I check friends’ Snapchat stories from time to time, and Snapchat suggests public stories on the same page. I think Snapchat has the same sort of singular data point on me that “this account is likely a straight man”, because most of what they show me are sports clips, woman influencers in revealing clothing, and right-wing influencers talking about culture war stuff. I never view any of that sort of stuff, but it still shows up any time I try to check my friend’s stories. I guess I view public stories so infrequently that they just give me a default generic man feed.

You are correct. He used a VPN for several US locations in the video. He then compared what content was shown in different regions of the US to see if everyone sees the same thing or if the content is radically different depending on where you are.

Plenty of great advice here, but one more thing to think about is how such a large win for Republicans can be used against them a bit in the future. They won the Presidency and have majorities in the Senate, likely the House, the Supreme Court, and governorships. They have free reign to do what they want, which is scary, but it also means that they can’t blame the Democrats for any bad things that may happen in the next 2 years until the midterms.

Any law that passes with bad outcomes is solely their fault. If the economy gets worse, it’s all on them. If the deficit increases, they are the only ones to blame. If they don’t fulfill their campaign promises, it’s because they chose not to. If there is a government shutdown, it’s because they couldn’t agree on a budget. If bills aren’t being passed, they are arguing too much. They can’t even fall back on blaming the Democrats in the Senate because they have enough votes that they could cancel the filibuster while they are in office and reinstate it before they leave.

This means that you, and everyone else, can point out anything the government does that has a negative impact and say definitively that it is entirely the fault of the Republicans. If this is done frequently enough and loud enough, there may be enough frustrated voters to change the outcome the next time around. They will definitely do things that annoy almost every voter, whether they are going too far or not far enough in their agenda, and they can’t hide that it was only them that made those decisions.

I don’t think it is very well known, but I thought Scavengers Reign was very good. It was a bit slow, but I thought it gave time to see the weird alien world.

If you are on the fence about it, the show is a followup to this short and has some similarities in its world building.

As egrets mentioned, it is more sci-fi tech rather than realistic tech. I don’t think it is extremely unrealistic as a proposed idea, but it is something that could never work at the scale shown in the show. In a weird way, the end of the show felt to me like it got both more realistic and more unrealistic. I’m trying not to spoil anything, but I hope that can give a bit more info to decide if you would like it.

I second The Terror (never saw season 2 though). It was a slow burn horror for much of it, which I really appreciated. I liked the historical aspects and thought they conveyed the isolation well. I need to get around to reading the book at some point.

I really enjoyed Halt and Catch Fire, and I see so few people talk about it. The only issue I had with it was that each season felt like it was almost a reset point rather than a straight continuation of the plot. I wish they would have left a few more open plot points at the end of each season that flowed into the next. I felt the same way with Silicon Valley, even though I enjoyed that one as well.

I’m from the US as well, and I can verify that very few average people use those types of messengers primarily. It is almost exclusively iMessage and SMS/MMS/RCS texts as the main form of messaging. I will admit that quite a few people will use the messaging features that are built into social media apps (like messaging in Snapchat, Facebook Messenger, etc). At least to me, it seems like those are moreso used for sending memes or messaging people you don’t interact with regularly and are still secondary to the other forms of messaging.

Eh, their business practices regarding selling games are fairly consumer friendly, but overall they have quite a few issues themselves that aren’t great. I wouldn’t hold them up as a great company but rather a better company than the competition, which is a fairly low bar.

Maybe I’m wrong here, but I think most people never thought Ukraine would win the war outright. Personally, I’ve never heard anyone say that they thought Ukraine would push Russia out entirely and the war would end. Even if Ukraine did secure all of its land, Russia would almost certainly continue fighting along the border to prevent it from joining any alliance like NATO. It seemed the best anyone hoped for is that there would be enough pressure applied to Russia that something changed within where they gave up on the war.