more critical thought than they did, and still addressed the substance, and that’s fine enough by me not to tone police myself.

but i guess thats why I don’t work in marketing

Yeah, I guess it is, because this article works in Proton’s favor on multiple levels:

• Plenty of Proton users have switched over from Gmail, still have their old account, and still, even with forwarding, occasionally need to use those old addresses.
• People who search for or are sent a guide who’ve never or rarely heard of Proton might end up on their site and read a guide that lambasts Google and its usage of AI.
• Meanwhile, Proton’s alternative product is being advertised everywhere on the page outside the guide and even is advertised within it.
• These guides are going to exist anyway (many, in fact). You’re acting like this is some extremely niche thing users might want to do. Having your own guide but poisoned with your marketing when you’re the underdog is a sound idea.
• This gives a benevolent image of “Good Guy Proton” who just wants to keep people’s data private regardless of business – and a “Bad Guy Google” image because it’s apparently so dire that their competition has to do this.
• Consumers becoming more privacy-conscious generally is a boon long-term for businesses like Proton.

You’re so smarmy about this but just come off as a complete dipshit who gave this two seconds of thought.

So that’s why vegans are more likely to be iron-deficient.

Technically the numerical code still gives you a precise search key to find other people discussing the same issue.

… You know, as would be useful for a serious operating system where online support doesn’t mean trawling the bowels of Reddit praying somebody’s had the same issue and found a reproducible solution.

Heroic is an impressive achievement. It just isn’t a full replacement – and most of these points I’m about to list aren’t things it’s trying to or should necessarily do as a games launcher. Off the top of my head:

• It doesn’t work for social aspects like friends, statuses, etc.
• It doesn’t work for monitoring achievements.
• The storefront is just the actual gog.com webpage rendered as a surface. GOG Galaxy’s store UI, by contrast, flows with everything else.
• I don’t think games auto-update, although I could be wrong.
• It’s bloated by nature of also being a launcher for Epic and Amazon – platforms I will never use. GOG Galaxy allows crossplatform stuff, but it’s not a full-on multilauncher.
• The UI is pretty ass. I sympathize a lot with this one as someone who works on the (often disastrously undercoordinated) UI of a similar-profile project.
  • Rectangular UI elements’ corner rounding is all over the place (from sharp 90° to Material 3 and everything inbetween).
  • Themes are extremely samey with an enormous bias toward dark themes (I say this as someone who exclusively uses dark themes: a single light theme and thirteen dark themes means you don’t give a shit).
  • You can’t hide the left-hand menu bar to actually center the page you’re viewing.
  • Actions like toolbar dropdowns have no animations (I understand not wanting these; that’s accommodated with a “Disable Animations” option).
  • There’s absolutely zero compatibility with Orca (screen reader) that I can find.
  • Etc.

Again, all of these except the UI aren’t things Heroic is doing wrong or even supposed to be doing at all.

Side note: in Heroic, the GOG storefront opens with UTM parameters in the URL for “adtraction”. Wonder what that’s about.

I take some sense of ownership over my Steam library in that I can and will immediately pirate the game with the DRM stripped out if Valve ever decides to revoke my access to it.

On the other hand, this – and buying from a better company – is why I actively prefer GOG, even in cases when the price is higher. (But pssst, hey, Beyond a Steel Sky is $3.50 on GOG right now compared to Steam’s $35.) The fact I have to launch the Steam client to play a game I paid for is absurd, and I regret every purchase I made, like Stardew Valley Terraria, before I knew GOG existed. The main outstanding issue to me now is that GOG refuses to port its Galaxy client to Linux.