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Rob T Firefly

@ rob_t_firefly @lemmy.world

Posts
14
Comments
790
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Why do you personally hate Christmas?

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  • While I don't hate Christmas, my household isn't Christian and we don't celebrate it. Of course we know people who do and we're happy that they're enjoying it, but the really tedious bit is all the mainstream Christmas marketing and pushes of it as the "norm."

    The fact that the big stores start with the Christmas stuff around September now really gets up our noses.

  • Any RPGs that take into account when you reload a save? Or that break the 4th wall like this?

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  • Psycho Mantis didn't corrupt your save file, but he would read your memory card and reference other games you'd played. Given the creepy vibes of the scene to begin with, this freaked out many an unsuspecting player.

    Closer to OP's question, there was a villain in Metal Gear Solid 3 named The End, a sniper who was a very old man. If you saved your game during the fight and then waited over a week (in real-world time) before loading the save again, when you returned to the fight you'd find he'd died of old age while waiting for you to do anything.

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  • There was a story going around some time ago of someone who got a tattoo in Hebrew writing and asked for the word "butterfly" (🦋) but it instead read "butter fly" (🧈 🪰).

  • What was a time when you drank the kool aid?

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  • the nopoo conspiracy,

    Wait, what the f...

    that shampoo manufacturers

    ...oh, thank goodness.

  • Liar

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  • And later he gets eaten by a monster, inside of which he finds his missing father calmly awaiting the sweet release of death.

    You know, for kids!

  • Liar

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  • Pinocchi0wned.

  • What is your choice for a dedicated Linux audio player?

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  • I listen to music a lot, and I also just use VLC. I have a well-sorted media collection and just drag whatever files/folders I want into VLC.

  • Mozilla’s new CEO is doubling down on an AI future for Firefox

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  • You either die Old Mozilla or you live to see yourself become Current Mozilla.

  • Does everyone have an opposite gender name they would use?

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  • I was named after my dad while my first sister born after me was named after my mom. (My parents would not have won any points for originality.)

    If I'd been assigned female at birth I would probably have been named after my mom instead, and given the name my sister ended up with rather than just the feminine version of my present name.

    As it stands I'm a cis man, but if I suddenly needed to change to a woman's name for some reason my name has a common feminine variant I'd use.

  • This long-term data storage will last 14 billion years

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  • At least give them to the nations which aren't currently trying to ignore and undo the last 100 years of medicine, physics, and biology. (Sorry, United States.)

  • LG Update Installs Unremovable Microsoft Copilot on Smart TVs, Ignites Backlash

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  • Thanks for your kind words! I'm happy to help.

  • LG Update Installs Unremovable Microsoft Copilot on Smart TVs, Ignites Backlash

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  • Hi! I'm just one guy on the radio, there may be others.

  • LG Update Installs Unremovable Microsoft Copilot on Smart TVs, Ignites Backlash

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  • The common "why doesn't someone just make a 'dumb' TV for people who don't want this crap?" question has an easy answer. Dumb TVs do exist, they're called "commercial monitors" or "commercial displays" and just show the audiovisual signal given to them by whatever else you hook up, in the manner of old TVs before additional apps or spyware were a thing. As implied by the name, stores and other businesses use them to show what they want without the added guff of the apps and ads they wouldn't be able to fully control.

    Important detail: commercial displays tend to be fuckoff expensive compared to smart TVs of comparable size, quality, and feature set.

    "Hey," you may be thinking, "how do they get away with charging so big a premium for an appliance with fewer features?" And you wouldn't be out of line to think that. However, what's going on is more insidious.

    The higher price of a "dumb" TV is more correctly thought of as the real price of the appliance. The reason you pay so much less for a comparable "smart" TV is because the companies behind all the apps and spyware, the preinstalled shovelware apps which get you interested to subscribe to their services (Netflix, Hulu, Prime, etc.) and/or send you advertisements, as well as the spyware companies who profit from all the data about you that gets phoned home as you use the thing, pay the hardware manufacturers to put their shit software onto the device at the factory. That money made by the manufacturer from the shit companies goes, at least partially, toward lowering the price of the TV to entice you to pick it up at the store instead of a competitor's TV.

    Look at that big chunk of money you save buying a smart TV over a comparable dumb display, and consider that the shit companies are paying the manufacturer that amount or more for the opportunity to monetize you and your household.

    Then, if you have the wherewithal to pay what is now easily considered a ridiculous amount more for an appliance that isn't part of a system meant to take permanent advantage of you, you can just buy the commercial display instead. Alternatively, you can find clever technological ways to buy the cheaper "smart" one but counteract the ways in which it monetizes you, whether technical ways like jailbreaking or installing alternative OSes (some very early-stage efforts to get this sort of thing going are out there, but still very scattershot compared to the scene for doing so to smartphones) or simpler methods like just never letting the thing onto the Internet no matter how much it begs or enshittifies your user experience (a strategy which will stop working once it becomes cheap enough for the shit companies to just include their own connectivity hardware in the device which uses its own wireless and doesn't need your network.)

    It's a continuing battle.

  • What are some funny WiFi network names you've run into?

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  • It was a Geico ad which took advantage of it being the era with all those competing collect-call services everyone knew about.

  • What are some funny WiFi network names you've run into?

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  • I knew someone who used Unicode glyphs to name their wifi the following string: ┓┏ 凵 =╱⊿┌┬┐

    It was a reference to a Doctor Who episode in which people were getting zapped by the monster of the week after connecting to a mysterious alien wifi network.

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  • They cost the same as a comma to go between "what" and "are."

  • Marco Rubio bans Calibri font at State Department for being too DEI

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  • Trust that these people would 100% be removing the curb cuts from every sidewalk if they thought they could get away with it.

  • What about second short rest?

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  • Tweezer technology is also very useful.

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    Can I find communication in places other than discord?

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  • There's still IRC. Discord has always just been IRC with additional media embeds and an outer layer of shiny Nerf controls for babies.

  • Give the man a minute, damn.

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  • Poor Peter was resurrected all alone on the other side of the Genesis Planet while shit went down, but nobody ever knew.

    "Guys? Uncle Montgomery? Anyone? ...Well, this sucks."