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.

My smartphone isn’t a phone with “extra” features to me. My smartphone is a portable personal computer with extra sensors, a GPS receiver, and wireless internet, which also happens to have a phone app. I don’t want to carry an extra “dumb” phone. I would prefer my smart watch to be the communication and identity hub for me and my devices: holding the SIM card, acting as a wifi hotspot, routing calls and internet to my handheld brick or laptop, etc. Instead of acting like a third party add-on, it would be a mostly distraction free core. Let me use a smartphone, laptop, steam deck, cobbled together cyber deck, or whatever else have you as my local screen, storage cache, and/or proper desktop. Then I can put the screens down or leave them behind without feeling cut off or potentially stranded in a world that practically requires it to navigate with any ease. I want a smart watch that enables me to leave the house without car keys, driver’s license, and credit cards; essentially with nothing but my watchphone. I want to be a cyberpunk Dick Tracy. What I want, with the freedoms and open standards I want, with the privacy I want, without being locked into a single monopoly walled garden, is probably a pipe dream. I want what is probably the next evolution of the “year of the Linux desktop”. But a kid can dream.

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.

They missed the other big one:

If you think you’re hungry, drink a glass of water first. You’re probably just thirsty.

Maybe, but they’re paying attention to the task of scanning items, running the register, and the customer at the front of the line. I don’t really think it’s reasonable to expect them to keep an eye on that moving target as well. I’ve seen the very thing happen: Loading my stuff on to the belt, trying to leave a space because there is no divider available, the cashier is busy concentrating on the other things they are doing and the customer in front of them (not me and my stuff), they grab the last item of the other person’s stuff, scan it and bag it, turn back to check for more stuff (by this time and while the cashier’s back is turned the void I’d left is gone because the belt doesn’t stop advancing until a divider or product blocks the sensor). They may not ever see a gap (only the next item to be scanned).

There’s no perfect solution here, but I don’t see any reason to heap any more responsibility or blame on to an overworked, underpaid, daily abused retail worker just trying to stay sane in one of the most soul crushing and mind-numbingly repetitive jobs I’ve ever known.

The belts usually move forward automatically, eliminating any space left intentionally between two groups of things on it once the first group has been removed from the belt.

A note about surge protectors: Make sure they are actually surge protectors and not just “power strips” that Amazon has mixed into the search results. Power strips are easy to find in many varieties, made by any number of fly-by-night companies; they’ll do nothing to help protect your stuff from power surges. Legitimate surge protectors from reputable companies are much less common. Also, they don’t last forever. An older surge protector may still work as a power strip, but over time they may become much less effective as surge protectors.

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

The nostalgia is the point. Nobody stores crackers in barrels anymore, but everybody did then because it was the best option at the time. Same reason the save icon is a floppy disk.

I’d ask a couple thousand people to guess in private. So the most popular answer would probably be either surprisingly close to correct or Cuppy McHazelnutface.

Same era, 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. We would even trade the games around with the kids that didn’t have a computer and/or Internet at home. We’d connect them with funky little cables that looked like audio jacks.

I’m in awe of a stomach so delicate it can be turned by an animated stick figure physics diagram.

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

A fucking Members Only pizza.

There was a scene in Braveheart we had to skip when we watched it in middle school. I’m sure many convinced their families to rent Braveheart from Blockbuster for “homework” later. At this point, I don’t even remember what the scene was. Maybe there was a penis? Probably it was just butts or boobs. The corpses and violence were of little concern.

There was that one time we watched a particular version of Romeo and Juliet and the teacher was delightfully inept at skipping scenes. That girl was barely older than most of us.

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.