cobysev

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I was worrying about this change because my Plex server provides free streaming for several of my friends and family and I didn’t want them to have to start paying for it. The whole point was to get them away from Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, etc.

But this sounds like, since I’m already a Plex Pass subscriber, my remote viewers will still be able to access my stuff for free. Do I have that right? Because if so, this change is just business as usual for me.

I saw the “Women in Metal” title and thought this would be a thread about women in trade jobs (i.e. metalworking).

In the US? Democrats vs. Republicans.

According to the rest of the world, the US doesn’t have a left party. Democrats are right wing and Republicans are extremist right wing. The left is completely unrepresented in our government. Both major parties lean conservative (from a global perspective) and care more about helping major businesses and the rich elite than actually representing the people.

That’s why there’s a whole movement centered around “no war but class war.” The American people are not actually represented and are instead pitted against each other in this fake “red vs. blue” distraction so we don’t actually go after our political leaders, or weed out the source of the money behind the scenes that dictate their actions.

Back when I was a teenager (~25 years ago), I had the worst time waking up every morning for school. My dad would have to come drag me out of bed, then I would be sitting in the shower dozing for a while before I actually started cleaning myself. Like, literally sitting - I would sit on the edge of the tub while in the shower and just slip in and out of consciousness for a little bit until I was awake enough to shower.

Of course, this made me run late every morning. My dad always poked his head into the bathroom to yell at me that I’m going to miss my school bus if I don’t hurry up. I rarely ever missed the bus, but I also barely caught it most days, which always made my dad anxious about my morning routine.

As a healthy young teenager, I always had morning wood that wouldn’t quit. I had gotten used to it, so getting ready in the mornings with a raging boner wasn’t unusual. But I was generally pretty good at keeping it hidden from others until it went away.

One particular morning, I had gone through my shower-sleep routine and finally got around to cleaning myself. I had lathered up my entire body with soap and was scrubbing all the cracks and crevices thoroughly (I was a bit OCD when it came to cleanliness).

This day, my dad had finally had enough and decided to see what took me so long in the shower every day. Out of nowhere, he whipped open the shower curtain and opened his mouth to yell at me.

I was standing there, frozen in shock, both hands gripping my soapy raging boner. My dad glanced down, then back up at my face, then gave me the goofiest smile I’d ever seen him make. Then he wordlessly shut the shower curtain and walked away.

It took me a minute to realize why he changed his mind about yelling at me; it didn’t process at first what the situation he walked into looked like. I was just washing my body, after all.

My dad never again yelled at me to hurry up in the shower.

Well, I did serve throughout the Iraq War. I got some PTSD from my time in war zones that is a 70% disability rating alone. Plus several minor and major physical injuries over the years that I never fully recovered from.

The VA doesn’t do a direct addition when it comes to disability, so a 10% rating and a 10% rating doesn’t equal a 20% rating overall. They have some weird equation to calculate disability, which would probably bring it out to 12-15% disability total. But I had so many claims to submit, I made it all the way to 100%.

I thought I had maybe 2-3 medical claims to make when I retired. But I spoke with a VA counselor who spent 3 hours pouring over my 20 years of medical records in the military, then went over every single body part and asked detailed questions about my functionality and how it’s potentially degraded over the years since I joined the military. By the end, I had 33 claims to submit, and the VA accepted 30 of them. Enough small ratings (plus a few large ones) got me all the way to 100%.

I may not look disabled if you met me in person, but I am struggling, both mentally and physically. The VA actually fixed my knees; I was walking with a cane for the last 4 years I was in the military. But it’s not a perfect fix, so I still struggle to get around and I can’t run anymore without pain. But I don’t need a cane anymore, so there’s that.

YOU ARE ONLY 38?!

I was 38 when I retired three years ago, actually. I’m about to turn 41 in a few months. Sorry if I didn’t write that clearly in my comment.

The first few years going home feels like nothing ever changes but I recently went to my home town for a wedding and saw some friends for the first time in 15 years. Wow did the passage of time hit me like a truck.

I feel this. In my early years of the military, I used to take a month off every year and go home to chill with family and friends. The first few years of that, it was like nothing changed. But then I started dating my future wife and spending my time off traveling and honeymooning with her. When I did finally go home again, I almost didn’t recognize it. My friends and family had moved further away, my hometown had changed, everything was suddenly different.

True, 38 isn’t that old. But keep in mind, I’m 100% disabled according to the VA. Two decades of military service has wrecked my body, so I’m unable to work any physically demanding job. Heck, I struggle just to go up and down stairs in my own house without pain in my knees and back.

Which is a shame, because I was an extremely fit and active person in my youth. That’s part of the reason I joined the military - I was in the best shape of my life and could keep active all day without breaking a sweat. I’m actually frustrated now that just walking from my house to my mailbox takes me out of action for an hour or two.

I keep telling myself I’m young, but my body’s acting like it’s 80 years old. That’s the one downside to military service; it can easily overstress your joints and physically age you much faster than normal.

This is a compartmentalization technique seen in a lot in people with ADHD. Not saying OP has ADHD, but it’s something to look into if they have other signs.

I did this for literal decades. I was excited to start my adult life after high school, but an opportunity I couldn’t pass up dropped into my lap, so I chose that route instead.

Joining the US military was that opportunity. My uncle explained how the Air Force had taken care of him for 30 years, giving him free food, free lodging, free education, free travel around the globe, free medical and dental, and a steady, decent paycheck on top of it all. It sounded too good to be true, so I signed up as well. I figured I could get back to my plans for adult life later, after I’d taken advantage of all the benefits the military could offer me.

20 years later (3 years ago), I retired from the Air Force. It was a pretty stressful career, in a positive way, so I was glad to get home, relax a bit, then finally pick up my life where I left off.

The things is, a lot happens in 2 decades. All my friends had left town and moved on to new lives, new careers, created new families, etc. my own family had mostly moved away, except for my dad who was still living in my childhood home. He offered to let my wife and I stay with him rent free as long as we wanted. He passed away last year and I inherited the house from him.

So now I’m back in my childhood home, just starting to really get settled back in and trying to figure out what to do with myself. I feel like my life has been on hold for so long, I don’t even know where to start in picking things back up again. I’m not young anymore, so a lot of the physically active jobs and hobbies I was previously interested in are either difficult or impossible for me now. I also changed a lot mentally with 20 years of military service. I’m not the same person I was at 18, so I have to readjust my interests and hobbies.

Fortunately, I have a lifelong pension from the military. I was grandfathered into the old pension program before they switched to a 401K-type plan, so I get paid half my final paycheck every month for the rest of my life. I also got the coveted “100% Permanent & Total” disability rating from the VA, so that is an additional monthly payment for life that’s about double the size of my pension. Plus free medical and dental for life. My wife didn’t retire from the military, but she also got the 100% P&T disability rating, so she gets the same medical pay and benefits as me.

So with all this passive income, we can actually be retired, as of 38 years old, and have the free time every day to focus on rediscovering our lives. I don’t feel like I need to put my life on pause while I work a job I don’t necessarily care for, or save up enough money for something I really want to do. I can live my life fully now, unpaused, for the first time in my life. It’s been very liberating, both mentally and physically.

I think it was paid… But it’s been years so I couldn’t tell you.

It’s currently $3.99 in the Play Store for me, with a crossed-out list price of $6.49. Not a bad deal.

Got me. 🤗 Poor spelling/grammar is a pet peeve of mine, but it’s so hard to point out online without getting a lot of hate. I only responded here because it was topical and, I assumed, intentional.

I dare you to proof that its dead.

I don’t know if this comment was intentionally improper, but…

• prove
• it’s

According to that first link, it costs $6.1 billion to $11.7 billion annually to run YouTube. Even if you segment that into niche video communities, it’ll still cost hundreds of millions of dollars annually to host it, if you get a decent amount of traffic.

This is why YouTube is a monopoly. Because they have the ridiculous amount of money to throw at a “free” video hosting site. Any other video host would crumble under the weight of YouTube’s level of traffic. That’s also why some others, like Nebula, require a subscription model to function. Or any movie/TV show streaming service. They can’t afford to host that stuff for free.

This is also why Google is so obsessed with cracking down on anti-ad software. That’s how they make the money that pays for YouTube.

My mother used to work a state govt job. I don’t think she ever had a “take your kid to work” day, but there were a few times when she brought me into the office for the day. She was the manager of an entire wing of her building, so she could just bring me in anytime and no one said anything about it.

Her coworkers were always so nice and had apparently heard all about me because they all seemed to know me intimately. I sometimes wondered if her coworkers were only nice to me because I was the boss’s kid. But my mom was a genuinely nice person who was always looking out for others, so I wouldn’t be surprised if her coworkers actually liked her.

Sometimes I’d get tours of various offices, sometimes my mom would just set me up with something to do to entertain myself. I drew a lot in my childhood, and my mother would always put up my artwork in her office to show off to her coworkers.

My dad ran his own business and as long as I could remember, it was just him and his secretary renting out a large office space in the cities. He had a partner originally, but his partner died really young, so my dad was left with the whole company to run himself. Fortunately, my mom’s govt job paid the bills, so my dad didn’t need to make a ton of money with his small business.

Every time I went to my dad’s office, he would set me up at a computer near his secretary and I would spend the day either playing Wolfenstein 3D or Pac-Man. This was back in the early '90s, so you had to boot these games from a command line. The computers themselves were Windows 3.11 or so.

EDIT: I never had kids of my own, and I retired young, so I won’t ever get to experience taking my kids to work.

I’m atheist (and used to be extremely Christian once upon a time) and I’ve always celebrated Christmas. I’ve never seen it as a religious holiday, even though Christians try to claim it as their own. It was originally Saturnalia, and has more lore behind it that doesn’t line up with Christian beliefs. Like, who is Santa Claus in Christianity? They literally just took an already established holiday and claimed it for their religion to pull in more followers to their faith. Nah, I’m gonna keep celebrating Christmas without the Christ part. It’s a fun holiday that doesn’t need religion poisoning it.

Is anybody else just Not planning on gift-giving this year?

I’ve always been awkward about mandatory gift-giving situations, like birthdays and Christmas. I prefer to give gifts in the moment, from the heart, that people really need. Not gifts because the situation demands it from me.

As such, I tend to avoid gift-giving for specific holidays and events and tell everyone to avoid giving me gifts in return. I usually buy everything I want for myself anyway, and I hate receiving gifts I never asked for. What am I going to do with a trinket, or daily calendar, or a light-up desk toy? Maybe it’s the ADHD in me, but I like to plan and organize my home and other spaces, and receiving gifts I didn’t ask for messes up my structure. I don’t want to be a jerk, but if you give me a non-functional gift, it’s likely going in the trash the first opportunity I get.

My wife and I are already talking about getting a divorce (due to other long-standing issues) and things have been tense in the household for some time now.

Sounds like you have more on your plate than worrying about gift-giving this year. My recommendation is to give your kids and niblings (nieces and nephews) some simple gifts at a minimum. Don’t ruin their Christmas because the rest of your family are treating you like crap. They aren’t to blame, and they shouldn’t be roped into the drama. If anything, avoiding giving them gifts is just more ammo your family can use to turn them against you.

Keep the peace with the innocent bystanders, but I would totally forego gifts for the rest of your family. Save that money and buy yourself something nice instead. (Or save for a divorce lawyer if you need one)

• Epic wants to be Steam’s direct rival, so their storefront has many of the same features, but it’s not as popular within the community. I honestly have no opinion about them.

I have an opinion on them. They’re a terrible company with anti-gamer friendly policies.

I have no problem with competition. It keeps businesses legit and cheap/reasonable for consumers. Heck, GOG does a great job as a companion storefront with Steam.

Epic Games could have tried to be competitive too and provide a similar or better platform for games. But instead, they wanted to corner the market and steal gamers from Steam, so they started pushing exclusivity contracts with publishers. New games would come to only their storefront for the first year, then release to other PC storefronts after that.

Then they started publishing games themselves, which kept them isolated to their storefront indefinitely. Even game series that were released to other consoles and PC platforms suddenly had a sequel that was stuck on Epic Games. I’m looking at you, Alan Wake II.

Or worse, buying up IPs and removing them from other storefronts, like Fall Guys and Rocket League.

They also tried to pull people in by releasing a new game for free every week (even AAA titles!), which was actually the coolest thing they ever did. But it doesn’t excuse all their other anti-gaming practices. If anything, it made me feel dirty using their platform.

I have never given Epic Games a penny of my money and until they decide to be competitive with Steam instead of just stealing the market from them, I will continue to boycott them.

I’m not alone in this mindset. Ubisoft was releasing games exclusively on Epic Games for a while and they’ve just decided that their newest Assassin’s Creed game will release on Steam, due to poor sales on Epic. Also, Alan Wake II had dismal sales because it’s locked behind Epic’s storefront. So a lot of other gamers aren’t willing to put up with Epic Games’ BS and their model is crumbling.

Epic is what happens when a corporation pops up expecting to make money off gamers. Steam is what happens when someone who is a gamer themselves and appreciates the gaming experience creates a store for gamers. I have given thousands of dollars to Steam over the years and have a massive library of their games. I only have a few free games on Epic and I won’t even install their launcher anymore. As a consumer, I vote with my wallet, and Epic needs to get with the program or go away.

I would highly recommend not starting with phone games. 90% of them are designed to be addicting, borderline gambling games, which you can collect or accomplish more things if you just pay them an easy $2 or more… which quickly turns into $20, which then becomes $50+. Before you know it, you’re throwing hundreds of dollars at what is essentially a repetitive unending game, just for the dopamine hit.

I know; my wife is addicted to these games and I see $20 charges to our bank account every few days. Nothing ever changes in her games. She never progresses anywhere and there’s no end to the game, but it gives her a boost on scores or collectibles or rare limited items, so she drops the money. It’s been especially hard to break her of the habit.

I got her to sign up for Steam on her desktop PC and I gifted her a few co-op games, and so we play games online together to give her something fun to do that doesn’t require spending money to progress. She used to be awful at FPS games, but playing with me gave her more confidence and practice, and now she’s pretty decent.

She really loves Deep Rock Galactic, because a lot of the game is just mining and resource-collecting, with only a little alien bug shooting. She plays as the engineer, so she can set up a turret and not have to worry too much about aiming herself. Plus, playing solo means she gets Bosco, the flying droid, to help her with combat and resource-collecting too. If I’m not around to play with her, she has all the assistance she needs to relax and enjoy the game. It was a very good intro to video games for her.

Lemmy is my main social media account. I also switched from Reddit when Spez killed third party apps, and I won’t go back. I use Sync for Lemmy on my phone and tablet. I paid for the lifetime Ultra account, because that’s how much of a “fuck you” I wanted to give Spez. I’ll gladly pay the $100 for an alternative ad-free app than use Reddit’s free app.

I also use Imgur, although it’s been suffering from enshittification ever since Sarah and the team sold it. I can’t even save a post without getting a pop-up asking to subscribe to the user or follow similar content tags. Or downvote without being asked if I want to block the user or related tags. Just let me do the thing and move on! Stop trying to customize my experience! I’m still able to block their ads, thanks to my VPN service, but they built a dedicated ad space at the bottom of the app that I can’t make go away. So a section of the bottom of my Imgur screen is unusable black space. I miss being able to use my full screen to browse images.

I still have Facebook, but only because everyone I know from my childhood until now is there and it’s my main way of staying in touch with people. If I dump Facebook, I’ll have practically no one left in my life, except for my sister, wife, and maybe two friends. If I need social engagement concerning something going on in my life, I’ll post it there. But I don’t use it much.

I have LinkedIn and spent years keeping my profile up to date and super detailed, expecting to need some good references and a solid history of experience and accomplishments. But then I retired at 38 years old and found out I don’t need to work anymore, so it’s just been collecting dust for the last 2 years now. I still get the occasional request to connect from someone offering to help me find a job (I’m a veteran), but I don’t need their assistance. I’m quite happy being retired young.

I have a Discord server I built for my closest friends to stay in touch, but only 2 people regularly interact on it. I subscribed to maybe 30+ other random servers, but I mute pretty much all of them so I’m not inundated with Discord notifications all the time.

I have Twitch, but mostly used it to stream the games I’m playing when I’m bored. I’m happy if I get 1 or 2 views. I do it just for the fun of it, not to build a following or anything.

I have NextDoor, but there are thousands of people in my town who use it regularly, so it’s hard to stay in touch with my “neighbors.” I mostly ignore it unless I’m trying to find suggestions for something local.

I made a Bluesky account last year; got an invite from a friend before it opened up to everyone. But I hardly ever used Twitter in the past. I always felt like it was pointless unless you were a celebrity with tons of followers. So I’m having trouble thinking of ways to use Bluesky now.

I have Instagram, but only because Facebook merged my account with Instagram when they bought it. I’ve never used it, not even to browse others’ content there.

I made a Snapchat account in high school, but never used it. That was over 20 years ago. Back then, Snapchat was just used to share selfies, and I didn’t like taking selfies so I had no use for it. Is Snapchat still a thing?

I had a MySpace account when I was a teenager, but I guess the site got sold sometime in the past decade or two. I kinda forgot about it, and the last time I went to check it out, it was a totally different site and didn’t recognize my login anymore.

I made an account on Pixelfed last year to share pictures, but I don’t really have anything to share right now. I only remembered I had the account because I just now found their app in my phone.

I use Patreon, mostly just to follow a few people I know and support them.

I worked as an IT guy in the military, and we were explicitly banned from using TikTok when it became popular, because it was a Chinese spyware program and they didn’t want it stealing data on US military members. When you installed it, we found that it embedded itself in your phone in a way that was extremely difficult to fully remove, then granted itself full access to your phone and started trickling your data to Chinese servers. It was a massive security vulnerability, which is why President Biden pushed to block TikTok from the US. But the app was so popular, he got a lot of pushback and it never got blocked. It’s still wildly popular, but I’ll never touch that program.

I didn’t even know Netflix had a games department, and I have a Netflix account. I’m assuming this is just another effort on their part for further enshittification of that service. Perhaps it’s finally time I unsubscribed from Netflix.

This doesn’t seem like it would work. Debris falling off the trains, dusty buildup, vibrations, rocks bouncing around the tracks; heck, even just wildlife crossing the tracks. So many things are gonna damage those panels if they’re just lying on the ground between tracks, and solar panels are extremely fragile.

I hope they have some sort of bullet proof glass or something over those panels. Probably going to need a special train to spray water over them to clean regularly, too.

I dunno about Swiss trains, but the tracks behind my house in America leave a thick black film on everything, and it’s very hard to clean by hand. I think they transport coal.

I’ve spent the last year or so playing Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint with a couple friends.

It has an interesting sci-fi/military story, tons of side missions if you’re tired of following the main campaign, and a wide open map to explore if you’re just bored of everything. Plus, there are random missions every day, so if you’re done with the main campaign, you can continue to do missions and enjoy exploring the world even more.

Also, your party doesn’t have to stick together. You can play on the same map, but go off and do your own thing. I have a buddy who can’t follow instructions to save his life. He’s always running around, causing chaos everywhere he goes. We’re trying to stealthily infiltrate a base and he just crash-lands a helicopter into it and runs in guns blazing.

So… we let him run off and grief other bases or enemies while the rest of our party focuses on the mission. Everybody wins, and we all get to play together and have a good time.

EDIT: Same goes for Tom Clancy’s The Division and The Division 2. Unlike Breakpoint, which takes place on an island nation, fighting against a wannabe dictator, The Division takes place in America after a virus plague has wiped out most of civilization, and you’re playing as an elite team that’s trying to restore order to the population.

I’ve been playing The Division with my friends for a few years now. It’s a very fun game series.