Rob T Firefly

the nopoo conspiracy,

Wait, what the f…

that shampoo manufacturers

…oh, thank goodness.

I listen to music a lot, and I also just use VLC. I have a well-sorted media collection and just drag whatever files/folders I want into VLC.

You either die Old Mozilla or you live to see yourself become Current Mozilla.

While I respect Marc Maron’s work, why does he care what I’m using?

I was named after my dad while my first sister born after me was named after my mom. (My parents would not have won any points for originality.)

If I’d been assigned female at birth I would probably have been named after my mom instead, and given the name my sister ended up with rather than just the feminine version of my present name.

As it stands I’m a cis man, but if I suddenly needed to change to a woman’s name for some reason my name has a common feminine variant I’d use.

At least give them to the nations which aren’t currently trying to ignore and undo the last 100 years of medicine, physics, and biology. (Sorry, United States.)

Thanks for your kind words! I’m happy to help.

Hi! I’m just one guy on the radio, there may be others.

The common “why doesn’t someone just make a ‘dumb’ TV for people who don’t want this crap?” question has an easy answer. Dumb TVs do exist, they’re called “commercial monitors” or “commercial displays” and just show the audiovisual signal given to them by whatever else you hook up, in the manner of old TVs before additional apps or spyware were a thing. As implied by the name, stores and other businesses use them to show what they want without the added guff of the apps and ads they wouldn’t be able to fully control.

Important detail: commercial displays tend to be fuckoff expensive compared to smart TVs of comparable size, quality, and feature set.

“Hey,” you may be thinking, “how do they get away with charging so big a premium for an appliance with fewer features?” And you wouldn’t be out of line to think that. However, what’s going on is more insidious.

The higher price of a “dumb” TV is more correctly thought of as the real price of the appliance. The reason you pay so much less for a comparable “smart” TV is because the companies behind all the apps and spyware, the preinstalled shovelware apps which get you interested to subscribe to their services (Netflix, Hulu, Prime, etc.) and/or send you advertisements, as well as the spyware companies who profit from all the data about you that gets phoned home as you use the thing, pay the hardware manufacturers to put their shit software onto the device at the factory. That money made by the manufacturer from the shit companies goes, at least partially, toward lowering the price of the TV to entice you to pick it up at the store instead of a competitor’s TV.

Look at that big chunk of money you save buying a smart TV over a comparable dumb display, and consider that the shit companies are paying the manufacturer that amount or more for the opportunity to monetize you and your household.

Then, if you have the wherewithal to pay what is now easily considered a ridiculous amount more for an appliance that isn’t part of a system meant to take permanent advantage of you, you can just buy the commercial display instead. Alternatively, you can find clever technological ways to buy the cheaper “smart” one but counteract the ways in which it monetizes you, whether technical ways like jailbreaking or installing alternative OSes (some very early-stage efforts to get this sort of thing going are out there, but still very scattershot compared to the scene for doing so to smartphones) or simpler methods like just never letting the thing onto the Internet no matter how much it begs or enshittifies your user experience (a strategy which will stop working once it becomes cheap enough for the shit companies to just include their own connectivity hardware in the device which uses its own wireless and doesn’t need your network.)

It’s a continuing battle.

It was a Geico ad which took advantage of it being the era with all those competing collect-call services everyone knew about.

I knew someone who used Unicode glyphs to name their wifi the following string: ┓┏ 凵 =╱⊿┌┬┐

It was a reference to a Doctor Who episode in which people were getting zapped by the monster of the week after connecting to a mysterious alien wifi network.

The minuscule touchpad sucked on that netbook, making it far quicker and easier to type than smush my finger around while clicking awkwardly-placed buttons.

Back in the early 2010s I was sitting on a long train ride, and opened my hacker-sticker-covered netbook and started doing some terminal stuff in a console window; nothing particularly remarkable or exciting-looking, just navigating directories and moving some files around. An older lady sitting next to me glanced over, her eyes got wide, and she got up and moved to a seat further away from me.

I still think about that moment a lot.

Trust that these people would 100% be removing the curb cuts from every sidewalk if they thought they could get away with it.

There’s still IRC. Discord has always just been IRC with additional media embeds and an outer layer of shiny Nerf controls for babies.

I click the arrows.

That may be the first good thing that author did.

That was pretty much the trajectory of Second Life, as I recall.

Speaking as a white person of mostly Italian-American ancestry in my late 40s from New York, USA.

My mother and father were always called “Mom” and “Dad.” They divorced, my dad remarried first, and my stepmother has always been called by her first name; my sister and I were never asked to call her “Mom,” and it would have been very weird for anyone to ask us to do so when we already had a mom who wasn’t her. When my mother remarried, he was an immigrant from a Spanish-speaking country and we briefly fell into calling our stepfather “Papi” which is Spanish for “Dad.” That was a little weird, though, and we went back to using his first name.

The cliche’ you mention from Western TV and films of a child calling a mother or father by their first name is often a standard joke about the kid acting rebellious and rejecting their parents’ authority, and usually is depicted as a brief goofy phase which passes by the end of the episode, and not meant to depict a realistic ongoing relationship between parent and child. Alternatively, it could be illustrating a more nontraditional “hippie” family culture as noted by some others in these replies.

As for uncles and aunts, calling them “Uncle (name)” or “Aunt/Auntie (name)” is generally the norm in many Western cultures. I generally call my own “Uncle/Aunt (name).” However, it does very much vary.

Sometimes the formal “Aunt/Uncle” address is more of a thing for children, and when one reaches adulthood they might drop the “uncle” or “aunt” title and just use first names as their relationship transitions from one between a child and adult to a more equal dynamic between adults.

In some families the dynamic may even be different for individual aunts or uncles depending on how close the family relationship is; if it’s a family member who lives nearby and you see all the time and have a very close personal relationship with, or if it’s a distant relative you may only meet in person and communicate with rarely over the course of years, one may find the individual relationship (and, consequently, the form of address) develops differently with that family member. I call my close aunts and uncles who are regular presences in my life “Aunt/Uncle (name),” but if I encountered a distant relative from far away who I haven’t seen or spoken with in 30 years I’d probably just use their first name.

Also, in some families “Uncle” or “Aunt/Auntie” can be a form of respectful address for older adults even if they are not family relations. In my childhood some of my mother’s closest friends who were regular presences in our lives were addressed as “Aunt/Uncle (name)” despite there being no blood relations between us, though when I grew up the “Uncle/Aunt” title was dropped and we just call them by their names as our adult-to-adult friendship continued. This was not the case on my father’s side of the family, where adult friends were always just called by their first names.

Particular mention must be made of the use of the terms “Uncle/Unc” or “Aunt/Auntie” among and toward elder members of the Black community with which one is not related. It is a very delicate issue, and as a white person I don’t use it and don’t claim any authority to speak on the subject, but I think it’s important to learn more about. Some more info can be found starting here and here, but it should be discussed with members of that community if you wish to know more.