• 14 Posts
  • 142 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • I am American, and I have always loved my country. Until now, I’ve never been ashamed to call myself patriotic. My thought has always been than there will always be uninformed, uneducated assholes that vote against their own self-interests and the interests of their own country.

    This election is different, though. We knew exactly what we were getting if we re-elected Trump. We responded by not only electing him in a landslide election, but handing the House and the Senate over to the Republicans, too. It was a clear message. America is not a nation of mostly good people with a few vocal “bad apples.” We are a nation of hateful, scared bigots, and we proved it in a big way.

    This was a turning point in American history, and the majority of us sent a clear message to their fellow citizens and to the world. America is not a nation of mostly good people being overshadowed by a media that covers the loudest assholes in the room. America is a nation of people who by a majority support exactly what the “crazy” Republicans are saying. I would feel better if Trump lost the popular vote but won the electoral vote, but that’s not what happened.

    This isn’t an election where I’ve lost only lost faith in the democratic process or my fellow citizens, although both are true. This is an election where I’ve lost faith in my country as a whole. I have never been proudly Republican or proudly Democrat, but I’ve always been proudly American. Now I’m just… sad. I don’t expect I’ll see a day any time soon where I can honestly say I’m proud of my country. The best I can do is retreat into my own personal bubble, live my life, and watch the world burn around me until the flames consume everything I care about.




  • I think at least for me, you really nailed it when you said that politicians are like celebrities to a lot of people. I personally have just never had any interest in celebrities. Music is a big thing for me, but if I had the opportunity to go meet one of my favorite artists, I wouldn’t. What am I going to do, say “hey, I really like your music,” and that’s the end of it? There’s no point. I enjoy the art that they make, but meeting them briefly in-person isn’t going to change anything for them or for me. It’d be a better use of my time to stay home and do just about anything else, maybe even stay home and listen to one of their albums.

    Politicians are the same. I’m not buying their album, I’m voting for them. They don’t produce an entertainment product, but they produce a change in my country (be it good or bad) that directly affects me. It still doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference to me or to them if I meet them in-person or not. I can respect what they they do professionally without having a desire to shake hands.





  • The biggest difference I’ve noticed is that while Reddit may have a lot of large active communities, I would rarely get a quality response if I posted a question or a discussion topic.

    Here, I can post to a community that hasn’t had a new post in a few days, and within an hour I have several people offering help or discussion.

    Reddit is far more active, but Lemmy users are far more helpful.




  • I use Jellyfin heavily, and it’s a fantastic project, but I really wish they would address the issues with transcoding, specifically the ability to force it on.

    My library contains a decent amount of HDR (lots of DV) content. On my TVs (using Nvidia Shield), it will direct play the DV content, resulting in a green picture. If I turn on burned-in subtitles or drop the bitrate and FORCE it to transcode, it’s looks perfect. I’ve resorted to just setting a low bitrate on clients so it always transcodes.

    I’m really hoping a future version gives us the ability to set more fine-grained transcoding settings per-client. Even the ability to disable direct-play completely would be fantastic.





  • I really believe that in order to subscribe to the SovCit bullshit, you have to be mentally challenged to some degree. None of these idiots have ever won a court case or a civil suit against a bank. Even if everything they said was true, it’s a blantly obvious fact that our legal system doesn’t agree.

    Suspend disbelief for a moment and give them the benefit of the doubt. They’re still clinging to beliefs that have been proven time and again not to work with our modern legal and financial systems. Nobody with a properly-functioning brain could possibly still think any of this is a good idea.


  • I was born in the 1980s. I remember growing up, I always had the impression that by this time in the 21st century, we’d have figured out some way to break the established laws of physics. Maybe it was because of watching so much sci-fi, but I feel like I’m not alone in this. The media seemed to reflect the same line of thinking. “Back to the Future 2” with its hoverboards and flying cars is now set several years in the past.

    Be it anti-gravity, interstellar travel, teleportation, whatever, I always kind of assumed that by now, we’d at least have a working theory of how we might implement it in the next few decades. I think a lot of that has to do with the start of the “information age.” Computers and the way they could connect us were so revolutionary, it seemed like “magic” to the layperson. More “magic” would only be a few years away, right? If we could fit all this power into a box that sits on your desk, then it wasn’t beyond the scope of reason to think that anything was possible; it’d just take a few more years for us to figure it out, then we’d be planning the first NASA mission to another solar system.

    What I never would have predicted is just how rapidly computer technology would advance. We now have supercomputers in our pockets, powered by CPUs that are well into the realm of nanotechnology and are now starting to run into limitations imposed by quantum physics. As a technological society, we’ve probably progressed farther than I would have ever imagined, just not in the way I expected.