cobysev

?:)

I’m more of a lurker, but this is an interesting way to see where I tend to contribute more.

That’s the route I took. I recently bought a 48" 4K monitor, hooked a mini PC up to it, and now I stream my movie and TV show collection through Plex. I still have Internet access on my “TV,” but I’m in control of what pops up (I block all ads on my home network). I just use a small wireless keyboard and mouse instead of a remote.

I haven’t actually owned a TV since about 2008. I have better media options through computers, and the technology just keeps getting better. Cable and public access television are a pain because you’re constantly bombarded with ads. With my own computer, I can circumvent ads and get a solid viewing experience.

My friend made an interesting observation:

NEVER click decline all. There are loopholes built in that still grant access to “legitimate interest” cookies, which are recognized differently from “consent cookies.” If you click reject all, it still allows collection of certain personal info through cookies labeled legitimate interest. Which is entirely up to advertisers to categorize.

As annoying as it is, always open up options and manually uncheck cookies.

come on we all go to reddit when we need to find some information because its almost always guaranteed to be there

Most of us dumped Reddit when third party apps went away. I personally haven’t been back to Reddit since creating a Lemmy account. Screw that place; they don’t deserve my patronage anymore. Or anyone’s, for that matter. Continuing to use their content is justifying their shitty business practices. It’ll never get better if people keep enabling it.

Also, what specific info are you searching for that Reddit can provide? Their search function has always been garbage. Or are you referring to general content and/or subs that don’t have an active userbase here yet?

I have a buddy who would rage quit when he dies in games, then rant about how there’s no advantage for skilled players and, “this game is all luck!”

He was exceptionally good at strategy games. Back in the days of Warcraft II, he would spend days writing down exact second-by-second instructions for building the perfect base to dominate the map. (“Dedicate 4 seconds to starting this building, the next 9 seconds are needed to harvest this resource, then 13 seconds to start recruiting 4 infantry,” etc.).

By the time I had made maybe 3 buildings and a few peons harvesting resources, he was already invading my base with a massive army. He probably could’ve gone pro, if esports leagues were a thing in our youth.

But he was a terrible loser. If his strategy didn’t go to plan, he would throw a fit about the game cheating and being all about luck instead of skill.

It’s the other way around; you connect to seeders.

In the example of 2 (3), there are 3 total seeders and you’re connected to 2 of them.

Although in your screenshot, you’re at 100%, so you’re not connected to any seeders at the moment and are, yourself, a seeder. You have peers (leechers) connecting to you. Same principle applies; in an example of 2 (7), there are 7 peers in total, and 2 of them are actively leeching off you.

When I was a kid, it was one and done. I grabbed a clean towel from the bathroom closet every day. Even though I was clean coming out of the shower, I also knew that showering loosens dead skin cells, which I was rubbing all over the towel. Over time, those skin cells would decompose, giving off a musty smell. I learned that from my dad, who almost never changed his towel. Ick. It made me extra paranoid about reusing them, so I swapped towels daily.

When I became an adult and had to do my own laundry, I realized just how miserable it was trying to wash 7 towels every week. (Why did my mother let me use so many towels as a kid?!) So I started reusing them. I used a towel for a week before throwing it in the laundry.

Now, I’m recently retired in my late 30s and shower every 2-3 days (or anytime I leave the house). Since I’m not showering as frequently, I will reuse a towel for about 2-3 weeks before replacing it. If I go to dry off after a shower and the towel smells a bit musty, I’ll toss it on the floor and grab a fresh towel instead. I think I’m on week 4 with my current towel, but it still smells clean, so I’m not too worried about getting a few more showers out of it.

I’ve been using Nebula. It’s a subscription-based alternative with no advertising, but I get it for free because I’m subscribed to Curiosity Stream (which is basically Netflix, but for documentaries).

The only downside to Nebula is that there aren’t a lot of content creators on it, so you don’t have the variety of videos that YouTube offers.

I was raised on skim milk. My mother was always on a diet, so we had a lot of diet-type foods in the house.

Skim milk is practically just water with a little bit of milk flavoring. It was my refreshing go-to drink on hot summer days. I drank almost nothing but skim milk all through my childhood. It was my favorite drink.

The first time I had 2% milk, I thought it was melted ice cream. It was so thick and creamy! I had no clue that it was “normal” milk.

Also, I learned in adulthood that milk makes your bones brittle. That whole “milk does a body good” thing was just advertising, not scientific fact. It doesn’t strengthen bones, it just makes them more likely to break. Makes sense; I survived off the stuff for years of my childhood and I’ve broken 9 bones in my life.

At first glance, I thought that was a fish head on a hardboiled egg. Once I saw the Nutella jar, I realized what it was. It’s significantly less gross to me now.

For me personally, video games are interactive stories. I love movies and TV shows, and being able to have some level of control over the action is an amazing experience for me!

I’m also not competitive and don’t care so much about scores, rankings, or online multiplayer vs. games. Just give me an intriguing plot and let me be the protagonist in it. I’ll play that game for hours on end.

I don’t like games that are essentially movies with a few interactive scenes between clips, though. It has to be really interesting if I’m going to sit through a game like that. I’m here to play, not to watch. The only series that’s been interesting enough for me to deal with hundreds of cutscenes dispersed every few minutes throughout is the Metal Gear Solid series.

I realize I don’t speak for the whole gaming community, but this is my personal view.

I’ve heard communities on Lemmy, magazines on kbin, and a lot of expats from Reddit like to call them subs.

A fellow Kurzgesagt enthusiast, I see.

The hair is styled differently.

I retired last summer. This is basically how my week goes. Trying to fill the void with some hobbies or entertainment.

Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG) is one of the most popular shows in the franchise (and definitely meme’d to death online). With a stellar cast, interesting development of characters, and fascinating action and psychological stories, it helped build a modern setting for the franchise to grow into.

Also, it’s one of the only series that received a modern sequel series (Star Trek: Picard). Sure, there are occasional crossover episodes between series, but TNG was so popular, they got most of the old cast back to reprise their roles decades later. So if you’re invested in the characters of TNG, you get to see what adventures they’re up to years after leaving Starfleet.

ALSO also… TOS and TNG are the only two series to get full-length feature films made alongside their respective TV shows. (Even the modern reboot films are set in the TOS timeline, following the characters from that show.) So if you’d like to see TV show characters on the big screen, TNG will give you those big budget productions along with your show.

The first TNG film (Star Trek: Generations) actually has Captain Picard running into Captain Kirk from TOS, who got stuck in some sort of time anomaly in space. It was awesome that they found a way to do a crossover between the two series, considering they take place almost 100 years apart from each other in the Star Trek timeline.

I spent 20 years in the US military. I had to quickly learn “military time” in order to function, as we were taught 12-hr time growing up in school. I was surprised when I traveled the world and discovered that everyone else uses “military time” (read: international time) as well. I guess Americans just really wanna do their own thing.

I exclusively use military time nowadays. If someone doesn’t understand the time I stated, I’ll correct it to 12-hr time on the spot, as converting is super easy. Just count back 2 hours and drop the 10’s digit by one; e.g. 1600 = 4 PM. 2200 = 10 PM. Etc.

I was serving in the last couple years of my military career when the pandemic started. The military took it very seriously, because we still have a mission that needs to be accomplished. Anyone dropping out for a severe illness would compromise our capabilities.

So we went on full lockdown. No one was allowed to leave military bases unless you lived off-base, in which you were only authorized to go straight home and then back to work. It was highly recommended you order delivery services for groceries and stock up so you wouldn’t need to leave home. Going to the grocery store was the only exception to the lockdown, but it was considered an extreme risk and should be avoided if possible.

Our work shifts (in my unit, anyway) were split in half. Half the crew came in for the morning shift, then thoroughly disinfected the office, locked up, and went home. Then 30 minutes later, the second shift would come in and do the afternoon shift. The 30-minute break ensured no physical contact between shifts. The split-shift allowed a shift to take over full work days in case someone on the other shift got sick. Their whole shift would stay home for 2 weeks to ensure the contagious period passed before sending them back into the office to resume split shifts.

We would’ve moved to work-from-home (WFH), but unfortunately, I happened to be working in an Intelligence unit at the time and 90% of their job was on classified computer systems, which we couldn’t access from outside the office. I was an IT guy, fixing the Intel guys’ computers, so I did WFH for a few months, managing their unclassified computer accounts from a laptop. But eventually, I was needed in the office for their other systems.

We were also required to wear masks outside of our homes at all times. Anyone caught without a mask anywhere - even sitting in our car on the drive to or from work - could be punished for violating a direct order from our base commander. We used to make fun of conservatives who bitched about how uncomfortable the masks were and how they couldn’t breathe while wearing them. We had to wear them all day without breaks, from the moment we left home until the moment we got home. I empathize with emergency room workers; it was brutal, but it wasn’t impossible to do, and we got used to it eventually. After a while, I started to feel naked without my mask on.

In the last 2 years I served, we had a few people drop out with COVID-19 (their civilian families brought it home from their work/school), but the majority of us stayed COVID-free.

When I retired last summer, I moved in with my elderly hermit dad who lives out in the countryside. He avoided leaving his house for the whole pandemic, and even now rarely goes into town. He, my wife, and I are still COVID-free to this day.

My sister and her family caught it 3 times! But my sister married into an ultra-conservative religious family who thought the pandemic was a hoax and continued to hold religious parties and barbeques for the neighborhood all throughout the pandemic (They were anti-vaxxers too; something my sister fought with her husband about long before the pandemic occurred). There were a few scares when she came to care for our father and then got diagnosed with COVID-19 a day or two later. But somehow, my dad never tested positive for COVID antibodies. And despite my sister’s husband losing his sense of taste and smell (which is still not fully recovered to this day), her whole family has thankfully survived their run-in with COVID.