Connections Puzzle #524
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I almost had the green category figured out, but I couldn’t find the fourth word because the blue category was a complete mystery to me. I had no idea what blue could have been, and I’m still baffled even after being shown the answer.

…it hasn’t yet gotten absurdly over-commercialized…

As someone who grew up watching hockey, I’m sad to report that it seems to be trending that way.

In the early 2000s, most of the commercial sponsors were limited to ads between periods, at least on Hockey Night in Canada. Those ads were for things like pickup trucks and beer. I do know that American broadcasts would have things like “the KFC power play,” which was cringy.

I watched my first games in over a decade during the playoffs last year and was appalled by how betting odds and the associated apps had taken over both the ad space and the analyst desk.

My son will probably start getting into sports in the next few years, and I’m not looking forward to trying to convince him that no, we can’t win $10k from FanBet or SportsOdds or GambleKing or whatever.

Any ____son is a last name. FYI the etymology is son of Jack, son of ____.

There’s something similar in Slavic languages with suffixes like -ovic, -ic, -icz, -ich, etc. So “Djokovic” means “little son of Djoko.”

There are lots of reasons for women to keep their maiden name. In the case of my wife, she had two good ones:

1. She didn’t want to become disassociated from her scientific publications.

2. She didn’t want to complicate or redo any immigration paperwork.

That I will never enjoy the taste of wine.

I figured out I would never like coffee in my teens, and had the same realization about beer in my 20s.

But it wasn’t until this year, in my mid-thirties, that I finally accepted that I don’t like the taste of wine and probably never will. After years of trying the full spectrum of wines, I had to admit that it wasn’t the “notes” that were turning me off, nor was it a problem with the quality of the wine. It was the fundamental “wine-ness” that I disliked, the same as I don’t like the “beer-ness” of beer or the “coffee-ness” of coffee.

More generally, it’s a Black Mage from the Final Fantasy series, of which Vivi is one.

I actually don’t believe the one in OP’s picture is Vivi, who normal has more adornments on his clothing . It looks more like an older version of the class, like this one from FFIV artwork.

Fun, but there should also be a few lines about Austria trying to punch Serbia and failing, Romania trying to punch Austria and failing, and Britain super promising the Arabs their freedom if they would just punch Turkey.

I dunno, I didn’t have much of a problem with them unless my hands were wet. Occasionally couldn’t make the triple-tap work, and maybe some issues with accidentally adjusting the volume. I found the “push and hold to play notifications” function to be super reliable, though.

Meanwhile, Google’s like, “We’re removing the ability to silently check your notifications using your Pixel Buds. You have to use the voice command now. No, we don’t care that you primarily use them in public spaces. And we really don’t care that our voice recognition has a 15% success rate.”

The emotional part of my brain is telling me to buy this ASAP, because the N64 was such a formative part of my adolescence.

The logical part of my brain is reminding me of all my other nostalgia-fueled purchases that subsequently failed to spark the joy of youth.

Anti-bullying policies at schools aren’t meant to protect victims. But they aren’t meant to protect perpetrators either.

They are instead meant to protect the school administration, notably from having to actually assign fault in bullying situations. They can simply say “zero tolerance,” punish all parties equally, and wash their hands of it.

It really wants me to host a webinar. I get a pop-up every day telling me about how great this function supposedly is. You’d think there was a VC generative AI project attached to it with how hard it’s being pushed.

I think that was Kent Hovind, not Ken Ham.

A Canadian airline being complete trash, what else is new.

And this is Porter, which in my experience is at least somewhat better than Air Canada.

They are mostly a toy store now. Last time I visited a GameStop I was told they don’t even stock new games at release, except for pre-orders. There doesn’t seem to be a point in going there anymore.

Nah, just the sad message of “Pretty please love me (because we sunk a bunch of money into this).”

Connections Puzzle #445
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One of the things I initially liked about Pixels was that I could uninstall/disable a lot of the proprietary garbage that would be mandatory on other phones. But now it looks like Google is abandoning that flexibility in favour of shoehorning Gemini into everything.

My only interaction with Gemini so far was telling it to kick rocks when it sent me an unsolicited text message. I also barely use Assistant to begin with. So once my current phone dies, I guess I’ll have to find something new.

While jarring and ad hoc, I didn’t think BSG’s finale was catastrophic. I honestly disliked the transition from S2 to S3 more than I disliked the ending.