I never liked going out to eat or drink, but its gotten insane lately. Seems like everywhere is $15 or more for a simple cocktail, $10 or more for a Miller Lite. Insulting when the staff might only be making $2.13 per hour, and I need to tip and add tax so that gets close to $20 for a drink I could have ppuree myself at home for probably $1. Bars and restaurants have also started to use Kore and more tactics to make themselves less pleasant to hang out in, enoucoraging faster consumption and quicker turn times to try to get more customers. Louder music, less comfortabke chairs, etc.

I used to build a gaming PC for both myself and my wife roughly every 6 or 7 years. I never needed anything top-of-the-line: I am perfectly satisfied with 1080p 60fps and playing older games. I liked to maximize value. I built myself a PC in 2019 and my wife one in 2020, just as the pandemic was starting to hit. At this point I am starting to wonder whether those will be the last PC’s I will afford in my lifetime.

I expect Streaming Services will be a common answer here. I started messing around with Jellyfin a few years ago, and my wife and I had slowly been buying DVD’s and Blu-Rays, occasionally supplemented by the high seas. This year we finally canceled our HBO and Netflix subscriptions. We also decided to try to cancel Spotify, so I went ahead and ripped all our CD’s, gathered our pirated collection (organized separately to make it easier to potentially decide to buy that music later), and started buying more music from artists directly. I’m good enough to cancel today, but my wife has become accustomed to the near-infinite supply of variety that Spotify has so… Yeah

I was raised Catholic, went to Catholic school until my parents got divorced in 2nd grade.

I remember being very young, probably around 6, and realizing what fiction was. A lot of things which did not make sense to me I just waived off as me being young and was told I would understand when I was older suddenly were revealed as just… Lies. I think Santa Claus waa the start, but within a couple of days I realized that the Easter Bunny and tooth fairy were lies too. The “government” is not some all-knowing benevolent entity that makes sure everyone is nice to each other. The claims companies make in TV commercials are lies. And there is no God.

The world suddenly got a lot scarier, but still felt more… Right. More real.

Aa I grew older and got more exposure to other religions, I realized that religion emerges from 2 aspects of human nature. First, we want to understand the world around us. We want to know where the ground beneath us came from, where we came from, why we exist, etc. Second, there are always people looking for opportunities, who are willing to lie (or otherwise hurt others) to get power and resources for themselves.

There are some good lessons to be learned from religion. Jesus overturning the tables of the moneylenders for example. This could be my own personal bias, but when I read the Tao Te Ching it seems to me like Lao Tzu was an autistic person who used “The Tao” as a way to solve the double-empathy problem.

But also a lot of religion is just old fiction. From the days before the internet and copyright laws. Imagine a Star Wars or Harry Potter fanfiction website, then imagine that those people can only communicate physically and in a world where most of them cannot read or write, and these communities persist for hundreds or thousands of years.

I really like going down the rabbit holes at the intersection of archeology and theology. There are plenty of books that did not make it into the Bible, and even the books that did make it in have different versions and translations across history and sects. A lot of what we think of as modern Christianity comes from Dante’s Inferno rather than the Bible.

So all this means that the messages tend to be inconsistent. Even when the actual text remains the same, the way those texts are interpreted and used in practice can vary significantly. So it’s really more about you interpreting and applying things for yourself than the actual texts, and this is something you can do just as well with any other piece of art.

Everything is 95% shit

This right here is a piece of wisdom that I think a lot of people would benefit from. It applies to almost everything.

“Genre” as a concept is incredibly limited. It’s used by marketers to help sell things. Convince people media is more similar to stuff they like than it actually is. Its also used by academics and content creators because their very existence is depending on inventing rigid categories and definitions where none truly exist. Genre can be useful when its descriptive, but I think it can be harmful when prescriptive.

I read an interview a long time ago… I think it was with Jerry Cantrell of Alice in Chains, but I could be wrong. The interviewer set up the context that a lot of people take the position that grunge killedor replaced metal, but some AIC fans argue that AIC is a metal band. He said something along the lines of “we use a lot of metal-isms in our music, but when we are writing we aren’t really thinking about whether something is metal or not”.

I really embraced it when I started making music myself, and with band members. There have been occasions where I purposefully say to myself “I want to write a power metal song” or “I want to write a simple singer-songwriter folk song”, but those tend to sound almost like parodies. They’re popular with people who only listen to music casually. The more interesting artistic exploration happens without those assumptions and expectations. The most interesting pieces of media tend to defy genre boundaries.

Even “anime”… What counts? Stuff like Castlevania and Arcane get called anime, but they weren’t made in Japan. A lot of animation is outsourced to Korea or other countries now… Does that still count? A lot of Adventure Time was animated by a Korean studio… Is that anime? Is any japanese-made stop-motion or claymation anime? What about projects that blend animation with live Action?

Ah so these “communities” are just based on what an individual gets sorted into aor out of according to u/Grail

“Men” as a “political community” is entirely a fabrication. Reality does not conform to the social constructs you are trying to impose upon it. This may come as a shock to you, but most men do not actually know each other.

In the last US presidential election, 45% of women voted for Trump even after all of the misogynist shit he’s done, and 45% of men literally voted for a woman to be president (not including non-voters of course). A slight statistical trend, but certainly not enough to be able to predict who an individual woukd vote for based on gender alone.

Gender is a spectrum (or more correctly, a collection of a lot of traits, most of which are their own individual spectrums). That is not something I can selectively believe is true whenever I want to support my trans/nonbinary/gender fluid friends ans just conveniently ignore whenever it makes me feel good.

Racists absolutely love to cite statistics about violent crime in predominantly black communities. Do we say “good black people need to do a better job of holding the bad ones accountable?” Absolutely not, because that’s prejudiced ans ridiculous.

If one trans woman sexually assaults a cis woman in a public restroom and JK Rowling starts howling about it… What do we do? Do we demonize all trans women, or even all trans people entirely? Do we start doing genital checks in toilets? Do we start to become afraid of trans people as a “political community”? What if it were more than one case? How many cases does it take for it to become a problem? The answer is: the question itself is fundamentally transphobic and invalid.

I think most progressives get it: its unreasonable to generalize individuals by their identies and pre-judge based on things they cannot control. However, there always seem to be some people who have a problem with that and want to hate others as a sort of “revenge”. Right now it’s in fashion to hate on men. In the past it’s been white people, which I find particularly funny because “whiteness” itself is an incredibly recent concept and many “white” people in the US today would not have even been considered “white” 100 years ago. I’ve heard the occasional hate against straight and cis people.

Age is another one I see. People love to hate on Boomers, but most of the evil people destroying the world aren’t Boomers. Trump, Biden, Obama, both Clintons, Bernie, McConnell, Peloso, Graham… All Silent Generation. JD Vance is a millennial. Elon Musk is Gen X (though it’s even less relevant outside the US). Plenty of boomers are cool as fuck and have spent their lives fighting oppression to make the world a better place, while plenty of people from every “generation” have been shitty. The simple fact is that such generalizations are meaningless.

Spider-man is a vigilante who constantly fucks up and makes the system worse. He is also, and I cannot stress this enough, a work of fiction. Relying on the individual wills of physically and politically powerful men, even well-intentioned ones, is how we get to authoritarianism and fascism. The answer is not in individuals, but in systems.

In reality, the closst thing we have to Spiderman IRL is the NYPD, and we’ve already seen how ACAB.

The men with the most physical and political power are the ones abusing that power. The problem is the concentration of power, not men.

What happens when the “bad” men have more physical and political power than the “good” ones do in a system that allows those individuals to exercise that power unilaterally?

What counts as “solved”? What are the goalposts, and who gets to judge those?

My parents said that they would let me drink under their supervision once I turned 16. I didn’t take them up on the offer because i wasn’t interested. Any time my Mom lit a cigarette I would start talking about how bad it was for her. So they never felt a need to talk to me about other drugs. Eventually when I waa 20 I let a girl talk me into drinking with her at her place when her parents were out of town, and she’s my wife now.

For sex, my parents were like “you talked about that stuff in school right? You know to use protection?” And I was like, “yeah I’m good”.

I was a responsible youth, the one in the friend group always thinking about the consequences and long-term effects of actions. My parents knew they didn’t have to worry about me.

I also use them in my Schecter Hellraiser with no problem.

However, that is because I use NiMH batteries. They are regular old chemical cells- all of the circuitry and switching is done in the charger, which is a separate device. If you use USB-rechargeable ones it it quite possible something might cause noise. However, you might be able to add a smoothing capacitor to eliminate that if you really wanted.

Either one should be fine for pedals too, because every well-made pedal SHOULD have smoothing capacitors on the power supply to get rid of issues like that. Of course, that increases the cost by maybe $0.50 so some manufacturers cut that part.

The thing is, old incomplete games like that usually sold terribly. They are now either forgotten or worse: remembered for being terrible. Stuff like Superman64.

There used to be more pressure on developers to make good games first. Testing and QA departments have shrunk, or st the very least failed to scale with the increased scope of modern games. They instead rely on consumers to report the bugs.

So at the same time they keep raising prices, they are also pushing more of the work onto the consumers.

They make rechargeable 9vs.

Since it costs me virtually nothing, I change my smoke detector batteries every 6 months. That way I can do it at my own convenience, at like 2pm on a Sunday afternoon, instead of 3AM on a Wednesday morning when one starts to chirp.

I find this is often a conflict between what i want and what other people tell me I should want. And by “other people”, that is usually advertising companies.

There are billions of dollars being spent to convince me to go to bars and buy alcohol. Billions being spent to convince me to go out to eat at restaurants or order something delivered through an app. Billions being spent to tell me my body isn’t good enough, so I shoukd get hair treatment kr skin products or exercise equipment. Billions being spent to try to convince me to buy a bunch of cheap plastic shit, and a bigger house or even a separate storage unit to put it all in. Billions being spent to convince me to go to concerts and stand-up shows and raves and movies and festivals and conventions where I can spend more money. Billions being spent trying tk get me to sign up for a monthly subscription for everything. There’s billions being spent by various religions to try to convince me to join. For women, there’s actually money being spent by misogynists to convince them to promote the “tradwife” lifestyle.

A lot of the best things in life don’t have marketing budgets. There’s no one advertising the relief you feel when you have a solid emergency fund, gow great it feels when an appliance breaks and you can just replace it withoit having to stress over it. There’s no one advertising how good it is just to go for a walk, or to spend a summer evening sitting on my back porch, watching the bats catching fireflies in the woods. There’s no one advertising how good it feels to re-read your favorite book fkr the 20th time, or to watch your favorite TV show on DVD for the 10th time. There’s no one advertising having a couplr of close friends over for an evening to just… Talk. There’s no one advertising the evenings where my wife and I just put on one of our favorite albums and lay in bed listening to it. There was advertising involved to get us to BUY that album, and even that bed, but no advertising to get us to actually ENJOY those things. You need to do it yourself.

It is also not a binary system. Plenty of people go out to raves or burns once or twice a year, going on benders, then go back to quiet and simple lifestyles the rest of the time.

I ended up using duckdns for a free domain. It sucks that I had to tie it to a google account, and maybe one day this might be an area where I buy a proper domain instead.

I have a glinet Flint3 router that makes it easy to spin up Wireguard servers on it. It was a bit more finnicky, but eventually I was able to get into the advanced settings and configure the router to sync the dynamic IP with DuckDNS too.

So I have Wireguard on my phone and my wife’s phone. We have one pair of close friends who have a connection on their router too (and vice-versa) and their own Jellyfin server.

I would love to take my money elsewhere, but… Where? Everywhere else is just as bad or worse. Half the VPN’s are owner by one Israeli billionaire. I’m running out of options here.

I think that one of reasons gridiron football got so popular in the first place is because of its unique pacing.

A play starts, a few specific actions take place over the course of like, 5-15 seconds usually, then play stops while they set up. This might sound terrible to some people, but this means that there’s space in-between plays for people to talk. Could be talking about what just happened, or trying to predict what will happen next, or about how this fits within the greater context of the game or season. Or it could be talking about the beer or the nachos or whatever else. It makes the games more of a social event.

With the rise of television, this means advertising space and color commentary. Advertising = money, which fuels the entire industry.

This is also why baseball is “America’s favorite past time”. Golf is up there too, and I would even argue that oval track racing in NASCAR kind of follows this trend, because most of the interesting action tends to take place around pit stops (or at least it did when I used to watch it). Its not 100%- basketball and hockey are still popular.

Yellow by Baroness.

Well, technically its a double album: Yellow & Green. And I would say Green is a close second.

Something about it just blew my mind. Like, I had heard Baroness before, stuff from Red and Blue. They had a song or two on the early Guitar Hero games. I just thought “oh another okay metal band, whatever”. Yellow and Green were just… Different. The tone, the vocal style. The whole approach to writing ans playing guitars was different than what i was used to. Thr production has this kind of modern dirtiness, like the noise came from radiation or something. The lyrics are absolutely battling, as they were translated across multiple languages and the meaning was only clinging to them by a thread. The album art is incredible too. The bass is perfect, never too much or too little. The drums use disco and other dance beats along side this metal-ish music in a fantastic way.

It kind of felt it cane fron another dimension. A different timeline where English and western music evolved similarly to ours, but jjsy different enough to be uncanny.

Maybe its just me, but nowadays every public apace is incredibly noisey.

Every bar and restaurant is blaring music. Vehicular traffic, air conditions, all sorts of other machines are pumping noise in too.

I just went out with some people this weekend and found myself wishing we had, noise-canceling headsets to be able to talk to each other. Kinda makes me want to not go out any more.

Kape (and thus all of the VPNs they have purchased) is owned by Ted Saggi, an Israeli billionaire.

And yes, they are legally headquartered in London, but how meaningful is that? There’s hundreds of US companies that are headquartered into a handful of buildings in Delaware for legal and tax reasons. Their “development center” is based in Tel Aviv.

https://cyberinsider.com/kape-technologies-owns-expressvpn-cyberghost-pia-zenmate-vpn-review-sites/

For me its a spectrum, making my own judgment for each piece of media.

Copyright laws in the US have changed a lot over the last century, largely due to regulatory capture. The older versions of copyright law are mostly around 14-28 years after creation and those seem fair to me. So I don’t feel bad about anything >30 years old.

Another factor is the sliding spectrum between art as an altruistic creative experience versus art as a capitalist product created by gigantic corporations. Heavily monetized art tends to be stuff I enjoy less anyways so this kind of filters itself out. Its all formulaic and trend-chasing, largely the made by the same small group of people and rebranded with different faces. If I do ever want big-budget, mainstream content I don’t feel bad about not paying for it.

Sometimes its about convenience. There are a handful of creators still on YouTube that I like, and one of these days I want to get around to setting up yt-dlp and adding their channels to my Jellyfin to get around all the terrible ads of the platform, but I’ll probably buy some merch or throw them some money on Patreon or whatever to try to compensate for it. I also prefer to buy CD’s and merch from bands at their live shows where a higher % of the proceeds goes to the artist.