cobysev @ cobysev @lemmy.world

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3 yr. ago

I bought a micro PC and use that to stream Plex and other Internet media directly to my TV. I don't connect the TV itself to the Internet and I don't have cable or public access TV. I can block all ads with my micro PC and home network.

American here. My mother divorced my dad 15 years ago and moved to the other side of the country to live by herself in a cabin in the woods. My father just passed away 2 years ago. And my sister moved to the next state over and has her own family to celebrate Christmas with.

My parents are both originally from other states, so I have no extended family within 100 miles of me. My wife is originally from a few states away and is keeping her family at arm's length, so she also has no family here.

It's just my wife and I today (and our dog). We don't have any solid plans for today. Tomorrow, my sister is inviting us over to celebrate Christmas with her family, so our niblings get two Christmases! One of them has a December birthday, so that's 3 days to receive presents this month. Lucky kid.

I always enjoyed Christmas, but as I get older, I feel more awkward about giving and receiving gifts. I always worry about buying gifts for someone if they didn't specifically ask for what I bought. I'm nervous they'll hate it and we'll have to go through the awkward song and dance of, "thanks, I love it!" while arranging to return it the next day.

I've always felt weird about receiving gifts too. My parents spoiled the hell out of me as a kid, but I was unusual in that I actually didn't like being spoiled. If I expressed interest in something, there was a good chance it might be sitting on my bed the next day when I came home from school. I learned not to tell my parents when I liked something because I didn't want them automatically buying it for me.

Christmas meant a living room half-full of presents and a whole morning of unwrapping gifts. Meanwhile, I had friends who were lucky to get A present or two. It just made me feel awful and unfair the more I thought about it.

So now as an adult, I don't care so much about following Christmas tradition. I tell people not to buy gifts for me, but if they insist, I keep an Amazon shopping list with some cheap interests on it so they know what to buy me.

I also ask people directly what they want before I buy them gifts. I don't want to guess what they want, I'd rather just be direct. If they could send me a list to pick from, all the better. But I hate trying to guess what someone will like. It's extremely stressful for me. Although like my parents, I tend to spoil my friends and family with expensive gifts if they'll allow me.

Christmas traditions:

My parents were usually up real late wrapping presents on Christmas Eve, so they didn't want to be bothered first thing in the morning. They had a rule that my sister and I were not allowed to wake them before 9 AM. We could get up and admire the Christmas tree and all the presents "Santa" left, but we do it quietly.

Santa would always move our stockings to the foot of our individual beds. They always had candy, nuts, and an orange tucked into the toe of the stocking (which was later replaced with a chocolate orange when those became a thing). They also had a bunch of small wrapped toys. My parents allowed my sister and I to open those gifts on our own. They were meant as a distraction to keep us silently entertained until 9 AM.

Once my parents were up and had made coffee for themselves, then we would sit around the Christmas tree to open presents. We had a rule that only one present could be opened at a time, which gave everyone the spotlight to enjoy a gift and have it acknowledged by the family. It also taught us patience, so we didn't just spent 5 minutes shredding gifts.

My sister and I would hand out presents. We made sure everyone had a stack of gifts to open next to them, then we'd pick someone and go clockwise around the room, opening one gift at a time.

Afterward, my family would drive us to one of our local family friends and we'd spend the evening hanging out and eating a large Christmas dinner with their family.

I am 41 years old now, and to this day, my mother still hasn't admitted that Santa isn't real. She does this silly little innocent "wink, wink" act where she mails me her gifts, with a few labeled from Santa. She claims every year that Santa still hasn't gotten my address updated, so she accidentally got my gifts from him, which she forwards to me.

She also loves to write punny hints on the tags for each present and have my sister and I guess what they are. For instance, I might get a gift that says, "He was a skater boy..." and it'll be a skateboard. Or "Be careful or you'll get mugged!" and it's a new coffee mug.

My wife grew up in a very poor household, so she was used to not having much for Christmas. Her tradition is to only receive one gift from Santa, which was usually the cheapest gift. Because Santa rewarding rich kids with expensive toys and poor kids with practically nothing was upsetting for the poor kids, so her family made sure to teach them that the most expensive gifts came from family, while Santa only gave out small practical things, like socks or a new notebook, etc.

They also had a tradition where the oldest kids would help wrap presents. They were let in on the "secret" that Santa couldn't do everything himself, so he would ask families to help out. That kept the magic of Santa alive for the older kids who had to write "Santa" on their younger siblings' gifts. It also explained why Santa always seemed to have familiar handwriting.

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.

Hank Hill is a die-hard Republican, fiercely loyal to his grifter of a boss at the propane store. Of course he's going to advocate for the bland, simple taste of meat cooked by propane. He's not adventurous and he definitely wouldn't betray his brand.

According to my Steam Replay, I haven't played Satisfactory since February. What's that long yellow tube in the first image? Is that a T-junction for hyper tubes? I don't remember those; was that an update that dropped this year?

Critics claim the phrase is dismissive of nonreligious service members.

Very true. I was an atheist serving in Iraq during one of the most dangerous times to be there, minus the initial surge into the country. Our base was mortared at least once a week. Over 150 civilians died in a bus bombing the week I showed up. We were working and living in hardened bunkers most of the time. I almost got blown up once, only surviving because I stepped outside to grab a tool. The three members who were inside the small building I was working in weren't so lucky.

I never appealed to a higher power while there. If anything, the devastation and violence I witnessed further convinced me there couldn't be a higher power in control of all this.

"I'm sorry for being a positive influence to you but I'm not sure if you're going to have a good day today."

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.

I considered that, but I apparently have a really lumpy, scrotum-looking scalp. I do NOT look good bald. So... I gotta put up with what's left of my hair as long as I can.

The only reason my hairstyle has changed over the years is because of thinning hair.

I used to have such thick, soft hair, people would joke that I was actually growing fur. Everyone loved to scruff my hair and I got compliments all the time.

But now I'm in my 40s and the family balding curse has caught up with me. My hairline is receding, a bald spot is starting to show, and I needed to change up my style to avoid looking 20+ years older than I actually am. Eventually, I'll just give up and let it do its own thing, but I need to experience my midlife crisis first. 😉

I retired from the US military 3 years ago and I'm glad I left when I did. I absolutely wouldn't put up with this BS if I was still serving, as well as every other BS order that drunken frat boy Nazi gives. One Trump regime was enough.

That said, is this letter legit? The letterhead looks real enough, but there's no printed signature block at the bottom, just his signature. Have military documents changed format in only a few years since I left? Signature blocks are always required. The military is very strict on their protocols, so I'm surprised it's omitted.

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

My introduction to Tim Curry was when he played Rooster in Annie waaay back in 1982.

It's always been wonderful to see him pop up in movies and shows (and video games) over the years, even if he's just doing voice acting. I know it took him a while after his stroke to regain the ability to talk again, but I'm surprised he hasn't done more voice work since 2012.

There wasn't an original visual design to compare to, since the original character was in a book, but in the novel Ready Player One, Art3mis is described as having a hideous birthmark on her face, which she's ashamed of and keeps obscured with her hair.

In the movie, it's a slightly red tint to her skin around one eye. Barely noticeable in most shots.

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 don't know why this Fifth Element comparison is always shared when this specific picture of Musk looks more like Roger from the show Doug.

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 can't vouch for all East Asian countries, but in Japan, it's a matter of formality. When you meet someone, you always refer to them by their family name and an honorific. (Like we would say, "Mr. Smith.")

Once you start to get more friendly and familiar with an individual, you'll move on to more intimate honorifics, until you're allowed to call them by their direct first name, no honorifics. That's a sign that you're very close with someone.

It allows people to refer to you without being too direct and familiar until you've gotten to know them well. And you can tell what relationship two people have by what names they use to call each other. Heck, really close friends will probably make up nicknames for each other too.

When I was in the US military, it was kind of the same mentality. Everyone was referred to by rank and last name only. As you got to know someone of the same rank or lower than yours, you could refer to them by last name alone, no rank required. But only the closest of friends would refer to each other by first name.

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.