Back in the day, “boner” meant mistake. The Joker made a mistake and was humiliated to have it posted publicly in the newspaper (they didn’t have the Internet back then).

That’s Google for ya! Their motto was, “Don’t be evil.” That was the two original founders’ motto, which was silently changed sometime after the company was sold.

I’d need more context than a single screenshot and a second of audio. What’s happening leading up to this sound? What came right after? Can you make a video clip with at least 10 seconds of audio to pair with this specific capture? Visual cues and a bit more audio around the event will help make sense of it. As is, it doesn’t sound remotely like whimpering. Or anything recognizable.

Also, The Amazing World of Gumball is an excellent show! I’ve re-watched it 3 times already, and I’m in my 40s. Despite being a kid’s show, it’s highly entertaining no matter your age.

When I became a sysadmin 24 years ago, I figured the general public was still adapting to the rapid overnight advancements and integration into the tech industry. I assumed that as people figured out how to use software and computer technology in their daily lives, help desk support would practically disappear and we’d be able to move our efforts toward fully maintaining systems instead of customers.

I had no idea how resistant the general public would be to actually learning and understanding technology. We went from recommending customers avoid certain bad programs and hardware, to being forced to incorporate them into our infrastructure because the general public didn’t want to give them up.

My professional opinion was overruled many times because someone higher up the food chain wanted to use a device or app that hurt our client base or mission parameters, but was familiar to them, so they wanted it included in our suite of tools.

I’m grateful to see a lot of public resistance to AI, even if corporations are doubling down on their investment into the technology. But I don’t have any hope for the future of technology or the general public who use it daily. AI is just the latest excuse for people to not learn how to use technology efficiently.

I expected younger generations to be raised on this tech and be absolute wizards in its use, understanding it even better than I do! Instead, they were raised on slop and ad-riddled ADHD-promoting garbage apps that rotted their brains and prevented them from learning basic tools and functions. As a millennial, I’ve spent the better half of a decade teaching boomers how to use this tech, and then the next decade trying to reeducate zoomers on how to properly use tech and break their life-long bad habits.

I retired from the IT industry after only 20 years. Now I enjoy tinkering with technology in my free time. I always enjoyed teaching people how to use their personal computers and smartphones, but I can’t spend another minute on a help desk, fielding calls from people who still don’t know how to read error messages that pop up in their face. AI will be the death of the industry if integrated into everything and left unchecked. Maybe it’d be for the best.

“There is no war in Ba Sing Se.”

NOTE: Spoilers for a 33-yr old film ahead…

As a kid, I enjoyed Mrs. Doubtfire for the Robin Williams comedy. But I hated the ending, because it felt like all the effort of the film was wasted. Robin Williams’ character doesn’t win his wife back and he has to accept the initial conflict of the story is permanent and unresolvable. It felt like a gut-punch and left me feeling sad and unsatisfied.

As an adult, I understand that this film had a more realistic approach to family and relationship conflict and I appreciate it more… but I still feel uneasy about the ending. I can’t get myself to sit down and rewatch it because it just feels so tragic to me. I’d consider this the opposite of a feel-good movie.

It’s kind of funny because I really enjoy gritty realism in my films today. But back in the '90s, films were a happy, wholesome escape from reality. Most people didn’t watch movies for a reminder of their real lives, they wanted to watch a conflict get resolved and everyone live happily ever after. It made us feel better about our lives, like we could find our happily ever after too. Having a “family comedy” that ends with the family broken up and moving on is so heartbreaking and sad. It’s a twist ending that most people never saw coming back then.

I have a Firefox extension called “Hide Shorts for YouTube” that keeps the vertical shorts from showing up in my feed. I totally forgot that YouTube still has those.

I only use YouTube for long-form videos. I really hate vertical videos. And my ADHD is bad enough; I don’t need to feed it short-form content all day long. I’ll never get off my phone!

Chronologically, Metal Gear Solid 3 is the first game in the series. It shows Snake’s origin story, which leads into the original Metal Gear 1 and 2 games for the old Nintendo Entertainment System (long before the Metal Gear Solid series). So it’s a perfect place to start if you’re picking up the Metal Gear franchise for the first time.

Metal Gear Solid ∆ is just a modern remake of Metal Gear Solid 3, so it’s basically the same thing but better graphics and controls. I read once that due to the falling out with Hideo Kojima, Konami can’t legally re-release the original MGS3 game, so a remake from the ground up was their legal compromise.

Now Metal Gear Solid 4 is the only Metal Gear game that hasn’t been re-released on any other platform since it debuted on the PlayStation 3. But Konami plans to finally release it for PC and all modern consoles in August this year. Woo!

I had planned to review Metal Gear Solid ∆ for my Lemmy screenshot series, but I was having so much fun with the game, I forgot about preparing a review and just played my way through it. MGS3 is my favorite of the entire franchise! There’s something rewarding about actually trying to avoid detection in a game. It’s easy to go in guns blazing, but sneaking past guards and not alerting anyone? That takes skill and dedication.

I gave up Reddit the day I moved here. Haven’t been back to Reddit since. I much prefer it here.

This gif is from an episode of Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin’? It was her and her brother’s YouTube channel before she became a famous voice actress.

Each video short was a comedy sketch loosely based on a particular video game. This one was based on Civilization 5, and is much funnier than what’s shown in the gif. Here’s the video.

The bearded guy at the table is her brother who made the channel, the other girl was his girlfriend (dunno what their relationship status is now) and the old white dude is their dad.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard him laugh.

It’s like posting “lol” or “roflmao” in text, when your face doesn’t even change IRL. Except we’re voice chatting, so he’s using a laugh track instead of “lol.”

I voice chat with friends on Discord pretty regularly. I have one friend who, instead of laughing, will click a laugh track on our soundboard, filling the voice chat with boisterous sitcom laughter. I don’t know why, but that’s kind of unsettling.

Same. How could a machine steal its own IP address? It doesn’t make sense!

TL;DR: “Making democratic threats legible,” i.e. spreading the word about how every action Trump takes is a threat to our democracy. It has been proven in several other countries run by authoritarian governments to be effective at stomping out fascism before it can take hold.

Saved you a click.

I live in a forested countryside in the Northern Midwest. Leaving the windows open invites in bugs and other small critters. Even with screens on the windows, insects crawl through the cracks, and I’ve definitely had several field mice chew their way through screens. I also have rabbits and possums who tend to nest up against the foundation of my house, and if a lower window is left open for prolonged periods, I sometimes find babies nesting in the window frame.

If I open my windows, it’s for a limited time to get some fresh air moving through the house. I’ll turn on strategically placed fans in various rooms to encourage rapid airflow through the house so I can close the windows sooner.

I only open windows in the winter if I need to cool a room quickly. For instance, I’m renting my first floor to a friend and I live on the second floor. But I only have one HVAC unit and thermostat for the entire house. The first floor always stays a few degrees cooler than the second floor (heat rises), so I keep it a little extra hot upstairs to ensure I’m not freezing out my friend. But I’m always hot in general, so I’ll either have fans on me all winter, or I’ll occasionally shut myself in a bedroom and open the window for 15-20 minutes, just to lower my body temp a bit and help me tolerate the hot house.

There have been a few winter nights where my wife and I have left the bedroom window open to cool down our bedroom, while burying ourselves in thick blankets. We don’t sleep well if we’re sweaty and stuck to the bed. I usually get up a few hours later and close the window, so we don’t freeze overnight.

As much as I like this idea, I feel I need to point out that the fae don’t just take your name, but rather they use it to control you.

Somehow, I feel that’s worse than giving up your deadname. Being controlled by your deadname sounds like a nightmare!

When I was deployed to Iraq in 2007, I worked for a Communications Squadron, which managed the base’s computer network. Someone built a media server in our server room, so we could legally host movies and music on our network for other military members to enjoy at work.

We would borrow copies of DVDs and CDs from our base library and rip them to the server, then we built a rudimentary website where people could browse the catalog and stream content through the site. Nobody could download copies of anything, so we weren’t guilty of government-sponsored illegal filesharing. It was basically a way to digitally access the content from our library.

A part of the server that was locked down just for our squadron included video games we could install and run from our work computers. Our squadron especially liked to close up shop around lunchtime for some “simulated warfare training” and then jump into a giant Call of Duty multiplayer free-for-all map and shoot each other up for about 30 minutes.

Anyway, this is a long-winded way to explain that one day, I noticed someone added World of Warcraft to the server. I thought it was odd, considering MMOs needed an Internet connection and our military networks are specifically designed to block most non-work related content. Battle.net would definitely be on the block list.

Still, curiosity got the best of me and I installed it on my PC. And to my surprise, it was a local server instance! I could access all of vanilla WoW, and I was the only person online.

I don’t know what exactly that game mode was. I thought maybe it was a beta instance, but I’ve never been able to get any of Blizzard’s beta or test servers to run locally without an Internet connection. Someone had obtained an actual working offline copy of the game to play!

Suffice to say, that kept me entertained for most of my deployment. Back in those days, there were a lot of griefers online and you didn’t have much of a choice in avoiding PvP (this was before they started making specifically RP servers), so I was frustrated when other players would interrupt my gameplay to fight me. Having a whole MMO to myself was fantastic!

The only downside was that my character was isolated on my local server; all my progress couldn’t come with me when I left Iraq. But I was addicted to WoW back in those days, so it let me continue to enjoy the game while I was unable to access my actual account back home.

Interestingly enough, the reason Brad Pitt is advertised so heavily is the reason I still haven’t watched it.

Don’t get me wrong, I think he’s an excellent actor and I enjoy seeing him on screen. I just don’t understand why an F1 movie needed Brad Pitt. I’m here to watch race cars, not some famous actor behind the wheel!

If they cast an unknown in the lead, I’d be more intrigued because I’m interested in Formula 1 racing. But putting a famous guy in the lead makes me feel like this is gonna be some dramatic feel-good fantasy story, not something more grounded in reality.

And yes, I know this movie is just a giant advertisement for Formula 1. But that’s a real motorsport race, so I’d be more invested if the movie felt like watching a real person’s story, not an actor telling a fictional story in the setting of F1 racing.

I laughed at this joke, then looked over at my end table…

I know this is a shitpost, but to answer honestly… the last pear I had was when I was a child, and I’m in my 40s now.

I still remember their wonderful taste and I haven’t been intentionally avoiding them. I just never came across an opportunity to eat one since my childhood. I’ve primarily consumed apples and oranges over the years and I can’t even remember seeing pears at the store.

Maybe I should go check out my local grocery store and buy a few.