I read all the Jack Ryan books. Jack Ryan has a daughter (cisgender) and I think she's a teacher like her mum. He has one son, Jack Ryan Jr, ego isn’t trans either.
I don’t know about his real family. No minor characters spring to mind.
Also a bunch of people write as Tom Clancy now.
I've never been scared by scary movies. I'm reading IT by Stephen King (for the second time, I first read it when I was 11 or 12, or about the same age as the kids in the book) and it's good, but it's not scaring me. Neither did Pet Sematary. Next up will be The Shining. King makes some good scary situations, but they don't really make me scared.
The only thing that's really triggered a fear-like response (more like anxiety though) is movies with scenes of domestic violence (particularly towards kids).
Black Mirror had an episode about this.
Surprised it took someone this long to actually make it.
I forget the name of the episode. If you're curious, it's on Netflix, it's in season 3, and it's right before San Junipero. It was bleak AF, which is why the only happy (and arguably the best) Black Mirror episode came right after it.
Gen X here. My mother (boomer, hippie) would have friends over and they'd smoke, they'd send the friend's kid up to my room, upstairs and around the corner. Didn't matter if the door was open or closed, they were in the makeshift den (converted garage) stoned outta their gourds. I had a few girls up, and I remember one flashing me and being nervous about it. Looking back I think she was giving me a hint, somewhere between "I wanna see yours" and "come get this." But I was a dumb teenage boy and I think I just played on the Nintendo or the computer (had both in my bedroom). But yeah, had a few girls up there, and it didn't matter if we had the door open or closed, if we wanted to hook up, our parents wouldn't have known (except my bedroom was directly above the garage, though my mother would also play her records, so maybe they wouldn't have heard thumping).
Straight guy, but again, I wasn't really interested in hooking up in those days. And when I say "friend's kid" I mean boys or girls, as young as 5 or 6 and as old as 16 or 17. I was 13-15 when I lived there. If it was a little kid, I was designated the babysitter and would entertain the kid. I was pretty good at it. Only one or twice was it a girl my age. About half the time it was a boy, and about 3/4 of the time they were way too young — not that I was really into girls, or enough to try to make a move even if they were the right age. They were all, as the guy says in Fight Club about airplane neighbors, "disposable friends." Or was it "single-use"? So I never made a move on the girls my age; whether they were attractive to me or not, we just played Nintendo or computer games or looked at comic books or something.
Anything by Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp). Facebook literally got people killed by volunteering their location data to a tyrannical government in a third world country. Don't think they won't do that to Americans.
Android (the mobile OS) kind of is. The only reason Google bought the hobby project to put Linux on smartphones was because they could collect more data with it than they could with Gmail. You can get a Pixel device and install GrapheneOS on it, but not even 1% of Android users are turning off telemetry (which only anonymises it), let alone installing custom firmware that doesn't have it. I'm not saying iOS isn't — because it's not open source, we don't know — but I am saying Android definitely is. And I don't just mean Pixels — to use the Android brand, Google requires certain things of OEMs like Samsung, from having Gmail and/or Chrome on the main home screen, to having Google Play Services, which does the data collecting, installed. (I'm pretty sure the Play Store actually requires it. Forks that don't use the Android branding, like Amazon's Fire OS, don't have this restriction, but Amazon probably has plenty of other crap in theirs.)
Now, I never said Android was a honeypot, and it may not be. But Google was just sued for antitrust, and they made a deal to keep Chrome and Android under their banner. We don't know what the terms of that deal are. I would consider both of them to be compromised by bad actors (potentially they always were since Google was selling the data). Don't think so much about who you call (though that can be valuable) but like, your Maps data, anything you put in Health (like if you're female, like if you miss two or more periods but not eight or nine and then start back up again, I'm sure the GOP would love to know that — for the dense fellas, it could mean she got pregnant and then terminated it, or the pregnancy failed somehow). Tim Cook's advice of "get your mom an iPhone" doesn't sound so far fetched now. Your sister, too. Heck, specifically regarding Health, Samsung put out an update last year, maybe the year before — that is, before the current administration — saying if you keep using Health, they can sell your information to whoever they want. Either agree and keep using it, or disagree and they delete your data. At this point, no stock Android phone can be trusted to keep your information private. It's different if you use GrapheneOS, but that requires buying a Pixel, putting money in Google's pocket. The Pixel 10 is what, about as powerful as an iPhone 11? A 12 maybe? And it costs the same as an iPhone 16. You decide. Personally I don't think it looks like a very good deal.
Yeah, no shit. But they nearly doubled the price. I canceled my membership, but I doubt enough did to actually matter.
I was fine paying $60 a year for Office. I was never gonna use the AI stuff. When they said it was $100, I bailed. So now they don't get the $60. But enough people will go on paying that they will actually make more money on Office in the next year, not less.
Not enough people are willing to vote with their wallets or even their feet to effect any meaningful change. At least not when it comes to their tech toys.
Greater than zero.
You wanna tweak your melon a bit? Look up "Last Thursdayism." It's a thing — due to the way short term and long term memory work, the theory goes that anything before "last Thursday" is a lie. It's an arbitrary day of the week. The movie Dark City played off of this, when the — I forget what they were called — did their tuning and rearranged things and swapped peoples' memories around.
Do that many people in 2025 not know that while OpenOffice was first, LibreOffice is the more actively maintained fork and that OpenOffice has been somewhat problematic in the past and is kinda avoided?
I clicked your link, and I actually like how that office suite has the options on the left rather than the top. Like it was made for widescreen monitors.
The only other office suite I've seen do that is Apple's. As a Mac user, I recognised the style immediately. So I use iWork stuff because it's on my Mac already and it's good enough for me. I like the way LibreOffice is looking but I don't need another office suite. But I really like the way calligra looks. It might need some polish, but they have some good ideas.
The sound of silence. I don't mean Simon & Garfunkel, and I definitely don't mean Disturbed (though, it's a good cover).
Honestly though, I can sleep to whatever. My younger brother used to sleep to death metal. I'm not kidding. It was annoying for about a week. We've had noisy neighbors and my wife will ask if she should go yell at them or something when I'm about to go to bed (she stays up all night, I wake up early). I say nope, it's not an issue. And it never has been. I don't think I can sleep to a baby crying or a shrill alarm though. Anything high pitched. I'm pretty sure I even fell asleep to loud sex one time. As I was drifting off, I could have sworn I heard moaning and thumping. I remember having a bit of a chuckle over that. Hot college girl used to live next door, she's getting railed TF out of like 2 feet away through a wall, and she'd be embarrassed if I saw her in her underwear (I never tried to look, just saying). But you don't really think, there's another room right there, another bed up against the same wall, and somebody who always leaves before the sun comes up is probably in there. So yeah, anyway, I'm a heavy sleeper.
You don't believe it's ever happened?
I don't know why the CSS isn't loading on this CNN link, other than maybe because the link is 16 years old. (Probably older than the waifu in question.) But here you go: https://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/12/16/japan.virtual.wedding/index.html
It's not even the 6th yet! ...which tells me he's in Europe and that makes Nova a little cooler.
iPhone guy but of course I have Nova Prime on my backup phone. I wanna say I had a couple other apps he made, too? Tesla Coil sounds familiar. But it's been almost 10 years since an Android phone was my main phone.
So Nova should be usable for a few more years at least... but... what's everyone gonna replace it with? For what I use my S10 for, it should be good enough. I mainly need the launcher to support custom grid sizes, larger icons, and custom icons since my Android phone is a cosplay prop. (It's meant to look and act like the NookPhone from Animal Crossing. It's fully functional — you open Nook Music and it's Apple Music which I'm subscribed to, as long as it has WiFi it will play, and it has a lot of stuff downloaded. And of course the browser is Firefox with uBlock Origin — it's just Redd the fake art purveyor on a globe rather than the red panda we all know and love.)