I bet whoever made this is really embarrassed now.

A classical Greek tragedy about hard work, big egos, and French culture.

His fanatical attention to detail, frenetic work ethic, and discerning palate, propelled him to the top of his profession, and earned him a knowledgeable and loyal, but unforgiving and demanding clientele.

In the late 1990s, a new form of Asian-inspired "fusion cuisine" swept France, catering to an international corporate class and pleasing trend-driven "foodies" (a neologism of the movement), which Loiseau resisted.

Loiseau was downgraded from 19/20 to 17/20 in the Gault et Millau guide and received a strong negative media review from the gastronomic critic François Simon in the newspaper Le Figaro, but he still had his three stars in the Michelin Guide. Criticism continued to pour in and the media speculated about a possible future loss of a Michelin star.

But on February 24, 2003, the chef finished his lunchtime service, rolled up his apron and drove home. Telling his ten-year old son – one of three children – to go and play outside, he went upstairs, locked the bedroom door and shot himself in the head with a hunting rifle, a present from his wife.

After his death, three-star chef Jacques Lameloise said Loiseau had once confided, "If I lose a star, I'll kill myself".

Derek Brown, Michelin director at the time, said: "The idea of telling him about the concerns we had about some of his cooking was in order to give him an opportunity to consider whether he wanted to do something about it, which he did, as it turned out."

All in all, a messy story sparking many debates about whether reviewers should really be brutally honest, and if they are unfairly harsh. Perhaps it inspired Ratatouille (2007)?

David Hogg is being a pig, according to Democratic National Committee insiders who are already slinging mud at the new party vice chairman.

Barely two weeks into his tenure, Hogg has been leveraging DNC contact lists to blast out messages soliciting donations to his own political action committee — from which he draws more than $100,000 in compensation a year, according to Federal Election Commission records.

...

Hogg co-founded "Leaders We Deserve" in August 2023 with the stated goal of electing young progressives to Congress and state legislatures across the country. It also provided him a six-figure income job right out of college.

Since the PAC was founded, Hogg has pocketed more than $175,000, records show, with more than $20,000 in salary payments coming in December alone, the most recent month for which public data is available.

BREAKING: Newly elected DNC Vice Chair David Hogg is using party resources to funnel donations into his own PAC—where he pays himself a six-figure salary. pic.twitter.com/2p1RY7PfGq

— Clown World ™ 🤡 (@ClownWorld_) February 15, 2025

Documents show that not only did the “Leaders we Deserve” PAC pay David Hogg $16,351.39 in May, he is also on the permanent payroll.

THIS MEANS HIS PAYMENT WAS NOT a donation. He represents the PAC with every single statement, post and speech he gives.

CALL OUT HIS LIE. pic.twitter.com/fRNDdMzkL8

— Sarah Fields (@SarahisCensored) August 9, 2024

DemocRATs learn the grift early

this thread caught my eye so i had to look

sure emough:

OP post is

She is the definition of independence. When the world tells her to shrink, she chooses to expand.

Muscle mommies do not ask for permission.

They take what they deserve.

btw this is the same guy that huffed nitrogen

You forgot to mention that they are great cuddlers

surpised this wasnt peggiebigpeepee saying this

posting

All these women are fat nowadays

Muscle mommies is the kind of thing that looks great drawn

Haters to the left

i did not make that mistake that was literally how """he""" wrote it

this post sums it up

Porn Addition: The Thread

>It's real

"CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!"
–President Donald J. Trump pic.twitter.com/IMr4tq0sMB

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) February 19, 2025

!burgers !blueanon !chuds

If you had asked me three months ago whether I would have been on the side of the Republic or Ceasar in 48 BC I would have without hesitation said Caesar. Now with how The Orange One is behaving I realize the error of my ways: Pompey was right all along...

The situation on RTX 50 launch day looks dire. It seems that the few people who manage to find the cards in stock online will either be powered by fast AI algorithms or simply lucky to be near retailer servers.

We previously reported on the RTX 50 launch day lottery in Japan. The country is known for such draws, which, in order to prevent scalping, give everyone in line an equal chance to purchase limited-supply products. Only those whose tickets are chosen will be allowed to buy the product. While it's hard to call that a win, at least some participants don't leave empty-handed.

According to Japanese media, one of the lotteries at PC Koubou, which started earlier (around 15:00 local time), ended in chaos. People were seen climbing over the fence of a nearby kindergarten, and screams were heard. There's also a photo of a destroyed kingergarten sign (added above). The lottery concluded before many attendees even arrived, leading to frustration and disorder at the venue.

The PC Koubou Parts Hall has started calling for entries for a lottery to purchase the RTX5090, but the situation is currently in chaos.

Angry shouts were heard, and some people even climbed over the fence of the kindergarten next door.

@sarasteam0151 (translation)

Swedish retailer Inet confirms there may not be any RTX 5090 stock at launch. It seems they are waiting for an update from their courier company. Even if any 5090 units arrive, the retailer expects them to sell out immediately. The 5080, on the other hand, should sell "quickly."

According to a Redditor who compiled a list of MicroCenter locations and their expected RTX 5090/5080 stock, only 233 RTX 5090 cards were distributed across all stores in the U.S. Similarly, only 2,393 RTX 5080 models were allocated. This is an extremely low number of cards for launch day, though it's important to note that we cannot verify the accuracy of this list.

However, Tustin, California, appears to be one of the few locations where lining up might make sense. The queue is already over 300 people long show messages shared on Reddit, meaning that if the numbers above are correct, the last people in line won't even have a chance to buy a card.

While it's great to see such high demand for new graphics cards, it's difficult to understand why NVIDIA did not prepare a larger stock for launch. The company was not forced to release the cards this early, and there is clearly a significant supply issue. Nothing would have changed if the launch had been delayed by a month, allowing board partners to build inventory. This way, customers wouldn't have to rely on luck, fast reflexes, or being prepared to camp outside stores.

Haha jk they're Israeli

THAT'S AMERICAN HOCKEY. 🇺🇸🦅 #4Nations pic.twitter.com/l68FFiNsmn

— USA Hockey (@usahockey) February 16, 2025

Someone ping more !hockey !chuds !burgers

I had totally forgotten that the Dear Colleague letter was that early, holy frick

Angry bride struggles through vows as guest lets baby cry during ‘adults-only’ ceremony https://t.co/krV5rYs4IS pic.twitter.com/XwHcQoRkeQ

— New York Post (@nypost) February 17, 2025

Just whatever you want to post really, it doesn't matter what it is.

!metashit

Department of Education is (soon) kill!?

I was talking to a irl maga person a month ago and they were like:

...what? It doesn't matter who gets appointed to head the DOE because Trump will dismantle it. He literally said so lol

And I was like

pshhh that will never happen...

A year into their relationship, Jess and Nate got engaged next to the sea. "It was a golden, sandy beach – empty and secluded," says Jess, 26. "It was just us two there, so it was really intimate."

Except that the couple were actually hundreds of miles apart – and they were role-playing their engagement in the video game World of Warcraft.

Nate, 27, was living just outside London – and Jess was in Wales. After meeting briefly at an esports event in Germany in March 2023, the pair developed a long-distance relationship, playing the game together "from the moment we woke up to the moment we went to bed", says Nate.

The couple still play the game daily, even though they've been living together in Manchester since March 2024. And they know other couples who have found their partners through video games: "It's a different way of meeting someone," says Jess. "You both have such a strong mutual love for something already, it's easier to fall in love."

Nate agrees. "I was able to build a lot more of a connection with people I meet in gaming than I ever was able to in a dating app."

A selfie of Nate and Jess on the left, and on the right, a screenshot from World of Warcraft showing Nate proposing with the words, "Will you marry me?"

Nate and Jess (pictured, alongside their virtual engagement), found love online - but not on a dating app

Nate and Jess are not alone. According to some experts, people of their generation are moving away from dating apps and finding love on platforms that were not specifically designed for romance.

And hanging out somewhere online that's instead focused on a shared interest or hobby could allow people to find a partner in a lower-stakes, less pressurised setting than marketing themselves to a gallery of strangers. For some digital-native Gen Zs, it seems, simply doing the things they enjoy can be an alternative to the tyranny of the swipe.

Internet dating at 30 - a turning point?

Since it first appeared with the launch of match.com 30 years ago, online dating has fundamentally altered our relationships. Around 10% of heterosexual people and 24% of LGBT people have met their long-term partner online, according to Pew Research Center.

But evidence suggests that young people are switching off dating apps, with the UK's top 10 seeing a fall of nearly 16%, according to a report published by Ofcom in November 2024. Tinder lost 594,000 users, while Hinge dropped by 131,000, Bumble by 368,000 and Grindr by 11,000, the report said (a Grindr spokesperson said they were "not familiar with this study's source data" and that their UK users "continue to rise year over year").

According to a 2023 Axios study of US college students and other Gen Zers, 79% said they were forgoing regular dating app usage. And in its 2024 Online Nation report, Ofcom said: "Some analysts speculate that for younger people, particularly Gen Z, the novelty of dating apps is wearing off." In a January 2024 letter to shareholders, Match Group Inc - which owns Tinder and Hinge - acknowledged younger people were seeking "a lower pressure, more authentic way to find connections".

"The idea of using a shared interest to meet someone isn't new, but it's been reinvented in this particular moment in time – it signals a desire of Gen Z," says Carolina Bandinelli, an associate professor at Warwick University whose research focuses on the digital technologies of romance.

Getty Images Joggers running in a parkGetty Images

Many younger people are exploring alternatives to dating apps, from gaming to running clubs and other social activities

According to Danait Tesfay, 26, a marketing assistant from London, younger people are looking for alternatives to dating apps, "whether that be gaming or running clubs or extra-curricular clubs, where people are able to meet other like-minded people and eventually foster a romantic connection".

At the same time that membership of some dating apps appears to be in decline, platforms based around common interests are attracting more users. For instance, the fitness app Strava now has 135m users – and its monthly active users grew by 20% last year, according to the company. Other so-called "affinity-based" sites have seen similar growth: Letterboxd, where film fans can share reviews, says its community grew by 50% last year.

Rise of the hobby apps

And just as in the pre-internet age, when couples might have met at a sports club or the cinema, now singletons are able to find each other in their online equivalents.

"People have always bonded over shared interests, but it's been given a digital spin with these online communities," says Luke Brunning, co-director of the Centre for Love, S*x, and Relationships (CLSR) at the University of Leeds.

"It's increasingly difficult to distinguish between behaviour that's on a dating app and dating behaviour on another platform."

Hobby apps are taking on some features of social media, too: in 2023, Strava introduced a messaging feature letting users chat directly. One twenty-something from London explains that her friends use it as a way to flirt with people they fancy, initially by liking a running route they've posted on the platform. Strava says its data shows that one in five of its active Gen Z members has been on a date with someone they met through fitness clubs.

"[Online] fitness communities are becoming big places to find partners," says Nichi Hodgson, the author of The Curious History of Dating. She says a friend of hers met his partner that way, and they're now living together.

The same appears to apply to Letterboxd, too. With users including Chappell Roan and Charli XCX, it's a popular platform for younger people - two-thirds of members in a survey of 5,000 were under 34.

The company says it's aware of several couples meeting through the app, including one who bonded over a shared love of David Fincher's opinion-dividing 2020 drama Mank. "It could be that seeing other people's film tastes reveals an interesting aspect of themselves," says Letterboxd co-founder Matthew Buchanan.

Why the shift?

So what might be driving this? While dating apps initially appeared to offer "the illusion of choice", and a transparent, efficient way to meet partners, the reality for many has often proven to be different. The Pew Research Center found that 46% of dating-app users said their experiences were overall very or somewhat negative.

The recent decline in user numbers might also be a response to the way some apps are structured – in particular, the swipe feature for selecting potential partners, launched by Tinder in 2013 and widely copied.

Its creator, Jonathan Badeen, was partly inspired by studying the 1940s experiments of psychologist BF Skinner, who conditioned hungry pigeons to believe that food delivered randomly into a tray was prompted by their movements.

Getty Images A psychological experiment with pigeons conducted by BF SkinnerGetty Images

Tinder's swipe mechanism was partly inspired by Harvard Professor BF Skinner's psychological experiments with pigeons in order to understand the brain's reward system

Eventually, the swipe mechanism faced a backlash. "Ten years ago, people were enthusiastic and would talk quite openly about what apps they were on," says Ms Hodgson. "Now the Tinder model is dead with many young people – they don't want to swipe any more."

According to Mr Brunning, the gameifying interface of many dating apps is a turn-off. "Intimacy is made simple for you, it's made fun in the short term, but the more you play, the more you feel kind of icky."

The pandemic may have had an impact, too, says Prof Brian Heaphy at the University of Manchester, who has studied dating-app use in and after the lockdowns: "During Covid, dating apps themselves became more like social media – because people couldn't meet up, they were looking for different things."

Although that didn't last after the pandemic, it "gave people a sense that it could be different from just swiping and getting no responses – all the negatives of dating-app culture," says Prof Heaphy.

And in that context, the fact that video games or online communities like Strava or Letterboxd aren't designed for dating can be appealing. By attracting users for a broader range of reasons, there's less pressure on each interaction.

"Those apps aren't offering a commercialised form of romance, so they can seem more authentic," says Prof Heaphy.

The World of Warcraft characters of PurplePixel and Wochi

The humans behind Wochi and PurplePixel (pictured) met while playing World of Warcraft, though they say finding a partner wasn't their original intention

It's a type of connection free from the burden of expectation. A different couple who met on World of Warcraft – and go by the names Wochi and PurplePixel – weren't looking for love. "I definitely didn't go into an online game trying to find a partner," says Wochi.

But although initially in opposing teams, or guilds, their characters started a conversation. "We spent all night talking until the early hours of the morning, and by the end of the night, I'd actually left my guild and joined his guild," says PurplePixel. Within three years, Wochi had quit his job and moved to the UK from Italy to be with her.

According to Ms Hodgson, "While some dating apps can bring out the worst behaviours, these other online spaces can do the opposite, because people are sharing something they enjoy."

Because of these structural elements, she doesn't think the recent decline in numbers is temporary. "It's going to keep happening until dating apps figure out how to put the human aspect back."

New kinds of dating app

The dating apps aren't giving up without a fight, however. Hinge is still "setting up a date every two seconds", according to a spokesperson; Tinder says a relationship starts every three seconds on its platform and that almost 60% of its users are aged 18-30. In fact, the apps appear to be embracing the shift to shared-interest platforms, launching niche alternatives including ones based around fitness, veganism, dog-ownership or even facial hair.

They're also evolving to encourage different kinds of interaction. On Breeze, users who agree to be set up on a date aren't allowed to message each other before they meet; and Jigsaw hides people's faces, only removing pieces to reveal the full photo after a certain amount of interaction.

It means that it's premature to proclaim the death of the dating app, believes Prof Heaphy. "There's now such a diversity of dating apps that the numbers for the biggest ones aren't the key indicator," he says. "It might actually be a similar number to before, in terms of overall membership."

And there's a downside to people going to more general-interest apps looking for love – people might not want to be hit on when they just want to talk about books. Dating apps, at least, are clear about what their purpose is.

What might the future look like?

In an increasingly online world, the solution to improving relationships might not simply be to go offline. Instead, apps that can offer an experience which more closely mirrors the best of IRL interactions, while tapping into the possibilities of digital ones, might also show a way forward.

With the imminent integration of AI into dating apps, we are "right on the cusp of something new", says Mr Brunning. "It's interesting to see if we'll end up with specific apps just for dating, or will we end up with something a bit more fluid?"

He points to platforms in China that are more multi-purpose. "People use them for chat, for community, and conduct business on them – they can also be dating platforms, but they're often not exclusively for that."

In the meantime, the interactions possible in less mediated communities like World of Warcraft could offer more of a chance to connect than conversations initiated by a swipe.

Jess and Nate's in-game engagement on the beach might not have been real, but the couple are hoping to change that soon. "It's a matter of when, really. There are a few things we need to tick off the checklist, and then she'll be getting her ring," says Nate. And there'll still be a gaming element.

"You can role-play getting married," says Jess. "So it could be funny to get all our friends together at some point in the World of Warcraft cathedral, and we could have a marriage ceremony."

https://instagram.com/reel/DEp4QJfxQHN/

Woke up at 3 am, drove two hours and then walked three miles there and back to see this little neighbor say six more weeks of winter.