I don’t care whether you genuinely like it or not. I don’t particularly care if its a mutual interest or not. I don’t really like having unnecessary stimulation in my fiekr of vision.

If I want to talk to people about a band I like, I’ll go find an online community or go to a concert, not talk to random strangers wearing relevant t-shirts.

I’ve always viewee “boring” as a goal personally

I would extend this to all images on people. Graphic t-shirts, hats, logos, text on booty shorts, jewelry

Why does everyone need to be a walking billboard? Why must we cover everything with “art”? Why do we need to constantly be broadcasting messages to everyone who looks at us?

I get that people are excited about these things, and I never want to make anyone feel bad about having tattoos or wearing clothes they like. But personally i west plain clothes, mostly solid colors and the occasional stripes, nothing busier than plaid. I took thr dealership stickers and manufacturers logos off my car.

I love my charcoal grill. I watched a lot of Good Eats as a kid, and Alton Brown’s YouTube channel as an adult. Natural chunk charcoal > briquettes. A charcoal chimney is great for starting it.

He likes to put cooking oil on newspaper or butcher paper to light the chimney. Personally since I have a natural gas stove top, I just put the chimney on our biggest burner on high for like a minute. Yes, there’s technically a risk of carbon monoxide poisoning fron burning charcoal indoors, but I only do it long enough to light it and I usually open a window. It makes the drove a bit messy but its not terrible.

I love grilling a whole pack of burgers, a couoke packs of hot dogs, and like 5lbs of chicken breast or pork loin or something. Then we freeze some ans refrigerate some- its like a partial meal prep fkr the next 2 weeks where the entree just needs reheated and we can make sides as-needed.

There are people of all genders who do so, but I think society places more pressure on women in particular.

I think the more prominent difference is fashion, and the cultural approach to clothing.

Women are expected to “keep up” with the latest trend, and are influenced to dress like the celebrities and influencers they see. When my wife and I go back and look at pictures of ourselvelves, my wife can guess the year by the waistline of the jeans she’s wearing. Meanwhile I’m always there in the same jeans, with the same styles of t-shirts, buttoned-shirts, flannels, or thermal shirts depending on the formality and temperature of the occasion.

I ended up using duckdns for a free domain. It sucks that I had to tie it to a google account, and maybe one day this might be an area where I buy a proper domain instead.

I have a glinet Flint3 router that makes it easy to spin up Wireguard servers on it. It was a bit more finnicky, but eventually I was able to get into the advanced settings and configure the router to sync the dynamic IP with DuckDNS too.

So I have Wireguard on my phone and my wife’s phone. We have one pair of close friends who have a connection on their router too (and vice-versa) and their own Jellyfin server.

I finally did it: I texted my older sister asking if she wanted to talk, and we spent 2 hours on the phone.

She is 6 years older than me. Old enough that there was some distance between us, but I always felt a weird connection. Like the rest of the world had a different way if thinking from us. We both kind of understood we weren’t very social so we never really connected much as adults.

Several years ago she was diagnosed with autism. So for a long time I wondered whether I was also autistic or just shared some personality traits frome being raised together.

Talking to her on the phone was the best I’ve felt in months. Even beyond the content of our discussion. Just the way she talking about her own thought processes and approaches to things reminded me of how my own brain works. I’ve spent the past year in a polycule of ADHD and bi-polar people, and I noticed my brain just stopped functioning the way it used to. I spent so much time reading on autism, reading self-help stuff, doing meditation, getting diagnosed, seeing a therapist. And like, some of that stuff was helpful and I’ll continue doing a lot of it. But I made way more progress in those 2 hours than I did in the prior 9 months or so.

She said that other people often recommend going out, being social, doing stuff in public. My mom pressured her to join clubs and do stuff with friends in school, her first few therapists recommended social interaction too. For most people that’s true: it can be incredibly good for depressed and anxious people to get out of their house and interact with others. She said “that’s actually bad for me”, and that has hit me hard. For all my life I told myself that i just didn’t like doing that stuff, that it was a matter of taste but I was perfectly capable of handling it when I had to. Now I realize the truth: it’s bad for me.

All these months feeling terrible. Months of my brain sensing vague remnants of memories but not able to actually pull the information that should be there. Feeling disconnected from reality. My confidence being shattered. It was all because I was pushing so hard to do things that were really, really unhealthy for me because of pressure from my polycule. Talking to my sister made me realize that I need to put myself first and quit trying so hard to find a middle ground. I don’t know if I’ll be able to stay in the polycule. I don’t know if my marriage will survive. But what I’ve been doing, trying to to mold my mind to be more like ADHD and manic folk, is just not an option.

I would love to take my money elsewhere, but… Where? Everywhere else is just as bad or worse. Half the VPN’s are owner by one Israeli billionaire. I’m running out of options here.

I think that one of reasons gridiron football got so popular in the first place is because of its unique pacing.

A play starts, a few specific actions take place over the course of like, 5-15 seconds usually, then play stops while they set up. This might sound terrible to some people, but this means that there’s space in-between plays for people to talk. Could be talking about what just happened, or trying to predict what will happen next, or about how this fits within the greater context of the game or season. Or it could be talking about the beer or the nachos or whatever else. It makes the games more of a social event.

With the rise of television, this means advertising space and color commentary. Advertising = money, which fuels the entire industry.

This is also why baseball is “America’s favorite past time”. Golf is up there too, and I would even argue that oval track racing in NASCAR kind of follows this trend, because most of the interesting action tends to take place around pit stops (or at least it did when I used to watch it). Its not 100%- basketball and hockey are still popular.

If you look at human history, its kinda hard to find a place and time that someone isn’t consrtruing as shitty.

On days when I am feeling good and optimistic, I can convince myself that this is because humanity is constantly getting better. The fact that so many Americans can look back in history and recognize the foundations of colonialism, imperialism, racism, sexism, etc means that these people have grown. Just as I can look at myself fro 20 years ago and see how much worse of a person I was- that means that I’ve grown and gotten better. I hope to grow and get better in the future, that the person 20 years from now will look back at me today and see someone with a lot of flaws.

But I’m not feeling that right now. Today unjust feel like the world has been doomed to cycles of violence, oppreaion, and chaos since the first single-cell organisms evolved from the primordial soup.

That looks great, and I love the idea of 3D printing a stencil like that! I’m gonna have to try that on my next one.

Yellow by Baroness.

Well, technically its a double album: Yellow & Green. And I would say Green is a close second.

Something about it just blew my mind. Like, I had heard Baroness before, stuff from Red and Blue. They had a song or two on the early Guitar Hero games. I just thought “oh another okay metal band, whatever”. Yellow and Green were just… Different. The tone, the vocal style. The whole approach to writing ans playing guitars was different than what i was used to. Thr production has this kind of modern dirtiness, like the noise came from radiation or something. The lyrics are absolutely battling, as they were translated across multiple languages and the meaning was only clinging to them by a thread. The album art is incredible too. The bass is perfect, never too much or too little. The drums use disco and other dance beats along side this metal-ish music in a fantastic way.

It kind of felt it cane fron another dimension. A different timeline where English and western music evolved similarly to ours, but jjsy different enough to be uncanny.

Maybe its just me, but nowadays every public apace is incredibly noisey.

Every bar and restaurant is blaring music. Vehicular traffic, air conditions, all sorts of other machines are pumping noise in too.

I just went out with some people this weekend and found myself wishing we had, noise-canceling headsets to be able to talk to each other. Kinda makes me want to not go out any more.

I collect cool looking wallpapers and make an effort to change my phone often. Usually every quarter/season.

It’s similar to our house decorations. I’ll have something spooky in October. Something with a lot of oranges, reds, and yellows in November and December. Bright and colorful for April-June. Everything else is usually a wild card: cool art, fantasy, landacapes vaporwave, whatever neat stuff I can find that isn’t tied to a season or holiday.

I find it helps me to get in the spirit of the sesson and fully appreciate it. Fall really feels like fall. It kind of regulates my sense of the passage of time too.

Kape (and thus all of the VPNs they have purchased) is owned by Ted Saggi, an Israeli billionaire.

And yes, they are legally headquartered in London, but how meaningful is that? There’s hundreds of US companies that are headquartered into a handful of buildings in Delaware for legal and tax reasons. Their “development center” is based in Tel Aviv.

https://cyberinsider.com/kape-technologies-owns-expressvpn-cyberghost-pia-zenmate-vpn-review-sites/

Have you really never had the misfortune of encountering one cracked in the carton?

In my experience there is usually a small pile of cartons with cracked eggs set off to the side of the shelf in the refrigerator in the store.

If only anti-onsumption had an advertising budget.

I had been wanting for the last few years to build a proper home server, and to build a new gaming PC.

Gaming PC has been out of the question for a while now. Crypto led into AI, plus all thr nonsense the manufacturers have been pulling. I had a brief hope last year that the AMD 9070 or 9070XT might be reasonable, but alas the MSRP was completely fake.

Then the RAM prices increased from AI. I had an old machine cobbled together from 2013-2014 budget gaming PC’s, and it had 16GB of DDR3, so I turned that into my server. Slapped in a 1TB SATA SSD that I probably got around d 2022-ish and that would get me by until the market corrects and I can build a proper server, right?

Well then the drive prices started to climb. First the SSD’s because the NAND was being diverted to RAM, then the HDD’s because of the lack of SSD’s and the rise of data centers using them. The resty of my server may be old (so reliability is a concern) but its got plenty of performance for what I use it for. So this time I decided to try to buy on the upswing and get the HDD’s. I ended up spending a little over $1k for two WD 24TB NAS drives. One of them was DOA. After over a month of phone calls and emails with both B&H and WD, I eventually got a replacement from WD.

B&H at first offered to let me just send the drive back and replace it, but they were completely out of 24TB drives and wanted me to pay $200 to upgrade to the 26TB drive. Which was completely ridiculous because I was RAID’ing them, so either I pay a ton more for no extra effective storage or I pay like $400 more to do both drives and get 2TB of effective (albeit redundant) storage.

So instead I went through WD. Took a long time- they didn’t ship a drive for 2 weeks after they received my defective one. When I followed up, the impression I got fro the representative was that they were trying to find a drive to send me. Eventually one came in the mail: they just went ahead and sent me a 26TB drive at no cost. It seems even WD themselves was completely out and didn’t think they would be able to get another one anytime soon. On PCPartPicker now, the 24TB drive is listed at $670 a piece and completely out of stock everywhere

That’s absolutely wild to me. Part of the reason I went with 24TB drives I the first place was that the smaller ones in the 16-20 TB range were sold out.

I used to think I could just wait it out. I built PC’s for my wife and I in 2019 and early 2020, each with an RX580. Covid hit and I thought “wow I’m glad I bought those when I did”. Then the Crypto boom hit and I thought “wow once this bubble bursts I should try to upgrade”. Then AI happened. At this point I don’t have any hope anymore. I truly believe these manufacturers have former a cartel and have effectively bribed enough government officials of thr most powerful and relevant global economies. The goal is to end personal computing and instead move to lightweight clients with cloud subscriptions. In 45 years, I’m going to be the weird old dude trying desperately to maintain his 50 year old hardware, scavenging estate sales for parts.