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the site of the windows xp screen hurt me in my goddamn soul. I’m so scared of seeing that screen now, because I know I’m going to lose my entire morning trying to clean up this garbage and get rid of it.

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The way to approach it, I think, is not to ask, “What would it be like to be black?” but to seriously consider what it is like to be white. That’s something white people almost never think about. And what it is like to be white is not to say, “We have to level the playing field,” but to acknowledge that not only do white people own the playing field but they have so designated this plot of land as a playing field to begin with. White people are the playing field. The advantage of being white is so extreme, so overwhelming, so immense, that to use the word “advantage” at all is misleading since it implies a kind of parity that simply does not exist.

It is now common—and I use the word “common�� in its every sense—to see interviews with up-and-coming young movie stars whose parents or even grandparents were themselves movie stars. And when the interviewer asks, “Did you find it an advantage to be the child of a major motion-picture star?” the answer is invariably “Well, it gets you in the door, but after that you’ve got to perform, you’re on your own.” This is ludicrous. Getting in the door is pretty much the entire game, especially in movie acting, which is, after all, hardly a profession notable for its rigor. That’s how advantageous it is to be white. It’s as though all white people were the children of movie stars. Everyone gets in the door and then all you have to do is perform at this relatively minimal level.

Additionally, children of movie stars, like white people, have at—or actually in—their fingertips an advantage that is genetic. Because they are literally the progeny of movie stars they look specifically like the movie stars who have preceded them, their parents; they don’t have to convince us that they can be movie stars. We take them instantly at face value. Full face value. They look like their parents, whom we already know to be movie stars. White people look like their parents, whom we already know to be in charge. This is what white people look like—other white people. The owners. The people in charge. That’s the advantage of being white. And that’s the game. So by the time the white person sees the black person standing next to him at what he thinks is the starting line, the black person should be exhausted from his long and arduous trek to the beginning.

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When Gough sat down to write a narrative ending for the survival crafting game, he said it felt like the universe flowed through him. “I wrote it longhand, and, as I did so, sometimes my wrist sped up, and I would watch words simply appear on the page before me, without my conscious mind having any idea what the next word would be,” he said on his Substack. “So, the universe (or my unconscious, or Thalia, or the ghost of Philip K. Dick) dictated the ending, and I polished it up a little and delivered it to Markus.”

According to Gough, Persson loved the poem—which scrolls for about 9 minutes at the end of Minecraft once players defeat the Ender Dragon—and didn’t want to change a word. Persson put the poem into the game and had Carl Manneh, then the CEO of previous Minecraft owner Mojang, reach out to Gough about getting paid. According to Gough, the two exchanged emails but never formalized an agreement. Eventually, Mojang sent Gough €20,000, which he spent.

A month later, Gough said, Mojang sent Gough a contract that would sign away his rights to the ending poem. He refused. “I let them use the story, even though there was no contract, because I liked Markus, and I liked the fact that lots of people were reading the story,” he said.

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A few years later, Mojang reached out to Gough again. It was 2014 and the company was about to sell Minecraft to Microsoft in a multi-billion-dollar deal. They needed Gough to sign over the ending to placate the corporate giant. Again, Gough refused. They sold the game anyway and Microsoft kept using the poem.

According to Gough, the idea that his friend wanted him to sign away the rights to his poem hurt. So did the fact that Persson made billions of dollars from the game. Gough could have used some of that money. The problem tortured him for years, he said.

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Then he took mushrooms in the woods around the Dutch town of Apeldoorn. “I just told the universe, OK, forget about what I want; just give me whatever you think I need,” he said. “And it gave me, to my intense surprise, advice about Minecraft, and Microsoft… and you.”

Gough realized that the reason he was upset wasn’t the money. It was that he’d let the money stop him from enjoying the love he had received from creating something so many people enjoyed. “I had actively hidden away from love. Because there were many, many people who tracked me down over the years (my name is in the credits of the game, and with a bit of googling you can find a contact for me): I frequently got Twitter DMs, and emails, and messages through my website, that told me how much the End Poem had meant to people,” he said.

“And that night, with the stars blazing above, the universe told me that it wasn’t acceptable for me to give love, but then refuse to receive it,” he said. “That was just fake humility; another form of arrogance, of ego. I had to allow people to say thank you; I had to accept whatever gifts people might wish to offer in return, because too much charge was building up along that blocked circuit. I had to complete the circuit. Let it flow.”

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The UVA gunman had no shortage of guns—a Ruger AR-556 and Smith & Wesson Model 39 were found in his dorm room—and police have not yet released detailed information about the handgun found near the scene. (A spokesperson for the Virginia State Police said the gun had been handed over to the ATF, which is conducting ballistics tests to determine if it was the murder weapon.) By process of elimination, however, the likely candidate is the Glock 45 the gunman purchased in July of 2021 from Dance’s Sporting Goods in Colonial Heights, Virginia, a handgun that can be purchased there for as little as $599.99.

https://popula.com/2022/11/20/university-of-virginia-who-made-the-gun/

Anytime I think I have an expensive ass hobby, I see the price of a cheap gun and I’m like “I could buy ten commander decks for that price”.

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Today’s “Making Magic” article talks about Jumpstart 2022 and the history of Shapeshifters.

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the idea of using tumblr as a twitter alternative is incomprehensible. it's like if your local walmart closed down and you started doing all your grocery shopping at the cursed antique store from needful things

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𝕬𝖑𝖜𝖆𝖞𝖘 𝖆𝖓𝖉 𝕱𝖔𝖗𝖊𝖛𝖊𝖗

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sorry to post abt the tboy swag bracket but the people complaining abt gomez adams losing to the beastie boys have never seen pictures of the beastie boys

I could open the transmasc tag on tiktok rn and see three men just like this within 30 seconds

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I don't know when I went from one kid to two kids, but this dog has been a complication. People will call their pets kids, and I'm a shit heel for saying it but it's not the fucking same. However, the level of work involved is nearly the same so I feel for everyone putting in the work. In some ways it's worse. Every night, I have to bring Cheddar into Esme's room and put him into a bed and wake him three hours later to piss. It's a chore for everyone else but the kid who snores softly. For Cheddar and I, it's the last thing we both do before fading away. For him, he ruins uninterrupted time sleeping with his pack animal. For me, I'm starting the end cycle for a day, good or bad. Today feels like it could go strong for both of us but we know it's got to end. I've hosted a small improptu drink up in my porch. He finds a ball that he wants to play with. Neither wants to move forward to the final places we will spend the night, but I'm coaxing him back into a bed, so I can lay down. We are both know we could never be happier anywhere else, but tonight, we wish we could have one more hour.

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In the first quarter of 2016, Starbucks was keeping about $1.2 billion for its customers between money pre-loaded onto cards and the company’s app, the coffee giant told The Wall Street Journal. If Starbucks were a bank, that amount of deposits would make it a respectable midsize institution.

Starbucks Cards Hold So Much Money The Company Could Be A Midsize Bank

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Finished my father's day with wings with two of my favorite people. (at Providence, Rhode Island)

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Bad blood has run through the New York ice cream trade for decades. In 1969, a Mister Softee driver was kidnapped by rivals who blew up his truck. In 2004, a cone-selling couple in their 60s were ambushed by competitors who beat them into critical condition with a wrench. In a 2010 brawl caught on video, two drivers near Columbus Circle exchanged punches before one man pushed the other’s face into a planter.

A Renegade Muscles In on Mister Softee’s Turf - The New York Times

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Found a wild Pokémon, but it refused to let me capture it. #littlemissesme #pikachu

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Sweet Dreaming #littlemissesme

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Take Care (of your teeth). #littlemissesme #drakeviews

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18 seconds

I got one of those new chip credit cards, and it’s a total nightmare. It takes credit card machines forever to read the card, and society hasn’t yet developed the conversational mores for chitchat with the cashier during the half-minute the busted-up card reader is judging me. But there is hope on the horizon: Visa is launching software that can cut up to 18 seconds off the transaction time. I really wish I could go back to the swipe card because I don’t really need the extra security — that’s a problem for people with enough money where having a credit card stolen would be a cause for concern rather than a way for a thief to quickly overdraft at a Taco Bell. [The Wall Street Journal ]