Just sounds American to me, based on what I’ve seen on TV, but I couldn’t tell you what region or state or any of that. Doesn’t sound European to me.

You’ve fallen for the fallacy that everyone who doesn’t agree with you 100% is 100% wrong. Ergo, you can never be right, and no one wants you on their side because you’re trying to chase away their allies.

Cool thing is, it’s pretty easy to notice here.

Worth trying. Stick with it for a couple rounds…

If you don’t care about GTA VI, next time regular games go up in price, be sure to thank someone who preordered GTA VI for voting for gaming price increases.

No disc makes sense since the game is $100 and would be more expensive if they had to give you 3 Blu-rays with each purchase (what it would take to house the 212 or 216GB of data, at minimum).

No disc isn’t the problem, it’s the price tag. Digital was supposed to make games cheaper since they wouldn’t have to ship them or pay truckers or retailers.

Honestly, I stopped paying for Spotify because Apple Music gave me 6 months for free (it was a Black Friday promo). I figured, worst case scenario, I port my account (AM imported all my Spotify stuff), I get 6 months free, I cancel, I start paying Spotify again. I save $60. Not bad. Well, Apple Music had the Japanese music I was downloading off YouTube and painfully sideloading into Spotify. So I liked that. Plus, if I have an album that’s not on Apple Music, I just drop the album on Music (the app on my Mac) and it just adds it… just for me, though. Same conditions as the Spotify feature, just much easier to do. (Apparently it’s pretty easy on Windows, too.)

Then Spotify went and jacked up their prices and gave millions to Joe Rogan, who was working as Trump’s mouthpiece. That and Apple Music supporting Japanese rock made me stick with Apple Music. To be fair, Spotify has since caught up with Apple Music for Japanese music. I think Spotify is still a little better for music discovery, but Apple ain’t bad. I think both of them push more rap and pop, probably because it’s cheaper for them to stream to you. If you like rock music, Spotify pushes back against you less than Apple Music does, but Apple will also eventually open up and start recommending rock… alongside pop and rap you don’t care about (or at least I generally don’t and still see it). Now Apple Music does the Super Bowl halftime show, so they pushed Bad Bunny last year, and Jay-Z this year. I don’t mind them but I shouldn’t be recommended their stuff… except that it makes Apple more money.

Also, I was paying Spotify for a family plan, and Apple now. My wife never used Spotify, only used Pandora — on her Android phone. Once I switched to Apple Music, she started using that (because it’s on Android). That means something to me. Like if we go to something else (like Qobuz is a popular alternative now), maybe she won’t use it as much. I don’t know why, as a loyal Android user, she likes the Apple Music app so much more than the Spotify app, but she does and that’s what we pay for.

Not a Mac

I love using Macs, but I cannot get my desktop to not sleep, and when it sleeps, it disconnects its external hard drive (which is not bus powered, it has a dedicated power supply). The bus-powered SSD (Samsung T7) is fine though. I don’t know if it’s an Apple thing or an ARM64 thing, but I’m looking for a low-end 8th-gen Intel box that’s limited to Win10 to put headless Linux on it, and terminal in from my Mac for server/homelab stuff. Macs are good for Unix type stuff since that’s what they’re based on (since OS X) but they don’t seem too good as servers.

Could be PEBCAK but I dunno.

They’re encoding digital files to DNA, which uses four digits rather than binary’s 2. Binary uses 1s and 0s while DNA uses A, C, G, and T. (You can remember them by the movie Gattaca being made up of the letters. The movie itself was not memorable, but I remember its name for that reason.) So essentially you have four digits, which means you can hold 2 or 4 times the data — I forget which.

“So why don’t we store everything in hex (base 16, 1-F)?” I dunno. I’m not a scientist. But I suppose, the more states data can be in (two for binary, 4 for DNA, 16 for hex), the less reliable the medium is.

Also, every song being 10MB isn’t too far off the mark. If you use MP3 or M4A 320, you’re getting about that. Apple Music uses M4A 256, so they’re squeezing under the 10MB average. I use M4A 320, so I’m just over. But I’m an individual; I don’t want every song ever recorded. What I want is far less, so of course the format will be enough for my collection (which is around 150GB, and fits on a 256GB microSD card).

(MP3 and M4A are not interchangeable. M4A is the newer format, and stores roughly twice as much signal data per bit, so while MP3 320 is still the gold standard with some, M4A 320 holds a lot more sound data in an ever-so-slightly larger file. So why don’t more people jump to M4A? Well, Winamp doesn’t support it out of the box (it does with a plugin). Also, some associate M4A with Apple, and, while Apple does use M4A, it’s an open format anybody can use. Also, habit. People have been using MP3 for decades and see no reason to change. When M4A came out and people were told they could get MP3 128 quality in M4A 64, they didn’t believe it, even though the science was there. And MP3 128 was the gold standard then. MP3 320 is as far as the format will go, and M4A 320 is about twice as good. And so yes, Apple Music’s M4A 256 is about four times as good as MP3 128.)

(Of course, if this argument of MP3 vs M4A bores you because you have the storage, FLAC and ALAC are there for you. Free Lossless Audio Codec, and Apple Lossless Audio Codec. FLAC uses the .flac extension, and ALAC uses .m4a (as well as M4A). I think ALAC is an open file as well, but I wouldn’t trust it when FLAC is right there. There’s no “better quality” in lossless because nothing is lost from the source. However, there is also APE (or Monkey’s Audio) which produces smaller file sizes than FLAC/ALAC while also being lossless.)

It’s not cheap enough. Also doesn’t have enough headphone jacks. Though, I think more phones should use Thunderbolt — and more phone users should understand that Thunderbolt is not an Apple protocol, but an Intel one, Apple’s just the one most known for using it, since they slap it on everything, because it’s awesome.

Give me a phone with Thunderbolt 5 and I won’t complain about the headphone jack or an SD card slot, because then you’re going to see phone docks with USB, Ethernet, SD/microSD, HDMI/DisplayPort, internal M.2 SSD, etc, most of which won’t be necessary, but imagine if your phone could just be your computer and plug into a dock. We have the technology but no one puts it on phones. Samsung is close with Dex, but it’s not very good and it isn’t automatic (and their ports lack the bandwidth). With as much as phones are going up, it should be a given that they could double as computers.

Blue replaced tan. When I was a kid, you had red, yellow, tan (some said orange), green, and brown. In the 1990s, they retired the tan one and replaced it with the blue one. I’m not 100% sure it was done at the exact same time, or if there was a gap between the two changes.

What I recall hearing about it at the time was that the blue dye was previously considered unsafe to consume, but they found a way to make it safe. They were set up for only so many colours, so they dropped the tan one as they already had a brown one.

As to the picture posted below, green M&Ms were always a sexual reference. Giving someone a green M&M, or a handful of only green M&Ms, meant you liked them. That’s (probably) why they made the green M&M a sultry female.

Music.

Sound travels along a wave, and a waveform kind of looks like a key. A key works by aligning tumblers in a specific way. This sounds like a shitty analogy, but, bear with me a bit. Or, as the young ones say, “let me cook”.

Your mental health is like a lock, and each of the tumblers are a problem. You go looking for a solution to each of the problems, but each ideal solution will only fit one tumbler. It won’t open the lock.

Finding a song that turns the lock should be one of your goals with music. The world throws a lot of popular music your way, and some popular music can work. I think that’s why it’s popular, it appeals to the most people. I grew up with rock and metal, but right now, Taylor Swift’s latest album is one of my favourites. I never thought I’d say that, but I just love that album, especially the first half. *Opalite *in particular really makes me wanna move, but I’m not a dancer. Starting with popular music is fine, but you should dig deeper. Full disclosure, I run a music comm on the instance I’m on, and I’ve posted over 100 songs that all meant something to me.

There’s a music community here on lemmy.world, too, but I’m not involved with it. Like me, they post songs of the day. I’m not sure why they pick what they pick. I kinda focus on mine, but I do try to listen to new music as it comes across my feed. Not all the time, but some of the time. In the last year alone, I started listening to Norwegian singer Aurora, and I just discovered the (coincidentally similarly sounding named) Spanish singer Au/Ra. The former is like faerie pop; the latter, quite the opposite. Not quite “demon pop” but she definitely has a darkness around her that I dig.

Right now my favourite song is a Japanese idol (pop with multiple singers in harmony and/or duet) song called Hyacinth by 22/7. If you’ve seen Kpop Demon Hunters, you have a basic idea of what 22/7 actually is. They’re a cartoon band that was made for an anime series. The series never got translated to English, and it wasn’t picked up for a second season. However, the girls stayed together, continued to make music, and now they make music for other anime series, as well as just release music just because. So like, if HUNTR/X were a real band that released music outside of the film. The song is absolutely insane with all the overlapping vocals, and they went and mastered it in Dolby Atmos, so it sounds incredible on AirPods Pro (or, really, I’d imagine, anything else that can do spatial audio). As someone who doesn’t know more than 50-60 words in Japanese (which does sound like a lot, but I’m not conversational, nowhere near fluent, and I can’t read kanji), the song feels more like a tech demo for spatial audio and what can be done with it, but I’m all about the engineering of the sound

But going back to the lock. It’s not real. Or maybe it is, but music as a key isn’t real. Music won’t actually solve your problems, unless your biggest problem is how to expand your music library. That would be an interesting problem to have. It just makes you feel better for a while. Which is sometimes all we really need to focus on what’s important.

Working in customer service. Everyone should work either at retail, and/or in a restaurant as wait staff. Male or female. You will get treated like crap. The idea is that you won’t later do the same to other retail/service workers.

At the very least, you should, if you ever intend to frequent such establishments, anyway.

Maybe I should switch back to Google, at least for video game/anime searches, because it’s costing both Google and Fandom money. (Fandom runs fan wikis which are loaded with ads.)

Deus Ex.

Took me a minute to realise what “dog whistle” meant and it made me think about how on Ted Lasso, Roy just yells “whistle” as opposed to blowing one.

“Family values” can mean anything from hating gays, hating women who aren’t rushing to squeeze out kids, basically anything that goes against the productive/nuclear family, to them — to the rest of us it’s just that people should have a choice.

I don’t see a lot of Americans talking up their Second Amendment anymore? I guess because they all sat back and let fascists take over, they can’t really say their guns are defending them against tyranny. Funny how that played out.

None of them miss the ads? Weird.

As for the NSFW, I don’t blame most instance admins for banning it. There IS an NSFW instance, and .world allows softcore stuff. On the actual NSFW instance, there are a few users who post fauxbait exclusively. That is to say, adult women who try to make themselves look like teenagers/prepubescent children. No ink, no piercings, waxed genitals, and completely or nearly flat-chested. Sure, there are legitimate adult women who fit some of those, but do they also wear their hair in pigtails, clutch stuffies or a blankie, or other childlike behaviour? Generally no. I saw an interview with a very interesting young lady who looks 10 or 11 but is in her 20s, and she fights every day to be recognised as a valid adult. I think there are a few people who have illegal content on their drives and they are very careful about what they actually post, and maybe some illegal stuff does get through… IMO, they make the entire NSFW scene look bad, and they are the reason for the ‘censorship’.

If you’re writing a novel, I would actually avoid the stereotypical names, unless you want people to think the work is low-brow. Dare to defy expectations. People expect a Cletus. Give them something more normal but not too uptight… like Nolan or Patrick, maybe… and let the character define himself rather than the name.

See username. I could probably name a better bird for what I want, but hawk is literally right there. Not actually what it means in my username, but hey, if the shoe fits…

…as to why, it’s basically just flight.

Because both Microsoft Office and iWork have become so dependent upon AI and subscriptions and LibreOffice just comes out and says “hey we don’t use AI and by the way, want a free office suite that’s just like the big ones before they enshittified?”. Of course people checked it out.

Hopefully others take note.

I didn’t watch Robocop when it was new, but we rented Robocop 2. My mother made me leave during the disembowling scene, and I had this inflated idea of how bad it was. It really wasn’t. What they did to Murphy in the beginning of the first one was far worse.

Then there’s the third one where a little girl with a laptop hacks a robot between its legs where it can’t get her and Robocop himself flies. Yeah, that shit was dumb.

There was a SA scene that really got to me and I forgot what it was. Found it years later so I could never watch that film again. Showgirls. I remember it being much worse, but it was still pretty bad. Also not the worst SA scene I’ve seen. All I’m gonna say is, “Jena Malone’s first movie.” IMDb will be very helpful in advising you which film to never watch (assuming you could ever find it, and unedited, at that — I mean Lifetime airs it from time to time but they gotta cut all the bad shit out). Easily the most disturbing film I’ve ever seen, just because that kind of shit happens. Oh, and if you look up the author, she just threw North (or South) Carolina under the bus because South = Incest Country. She’s from fucking California. So yeah, that shit does happen everywhere, and for the most part, nothing’s done about it. Huge TW on that whole thing. Yeah, staying up late watching Showtime was not a good thing.

A bit later, but the American The Ring (remake of Ringu). Was it better? Eh… It had its moments. The creature design on the teen girl being scared to death was too good, though. That shit haunted me for a while. So I set it as my wallpaper on my laptop to desensitise myself. People routinely asked me what the fuck my problem was when they saw it. Still creepy AF. If you haven’t seen it… they made her look "scared to death and simutaneously having had instantly having been soaked in filthy water for a week. So her face was pale, water-logged, green-ish, and her jaw was unnaturally stretched open. And her eyes were blackened. Almost like what the Scream mask was, but applied to a real face. (And yes I know Scream came first. It might have inspired that makeup design. Also, that makeup/costume designer should have won some award. Say what you will about the rest of the movie, save for Daveigh Chase, who was awesome, but don’t knock the makeup job.)