Smoother legs in the icon versus ones with…fullers (is that the word?) in the game art, plus the game art has some raised fins around the central base that the icon art does not have.

I used to live in China, where socialized medicine was in theory available for everyone, but in practice most everyone who had a decent job had private insurance from their employer not unlike in the US, which was my situation. It was…fine, but I was a healthy young adult and didn’t have much going on medically. I’ve heard some horror stories from others about the degree of care they received, and had one experience where my doctor simply attributed my migraines to my “unhealthy American lifestyle”, but I never had to worry about coverage.

When I moved back home to Massachusetts a few years later, I didn’t have a job lined up right away, but I did gain immediate coverage through MassHealth (the system the Affordable Care Act was based upon) and it was very cheap. I didn’t have to pay for coverage, but did have a couple copays here and there which weren’t anything crazy.

I started up one job, was laid off after just a couple months when the pandemic happened, and MassHealth was still there to give me some peace of mind. It’s not a perfect system, but it beats running the risk of suffering a health episode that leaves you financially destitute for years and years. I don’t know how well I would have managed elsewhere.

I eventually landed a more stable-long term career and get employer-provided insurance through Tufts. And it’s okay, but I recently had to fight a months-long prolonged battle to get a prior authorization approved for a med I had been taking for years that they just decided out of the blue I didn’t need to take anymore. And it took a lot of back and forth from my doctor to really stress that I needed to stay on this med before they eventually caved and gave me a 1-year approval, but now I’m worried I’ll have to go through this whole song and dance again when that time elapses in a few more months.

I think it’s just a bit ridiculous that the insurance company can simply decide they know my health situation better than myself or my doctor who I’ve been seeing for years now, and out of the blue make life-changing decisions without even having spoken to me or my doctor first.

I’ve lived in apartments most of my life, so I wouldn’t even know what to do with a big home if I had one.

What I will say is that, when playing Skyrim, Breezehome in Whiterun was always the house for me. Not nearly as big and opulent as some of the other ones you can get, but it’s compact and efficient, it doesn’t have a lot to maintain, and I don’t feel like I’m forced to fill it with stuff just for the sake of not letting empty space go to waste.

I feel like similar logic would apply to a real-world house for me. I’d like at least some space in there to be able to host gatherings of small groups of friends, but I like to live minimally and efficiently. I don’t want a lot of stuff to maintain or space to clean, I want to know where everything is when I need it, and I want to leave as small a footprint as I can (within reason).

I think my main grievance right now, looking at the housing market, is mainly that no one is building smaller homes anymore. All new developments are these massive mansions with huge yards which I don’t want, but when I’m looking for a smaller home, they’re all 50-100 or more years old and need a lot of work done.

There aren’t many bigger companies in the world than Microsoft, to be fair. In tech you’re looking at…Apple? And I think that’d be it.

Tencent is a bit further down the list from Microsoft in terms of overall value but I’d assume they’d be next in line to buy.

It’s also normal for people to become nose blind to their own BO while still having an otherwise normal sense of smell. I think simply being direct about it is easier than trying to set up tests.

Like: I guess I have to give it to Icarus and Daedalus. There’s something so sympathetically tragic about a kid who was just so excited to be free flying too close to the sun.

Dislike: Zeus disguises self and commits adultery, take your pick.

Honorable mention to Hades and Persephone; when I first heard this myth as a kid, Hades was painted in a villainous light where he kidnapped Persephone and then tricked her into eating the pomegranate seeds so she could never leave. But I prefer the reframing of the myth I see more often these days, where Persephone actually loved the unfairly maligned Hades and chose to elope with him.

There are definitely bots mining fediverse content as well. When the Reddit exodus was ongoing, there were entire Lemmy instances with no users but bots. Not posting or reposting, just…watching and waiting, I guess.

Not that it’s of any consolation, just better to assume that nowhere is safe from being mined for AI training.