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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 25th, 2023

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  • Any breakfast at home is almost always better than breakfast out, if you’ve got the time and ingredients. I can, with the right ingredients and tools and while half asleep, hungover, or still drunk, make a full breakfast for a family of four better than 90% of the breakfasts I’ve ever had out. Sure it took some practice, but breakfast isn’t rocket science or usually particularly complex recipe wise.

    The only thing I haven’t been able to do better at home breakfast wise so far is making my own fresh bagels or donuts. I don’t like making poached eggs either, and hollandaise sauce is a pain in the ass, but I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve gotten an eggs Benedict out at a restaurant that didn’t make me immediately regret my choice. Same with biscuits and gravy (why do restaurants think that gravy comes out of a box and should be bright white?) , bacon (just bacon flavored bacon please), eggs (sunny side up does not mean I want the whites to be clear and runny too), etc. All things I really like, but can’t tolerate having someone else fuck up and charge me for it.


  • I’ve only ever watched the show in passing, as in literally just passing through the room. And it is painfully obvious in an instant that her character is the ONLY one that is pleasant, eloquent, intelligent, and kind in any appreciable degree. That’s what’s fucking sexy about her character.

    Moreover, those other waifs don’t even know what sex is, but that girl FUCKS with nerdy literary passion and will let you cry like a baby into that cleavage afterwards.





  • Teach us then 😭

    I think this hits on another big generational difference. Those who grew up in the early days of personal computing and the Internet didn’t have teachers or a hallucinating language model to spoon feed them instant answers. They had to actually RTFM thoroughly before they could even think of asking in some arcane BBS, forum, or IRC for help from elders that had absolutely zero tolerance for incompetence or ignorance. MAN pages and help files came bundled, but the Internet (if you had it) was metered and inconvenient on a scale more like going to the library than ordering a pizza. They had to figure out how to ask the right questions. They had to figure out how to find their own answers. The Internet was so slow that all the really interesting bits were often just text. So much indexed and categorized one might need to learn a little more just to find the right details in that sea of text. There was a lot less instant gratification and no one expected to be able to solve their problems just by asking for help.

    I’ve seen way too many kids give up at the first pebble in their path because they are so accustomed to the instant gratification that has pervaded our culture since the dawn of smart phones.









  • I’m not a nice person. I’m not a kind person. I’m not even a good person. I try to be all of those things and sometimes it feels like a struggle. I don’t think I’m evil or a total asshole or a sociopath or something. I just think it a metric we have to constantly check-in on and adjust. I don’t really trust people that think of themselves as nice, kind, or good. I don’t think I really agree with those people about what it really means to be nice, kind, or good. For example, I do believe the song got it right, sometimes you do need to be cruel to be kind in the right measure.




  • Yeah, good food isn’t trivial to find when you travel. I’m empathetic to that frustration. But judging all bread based on the cheapest abundant and easy to find bread a foreigner can find without any apparent effort seems like a mistake to me. I certainly wouldn’t judge all Italian food by what I found in my hotel in Venice. I wouldn’t judge NY bagels by what I found during my layover at La Guardia. And I wouldn’t judge an entire countries bread based on what I found in the grocery store.


    1. Good bread is expensive or made yourself.

    2. It seems pretty common for travelers to lament the lack of good bread like at home. Bread basically a living organism that is ultra local. Good bread like at home really only exists at home. Local water, temperature, humidity, and other environmental factors seem to play a big part.

    Ask anyone from New York or New Jersey about getting a good pizza or bagel in another state. It doesn’t matter who makes it or if they’re using the exact same recipe, perfect bread can evidently not be replicated outside the region. There is even a bagel company in south Florida, catering to snowbirds turned transplants, that claims to use water from that region to make their bagels.


  • Downloading from YouTube or Spotify is still piracy. And those sources offer mostly shit quality far removed from the artist’s intent.

    Believe it of not, there are things that aren’t on Spotify, YouTube, TIDAL, Apple Music, Bandcamp, or any streaming service. Sometimes when a streaming service does have a song or album, it’s either not the best quality or only a radio censored version available, even if Spotify claims it’s the explicit version. And that explicit tag feels like a slander because the original intent should be default and the radio edits should be the one’s with the CENSORED tag.

    There is great music out there you can’t purchase or stream a digital release of.

    There are old and often played CDs in my collection that can’t be ripped properly (by me) for one reason or another.

    There are some really high quality vinyl recordings out there, done by people with better hardware and more skill than I. Again, many of these vinyl releases are not available in any other format and are no longer available for purchase anywhere.

    The real primary reason I got into it, in the long ago times of Napster, was that I liked to make mixtapes/discs. When radio was no longer playing songs I wanted on those tapes, the wilds of Internet was the answer.

    I still regularly support the artists I like as directly as I can: buying albums and merch directly from them at shows or their own websites. And I spend more of that money on more artists and especially less popular artists specifically because of the habits listed above.


  • In my experience, 2 devices will ultimately save you effort and frustration. Anything you choose as a good NAS/seedbox will be unlikely to have a good from the couch interface or handle Netflix reliable and easily. A small Android TV box may have a much better interface, simple app setup, and support all the streaming services, but probably won’t be very powerful or convenient to use as a NAS. The NAS is always on, plugged directly into the Internet access point, and tucked away out of sight and sound. The Android TV or Apple TV box is silent, small, and can be mounted directly to the Beamer/Projector.

    Yes, Kodi exists and it’s add-ons can bridge this gap. But I still think that a SBC NAS running Jellyfin or plex + an Nvidia shield with jellyfin, Plex, Netflix, Spotify, YouTube, amaon, etc. will be so much easier to setup, manage, find support for, and upgrade.

    I have a similar setup even though my server has a direct HDMI link to my TV. I’m not a fan of viewing using the server it from the couch. Setting up IR remotes sucks always. And it’s confusing for anyone but me to use. But if my Nvidia Shield dies or I’m having network trouble, VLC a pretty good backup.