ThePowerOfGeek

Both I and my book feel personally attacked by this cartoon.

I’m middle aged.

Yeah that was my assumption because he looks middle-aged to me. Found out after I wrote that he’s like 35? How the fuck can you look that haggard when you’re a 30-something content creator raking in the money from your parents’ basement!

It’s the natural progression for a 20-something piece-of-shit gamer edgelord. When he hits middle age he pivots into being a miserable racist piece-of-shit bore.

I don’t have any empirical evidence for you on this topic, but in my opinion yes, I think some people are - especially with oral language adaptation. And I think I’m one of them too.

I’ve tried learning French on and off for most of my life. Did it in school for several years, got a French tutor who helped me scrape by with a C in it, spent a few years with it on Duo Lingo (I know I know, that so is far from perfect), spent time watching French news. And after all that I’d say my French language skills aren’t even closer to a conversational level. I especially struggle with the oral side of the language, even though multiple teachers have told me I have a good jack for pronunciation.

I haven’t lived there, so maybe that would push my over the edge? But I don’t know. I think I’m in the same boat as you.

The language your are learning also factors in. I’ve also tried learning Spanish and have found that easier. Meanwhile, I tried learning Mandarin and was completely lost. And English is often described as being ready to learn at as basic level but difficult to master. It’s such a relatively unstructured language with so many weird exceptions.

But with all that said, don’t give up! It might just take longer for the oral part to lock in. And your written English is excellent.

Photoshop as in the general concept of editing photos? Sure. There are a lot of decent tools out there, including for mobile devices.

Photoshop as in use the proprietary Photoshop UI? Probably not.

Awesome, thanks for the tips!

I started down the Jellyfin path after they made that announcement. It’s super easy to install, and in many ways the UI is nicer than Plex. But I ran into challenges getting my server safely accessible for users outside my LAN. And I haven’t had the time to look into that further.

Would be great if there was a clean, easy way to set up the webserver portion so it’s as easy to share content entirely as Plex. But I get they are a volunteer project with a lot on their plate.

It started happening a few years ago in my area. Maybe like right before the pandemic?

For a while some of the stations had a hidden option where you could hit one of the unmarked selection buttons and it would at least mute the ads. But starting around the end of last year they took that option away.

The only stations I know of that don’t show ads are Costco (and I assume Sam’s Club too, but idk). Plus they have slight discounts on gas because they are member only. But my local Costco station is such a headache to get through these days - even at around 9pm after the main store closes - that I not just go to a local Shell or Valero and resentfully try to ignore the fucking ads that always play.

That’s objectively poor survey design. For questions like that there should always be an ‘Other’ option. There should also be a ‘None’ or ‘N/A’ option.

Disqualifying in a social sense? Unfortunately, yes I think it would be. It doesn’t matter how awesome your husband is, for a significant chunk of the American electorate, a candidate’s calibre is eclipsed by the voters’ prejudices. And there is a hysteria-level paranoia towards LGBT folks among these people.

It took ages for a Catholic to be elected President due to evangelical paranoia about ‘papists’. And we still haven’t elected a woman, which is insane when you consider women make up half of the electorate. We did have a black guy elected twice, but that was due to a few mitigating factors: a) the timing was right (in the sense that he ran when diversity was seen as more acceptable); b) he was ridiculously charismatic; c) he was also half white; d) he was a Protestant Christian (despite what the ‘secret Muslim’ clowns kept screaming).

IMO it sucks that someone’s orientation, ethnicity, gender, religion, or heritage still bars so many good candidates from running (because this isn’t just a case of the visible candidates like Harris, Buttigieg, or even the likes of Carson, Hilary Clinton, or Palin getting denied at the final hurdle; many candidates never make it close to running due to these biases). But this is the ass-backwards, self-immolating world we live in.

Well, given the subpart quality of most complex AI-generated code right now, it could easily mean that too. You just have an AI system generate some spaghetti code and then just vibe with it and ignore the cavalcade of errors and issues that code causes.

“Scruffy’s on break!”

I’m not sure, but probably. I know there was a guy who was in a maximum security prison and often put in solitary confinement for long stretches who said in an interview that he learned to go into a meditative state and project himself into fully immersive scenes of his own creation. And he could do that for hours on end and at will.

It’s basically the evolution (or devolution?) of the Internet in a capitalist global economy. This is just the next step in the effort to profit off digital Data and communications.

Back in the early 2000s pretty much everything was free to use, and revenue came from passive ads. Then ad blindness and ad blockers kicked in, revenue went down, and the cat and mouse game began of companies trying to find ways of getting clicks and views while the consumer didn’t want to do that. This has escalated over the last 20-odd years.

We’re now at a point where paywalls are fairly effective (for now). So that’s what’s being pushed. Plus, subscriptions and everything-as-a-service is in vogue right now.

I expect that will end when the money-making enshitification of the Internet reaches a critical mass and the economy nosedives for various reasons.

Given the context, no I don’t think you are being aloof. They both knew what they were doing, and no amount of toadying up to you can make up for that.

Additionally, there’s are some pretty nice free plugins for Java Minecraft server (e.g. Deluge) that allow Bedrock users to play on it too - from a PC, Xbox, PlayStation, phone, or whatever.

Oh no, that’s giving me Game of Thrones / ASOIAF / George RR Martin / King Bran vibes!

I hadn’t. I’ve also withheld to much and got a warning letter from the IRS. It’s at a point now where things have been optional for the last few years. But with the new tax changes Trump is bringing in, I expect I’ll go from getting a small refund to owing a bit next year.

Yeah, it’s a shit show over here. You kinda guess at how much you will need to pay in taxes, hold back that amount in your paycheck, and hope for the best. And if your life situation changes or the incoming government fucks around with the tax codes, your estimating will be off. Getting it down to a very small refund is the optional solution, but it’s not always as easy as you’d think.