totm nov 2023 Thread to discuss negative things in a very general way, just see where it goes y'know?

[AlamoVampire]

Why on earth do people insist on having dogs in the beds of pickup trucks? The dogs are unprotected from the elements and are done for in accidents. Not to mention the dog could sudden have its prey drive kick in and leap from the truck… I have only ONCE seen a dog in that position that was in a carrier that was ratchet strapped down. 
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new page whee

Edited August 13 by AlamoVampire

[Nuke]

cable company finally gave me an ultimatum about my cable modem. upgrade or die.  so i give in and they send me this monstrosity of a cable modem. 3x the size of the original. with built in wifi and hard coded credentials. thank you for adding a new attack surface to my network, i really appreciate it. but the thing no doubt falls short of my existing router. looking to see if i can connect the two and just shut the wifi off on the cable modem, if it lets me. now i got the specs and am comparing them to those of my own router. i hate consumer networking manuals, because they dont tell you anything about the hardware. they are both wifi6, have 2.5 gig ports, mine has usb which i need, and theirs doesn't (and id rather not break my nas shares). its got 3 gigabit ports as well (will probibly aggregate those if i can, then i can have 2x 2.5 gig ports which will certainly speed up pxe boots).

the instructions they gave me dont match the equipment either. they send me a box and what i think may be a range extender (great another security hole). the instructions do not acknowledge it at all. the rest is pretty much the basic plug thing in here, plug thing in there, install mobile app (on what exactly) and do acts of voodoo behind a clean simple interface. fortunately i found a datasheet. the specs aren't terrible (barring the missing usb ports for my external drives). its capable but i cant retire my existing router. they didn't even give me a modem only option they just sent me this box of crap. i dont want a 3rd party looking at my router settings. how about we reach an understanding, everything on my side of the wan port is mine and everything on your side is yours. keep your grubby fingers off my side of the infrastructure.

23 hours ago, AlamoVampire said:

Why on earth do people insist on having dogs in the beds of pickup trucks? The dogs are unprotected from the elements and are done for in accidents. Not to mention the dog could sudden have its prey drive kick in and leap from the truck… I have only ONCE seen a dog in that position that was in a carrier that was ratchet strapped down. 
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new page whee

thats nothing, my sister's ex husbands family used to ride around the roads like the beverly hillbillies. dogs, kids, the elderly, me, a deer carcass. like on rough unpaved single lane dirt roads. one time my grandma came up to visit, we went out to the bush. me and my sister started racing (no cops till moose season, no license, no cops, no problem) and i almost threw grandma out the tailgate. seconds later my sister's tire blew up and i had to break pretty aggressively which caused grandma to slide back to the window. some people shouldn't drive, and im one of them.

Edited August 14 by Nuke

[Nuke]

the attack surface problem is bigger than i thought.  the cable modem broadcasts an ssid i never intend to use. if they crack the random angry keyboard spam password im in trouble. there is no way to control the router over the usual browser interface, they force you to use a phone app. im glued to the bloody magnifier and my neck hurts.

[Lisias]

I found something on eBay that I should, but couldn't let it pass.

So I compromised with myself by making a shameful offer that, frankly, I would not accept if I would be in the seller's shoes - this way I would keep my inner child quiet by "trying", but also my adult as I would not had to use money on shipping and taxes and exchange fees on my country.

That dude accepted the offer.

There're so many different "people" right now screaming on my head, for many different reasons...

Edited August 17 by Lisias
Entertaining grammars made slightely less entertaining...

[AlamoVampire]

1. Im getting even more sick of ads. I watched a video by a mechanic on youtube that was sub 30 minutes in length. Like 25-27 minutes. I refuse to pay for youtube or have a google account at all. In this video I was forced into watching over 5 MINUTES of unskippable ads. It claimed “fewer ad breaks for this longer video” and forced at EACH break 45-55 seconds of ads BEFORE letting me skip them. This is a cancer. It truly is.

2. Im getting sick of googling something and instead of being given factual results im given AI generated responses for a quarter to half the page before getting google sponsored results THEN the results that I need. Its getting bad in modern day where crap like 1&2 are happening.

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Edited August 22 by AlamoVampire

[Nuke]

i was talking to a girl online about alaska. just answering her questions you know. subjects of philosophy and religion come up. i get the feeling she is of a new age sort (i dated a witch once before so i know) and was wondering what she was doing chatting with a conventional old goat like me. getting tired of the email format she suggested we try a phone call, but me being the anti smartphone type suggested voip instead. so we agree on an app and just as i was about to set up a time, she emails back about here feelings and an ultimatum. anyway somehow over the subsequent 24 hours we managed to end up in a long range relationship and then break up (i do that with a long and brutal telling of truth). that was well outside of the scope of the conversation i thought we were having.

1 hour ago, AlamoVampire said:

1. Im getting even more sick of ads. I watched a video by a mechanic on youtube that was sub 30 minutes in length. Like 25-27 minutes. I refuse to pay for youtube or have a google account at all. In this video I was forced into watching over 5 MINUTES of unskippable ads. It claimed “fewer ad breaks for this longer video” and forced at EACH break 45-55 seconds of ads BEFORE letting me skip them. This is a cancer. It truly is.

2. Im getting sick of googling something and instead of being given factual results im given AI generated responses for a quarter to half the page before getting google sponsored results THEN the results that I need. Its getting bad in modern day where crap like 1&2 are happening.

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something that came across ltt recently, if you search for the video with bing, it will play without ads. i havent tested it because i dont have ads, but you might try it.

[Iapetus7342]

Sometimes i look at the state of Google and Youtube and think to myself "They seriously expect us to use their services while they treat us as walking moneybags? pathetic."

It is for this reason that i switched to firefox.

[Nuke]

censorship on the internet is getting out of control. its either join an echo chamber in which case the dialogue is pointless because you are always preaching to the choir. or get shadow banned / have posts deleted / get hate spam from the dominant echo chamber. i dont mind censorship if you are using it to take down online bullies or spewers of hate speech, but when you start suppressing common sense, its gone a bit too far.

[Lisias]

58 minutes ago, Nuke said:

I dont mind censorship if you are using it to take down online bullies or spewers of hate speech, but when you start suppressing common sense, its gone a bit too far.

Common sense is anything but common nowadays. We would not have harassment nor hate speech otherwise.

Censorship is merely bullies switching sides and exercising hate silence instead.

[Iapetus7342]

18 hours ago, Nuke said:

censorship on the internet is getting out of control. its either join an echo chamber in which case the dialogue is pointless because you are always preaching to the choir. or get shadow banned / have posts deleted / get hate spam from the dominant echo chamber. i dont mind censorship if you are using it to take down online bullies or spewers of hate speech, but when you start suppressing common sense, its gone a bit too far.

Something similar's happening on YouTube, the website's become a LOT more sensitive to this.

[DDE]

18 hours ago, Nuke said:

i dont mind censorship if you are using it to take down online bullies or spewers

You forgot the purveyors of stolen personal data, [substance names redacted], [imagery/video type name redacted], online casinos and poachers. I think I read an analysis of the Russian internet blacklist many years ago - where things weren't too political yet - and these cases of legitimate censorship accounted for literal 99% of the domains blocked.

[BA-Forums]

I just got Ready or Not…

I have no words…

[SunlitZelkova]

I had to go diarrhea twice in the night, and then when I finally laid down my cat came over to have his belly rubbed.

But I fell asleep while doing that, and must have not unconsciously moved my arm away from his belly. He eventually wanted to clean himself but I wasn’t moving so probably went in to mouth and paw at me like he usually does, but because I was asleep I couldn’t react in a timely manner and got bit and scratched.

I was awoken by a pain in my hand and the sound of him hopping off the bed. I turned my phone’s flashlight on and lo and behold…

It’s the second time in my life I’ve been bitten by an animal. The first was when two of my guinea pigs who didn’t get along with each other accidentally crossed paths and as I grabbed one the other moved in to attack with his mouth and couldn’t stop in time (normally they’re well aware of what’s food and what’s not).

EDIT- Why is paw underlined lol

Edited August 30 by SunlitZelkova

[Lisias]

Escape from Tarkov, Hitman, Frostpunk, Pathologic 2, The Witcher, and some other indie games I'm playing lately (GoG is being nice to me, but I found some perls on Steam too). And now Wukong (man, what a game!).

I'm seeing more and more appealing games from non USA developers than otherwise - East Europe, Russia and China mainly. But the British (Scottish in the case of a game I'm playing lately) are doing really fine too.

Now compare them with recent USA/Japan tittles I was following... They don't deserve not even being named...

Unless someone reverts this trend (and I don't see this happening soon - #sweetbabyincFeelings), I'm afraid I'm going to need learning Russian and/or Mandarin sooner than later if I will be willing to mod something and be able to better interact with my future game's developers and modding community...

Oh, well... Thanks God for the Unicode charset so, right?

On 8/30/2024 at 3:51 PM, SunlitZelkova said:

EDIT- Why is paw underlined lol

Because it's an abbreviation for Part Action Window.

[Fizzlebop Smith]

On 8/30/2024 at 11:51 AM, SunlitZelkova said:

I had to go diarrhea twice in the night, and then when I finally laid down my cat came over to have his belly rubbed.

But I fell asleep while doing that, and must have not unconsciously moved my arm away from his belly. He eventually wanted to clean himself but I wasn’t moving so probably went in to mouth and paw at me like he usually does, but because I was asleep I couldn’t react in a timely manner and got bit and scratched.

I was awoken by a pain in my hand and the sound of him hopping off the bed. I turned my phone’s flashlight on and lo and behold…

It’s the second time in my life I’ve been bitten by an animal. The first was when two of my guinea pigs who didn’t get along with each other accidentally crossed paths and as I grabbed one the other moved in to attack with his mouth and couldn’t stop in time (normally they’re well aware of what’s food and what’s not).

EDIT- Why is paw underlined lol

I like cats, especially big fluffy ones that have a penchant to sometimes behave as if a dog.

I hate cat bites.

I am getting somewhat older now. Three times in my life, I have been close enough to taste deaths sweet kiss. 

Of those three, one was from a cat. Everyone who has ever owned a car recognizes that moment where the LSD cascades have been triggered I'm a cats brain.

Pupils dilate, they do 2-267 laps around the room with the pounce tail twitching back and forth.

I had replaced a set of blinds about 6 weeks previously and Mikey (my amazing 23lbs Mainecoon) just went into full spaz mode.

He was sitting there all hunkered down looking the 220$ blinds. The apartment I first lived in was super small, but had a 10 x 8 window in the non bedroom. He had climbed the blinds a few weeks prior while I was at work.

I reached down and scooped him up all casual.. to prevent another disaster. He bit, it hurt but wasn't that big a deal. I soaked my hand in warm water / put bacitracin on it. By the time I woke up, my hand had tripled in size and I was delirious with a 104° fever.

Thank god for my partner because I lost a few days in the delirium. There is a chance I might have wandered out into public and made it to someone with concern, but who know.

The doctors said, If my partner would not  have brought me in, it would have been bad. The pictures had red in the veins & the infection blistered my skin like a sunburn. The top most layer flaked and peeled from the heat of my body.

All within 12-14 hours of being bit. It was crazy.

I also hate that I have to take allergy shots or eye lashes fall out from combination puffy / rubbing

[SunlitZelkova]

I saw a news article describing how in Namibia, officials plan to kill, among other animals, elephants and rhinos and distribute the meat to people amidst drought.

This is eerily similar to how I envision the Holocene extinction event in my world building projects that I made a couple years ago. Climate change and unsustainable farming practices lead to catastrophic loss of food production, thus people take to the wilderness to hunt food.

Then, most animals are hunted to extinction, further exacerbating ecological damage. Humans then starve en mass. Those that survive live off rat and corvid meat (the top dogs of this era of death) for about a millennia before dying due to a combination of “generational malnutrition” and an inbreeding depression.

On the bright side, the survival of many rodents and of course corvids means several million years later we get the likes of J. Monesi and the terror birds back.

Bad news: while the K-Pg extinction event resulted in anything not much larger than a dog dying, anything bigger than a guinea pig isn’t so lucky in this one. Bye bye cats. You had a good run.

[Nuke]

On 8/31/2024 at 3:02 PM, Fizzlebop Smith said:

I like cats, especially big fluffy ones that have a penchant to sometimes behave as if a dog.

I hate cat bites.

I am getting somewhat older now. Three times in my life, I have been close enough to taste deaths sweet kiss. 

Of those three, one was from a cat. Everyone who has ever owned a car recognizes that moment where the LSD cascades have been triggered I'm a cats brain.

Pupils dilate, they do 2-267 laps around the room with the pounce tail twitching back and forth.

I had replaced a set of blinds about 6 weeks previously and Mikey (my amazing 23lbs Mainecoon) just went into full spaz mode.

He was sitting there all hunkered down looking the 220$ blinds. The apartment I first lived in was super small, but had a 10 x 8 window in the non bedroom. He had climbed the blinds a few weeks prior while I was at work.

I reached down and scooped him up all casual.. to prevent another disaster. He bit, it hurt but wasn't that big a deal. I soaked my hand in warm water / put bacitracin on it. By the time I woke up, my hand had tripled in size and I was delirious with a 104° fever.

Thank god for my partner because I lost a few days in the delirium. There is a chance I might have wandered out into public and made it to someone with concern, but who know.

The doctors said, If my partner would not  have brought me in, it would have been bad. The pictures had red in the veins & the infection blistered my skin like a sunburn. The top most layer flaked and peeled from the heat of my body.

All within 12-14 hours of being bit. It was crazy.

I also hate that I have to take allergy shots or eye lashes fall out from combination puffy / rubbing

the little fuzzballs are still worth it.

[BA-Forums]

This.  I don’t expect Scott to be posting anytime soon…

 

[DDE]

Nobody, absolutely nobody:

Wh40k fans who decide their setting is already upon us: "oh yeah, time to make some real purity seals with Psalm 91"

Spoiler

This is not the timeline I signed up for...

[AlamoVampire]

<cautiously peeks out from the shadows><quickly runs out> i had to buy my cat some more food. Normally not a big deal but, i do buy her 1 specific type of food. Purina Cat Chow Indoor dry cat food. I usually buy it at my local grocery store. Today I couldnt. I started what would be a 3.5 hour 100 mile quest to find her food at 0630. I got to my grocery got some stuff for me then went to the pet food isle to get her food. They had all sorts of cat food but the food my cat eats? None. No big deal I thought, ill just go to another store. I kid you not I drove to 6 or 7 DIFFERENT branches of my local grocery store going north in hopes of finding her food. Not 1 of them had it. I finally went to petsmart to find it. When did everyone decide their kitties all need purina cat chow indoor? Holy grail of cat food i guess.

<runs back to the shadows to hide>
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Edited September 15 by AlamoVampire

[Nuke]

fortunately my cats aren't picky eaters, and at least in the case of lizzy, it shows. this is useful when you live on an island and have exactly 2 stores to choose from, neither of which can stay on top of their stock.

anyway vlc is a great media player, it can play practically anything. however when you try to use the streaming features, you get really inconsistent results. having a 2 floor apartment gets troublesome when i want to use the 3d printer on the top floor, but my caregiver responsibilities require i spend most of my time on the lower floor. so when you start a 8 hour print, running up and down stairs 50 million times to make sure the part didn't loose adhesion gets extremely tiring, especially considering my bad knees. so a webcam and some streaming is the obvious answer. except the camera is really cheap and the stream drops a lot. also its really hard to set up, you cant load the settings in a way that you can click an icon and the camera just starts streaming, it requires a complicated setup, and forgetting a small detail, like what the multicast address is, or the port number, or to allocate enough bandwidth for the damn thing to even function can really break things. trying to save the playlist file doesn't seem to start streaming anything when you run it. so i will probibly need to figure out the command line for it.

Edited September 15 by Nuke

[AstroWolfie]

On 9/15/2024 at 7:13 AM, DDE said:

Nobody, absolutely nobody:

Wh40k fans who decide their setting is already upon us: "oh yeah, time to make some real purity seals with Psalm 91"

  Reveal hidden contents

This is not the timeline I signed up for...

what???

I cant see the image

[Spacetraindriver]

got on a really weird nostalgic kick for some reason. just scrolling through old posts and seeing all the dead image links got me sad and reflecting...its funny how general public thought went from 'anything you post on the internet will be there forever' to 'old internet is completely gone and you can never go back.' this commentary has probably already been made thousands of times already but still, it just really feels like we took it all for granted, like is all popular game discussion these days really doomed to the glorified impermanent group chat format of like discord? at the least im still able to check back here like I am right now, nice knowing this place is still here. not that I ever was as active in public servers like I was here in its heyday (truthfully, feels spiritually far too similar to being ignored and talked over at high school lunch tables) but what if I was and wanted to look back there like I am here right now? I do that with what, screenshots? hours of searching through text search? i dunno, its probably not that important of a discussion but I get sentimental easily, what can I say

[Nuke]

ive come to the conclusion that the forever internet is just a myth. bit rot and neglect are real, and capacity has its limits. information theory has a lot in common with thermodynamics, namely entropy. storing data costs energy (not as much as moving data) and the things you store that data on are subject to wear and data loss. data can only be kept indefinitely in so far as people care to as it requires some effort in backup and verification. and while keeping your data alive is what everyone tries to do, at some point it will be someone else's problem, and they may as well just delete it to make room for their stuff. thus my preferred backup solution is deletion. say bye to all my bad code from the '90s.

Edited September 17 by Nuke

[Jacke]

Nothing is forever without the appropriate actions.

Things need maintenance and support.  If it's on a computer, that computer needs some sort of maintenance and support.  If it's a library, same thing.  Etc.  Or it needs to be passed on, copied, as appropriate, to a replacement.

Organizations need leadership and recruits.  Without leadership it will drift, eventually go off-course.  All organizations loose members, either to other concerns or passing away.  Recruits are needed to maintain the community.