https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

You’re probably the only person in the world who now views Brazil as a kind of Christmas movie

Brazil pops up in my Plex feed under the “Christmas” category. I just recently added it to my Plex library, but I still haven’t seen it. I guess I need to watch it today.

■■■ Proton ■■■■■■■ donated ■■■■ to ■■■■ Trump.

Did they? I know one of their CEOs was pro-Trump, but the organization as a whole spoke out against having any political affiliation. Do you have a source for their donation to Trump?

Every career I was interested in as a child tied into interests and hobbies of mine. I read thousands of books throughout my childhood, so I wanted to become an author. I loved drawing, so I considered becoming an illustrator. I had been singing in choirs since the 3rd grade (and singing at home while my mother practiced piano before that), so I started studying music theory and composition.

During my teen years in the late '90s, the Internet took off and computer technology became all the rage. A family friend who had just graduated high school decided to forego college because he could get an immediate $75K job as an IT technician. A few years later, he was offered a $300K job from another company, because proficient computer technicians were desperately needed in every business and very few people really understood the technology back then.

I was fascinated with the technology and its future applications and started studying computers myself. I read A+ certification books, tore apart and reassembled the family PC, watched training VHS tapes on how to do administrative functions within the Windows OS, etc. I even dabbled in a bit of programming (C++, BASIC, etc.)

Then came my senior year of high school. Nobody had ever spoken to me about college. I had no idea what college was, except that it was the next school after high school. I assumed I’d just pick a college and start attending; I didn’t know there was an application process, I didn’t know that you had to pick a degree to major in, I didn’t know you had to pay for it yourself. Whomever was supposed to educate me about college completely missed me. My parents expected school to guide me, and my school expected parents to guide their own children.

So here I was, my last year of high school, and I had done absolutely zero research into colleges. But then my family went to visit an uncle of mine whom I hadn’t seen since I was a kid and he became really interested in my future career plans. When I told him I still didn’t have a plan, he suggested the US Air Force. Turns out, he served for 30 years and loved every minute of it. They forced him to retire at 30 years, otherwise he would’ve stayed even longer.

He told me about all the incredible benefits; how you get free college education during your career training, free food, free housing, free medical and dental, free travel all over the world… and they pay you to do it all! Plus, you could retire as soon as 20 years into the service and collect a pension and benefits for life. It sounded too good to be true.

So as soon as I went home, my mother and I went to talk to a recruiter and I signed up. During the application process, I requested an IT job, which they said was a highly requested field at the time, due to the future career benefits when people leave the service.

I ended up spending 20 years serving as an IT administrator, traveling all over the globe and having many adventures and cultural experiences. Made friends all over the world and learned so much about our planet and the wonderful people who inhabit it. It really opened my eyes to the world. American politics seemed so small once I had lived abroad for a few years.

I qualified for retirement in 2022, being grandfathered into the military’s old pension program that they had replaced in 2015 with a 401k-type program. I retired at only 38 years old. And I had gotten banged up enough during my service that I qualified for 100% disability through the VA, which gave me lifetime free medical and dental care, along with a monthly medical paycheck twice as big as my pension. With all that combined, I didn’t really need to work anymore, so now I’m enjoying the quiet retired life, living in my former childhood home out in the countryside.

I’m glad I left the service when I did. I was still there for the first Trump presidency and it was a dark time for us. Things turned around during Biden’s term and I retired then. Since Trump came back though, the military has changed a lot, and not for the best. I’m glad I served when I did, but I absolutely wouldn’t serve now. Not with a fascist Commander in Chief running the show and installing his unqualified puppets in key leadership positions. Fuck that. I’d probably end up in jail before my service ended.

Now that I’m out, I could easily use my IT experience and knowledge to find another job and double my income, but I feel much happier not being tied to a job. The military was a bit intense, taking priority over my personal life for 20 years. And you can’t just quit. You sign up for 4-6 years of service at a time and you’re stuck in that contract until it ends. The easiest way to get out of it is to break the law and go to jail, which is not ideal, so you just have to put up with being in the military until your contract expires. And there were definitely days I wished I could quit.

It’s nice to be able to set my own schedule now. I sleep when I want to, take up whatever projects or hobbies I want, and basically plan my days for myself. I don’t really want to be tied to another career for another 20+ years, so as long as I’m making enough passive income to survive on my own comfortably, I’m just gonna stay retired.

There’s a pretty big difference between criticizing and harassing.

I’ve never used Instagram, Snapchat, or TikTok. I’m trying to get away from Facebook currently. I’ve successfully dumped Twitter, which I hardly used anyway. I only use YouTube because I can still block all ads, but if they ever force ads into my videos, I’ll drop it in an instant.

I’ve never cared for social media except as a way to stay in touch with friends and family, and maybe a way to meet new friends. But modern social media is just garbage content pumped into your feed constantly for clicks and reacts.

The only reason I haven’t let go of Facebook is because almost everyone I know is still there. If I dump it, I lose contact with 90% of my social group. I don’t really use Facebook anymore though, except to contact people.

EDIT: On a related note, I don’t believe children should have electronic devices. Maybe around 10 years old, they should be allowed to carry a locked down phone or something, so their parents can reach them, but they can’t browse the Internet or send photos to people, etc.

It was around 2010 or so when I first saw a friend hand their iPad to their 1-yr old to keep them distracted. That was a $600 device! Which was a lot of money for a personal electronic device back then.

As an IT professional who had to fix electronic devices all the time, I mentioned to my friend that a child probably shouldn’t have unsupervised access to an iPad, and they told me that’s why it has a thick padded case; a lesson they learned when their first iPad got cracked by the child. So the baby broke a $600 iPad and they bought another and handed it back to the kid?! Sheesh…

I always attempt to play a game the way the developers intended the first time through. If I decide to give it another playthrough and I don’t want to put up with the extra grindy parts of the game, I’ll look for legitimate cheats to help me fast-forward through the rough parts.

I mean “legitimate” as in, cheats the developers put in the game, not outside hacks or mods that alter the game itself. I’m not big on mods in general, and I don’t usually use cheats, but I will in rare situations.

Back in the day, Warcraft III had cheats that let you power through each level with stuff like infinite resources, invulnerability, or just letting you automatically complete a level. I used those on recurring playthroughs because each level could easily take 30 mins to an hour to beat, and it was very grindy.

In Satisfactory, there’s a cheat where you can add a single stack of a resource into the back of a factory cart, then deconstruct the cart. You’ll get all the resources of the factory cart in your inventory, plus double the resource you put into the cart.

Do this dozens of times and you can exponentially grow resources without having to wait on factories to make them. I’m pretty sure the developers are aware of this “glitch” because it’s never been patched out, even after a bunch of people started pointing it out on official Satisfactory forums.

I played hundreds of hours of the game and made some pretty massive continent-stretching factories. Upon building a new world, I started to implement this “strategy” to hurry up and acquire rare resources so I could get factories off the ground. Saved me from hundreds of hours of gameplay, waiting on production lines to make basic resources into more advanced resources so I could get to the next step.

A buddy of mine asked to be part of my Steam Family so he could have access to my 4,000+ game library. He regularly streams games online and figured it’d save him tons of money buying games to play.

But he’s also completed all achievements on almost every game he’s played on console and uses some website to automatically complete all the achievements for his Steam games, so he doesn’t need to redo them on PC.

The thing about Steam Family is… if someone’s caught cheating and earns a vac ban, the owner of the family account receives the ban, not the individual player. I told him I was worried that cheating of any kind might affect my immaculate record and/or library of games and he decided to just buy his own games instead of risking my account. Good friend; he didn’t even argue. I was still willing to let him have access as long as he was careful, but he chose another route.

[…] we have so many things wrong PlanetSide that it makes the stars almost irrelevant.

Yeah, this has been my fear lately. As a kid in the '80s/'90s, I had high hopes for humanity. I loved space travel stories; read so many science fiction books, watched Star Trek/Star Wars, loved space films of all genres…

But lately, I’ll be happy if we ever make it to Mars. The one person who had a dedicated mission to get a man on Mars turned out to be a self-destructing billionaire sociopath who seems to have abandoned that dream for political meddling aspirations instead.

If we can get capitalism out of the way, humanity might have a chance at bouncing back. But as long as a few powerful elites maintain control over society, our hopes and dreams will forever be redirected toward financial gains until the collapse of society.

On the plus side, even Rome, the most stable and advanced civilization outside of our own, eventually collapsed. Humanity survived and eventually went on to thrive once again, doing even better this time. By the historical timeline of the birth and death of civilizations, America is long overdue for a collapse. Maybe we’re about to see a global change that will reset our predicament and give us another chance to succeed. If we can learn from our past.

I just wish I could see how life goes on without me. How our world changes in the future beyond my limited time on this planet.

I think about people who lived hundreds of years ago. How they couldn’t even imagine the scientific and technological advancements that we have. And then I think about hundreds of years into the future. What changes will be so extreme and advanced that I can’t even imagine it today?

I wish there was some way for me to glimpse into that future and see where society is heading. Will we expand out to the stars? Will we be extinct long before we leave this planet? What’s the ultimate future for humanity? These are questions I want to know, but will never get a chance to find out, unless everyone but me dies out in the next 30-40 years. And I highly doubt that’s gonna happen.

I’m not. I browse by “All” and this was at the top of my feed when I commented. I follow a lot of games news, so I poked my head in to check it out. And at the time, there were no other comments here, so I left my 2 cents.

Had I noticed this was a dedicated Factorio community, I probably would’ve kept my experience to myself. I should’ve known a community dedicated to this game would gang up on me for not heaping praise on it. My apologies.

I keep a wishlist of things I want/need with their regular prices marked. On Black Friday, I check that list to see if anything got discounted. More than likely, nothing is, because discounted products are usually cheaper variants, or already-expensive items marked up in advance, then dropped to regular price for Black Friday.

Nothing on my list was discounted this year. So I bought some games through the Steam Black Friday sale and called it a day.

I’m still pissed that they won’t discount their game. They’re very adamant that they set an appropriate price and they refuse to take part in game sales. Personally, I’ve played their game and I didn’t feel it’s worth the price tag.

Joke’s on them, though. I got a Steam key in a game bundle through a reseller site. Spent like $10 for a dozen games and Factorio was one of them.

Meh, it’s a deal to get more subscribers. I’m not mad at them for not extending it to all users. It is a little shady that they didn’t make it clear it’s for new subscribers, though. If that’s their target audience, they should make it a little more apparent.

The way I was taught growing up, brackets are [these]. Parenthesis are (these).

Yes, technically the latter are also brackets. But they can also be called parenthesis, whereas the former is exclusively a bracket. So we were taught to call them separate words to differentiate while doing equations.

I have a Google phone, which has YouTube embedded on it. I can’t remove it. I had to disable it, then tell my phone to redirect all YouTube links to my browser. Now I can block ads again!

My uncle retired from the US Air Force in the '90s and got full medical and dental benefits for life for himself and his civilian wife, simply because he made it to retirement.

I retired from the US Air Force in 2022 and I had to qualify for 100% disability through the VA before they gave me the same deal. And that was only for me; my wife had to serve and get her own 100% disability rating to also qualify for those benefits.

Crazy how much things can change in 30 years.

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The first Mad Max movie is literally just a cop (Max) fighting against a deadly biker gang in a small town. The second movie didn’t say anything about an apocalypse, it was just set in a desert wasteland.

It was the American (maybe international?) version of Mad Max 2 that added a prologue about an apocalyptic world event.

So yeah, in the original Australian version, this may just be some lawless hicks surviving in the Australian desert, while the rest of the world continues on like normal.

As a kid in the '80s/'90s, my hair looked exactly like Will’s from Stranger Things. When my peers pressured me to change my hairstyle in 7th grade, I tried a bowl cut. It was the same, just the bottom half was shaved. Looked super ugly.

In 8th grade, I tried a buzz cut, which seemed to be pretty popular with my peers. A little longer on top, tight on the sides, tapered in back. Back then, I think I asked barbers to cut it as a #4 on top, #2 on the sides. It was extremely low maintenance; I could just shower and towel dry and my hair was immediately dry and perfect for the day. My hair was so extremely thick and soft, people joked that I had fur instead of hair. I had a lot of comments that touching my head was like petting a puppy, or a bear pelt. My hair also grows straight out of my scalp, so if I took too long to get a haircut, I started getting a bit of a mini-'fro.

Then I joined the US military at 18 and got the buzz cut professionally trimmed every couple weeks. My hair grows extremely fast and we had military hair regulations that had to be maintained, so I constantly needed to touch it up. I changed my cut to a #2 on top, #1 on the sides, with a little extra length in the front. Of course, still tapered in the back. The military doesn’t allow block cuts, you have to taper the ends.

I spent 13 years with a buzz cut in the military. My wife spent most of those years begging me to grow my hair out, but I kept telling her I can’t; military regs prevent me from having long hair. Finally, she showed me a picture of Captain America from the Avengers movie. Claimed he was technically military, but he had longer hair styled in a way that was still within regs. So I agreed to grow out my hair like Captain America.

Unfortunately, I had started balding a bit in my late 20s. My hair was getting thinner and my hairline was receding. I didn’t have enough hair in the front to style it like Captain America’s, so I combed the front back and over to a side, giving a bit more lift in the front with what thinning hair I had left. I grew out all the hair on top of my head and parted it to one side. On the short side, I buzzed it right up to the part, then kept the sides buzzed short with a taper in the back. I would tell barbers to buzz with a #1 up to the part, then go “skin” on the sides and back, tapered on the back.

It worked fine for the last 7 years of my military service. Then I retired and spent nearly 3 years struggling to figure out a civilian haircut. I had spent so long adhering to military regulations that every time my hair got a little shaggy, I’d panic and get a military haircut again. But I also didn’t want people to immediately look at me as a military guy when they met me. Short hair made me look much older, and as I was just starting my 40s, looking older is not what I wanted anymore.

Finally, I just shaved my head. A complete reset on my hair. I figured, if I’m completely bald, I’m going to have to go through an awkward regrowth period, so I’ll be forced to deal with it instead of being able to fix it on a whim. I was fully retired after my military service, so I didn’t have to worry about looking presentable for anyone. I basically just holed myself up at home; no one saw my bald head except my wife. I should note that I have a wrinkly scalp that looks like a scrotum, so the bald look is really ugly on me.

After nearly 6 months of letting it grow wild, I finally got a trim. I parted my hair to one side and cleaned up around my neck and ears, but left the rest. My hair is still growing straight out of my scalp, so I need a little hair product to comb it down and hold it, but otherwise, it’s been holding a side part pretty well.

I also grew out a beard for about the past 4 months. When I retired a few years ago, my chin had a white spot to one side, and in the 3+ years since then, it’s spread to my whole chin. So my beard is salt-and-pepper with a solidly white chin now. I don’t really care for the beard, but my wife likes it and I get compliments on it from others, so I keep it trimmed neat and maybe an inch long. It definitely helps to hide the fact I was former military, since we couldn’t grow beards while serving. And it adds a unique character to my look.

And they still put the ingredient on haphazardly.

Half the time I need to manually rebuild my burgers because the ingredients are slapped together like they’re assembling a burger from across the room. You’d think this “burger” would be easy to get right.