Yes, but only because we had a spare TV and nowhere else to place it.

For years, my wife was adamantly against using the bedroom for anything except for sleep. She used to make a big deal about how a TV would just keep us in bed all day, watching shows and movies instead of getting up and being productive.

The thing is, we spent most of our free time just sitting on the couch, watching TV shows and movies. And when my wife went to bed, she’d pull out her phone and spend hours watching online videos or playing games before she would sleep. So it’s not like a bedroom TV would be much different.

When we ended up with an extra TV and no space to put it in any other rooms, I placed it on the dresser near the foot of our bed. When my wife balked, I reminded her how we already spend hours in bed staring at screens; we might as well make progress on our backlog of TV shows instead of wasting our evenings with idle games or random videos.

Besides, our bed is one of those adjustable beds where you can raise the head and/or foot of the bed to whatever height you want. So we can literally prop ourselves up in bed and relax from a comfortable viewing angle while watching shows.

Despite all this, we rarely use that TV. We much prefer the larger one in our living room. But every now and then, when my wife is having a bad day and refusing to get out of bed, I’ll grab a bunch of snacks and drinks, join her in bed, and turn on that TV.

You only get better through failure. Drawing and art is a skill that you develop over time like training a muscle.

I’ve been given this advice my whole life and I’ve always hated it because it’s never worked for me.

I used to love drawing as a kid. I was always sketching things. I got a lot of praise for my artwork and was told that I was highly skilled for my age.

The problem was, I mostly just copied other works of art. I wasn’t very good at drawing something unique. And even with decades of practice, my skill never improved. I never figured out how to draw unique styles, shading, or details. Despite my “skill,” I eventually gave up drawing altogether.

As an older man looking back, I realize now that I was focused on technical details I could actually see and I could never recreate them from a mental image. I never had an artist’s mind. I was just really good at copying exact details from other art. I could’ve even draw based on a photo, because I didn’t know what details to include and what to exclude; there was too much information in a photograph and my brain couldn’t parse it all.

To this day, I can mimic other works of art very well, but I can’t create unique works, and no amount of practice will fix that. I’m just not artistically inclined. I can’t visualize a scene well enough to create it from scratch.

I could’ve used this community a month ago. For years, I swore I had a fever dream in my childhood about playing a side-scrolling shoot-em-up game with dinosaurs as anthropomorphic protagonists.

A friend of mine reminded me that Dinosaurs for Hire was a thing, released on the SEGA Genesis in 1993.

Take YouTube Shorts for instance. I’ve made it clear I hate these things, but they keep popping up on my homepage every other week.

🤔 What’s the deal with this endless pushing of features we hate? Are they just ignoring user feedback entirely, or is there some secret strategy I’m not seeing?

TikTok is insanely popular among the younger generations, so YouTube, also being a video hosting site, wanted to jump on that bandwagon and leech some of the revenue from that style of video. So they came up with YouTube Shorts, to mimic the popular short-form upright video style.

The problem is, YouTube is NOT TikTok. Most of their user base doesn’t go to YouTube for short-form videos. So getting their audience to engage with YouTube Shorts requires them to shove it in our faces until we just get used to it.

That’s the strategy; beat us with it until we give in. They know we’re not going to go away. People aren’t organized enough to properly protest against features in a way that will scare a company into fixing it. So they’re going to keep harassing us until we’re so used to seeing it, we just don’t care anymore. Or until their content attracts the TikTok generation and successfully feeds a whole new category of revenue for the company. That’s the enshittification process for you; as long as it’s profitable, it’s going to stay.

I forget how I did it, but I blocked YouTube Shorts from showing up in my feed. I use Firefox with uBlock Origin and that removes all ads on YouTube. I even blocked the YouTube app on my phone and redirected all YouTube links to Firefox.

I used to have another extension that blocked YouTube Shorts, but I don’t see it in my extensions anymore. But they still don’t show, so maybe uBlock Origin is doing it for me?

I also don’t allow YouTube to keep a history of my activity. Which makes my homepage just a blank screen. I’d been fighting them for years, trying to remove all suggested videos from my homepage, and now it’s so simple: I just don’t save my activity and they don’t recommend anything to me.

I have subscriptions that I follow and that’s it; I don’t let them suggest videos for me to watch. I don’t need to feed their algorithms or help them build a better profile on me. I’m very anti-advertisement already, and I do my best to not let companies influence my economic behavior.

They couldn’t get Leslie Nielsen to reprise his role (since he passed away 15 years ago), so they called the next closest name in the Hollywood phone book: Liam Neeson.

My technique is to not be interested in the person. Not like ignoring them or being mean or anything. But… when I like someone, I get all shy and awkward around them and I tend to screw up any attempt at socializing.

If I’m not romantically interested in them, I can be myself, which I’ve been told is naturally very funny and flirtatious.

Every person I’ve ever dated was a friend long before I started a relationship with them, because I took the time to know them and eventually developed mutual feelings for them. By the time I was asked out, I already had deep respect for them and felt comfortable being myself around them, so dating was just the next step in our relationship.

And yes, I’ve always been the one asked out. I asked out a girl once, and instead of just saying no, she made a public spectacle about how creepy I was and how she would never date me. I was extremely shy back then and my failed attempts to approach her apparently came off as me creeping on her, so by the time I actually worked up the courage to talk to her, she gave me a traumatizingly public “hell no.” I never asked anyone else out again after that. I’ve dated close to a dozen people in my life and every single one of them asked me out.

Movies have actually been a huge influence on America’s view on sexuality, if not the largest influence.

There’s one organization, CARA (the Classification and Rating Administration) who provides ratings for movies and TV shows in the US, and they’ve heavily censored nudity in film for decades, giving films shockingly high ratings if even a breast is flashed on screen for a moment.

This has caused studios to limit nude scenes, or to be extremely creative about sex scenes, to avoid higher ratings. Because the higher the rating, the smaller the audience will be, and they want to appeal to a larger audience.

If you watch American films from the 70s and earlier, seeing casual nudity in a film was a pretty normal thing, whereas you have to buy a porno just to see any nudity today.

This had a nasty backfire effect, where our culture now associates nudity with sex. We don’t appreciate the natural human body unless it’s under the context of sexual desire or procreation.

The crazy thing is, nobody really knows who the members of CARA are. Their identity is kept secret. The heads of their organization are known; you can check them out on their official website (https://www.filmratings.com/About), but the organization as a whole keeps their members’ names secret. So we have no idea who these people are who are censoring nudity in American films.

This depends on a lot of factors. If you’re part of a targeted demographic due to race, gender, religion, etc., then it might be safer to flee before you draw attention to yourself.

If you’re not a targeted demographic, then it might be best to stick around and stand up for your fellow citizens. But this could also lump you in with the targeted demographic and might eventually lead to your own persecution, so it’s a risky choice.

Either way, I still advocate for standing up to any oppression or persecution going on in your home country. No one should ever lose their home to dictators and/or fascists.

This is actually how a lot of states get divided politically. People see a place as a “red state” or a “blue state” and decide to either avoid them or move away if their political ideology doesn’t line up. But that just further entrenches the area into a political leaning. By sticking around and advocating for human rights and better community and respect, you can help prevent the splitting of communities and stop divisive concepts like fascism from forming.

Akira is a total trip as well.

There’s been a live action Akira film in development hell for over 20 years now. I’ve been patiently waiting since my teen years to see it and I’m in my early 40s now. I guess directors are so scared of not being able to live up to the masterpiece that is the original anime film, so nobody sticks with the project long.

Personally, I’d love to see it recreated as a miniseries. If you’ve read the manga, the film barely touches on the plot. There are gang wars, political factions, economic and social collapse, insurrections and riots, even global wars! None of that is covered in the film; they just focus on Tetsuo and Kaneda.

Heck, even its namesake, Akira, isn’t around! He was a central figure of the manga, but he’s only around for some brief flashbacks in the film.

A miniseries would give it time to world-build and cover everything in the original manga series.

IMPORTANT NOTE FOR CURRENT PLEX PASS HOLDERS:
For users who have an active Plex Pass subscription, remote playback will continue to be available to you without interruption from any Plex Media Server, after these changes go into effect. When running your own Plex Media Server as a subscriber, other users to whom you have granted access can also stream from the server (whether local or remote), without ANY additional charge—not even a mobile activation fee. More on that later in this update.

I was worrying about this change because my Plex server provides free streaming for several of my friends and family and I didn’t want them to have to start paying for it. The whole point was to get them away from Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, etc.

But this sounds like, since I’m already a Plex Pass subscriber, my remote viewers will still be able to access my stuff for free. Do I have that right? Because if so, this change is just business as usual for me.

Hobbies are about enjoyment, not skill. You should never measure your accomplishments with hobbies based on how good you are at them.

That said… when I was younger, I only indulged in hobbies that I had any skill in. If I sucked at something, I typically gave it up quickly and looked for something else to do.

Video games were an exception. I enjoyed the gameplay so much, it didn’t matter that I was awful at them. I’d grind the same levels over and over, hoping to finally beat it this time.

Interestingly enough, I’m actually really good at video games now. Not professionally so, but I have a lot more skill than most of my friends. I’m usually appointed team leader in any co-op games I play with my friends because I’m really good at tracking the mission objective and keeping everyone together. And now that I’m retired young, I spend a lot of time gaming throughout the days, which only makes me better.

I don’t play games for the challenge or skill, though. I mostly play to enjoy an interactive story. So I usually turn the difficulty down to the easiest option so I don’t get stuck from progression at any point. I can handle really difficult games, but I just don’t want to. Unless my friends want a challenge, then I’ll crank it up and then be constantly bailing them out from the nightmare they chose to play.

I must’ve been tired last night… I stared at this meme for so long, not able to make any sense of it. What does the Cold War have to do with refrigerators?! I finally put down my tablet and went to sleep.

This morning I picked up my tablet, saw this meme again, and immediately thought, “Oh, the COLD war.” Duh.

A childhood friend of mine worked as a developer for Riot Games over a decade ago, when League of Legends first became popular. He tried to get me to play it with him, but the community was so toxic, it’s the first and only game I ever quit solely because of the community.

If you didn’t play specific characters with very specific builds, you were just wasting everyone’s time and any losses would be blamed on you. It was really bad.

I love the content and lore that comes from LoL (Arcane, K/DA, etc.), but I can’t stand the game itself.

I saw the “Women in Metal” title and thought this would be a thread about women in trade jobs (i.e. metalworking).

In the US? Democrats vs. Republicans.

According to the rest of the world, the US doesn’t have a left party. Democrats are right wing and Republicans are extremist right wing. The left is completely unrepresented in our government. Both major parties lean conservative (from a global perspective) and care more about helping major businesses and the rich elite than actually representing the people.

That’s why there’s a whole movement centered around “no war but class war.” The American people are not actually represented and are instead pitted against each other in this fake “red vs. blue” distraction so we don’t actually go after our political leaders, or weed out the source of the money behind the scenes that dictate their actions.

I mean, I am the source. This was my personal experience while serving in the military.

But if you want official reports to back up what I experienced, here’s you go:

Intelligence officials withheld sensitive information from Trump while he was in office because they feared the ‘damage’ he could do if he knew.

I was working in an Intelligence unit when Trump was president (not the one directly briefing him) and it’s all anyone talked about at the time. They had to be extremely careful what information they shared with him because he would just go and post details on his social media accounts.

My unit had to change a lot of their missions and coordination because Trump would expose our secrets online. It ruined a lot of ongoing missions we had planned, and we had to scrap and rebuild a lot of our programs after he blabbed about them.

Trump fires top US general in unprecedented Pentagon shakeup

This was more recent, after I retired. But he basically fired our top military leaders, then made his own suggestions for replacements, completing ignoring the official promotion system we have in place.

He didn’t want people with years of experience and exemplary service to lead our military, he just wants his own loyalists in charge so he can control the military. He nominated highly unqualified people for the positions, with the only seemingly common quality being that they were loyal to Trump.

He was also annoyed at how hard it was to replace key people and wanted to circumvent official processes so he can hire and fire people at will, like his old businesses.

I retired from the US military 3 years ago. Yes, they can refuse unlawful orders. If I was still serving, I’d be abusing the hell out of that regulation right now.

During Trump’s last presidency, our intelligence community actually held back a lot of details in his intelligence briefings because we knew he couldn’t be trusted to keep his mouth shut. He has a top secret clearance, not because he could be trusted with it, but because it was a requirement for his job. And he also reversed our decision to withhold clearances from sketchy members of our government, so a lot of untrustworthy people also got access to our sensitive data, and thanks to that, we had a lot of compromised missions during his first tenure as president.

But we also had a majority Democrat government, which kept him in check. This time around, he’s attempting to replace everyone he can with his “yes men” so he gets no push-back. He’s even been trying to replace military generals with his own loyalists. If he can control the military, he can basically stage a coup overnight and no one will be able to stop him.

Things are getting really dangerous right now, so that regulation about refusing unlawful orders is very important, and I hope our current military members are willing to exercise it as needed.

I’ve been paying for Proton VPN for a couple years now and I’ve never been blocked by YouTube.

I’m also using uBlock Origin and Firefox as a browser. YouTube takes like 5-10 seconds to load videos, thanks to their built-in delay timer when ads can’t play, but otherwise it works fine.

Honestly, I’d gladly wait 30 seconds staring at a black screen than watch a 10-second ad. So their delay timer is pointless.

40-yr old male here, been retired since I was 38. (Collecting a military pension, plus 100% VA disability benefits) I’m usually awake until around 4-6 AM, then sleep until either noon or 1 PM. Unless I’m having a night of PTSD-induced insomnia, which strikes randomly. In which case, I might be awake until 10-11 AM, then crash for the rest of the day.

I’m a night owl and am at my most productive at night. Then I go to bed and usually don’t set an alarm so I can wake up naturally. After I wake, I might lie in bed for another hour or two, catching up on news or social media on my tablet. Then I’ll shower, grab some food, then plan out my day from there.

I’m drowning in hobbies and interests, and I have ADHD, which makes me hyperfocus on a dozen detailed tasks all at once. So there’s never a shortage of things to do each day. But I also don’t feel the need to be accomplished every day. Some days, you just need a day to rest and do nothing.

Not to mention workers. Capitalism doesn’t work unless there are enough worker bees keeping those cogs turning. If you can have more workers and pay them next to nothing, your profits will soar. That’s the capitalist ideal.