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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: December 19th, 2023

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  • I’m confused how your pro #2 has to do with wireless headphones, as you could find much cheaper wired headphones with noise canceling even 20 years ago. I’m not sure about pass-through, but I imagine that’s more of a feature now because of technology upgrades.

    I even used those wired headphones while mowing the lawn with noise cancelling and could hear the music without having to crank the volume to max. I think there might have even been an EQ button with different settings pre-made (however weren’t customizable to my knowledge). Not sure whether that’s also just because of the technological process now or not.

    I’d say battery life is another con for wireless headphones, both for the headphones themselves and the device being used. I have worked a job where we’d have some shifts as long as 10-12 hours and with wired headphones, I’d still have 20-30 percent of the phone battery left, even if I had been listening to YouTube videos with the brightness all the way down. However, with the wireless headphones either my headphones or my phone would die before the end of a long shift like that and I’d be stuck without my music for the last 2-3 hours, even just listening to music with no video.



  • The US isn’t any more concerned about sexual orientation now than any point in the past. Back in colonial times, it wouldn’t have been safe to be anything other than straight with all the hyper religious colonists. They were even forcing their gender conformity and the straight sexual orientation on the Native Americans. Baron Friedrich von Steuben got a pass for being gay, probably because he was the one in charge of training the troops for Washington. 100 years ago, you could be killed on the street for being anything other than straight or denied jobs. The Lavender scare of the mid century brought this more to light. The AIDS crisis that started in the 80s and bled through into the 90s and 2000s as new medicines were being invented, further brought negative light to sexual orientations outside of straight. The cause of all of this attention to sexual orientation has been the religions brought over by colonists.

    In recent years, sexual orientations outside of straight are finally being seen in a positive light with Lawrence v TX (2003) legalizing same-sex relationships and Hodges v Obergefell (2015) legalizing same-sex marriages. In Bostock v Clayton County (2020) legal protections against job discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity were finally put into place over 70 years after the start of the Lavender Scare.

    The attention to sexual orientation has always been part of North American history. It has just changed from acceptance with the Native American peoples to hate, death, and intolerance under the colonists, to a more accepting present day. With some of the positive news in recent years, it can be easy to forget (if you’re surrounded by progressives in a blue state) that the hate of sexuality injected into North America in the 15th Century still has hold over large portions of the population today.



  • Don’t forget, insurance covers 50% before the deductible is met, not after. When a policy has that verbiage, usually there’s a footnote that states how those claims are handled in the future. From what I’ve seen, that could mean that insurance will cover 100% of said procedure after the deductible is met or it could mean a co-insurance of 30%.

    After the deductible is met, OP won’t necessarily pay 50%. The percentage of the bill that OP and/or insurance will pay will be on a footnote at the bottom of the blue plan overview page (at least it’s blue when looking at plans from the ACA marketplace).


  • If you’ve met your deductible, you may not owe for the upcoming procedure.

    However, you’d need to look at your policy or call the insurance company to see if the procedure counts towards your deductible. Normally the plan specifies that its 50% before the deductible and by an asterisk or buried somewhere in your plan’s terms, it may say that it’ll be 100% covered after tour deductible is met.

    Is your deductible and out-of-pocket max the same? If you’ve met both, you may not even owe a copay. If you still haven’t met the out-of-pocket max, you will still owe co-pays.

    Your plan documents or the company will be able to give better answers, as companies and plans can be very different in how they cover things.










  • It’s largely the same system. You can play as the Greeks, Norse, or Egyptians. Each civilization has the choice of 3 major gods (is Zeus, Hades, or Poseidon) that choice is kinda like choosing your civilization in AoE. Instead of going feudal age to castle age, you choose a different minor god to worship. Each god gives you a different god power and mythological unit (Cyclops, trolls, anubites, etc). The final civilization upgrade allows you to build a building that unleashes a titan on the map.

    There is a new currency called favor that is used to research some improvements unlocked by worshiping specific gods and to train mythological units.

    The types of games are largely the same as AoE, with different maps. The campaigns are a lot of fun. It’s a great game, especially if you like mythology. The stories are original and not based on the original myths, but you can learn some of the myths of heroes, mythical creatures, and the gods by right-clicking on them. The campaigns walk you through how to play and through the features that are different from AoE.

    You can choose varying difficulty for the scenarios and can choose the difficulty of the computer players when playing a random map. This makes it about as complex as Age of Empires. However, just as with online AoE, the player vs player can have a steep learning curve if you’re matched against people that have been playing a long time.

    Age of Empires and Age of Mythology play similarly, where it’s easy to cross from one to the other with many similar human units shared between the games. I think it’s definitely worth a look into! Even the remake that’s already on steam is worth it in my opinion.