cobysev

deleted by creator

I feel like this is more accurate:

I have a genetic predisposition to be a night owl. I proved it with a DNA test, comparing my results with actual scientific research on various genetic-related conditions. Plus, my mother’s side of the family always stays up super late every night.

Unfortunately, I signed up for the US military when I was 17 and they require you to get an early start every day. So I spent 20 years going to bed when I’m not tired and getting up at godawful early hours of the morning. I would basically get a lack of sleep for a few days until I was so tired, I’d pass out early and get a solid night’s sleep, then start the cycle over again. My days off were the only days I got to sleep in.

Now I’m fully retired and have nothing important going on each day, so I can finally let my body adjust to its preferred sleep schedule. I’m wide awake until 2-4 AM (sometimes later), then I sleep until 10 AM to 1 PM. It’s so nice not having to set an alarm anymore and naturally wake each day. I’ve never felt so rested!

When those services are the only place with a license to provide the content you want, and your choice is to either suck it up and deal with their enshittification, or pirate the media you want… guess which option is the preferred choice?

I tried watching Dragon Ball once. Someone was charging for an attack, and it literally took them 3 episodes to charge it (while cutting to other characters dealing with their own drama elsewhere).

When they finally fired their charged shot, it missed. I turned it off and never went back to that show. What a waste of an hour and a half.

I was actually living in Japan at the time, and I’ve learned why some shows drag on like that. It’s because a manga series is super popular and it gets licensed for animation… but the manga is incomplete and still being made. So eventually, the anime catches up to the latest volumes and then they need filler to keep the series going while waiting for the manga-ka (author/artist) to make more stories. So they stretch out scenes and stories to cover multiple episodes instead of just getting to the point and moving on.

That’s why we get lengthy shows like Dragon Ball, One Piece, Naruto, etc. They’re made before the manga is finished, so they will run out of material and abruptly end unless they stretch their story arcs out over dozens of episodes.

The other route is to find a decent place to end an anime series without a full resolution of the plot. For instance, the '90s Berserk anime just told the story up to the eclipse, which was just about where the manga was when the show aired. The series is still being made now, 2 decades later (even after its manga-ka passed away last year), and there have been a couple attempts to make new anime series telling more of the current plot. But they’re not stretching the story across hundreds of episodes to keep it going.

I’ve spent nearly 2 decades connecting with friends, family, coworkers, and associates through Facebook. I hate Facebook, and actually use F.B. Purity to remove 90% of the content, ads, promotional junk, games, marketplace, etc. from it. But as the main way I’ve stayed in touch with people I’ve known over the course of my life, I just can’t dump it.

Besides that, I have Lemmy (of course); LinkedIn, which I’m not really using anymore since I retired young; Imgur, which I mostly just use for browsing memes; and Discord, which I only use to communicate with a few close friends whom I game with weekly.

I created accounts for Instagram and Whatsapp, but I’ve never used them. They were too self-promoting for my taste. When they first became a thing, they were all about taking selfies and sharing your face with your friends. I wanted discussion and interesting content, not to see selfies. They created the generation of “social media influencers” who think they’re entitled to things in life because X number of people follow them on social media.

I also avoid TikTok like the plague. I was in the US military (working as an IT guy) when TikTok became popular, and we discovered it embedded itself in your phone so deeply, you couldn’t fully remove it even when uninstalling. Plus, it gave itself full admin rights to your phone, then started trickling your data to Chinese servers. Which is why the president made such a big deal about TikTok being a national security threat. It’s not because we didn’t get along with a Chinese company; it’s because a foreign government was collecting personal data and building profiles on American citizens. I will never touch that program as long as I live.

I’m 40 years old, by the way. A lot of people say Facebook is only used by old people, and yes, I just turned 40 and am finally becoming an “old person.” But I’m still relatively young compared to people’s expectations of Facebook users. And I have a lot of Facebook friends who are much younger than I am.

“Main goal” sounds kinda like “mango.” OP was making fun of the way someone said “main goal” and didn’t realize his mic was unmuted.

I was in the US Air Force for 20 years, working as an IT guy, and our computers were so locked down, you couldn’t use password managers at work. Nor were you allowed to bring them in.

Almost every office I worked in was secured; no removable electronic devices allowed. No cell phones, no flash drives or removable drives. Heck, CDs were a controlled item. You had to check with a security manager for approval before bringing in a music CD, and and data CDs required a log of their use and physical control by a trusted agent.

Plus, the computers themselves had a custom-configured OS and you couldn’t install any software on them that wasn’t on a pre-approved list. Half the time, normal users needed to talk to an admin like me to install something, and I might not even have the rights at my level to do it.

I didn’t get to mess around with password managers until I retired a couple years ago, and they’ve been a game changer! In the military, we needed unique complex passwords for everything, can’t reuse passwords, can’t write down passwords, and you had to change them every 60 days.

Having a password manager makes my personal accounts so much more secure. I can have super complex passwords for everything and not need to remember them. I currently have Proton Pass (been de-Googling my life and switching all my stuff over to Proton lately) and it’s been wonderful.

I don’t know why the military doesn’t get some sort of password manager approved for use. This is far more secure than what they’ve been doing in the past. I had 3 standard password templates, then made minor changes to them for every unique account. If they got too complex, I’d forget them (and again, we weren’t allowed to write them down). Now I can just auto-generate a 25+ character complex password and I don’t even need to remember it. I love it!

Technically, my Microsoft account. I created a Hotmail email account around 1997, my first ever online account. At some point, Microsoft merged my Hotmail login with their Microsoft login, and I still use it today; although I’ve changed the email address to a more current one. Microsoft killed Hotmail a long time ago, in favor of Outlook.

Post-COVID Anarcho-Punk

Fluently? Only English. But I spent 20 years in the US military, nearly 8 of them living full-time in foreign countries. So I did my best to learn at least a little of the languages I was exposed to in my travels.

I was stationed in Japan for 3 years. I learned how to get around and order food in Japanese, plus some limited conversation. I’m actually studying to read the language now. I could read Hirigana and Katakana (the Japanese alphabets) when I lived there. But it takes their students their entire school lives to learn how to read Kanji (the complex Chinese-borrowed symbols that represent entire words), so that one will keep me busy for a while.

When I was stationed in Germany, I learned some basic German, thanks to having friendly neighbors who spoke nearly fluent English. They helped me correct and improve my German language skills. But I was only in the country for a couple years, so I didn’t get very advanced with it.

I took 4 years of French in high school. I thought I was pretty decent at it, but every time I attempted to speak the language in France, the locals immediately switched over to English to converse with me.

Random related tangent: my wife and I took a vacation to Berlin once, and my wife, like me, spent several years studying French in high school. She decided to test her German language skills with the locals, and when she spoke, they immediately switched to French for her. Turns out, she speaks German with a heavy French accent. She was able to finish her conversation in French.

I’m currently studying Norwegian. My 3x great grandfather immigrated to America from Norway, and I still have living descendants of my ancestors over there. My dad and I went to visit them once, and I would like to be able to speak their native language the next time I go back. It used to be a rule that everyone in my family line learned English and Norwegian, but my grandfather died when my dad was only 2, so my dad never learned Norwegian, and thus neither did I.

I learned some extremely limited Korean. I was assigned to South Korea twice, for a year each time, and the military wouldn’t let me live off-base amongst the locals, so I didn’t get much free time to explore the country and learn the language. But I made an effort to learn some phrases so I could be polite in public, order food, and find my way back to the military base if I got lost.

Other languages that I’ve been exposed to and picked up a handful of words/phrases, but never seriously attempted to study: Italian, Arabic, Spanish, and Hawaiian.

I bought and played this game on Steam last night. Ended up playing for several hours; I was hooked. It’s kind of like Untitled Goose Game, except you’re a tiny man and you go around slapping everything/everyone until you accomplish your objectives.

I came here for this. I have it on Steam. Excellent game!

As a former IT guy, I got used to just saying “secure shell” every time I saw SSH, to help teach my younger IT folks the lingo. I don’t even say the acronym anymore. When I did, I just spoke the letters (es-es-aich).

Same for ZSH; I just call it Z-Shell (zee-shell).

Sudo has always been “soo-doh” (or “sue-dough” as OP spelled it; same pronunciation). I’ve never met anyone who pronounced it differently in my 20 years of IT work.

My dad was paying an annual subscription for several Ring cameras around his house. I replaced them with Eufy Security cameras, because you can store the video feed locally and not have to pay any subscription at all.

Then my dad passed away in January and I’ve spent this year closing all his accounts and switching bills over to my name. A few days ago, I got a reminder email in his account that he was about to be charged several hundred dollars for another year subscription to Ring. Even though he hasn’t had active cameras with them for almost a year now. Glad I caught it!

My guess is he’s trying to say “Kama-BLAH” as an insult. But no one’s picking up on it.

It says this is no longer available on the Steam store. I already own it; can anyone else still buy it from this link?

Why does this percentage keep going up? Who keeps inflating the numbers? The first time I heard about this, it was like 64%. Then 77%. Now 81%?! Tomorrow, I’m gonna see a meme stating 97% of Mozilla’s income is from Google.

I’ve avoided his content because something about him just creeped me out. After several years, I think I’ve finally pinpointed it: he doesn’t smile with his eyes. It makes his grin seem cold and emotionless, like a sociopath trying to blend in.