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Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

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  • Have you? Several of the first few cars I drove did not have power steering and without any doubt or hesitation I can say they were not as safe to drive. And having been personally struck by a vehicle at slow speeds I’m pretty confident that your argument there doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. I’m not saying they can’t be driven. I’m saying that they are less safe, the same way cars without anti-lock breaks are less safe. Both require extra training and practice to operate safely in an emergency situation, training that is increasing difficult to get because most people drive cars that have had these essential safety features for their entire lives.








  • There is a reason that I have fallen asleep during the extended 3rd act fight scene in every single god damn marvel movie since Mark Ruffalo became the Hulk.

    They all turn into the same movie, with the same fight. And these super long fights all seem to be surprisingly light on showing any of the actual real world impacts of such violence. Nobody ever gets seriously hurt unless the plot needs more sacrifice. But even when they do, the injuries mostly happen off camera and the blood never flows or spurts, it just instantly appears as makeup. It’s really giving people a deep rooted and totally unfounded sense that violence both solves every problem (it doesn’t) and does so bloodlessly (it doesn’t). At least Batman knows he’s not a hero.

    But really, the DC universe isn’t much better. Think about how shocking a little bit of blood at the beginning of the new Superman movie was, before they basically destroy metropolis (which was rather expected and mundane). And then they only show the tiny fraction of people personally saved by Superman, not the countless mangled corpses buried under rubble. This may be why the public has trouble confronting the realities of war and violence.







  • Jellyfish cannot to setup to securely and safely be exposed to the Internet. It is only safe to access through a VPN. That rules it out as an option for sharing with friends, family, or even my own spouse. You call it phoning home to the mother ship; I call it paying Plex to manage user authentication for me. Until Jellyfin’s security holes are patched and it becomes clear that the Jellyfin developers actually care about security, it stays locked down to my LAN. Setting up a VPN is difficult for the average user on a good day, impossible in some circumstances on even the best of days, and is not access I want to hand out (and support) to all the people I share my Plex with anyway.



  • If someone wrote this article in the early 90s, it would be called “Why I ditched the radio, and how I created my own CD collection.” I think rephrasing it that way really shines a light on why it’s mostly still comparing apples and oranges.

    I have a pretty substantial collection of music hovering around 5,000 albums or 1.6TB (mostly lossless FLAC these days, but still some moldy old mp3s and ogg vorbis files from my youth). I’m not even counting the physical media I still hold on to. I still use Spotify for discovery and playlists. I don’t think the depth and breadth of my library will ever match the depth and breadth of the music that I want to listen to in the very next moment. Lots of times I want to listen to the stuff I’m familiar with, and I do that using my own library. But, when I want to: remember a song I heard in the wild, share a holiday playlist with friends, make an obscurely themed playlist of songs features peaches, preview a musician’s or band’s stuff, discover other things that musician has collaborated on, or simply discover new music; I still use Spotify.

    There are (or were) bits and pieces out there (many that pre-date Spotify) that can do some of these things. Last.fm (fka Audioscrobbler) was good for tracking listening habits to compare and share with others, it helped a little with discovery. I used allmusic.com a lot long ago to discover the artists that inspired the artists I was listening. If I wanted to share a playlist, I made a mixtape (really it was burning a mix CD). But, all of these collected information only, not the music itself. If I wanted to actually hear a new song, I had to go somewhere and find it first. That often meant literally traveling somewhere else or ordering from a catalog and waiting for delivery. Every new music discovery was a bet made with real dollars that I would actually enjoy the thing or listen to it more than once. Even after napster paved the way for free listening via piracy, one still had to work to actually find the music.

    Spotify (and similar services) finally collected (almost) all of it under one app, so that I could discover and listen seemlessly. It is instant gratification music discovery. I’ll never give up my self hosted collection, but I also don’t have much hope that any self curated collection will be able to complete with the way that I use Spotify. Spotify is just the new radio. It’s never the end of my listening though. Just like with radio, when I find something I like enough, then I can expend the energy (or more often expend the money as directly with the band as I can) to add it to my collection.


  • A note about surge protectors: Make sure they are actually surge protectors and not just “power strips” that Amazon has mixed into the search results. Power strips are easy to find in many varieties, made by any number of fly-by-night companies; they’ll do nothing to help protect your stuff from power surges. Legitimate surge protectors from reputable companies are much less common. Also, they don’t last forever. An older surge protector may still work as a power strip, but over time they may become much less effective as surge protectors.



  • Have you never actually seen a crosswalk before? Because I’m having trouble figuring out which part of these rainbow flag colored crosswalks makes them look any less like a crosswalk or makes them less visible or recognizable in any way. Literally the only other pavement marking that comes anywhere near looking like or being placed in the same way on a road is a stop bar. And guess what, car drivers routinely mistake the plain crosswalks for stop bars, thereby blocking the crosswalk. Making the claim that painting a pedestrian crosswalk in bright colors somehow makes them less visible or recognizable has got to be the dumbest argument I’ve heard this week.