cobysev

It’s another name for fairy. They have all sorts of types and behaviors depending on the mythology they’re from. Some are tricksters who kidnap children from their homes and eat them or turn them into fairies, others are helpful forest or elemental sprites, some are demons, and some are changelings, taking the form of humans or animals whenever it suits them. As well as some other variations of fae depending on their origin.

One of the more common beliefs is that, if you give your name to a fae creature, they own your name and thus you, giving them complete control over your body. Which is why you never give out your name to a fae. They might march you off into the woods against your will and you’ll never be seen again.

Another common belief is that fae can’t touch iron, so it’s a good ward to keep them away. Hence Columbo never carrying a gun.

They’re magical creatures, so the fact that Columbo seems to always be where he’s needed or produce what he needs from his pockets seems almost like fairy magic.

I didn’t even know Netflix had a games department, and I have a Netflix account. I’m assuming this is just another effort on their part for further enshittification of that service. Perhaps it’s finally time I unsubscribed from Netflix.

Ugh… I’m in that first category. I have no idea who Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter are.

This doesn’t seem like it would work. Debris falling off the trains, dusty buildup, vibrations, rocks bouncing around the tracks; heck, even just wildlife crossing the tracks. So many things are gonna damage those panels if they’re just lying on the ground between tracks, and solar panels are extremely fragile.

I hope they have some sort of bullet proof glass or something over those panels. Probably going to need a special train to spray water over them to clean regularly, too.

I dunno about Swiss trains, but the tracks behind my house in America leave a thick black film on everything, and it’s very hard to clean by hand. I think they transport coal.

You could’ve saved a heckuva lot more money. I have two in my house as well, both were about $45 each and those were the luxury versions! My old ones were about $25.

They’re non-electric LUXE Bidet brand, activated solely by water pressure when you turn the dial on them. No fancy bells and whistles, but they have pretty decent water pressure and get the job done.

No.

I think it’s great for a ground-floor investment in a YouTube competitor. It draws more people to the platform, gets a chunk of money flowing up front to help boost the service, and they can always sunset the lifetime option if the site gets popular and revenue starts to get tight. As long as they continue to honor it for everyone who paid initially.

Like I said in my original comment, a Nebula subscription is only $6/mo. A lifetime access payment is over 4 years of subscriptions up front. That’s a nice chunk of change to help get them established.

I saw someone’s video about how Nebula works (I think Legal Eagle? He was advertising it hardcore on YouTube for a while) and the subscription service is how they pay content creators. He said it’s a more stable income than YouTube, where your videos earn advertising money based on trends and visibility. If you’re not YouTube famous (and the algorithm doesn’t make you visible), you’re not going to make any money on the platform. But Nebula gives you a more solid income, plus the freedom to make the content you want. No AI moderators flagging videos because it thought it detected the word “suicide” or something. No forcing you to include key words or pushing regular videos on a tight schedule to ensure the algorithm keeps recommending your channel.

Yeah, like I said, it needs more content creators to dump their libraries there. It could be a fantastic competitor to YouTube if only more people knew about it and used it.

Find me a self publishing video platform with the reach of YouTube that doesn’t require self hosting and I’ll happily move my content there.

Nebula is the next best thing to YouTube, but not enough content creators have moved their stuff there, so it’s easy to run out of interesting videos to watch after a while. Some of the bigger folks I follow share their content on both platforms, and the incentive to watch on Nebula instead of YouTube is that content creators have more freedom with their videos on Nebula. They can post bonus/extra footage that would be automatically flagged and blocked by YouTube normally. Don’t need to dance around the censors on Nebula.

Nebula is subscription-based, so they don’t show ads anywhere on their site. But if you don’t want to pay for another subscription service, you can also do a one-time payment to have lifetime access to their site. It’s $300, which is the cost of just over 4 years of their subscription service ($6/mo). Considering I’ve had an account for over 3 years now, it’s almost paid for itself.

I’m terrified of Gabe retiring or passing away. He’s been amazing for the company and I don’t trust anyone else to not want to use Valve for their own greedy purposes. The next president of Valve will likely ruin all the good things about it, thanks to late-stage capitalism.

I firmly believe in voting with your wallet; I normally don’t invest much long-term interest into businesses because you never know how they’ll change over time, but I’ve been so happy with Valve that I’ve gladly given them thousands of dollars over the decades for Steam games. My library is sitting at just over 3,500 games right now. I don’t know what I’m gonna do when Valve crumbles one day. I really hope they give me an option to download and play offline all the games I’ve bought, because that’s a massive library to lose.

I’ve never given a penny to Epic Games, and unless they get on-par with Steam’s functionality, I won’t ever buy or play any of their games. The one thing that might make Epic Games competitive (and could convince me to use their platform) is letting Steam users copy their libraries over, so we’re not just starting over from scratch with a new service.

That’s what got me on Steam in the first place. Back around 2010 or so, I discovered that if you had a physical PC game that was also in Steam’s store, you could type in the serial number on the game box and it would register and add it to your Steam library. That’s how I got my collection of early Call of Duty titles on Steam, as well as Half-Life and some others. I moved my physical game library over to Steam and I’ve been a Steam loyalist ever since.

Why does this percentage keep going up? Who keeps inflating the numbers? The first time I heard about this, it was like 64%. Then 77%. Now 81%?! Tomorrow, I’m gonna see a meme stating 97% of Mozilla’s income is from Google.

AskJeeves and Hotbot! Man, that takes me back. I also enjoyed Excite and Infoseek back in the pre-Google days.

Proton’s top tier service for individuals (Proton Unlimited) is only $7.99/month if you pay for 2 years of service. Gives you full access to all their services.

Proton just announced last month that they’re turning the company into a nonprofit organization, because security is more important to them than making money. That’s why their services are dirt-cheap; they want to ensure it’s affordable for everyone, and the only reason they collect money at all is to keep the servers online.

I’m currently de-Googling my life. Moving all my services over to Proton, testing other search engines, etc. Trying to slowly cut out/replace all services that Google provides me.

Oh, and I’m sticking with Firefox with Ublock Origin, to ensure Google can’t ever advertise to me, even incidentally.

When I was 13, I decided I wanted to learn piano because I heard Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and became obsessed with it. I already knew how to read sheet music from performing in choirs since the 3rd grade, so I just had to figure out where middle-C was on the piano and pluck out the rest of the keys from there. It only took me 2 weeks to completely decipher and memorize the Moonlight Sonata, without any instruction or lessons.

I was a natural at the piano, and I taught myself more complicated pieces over the next handful of years. My wife is super jealous of my skill because she had to take 4 years of piano lessons for her music college degree, and I, without any formal lessons, can play better than her.

Fast-forward a few decades. I haven’t been around pianos for so long, I’ve forgotten most everything I learned. I just bought a fancy electric piano at an estate sale (normally costs $5,000; family was willing to sell it for $240!) and I’m excited to play again, but I’ve been afraid to just sit down and figure out where my skill level is at now. Gonna be a lot of hard work just to get back into it. And I’m old now, so I’m hardly the impressive “teen piano genius” I used to be. Now I’m just an old guy who might remember how to pick at a few simple songs on the piano.

Getting old sucks. Especially if you don’t keep up your skills. You’re special if you have great skills as a kid. But if you’re old, people just assume you’ve had a lifetime of practice. And that’s if you kept up with it over the years.

Meh, don’t feel confined to the sidewalk. Be adventurous. There’s a path to the left there, where others have continued their walk.

I knew a guy when I served in the US military who got caught cheating in a semi-related way. He got assigned to a base in a new state and his wife refused to relocate their whole family for the few years he’d be assigned there, so he went by himself, leaving his wife and kids in his home state.

Turns out, he was sexting one of his younger subordinates at work. One of his daughters found out when she tried to use an old tablet and found out his account was still synced to it. She saw all his texts updating in real time.

He was ultra-conservative and didn’t believe in divorce, so he was doing everything he could to save his marriage. His wife forced him to install security cameras in every room of his apartment and banned him from going anywhere after work. She knew his schedule and expected him home immediately after work ended. He was basically on house arrest until his job was done and he could move home.

The last I heard, he told his wife the landlord needed to paint the walls, so he removed all the cameras, dunked them in the bathtub, then played dumb when none of them would work when he set them back up again. He was seen inviting young women over to his apartment after that. So, you know… he didn’t learn his lesson.

I remember when this meme was about the early '90s. I just turned 40 like a month ago. Now I just feel super old.

I guess MS envisioned it as a digital replacement for the physical suitcase of documents you’d bring to/from work.

The whole computer was originally visualized as a digital office replacement. That’s why you have the “desktop,” like an actual desk top surface to work on. Files had icons that looked like papers, folders looked like the tan file folders you’d store in a filing cabinet. Plus a slew of other office-related parallels.

The briefcase was just a continuation of that digital theme. Office workers would bring their work files home in a briefcase to work on later, then bring back to the office the next day. Microsoft tried to digitally replicate that by creating a briefcase folder that would automatically sync your files to a floppy disk, so you didn’t have to do it yourself. The Internet kinda ruined that concept, though. Now you can just email yourself files, text them to yourself on your phone, or store them in a cloud service to edit live on the site.

I actually prefer Lemmy because it’s less active. I browse Lemmy’s version of r/All and I have more than enough content to keep me entertained for hours. Plus, when I find a popular thread, I can actually contribute to it and my comments aren’t buried under 10K other comments within a few hours. I feel like I can actually communicate with the community here, instead of shouting into the void like on Reddit.

That analogy doesn’t make sense. Volkswagen is a brand; PC is not. Every personal computer is, and always has been, a PC. That’s why we differentiate between desktop PCs and laptop/tablet PCs in the industry. Macs are a type of PC. I know this; I worked IT in the federal govt for 20 years and there’s is no name brand just called “PC.”

What you’re confusing for “PC” is specific name brands of PCs, with specific hardware. When they added PC to software designation back in the day, they were letting you know it was specifically for a personal computer; not a VHS, not a record, not a game cartridge, not a cassette tape, etc. That was the designation, and then there would be more details about what specific hardware/software was required to use it. (e.g. Windows 95 with 512 MB RAM, at least a Pentium III processor, etc.)

When Apple started marketing their PCs, they built their own unique system that wasn’t compatible with other PCs, so they started pushing the Mac vs. PC campaign to separate their equipment from the rest, which eventually culminated in those Mac vs. PC ads many years later. Products started receiving a Mac label instead of PC, to show that they wouldn’t be compatible with the rest of the PCs on the market.

It helped that the rest of the PC industry started standardizing their equipment, to be compatible across all systems. Macs stood out from the rest, by refusing to be compatible with other PCs and forcing their users to stick exclusively with Apple products. It was a very anti-competitive practice, preventing users from sharing across systems, and one of many reasons the federal govt never went with Apple computers; we need to be able to share data with a variety of systems across the globe.

But Macs still fall under the umbrella of a personal computer. They are PCs. Even if they prefer no one calls them that.

On a side note, the EU just forced Apple to standardize their cables to USB-C, so they’re getting rid of their Lightning cables and finally joining the rest of the world in cable standardization. But they’ll fight tooth and nail to prevent any other changes. They’re still fighting against Right to Repair laws, as they want to force you to return to them directly for any maintenance.