So, far right parents in a conservative religion in a Republican town in a Republican state produced a child so tortured by a culture of hate and violence that as soon as they even start to lean either way their instinct is murder. Breaking the cycle of hate is relatively easy compared to breaking the cycle of violence. The statements they made to their roommate (even if that heresay is true) just confirm that they were a troubled child from a troubled culture trying to change. It should surprise no one that those childish attempts would be a VERY twisted reflection of the ideal. So no, he was not part of the left. Just a child in pain reacting the only way their conservative upbringing taught them.

That’s not very helpful for connecting family, friends, and especially grandma.

Jellyfish cannot to setup to securely and safely be exposed to the Internet. It is only safe to access through a VPN. That rules it out as an option for sharing with friends, family, or even my own spouse. You call it phoning home to the mother ship; I call it paying Plex to manage user authentication for me. Until Jellyfin’s security holes are patched and it becomes clear that the Jellyfin developers actually care about security, it stays locked down to my LAN. Setting up a VPN is difficult for the average user on a good day, impossible in some circumstances on even the best of days, and is not access I want to hand out (and support) to all the people I share my Plex with anyway.

So edgy.

If someone wrote this article in the early 90s, it would be called “Why I ditched the radio, and how I created my own CD collection.” I think rephrasing it that way really shines a light on why it’s mostly still comparing apples and oranges.

I have a pretty substantial collection of music hovering around 5,000 albums or 1.6TB (mostly lossless FLAC these days, but still some moldy old mp3s and ogg vorbis files from my youth). I’m not even counting the physical media I still hold on to. I still use Spotify for discovery and playlists. I don’t think the depth and breadth of my library will ever match the depth and breadth of the music that I want to listen to in the very next moment. Lots of times I want to listen to the stuff I’m familiar with, and I do that using my own library. But, when I want to: remember a song I heard in the wild, share a holiday playlist with friends, make an obscurely themed playlist of songs features peaches, preview a musician’s or band’s stuff, discover other things that musician has collaborated on, or simply discover new music; I still use Spotify.

There are (or were) bits and pieces out there (many that pre-date Spotify) that can do some of these things. Last.fm (fka Audioscrobbler) was good for tracking listening habits to compare and share with others, it helped a little with discovery. I used allmusic.com a lot long ago to discover the artists that inspired the artists I was listening. If I wanted to share a playlist, I made a mixtape (really it was burning a mix CD). But, all of these collected information only, not the music itself. If I wanted to actually hear a new song, I had to go somewhere and find it first. That often meant literally traveling somewhere else or ordering from a catalog and waiting for delivery. Every new music discovery was a bet made with real dollars that I would actually enjoy the thing or listen to it more than once. Even after napster paved the way for free listening via piracy, one still had to work to actually find the music.

Spotify (and similar services) finally collected (almost) all of it under one app, so that I could discover and listen seemlessly. It is instant gratification music discovery. I’ll never give up my self hosted collection, but I also don’t have much hope that any self curated collection will be able to complete with the way that I use Spotify. Spotify is just the new radio. It’s never the end of my listening though. Just like with radio, when I find something I like enough, then I can expend the energy (or more often expend the money as directly with the band as I can) to add it to my collection.

Hot take: Most metal is just Classical Music II Electric Bugaloo.

I used to playing games on my calculator. I suppose you still can, but I used to do it. I remember I had RISK on my TI-89, but the games on my TI-82 were on par with the version of snake shown in the post.

Primates make tools to help eating ants, among other things. It’s a bit of an unusual snack, but people eat ants too. We are anteaters? How much of your diet needs to be ants before you’re considered an anteater?

Not to be confused with disco snails.

Somebodies lying (or at least being deceptive). I checked the link. There’s no mention of 20 countries anywhere. Nobody said 20 countries here either. Setting that pedantry aside. In fact, even if it were used by significantly fewer than twenty countries, the ones that without a doubt do use them are spread around the globe. Thus, they are used globally.

David Byrne. Stop Making Sense

Conservatives really like the recycling myth because it puts the onus of waste on the individual consumer instead of the corporations actually producing the waste.

Plexamp has gotten better lately. It can save your progress on audiobooks now. It’s a per library feature, so I have one library of music (that does not save progress) and one for audiobooks (that does save progress). I used to have trouble with some audiobook formats (M4Bs needed to be converted (really just renamed) to mp4s, but that wasn’t necessary for the last few I loaded. Plex still has a little trouble with standards around multiple authors and different productions (and different readers) of a single book, but that’s more of an ID3 tag problem and is resolved if you’re consistent in normalizing the tags on your library. I’ve also used the syncing features a bunch for offline time (like on a plane or on long trips). For a large library, I see syncing offline files as a necessary feature.

And before the Jellyfin fanboys chime in, if Jellyfin could match these audio and syncing features (and be easier to setup for access outside my LAN and sharing with family), I jump ship in a heartbeat.

Yeah that was my first thought after getting over the weirdness of it, “How manageable is this hair going to be after getting home and later as it grows out?”

“pretty easy” is a bit of a stretch

Oh yeah, I was just venting. Every place has their quirks. I wish I had your lowkey Fridays.

LOL, not everywhere is like this. Fridays are always the day an emergency project gets dropped in my lap that absolutely must be done before the next Monday because somebody else has a deadline they need to meet (that they’ve known about for months) and they need our work for a critical part of it, but they never seem to remember until Thursday night.

I’ve also worked at places where the boss demanded a doctor’s note to return to work. I just said “No, I’m not doing that.” That’s always been the end of it. I returned to work once I was well and continued we all continued on as if it never really was about health and safety in the first place. Lots of places have policies on the books that are either outright illegal or unenforceable, but they get people to tow the line out of fear. If a few of us call their bluff, it’s better for them to quietly move on so that we don’t escalate the situation and shine a light on that policy. If word got around that the policy was unenforceable, they wouldn’t be able to bully the rest into compliance.

Moreover, not every “sick leave” is something that is contagious, migraines for example. I’ve even taken a sick day preemptively because I got to work and discovered that I’d have to work in close proximity to someone that was actually sick and contagious, but refused to stay home.

Also, if the company is requiring a professional evaluation in order to work, surely that is something that will be fully expensed to the company. I suppose that dynamic would be different under universal healthcare. But sending people that are recovering from a contagious disease that will resolve itself on its own would still be an incredible strain (and an unnecessary one) on the entire system.

There’s a lot of people in this thread proudly sharing how they stereotype and have preconceptions about people that they don’t actually know. And them their justification is that everyone should be a two dimensional single issue character archetype with literally no conflict or contradictions. Have you people even met any adults, especially professionals and academics, that aren’t your parents or your teachers?

You’re comparing archeology today with the field’s rather sorted past rooted in imperialism. They point out this issue in several, if not all, of the movies. This issue also comes up multiple times in the latest game. Nobody is denying that Dr. Jones is an outlier and a rogue amongst his peers. That conflict is like that core of the character’s motivation throughout. He’s a hero of western imperialism fighting fascist imperialism. We tend to view ALL imperialism in a negative light today (as it should be), but that certainly wasn’t the case when we were fighting literal Nazis.