For consumer boxes, it’s basically Shield (Google), Apple TV, Roku, Fire (de-Googled Android), or some bargain bin shitbox.

The best streaming box on the market is arguably the Apple TV because it’s a bunch of icons, no ads. You say it spies on you, I’ve seen or heard no proof of this. The only “proof” is that it’s closed source and you don’t know what it’s doing. But not knowing what it does does not necessarily mean you get to assume the worst and tout it as fact. It just looks like you have an agenda — or a stake in the competition. The best set-top box on the market for gaming (if we specify that) becomes the Shield, due to more options on Android, though the Apple TV can run RetroArch now, so it’s closer.

The best option is probably to get an old corporate junker, put Linux on it, find some 10’/3m interface, and get a wireless keyboard/trackpad deal like the K400, then you can do what you want with it. But, most people aren’t gonna go that far. Maybe more people should. Curious now what you’re running with. I’ll tell you mine — 2nd gen (2021) Apple TV 4K. Good for everything but YouTube. I mostly use it for Plex (streaming from my Mac). I could use Infuse (Apple-only streaming thing like Plex) but I don’t care for it.

I’ve heard anthropomorphic dragons referred to as “scalies” (as opposed to “furries”). So, they’re not, but it’s the same thing, just a different kind of creature.

I would say that for any furry who dresses up/has a fursona, the choice of the specific animal is a personal one, and, despite the name, it isn’t limited to foxes, dogs, cats, wolves, and the like (e.g. furry species). Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had my generation and the next couple wanting to be turtles for years. “Heroes in a half-shell!” And while Skyrim popularised the term “Dragonborn,” the name existed prior in D&D as an actual race of anthropomorphic dragon men (and women) with breath weapons and all. Just not wings. Sometimes tails.

So… the scalies always were. As for whether or not they belong in the furry fandom… tis not for me to say. I’m just a fan, though I do have a cosplay that is furry-adjacent (Tom Nook from Animal Crossing).

Maybe the 25th Amendment was written with tyrants in mind, but they should have written laws governing their checks and balances better. Allowing one party to take all three branches of government is a mistake. There should be three parties (at least), with no collusion (I know, what colour dragon would I like), and each one should get a branch. Voters want one party to take another branch, they have to give up the one they already have. It would work out better if there were four or more parties, one or more is just not in majority control of any one branch. Two party is already kind of a bust, but when one has control of all three, the 25th isn’t going to be invoked by anyone with the power to do anything about it. And that’s by design.

So you’re okay with Google scraping your data, but not Apple. Open with that next time, you save everyone the time of reading through your subterfuge.

You don’t care about privacy, you’re just tribal.

Tom Petty and Whitney Houston. Two of my favourite singers of the 1980s and 1990s.

Chester Bennington didn’t hit me at all — at first. Linkin Park had been growing out of favour with me, especially with regards to some of the things the band (and I think Chester) were saying about fans who preferred Hybrid Theory or Meteora to the newer stuff. Then I heard what Chester went through in his youth and how the music was therapy for him. It gave context to what he/the others said, and then it hit me. I hate that he felt he wasn’t enough to overcome his demons, but I hope that his music makes the next person stronger. Truly a loss for humanity and the arts. Good on Linkin Park for forging ahead, though I didn’t care for the new record. (Nothing against the singer, I just didn’t like the album.)

It’s worth noting that my favourite band was hand-picked by Chester to tour with them, but then he died and that didn’t happen. The band is ONE OK ROCK, originally from Japan (based out of Los Angeles for the last 10 years, though, and most of their songs are in English, or at least their music since the move). They did fine without Linkin Park, but I would have loved to see the two of them together (with Chester). Mike Shinoda either did a few live shows with ONE OK ROCK, or Takahiro Moriuchi did a few live shows with Linkin Park (or maybe just Mike Shinoda), shortly after Chester died. It’s just some live stuff though, and poorly recorded. Taka would have made a better singer for Linkin Park as he could do most of Chester’s style, but I wouldn’t have liked the move as it would have ended my favourite band. So I’m glad we still have both, and maybe Linkin Park’s next album will be better — I will certainly be here for it.

The actual ad (not sure why BBC wouldn’t post it; PC Magazine wouldn’t, either): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyQ8ktDrQbc

Some context to this: For one, it’s a US job. BBC is a British news organisation. So this is an offer to Americans. Second, you’d be a federal worker, which means your boss would be Donald J. Trump — or, at least, your boss’s boss’s boss, high up enough the chain. Two-point-five, when there’s a shutdown, you don’t get paid shit. That said, when the budget passes, you’re given back pay, and it’s worth noting that the FAA gave all air traffic controllers a $10K bonus if they missed no days during the big shutdown last year. So yeah, you could make good money, but you have to save some of it to pay bills when the job stops paying for a while. You get paid everything back, but you could go a couple months without a paycheck, depending on what the politicians want to do. Third, you have to either live near an airport, or be willing to commute to one. Most people live near a regional airport, but that regional airport might not need ATCs; you might have to move to a big city, which means a higher cost of living.

They don’t say, but I’ve heard they either have, or want, an age cap, so if you’re an old-school gamer, you might be too old to apply.

I clicked on new to see what it had and saw the new album by a popular American rapper. I hit the download button, and inside of 30 seconds, it gave me a handful of FLAC files in a ZIP folder. Fed them to fre:ac, the metadata is good; however, it had the ARTIST tag copied to the ALBUMARTIST tag, which made the output a little messy (I have it output to ALBUMARTIST(YEAR) ALBUM), but I was able to expand all the folders, dump the m4a files I made into mp3tag, and straighten them up. Album cover was embedded and 1280x1280. No ads in the comments or even the filename of the zip file.

Bookmarked.

Oh, I also searched for an obscure(ish) Japanese band I like. It had most of their stuff. Not all, and not my favourite song by them, but it had a lot of stuff.

FYI to others, if you see the [HD] tag on something, I’m thinking that means they have it in FLAC, as opposed to MP3 or AAC/M4A. Though unless you have really good ears and/or an expensive hi-fi system, I doubt most of you can tell my m4a output from the flac input. If you can, I hope you have enough hard drives to support your collection. I don’t need FLAC, but I’ll use it to get the best possible sound at roughly a quarter to half the filesize (I use aac low complexity at the highest bitrate fre:ac supports).

I use DuckDuckGo. And I have a good example: I asked it what the birthdays of the KPop Demon Hunters girls are. (I have an “anime birthdays” calendar on my computer. It’s cool to see who has a birthday, even if it doesn’t really mean much. And I wanted to add the HUNTR/X girls (and maybe Jinu). Duck.ai happily told me that while the girls’ birthdays are not widely known, it still generated a table. It listed a fan site and Wikipedia as its sources. Neither had birthdays listed for the girls.

I then found a fandom site (I know, they suck, they’re like the crotch of wikis, or at least the armpit). They listed two of the girls’ birthdays, and their source was an Instagram post by the official social media team. So as far as fictional characters’ birthdays go, that’s good enough for me. I added Rumi and Mira to my calendar. They have nothing for Zoey (ostensibly, her birthday hasn’t come around since the movie came out, which means it’s coming up soon) or Jinu (same, or they don’t care about his).

Zeroth rule, optional: Use an AI that is private and won’t use your query to train itself (these are going to be not as good because of the hindrance).

First rule: Use an AI that cites its sources.

Second rule: Check its sources. If for whatever reason you must use an AI that does not list sources, you can either ask it its sources, or you can fact check them manually (as I ended up doing).

Honestly it’s the same as Wikipedia, check the source. AI can be fooled. Wikipedia can be vandalised.

FYI: At many of these stations (they make the same offer all over), you can just ignore the car wash price. First of all, the cost of the car wash is going to make the bill higher regardless. You won’t save enough on most vehicles to offset the price of the wash. At best, you have a gas guzzling van you filled up, and broke even… on getting your van wet. Those automated car wash garages aren’t actually washing shit. They’ll get some stuff off, but they won’t get most of it. And for most drivers, you’ll actually spend more money that way.

Another scam stations run is a “cash price.” It’s fine if you bring the cash, but if you don’t, they have an ATM that will charge you $5 to get the cash out, so you’re not actually saving money and for some drivers, you’re paying more and wasting your time. But if you know about how much gas you need and can do the math, or you just carry that much cash on the regular, it’s not so much of a scam.

But here’s the thing: on sites like GasBuddy, they’re going to list the cash price or the car wash price, not the actual price. They don’t have to stipulate that you have to spend money and/or time to get those prices. Your best bet is to simply not patronise stations that engage in deceptive pricing, even if it means spending a bit more per gallon down the street.

My point is, even if I was in the top 1%, it’s not like I’m working at NASA or anything. I’m just a regular guy. So I don’t think the test was worth shit. If it was even an IQ test, official or otherwise.

You… do know why Android exists, right?

Oh, nice. If that was said before I’m at (just finished the poet’s tale), I missed it, but that totally tracks.

I hear bad things about some of the later books, but I have the first four (or is that all there is?) and I’m planning on reading at least the first one.

…Tell us you don’t mind re-traumatising survivors because you have a weird fetish without… or maybe people are more complicated than one opinion? Either way, I stand by compassion, and if that makes me a cunt, so be it. I’d rather be hated by people who like to hurt others than revered by the same. You’re telling us as much about yourself as you say I’m telling you about me.

When Dan Simmons passed, I heard a lot of good things about Hyperion. I didn’t hear much about it before he passed, but what I heard after made me pick up the audiobook and listen.

I suspect my brother is smarter than I am.

I tested very highly. I can’t remember what the number was. Triple digits at least. It impressed people. I was placed in advanced classes and did very well in school, but I also got bullied and didn’t get girls.

My brother tested very low. People told him he was smarter than that. He said, “prove it.” He attended normal classes, had more friends, and had plenty of girlfriends.

Neither of us attended university. We both work for a living and do alright.

I think he threw his test. So who’s smarter?

Also to be clear: I don’t put much stock in the test itself. We were tested in elementary school. It’s been almost 40 years, so I don’t remember much. Not all students were tested. We were tested at my elementary school, but I don’t remember if it was the office or a classroom or even the library or cafeteria. We were also tested at different ages — I’m 3 years older. So I can’t even say it was a real IQ test. Some kind of aptitude or placement test though. But after, they all said I was some kind of genius. But I never felt like they proved I was any smarter than anyone, just singled out to excel, and for what?

They should do this everywhere, but the speed should be a bit higher. Like if you’re on a cheap unlimited plan and you get deprioritized, it shouldn’t go lower than 5Mbit. The whales paying for priority can still get 50+Mbit or whatever, but they shouldn’t be given 100+ or 200+ so everyone else gets unusable speeds. Adjust the numbers to make it make more sense.

I mean, yeah, but nobody really uses Debian (or Arch) until they know what they’re doing. Distro hoppers start with Ubuntu because it’s popular, then hop to Mint because it looks more like Windows (no disrespect intended toward Mint or KDE), then they go back to Windows until Microslop pisses them off again, then they try Fedora… that was basically my journey through Linux as well.

Having been a Mac user for 3 years, I feel like I’d do better with Linux. If I ever get an old PC — one of my nerd fantasies is to “rescue” an 8th gen/later i5 workstation with 16GB RAM (maybe even 8) with the hard drive taken out (corporate secrets and whatnot), and I put a SATA SSD in there and put Linux on it. It’s not that expensive to do all that, but I don’t really have the room. I can also stick it in a corner somewhere and run it headless. I know that macOS is “certified UNIX” and I know enough to know that this is a mostly disingenuous statement, though I’m not well versed on the details. I do know you can do a lot more with macOS with the command line though, because macOS is built upon OS X, which was built upon NeXTStep, which was built upon UNIX. So the guts are still kinda there and you can do a lot with it. I actually prefer to use brew to install stuff, it’s a lot faster than going through the GUI. The site just gives me the name, I ⌘+Space, start typing Terminal (all I need is TER), hit Enter, “brew install” then whatever, and it installs the dependencies I don’t have, updates the ones I do, then installs the package and it just works. But anyway, all that aside, I’d just remote into it and run it as a server. Next step would be a NAS to take my Plex server to the next level. It runs fine on my Mac, but I think it would be better running on its own system.

I’m not that much older than you. Funny how the generation lines are drawn. And we’re both over 40, so it doesn’t matter anyway. Once you’re over the hill, it’s a moot point which decade you were born in… for a while.

I have a Piefed, I thought it would be so much different from Lemmy, but it’s just an older (looking/feeling) interface to the same communities. But I’m on RetroFed which tries to focus on retro computing/gaming. I rarely use it because it’s not that different an experience and I generally don’t like being two people on the same network/federation, it just feels disingenuous. If they don’t delete it for inactivity, I can use it if anything happens to this account.

Who was afraid of toilet paper, though? Or do you mean “fires”?

This guy was never anonymous, but we’re all calling him Waluigi (Warehouse Luigi). It would have cost Kimberly-Clark less to pay their people a livable wage than they lost in the fire, which they will almost certainly write off.

The OP (Opening) is supposed to represent the best of the show, but sometimes it shows things not in the show or straight up misrepresents the show. The best example of this is Bradio’s Flyers from Death Parade, a macabre semi-anthology series about people competing in billiards games in a bar in Purgatory to determine which of them takes the elevator up and which one goes down. Or something like that. The show is very dark, but the OP is bright and cheerful.

I think anime’s bigger sin is the use of CGI. It’s very obvious in many cases. I don’t hate it, I just think it’s slightly more offensive than OPs that misrepresent the show (therefore, I don’t care about AI in them if they’re pretty). I’ll skip an OP I don’t like. Like in The Promised Neverland any time they run down hallways. It’s so obvious and distracting. Lots of animes do it, though.

The greatest sin in anime is the texture of clothing. This is most obvious in the Count of Monte Cristo anime due to the art style. Basically if a character is wearing a robe or some other clothing that has patterns on it, the patterns do not move with the person. The pattern is fixed, almost like there’s a layer of nothing but the pattern across the entire frame, and the outfit is just “transparent.” In fact, I think that is exactly how they do it. Almost how a lot of PlayStation games (Final Fantasy 7 and Resident Evil were notable for this), where you have a pre-rendered scene and the characters move across it within invisible walls which are supposed to, but do not always line up with what is drawn behind them.