cobysev @ cobysev @lemmy.world

Posts

63

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543

Joined

2 yr. ago

We used these ToughBooks on deployments in the US military about 20 years ago. One of the guys in my unit tested it by slowly driving a Humvee over it. It still worked. Screen was a little cracked, though.

I've lived too much of my life as male. I think it'd be impossible to erase or dissociate from +30yrs of me. Hell, I'm not sure I'll ever be able to stop seeing myself as a man.

I totally get this. As a 40-yr old with extremely masculine features, there's no way I could ever successfully transition. Maybe if transitioning was a thing back when I was like 12-14 years old, I might've had a chance. But I've been male for so long, and even more masculine in appearance than most men I know, so I think it's only something I can fantasize about at this point.

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.

When I was stationed in Germany with the US military in 2010, I wrecked my car in a blizzard. It was totaled; I couldn't drive it anymore and I needed to get to work every day, so I dropped cash on a used 2006 Mazda 3. It was a 5-speed manual and was in immaculate condition. The former owner had detailed journal entries and receipts for every bit of maintenance they'd ever done. They were only selling it because they had more cars than they needed at the time and they needed some quick cash.

Fast forward to 2020... I was stationed in Nebraska and my Mazda 3 was finally showing its age. I had driven it across most of Europe and half of the US, and its mileage was approaching 200K. I was in the market for a new car.

I found myself "deployed" to South Carolina for 4 months during the pandemic, and while I was there, my wife called me up and asked if I wanted her to buy a new car for me. Apparently, some married friends of hers bought a brand-new 6-speed 2017 Mazda 3 Touring Edition as their daily driver to college classes. But their entry to college was delayed a few years, then the pandemic hit and all classes moved online. So it was just cluttering up their garage. They had 5 cars and hardly drove any of them, so they decided to sell 4 of them during the pandemic.

The 2017 Mazda 3 had only 7,000 miles on it. And they sold it to me for $17K cash. It was a helluva deal! I sold my 2006 Mazda 3 to a coworker and my wife bought the 2017 version for me. And I've been driving it since. It's way nicer than my older version, and the previous owners had even paid for some upgrades to the base car.

I'm retired now, since 2022, and I don't need to drive as much as I used to, but I always take my 2017 Mazda 3 when I leave the house. I enjoy cruising around in that car. It's not a super fancy luxury car, but it's the nicest car I've ever owned. I'm hoping I can get a solid decade or more out of this car before I need another one.

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

I'm fine with apps, as long as I'm not drowning in them for redundant services; i.e. I installed a bunch of Lemmy apps while I was trying it out, but now that I've settled on one, I removed all the others. I try to curate my apps every now and then and keep the clutter at a minimum, or at least remove any that I'm not regularly using.

YouTube is one app I will not use, though. Using Firefox with uBlock Origin, I can prevent it from advertising to me. But I can't stop ads in their app. So I've disabled their app (can't remove it, as I currently have a Google phone) and I forwarded all YouTube links to Firefox.

Why are there so many articles that drop the second Y from his name? It's Zelenskyy. I haven't seen an article on Lemmy in the past couple weeks that spelled his name right.

I have absolutely no idea what it's about, but it's only $2 (90% off) and I'm a sucker for steep deals, so I couldn't pass it up.

• Final Fantasy VII Rebirth
• Expeditions: A MudRunner Game
• Fear Effect Sedna
• Grim Dawn
• Keep Taking and Nobody Explodes
• RIDE 5
• REKA
• Bomb Rush Cyberfunk
• Old World
• Atlas Fallen: Reign of Sand
• Crime Boss: Rockay City
• Moonstone Island
• Inkulinati
• Monster Prom 3: Monster Roadtrip
• Venba

And I gifted Freedom Planet 2 to a friend.

The Winter Sale isn't over until January 2nd, so I might buy some more games before it ends. Problem is, I own most of the games on the Steam front page, so finding new and interesting games is getting difficult.

My numbers seem low compared to a lot of people here, but I also own almost 4,000 games on Steam, so I don't spend tons of time on a single game.

Also, here are my stats for 2024:

For the most part, I just avoid topics I know will upset her, and I try to keep the conversation on topics I know she appreciates. It's just peacekeeping at this point. I feel like I lost her long ago and all I can do is try to keep her happy now. It's rough because I lost my father earlier this year and all I have left is my mother and sister, but they're both deeply conservative people and shut down any topics they're uncomfortable with instead of having open, honest discussion.

There are the occasional fights when I'm trying to relay something important and my mother won't listen. Like the fact that I'm fully retired as of 38 years old, only because I'm a 100% disabled veteran will full medical/dental benefits for life. But Trump plans to eliminate the VA benefits program and privatize our hospitals. Which means I won't be able to afford to live anymore and I'll need to find a job. This severely affects my life, but my mom doesn't believe it will happen and she doesn't want to discuss it further. I basically need to become homeless and destitute before she'll believe me, and even then she'll probably have an excuse about how this is thanks to some obscure program Biden set up in the past.

Outside of my mother (and sister), though, I'm uncompromising. If I meet someone like my mother, I do my best to talk with them and have a meaningful conversation. If they won't allow it, then I'm done with that person. I won't keep people like that in my life; having to deal my mother is stressful enough.

You may ask why I keep my mother and sister in my life at all. The truth is, I grew up in a very loving, caring family and I've always gotten along with my family members well. I love them all and they love me too. I'm not going to let political discourse destroy my family, and I'll still be here to help them when political decisions affect their lives. My sister even told me she'll gladly take in my wife and I if we do end up homeless due to some policy change.

It's just frustrating that I feel like I need to wear a mask in front of my mother and sister now. I'm not as open with them as I used to be and it eats away at me because I care for them so much.

My mother was one of the most intelligent people I know; she had a genius-level IQ and always seemed to know how to handle any situation with grace and efficiency. She was the breadwinner in our family, making much more than my dad and supporting our family well. She was my role model growing up, and thanks to her, I prefer strong, independent, intellectual women in my life.

In her old age though, she's moved in next to her favorite brother whom she idolizes, a hero back in his day. (Firemen chief who's always been aggressively involved in his community and can fix/build anything.) Unfortunately, he's extremely pro-Trump and has convinced my mother that anything progressive is evil and "the way things used to be" is far superior to any "modern crap."

My mother now argues vehemently against any programs that help her out in old age, she attacks progressive politicians and projects, and she immediately shuts down conversation if I mention anything about politics, even just stating neutral facts like "Trump won the presidency." I just can't get through to her anymore.

On top of that, she doesn't handle controversy well anymore. My wife and I had one minor disagreement in front of her (not even raised voices, more or less an argument, just working through a misunderstanding) and she practically blew up at both of us, claiming we put her in an uncomfortable spot and she didn't want to be stuck listening to us "fight." Which prevented us from resolving our disagreement in a healthy manner and led to my wife and I having an actual fight later.

I've learned to be happy and cheerful around my mother and never bring anything decisive to her. Let her enjoy her final days in ignorant bliss. It hurts because I can't be myself around her. I can't have difficult discussions with her anymore and I can't go to her with my own problems. She's no longer the voice of logic and reason. There's nothing wrong with her cognitively; she's still all there in the head. She's just so rooted in her conservative belief structure that she won't accept me unless I'm the "perfect son." And that sucks.

Um. I was born in 1984 and I just turned 40 this year, thank you.

Nope, this is loss.

I'm too anal about cleanliness and organization, my house typically doesn't have a drawer like this. My favorite mantra in the home, which my chronically disorganized wife is tired of hearing me repeat, is "a place for everything and everything in its place."

However. I inherited my childhood home when my dad passed away this year (my wife and I had already been living here for a few years, in a separate apartment in the house) and my dad had a junk drawer like this. As a matter of fact, my dad was extremely messy and almost every drawer in his house looks like this. It's probably the reason I'm so anal about organization in my life; having to grow up in a constantly messy home.

Growing up in this house, though, my family always had 2 drawers side-by-side in the kitchen which were always filled with random junk. They're still here. I haven't gotten to them yet. So yes, my current house has a couple junk drawers. But if I have my way, they will be organized and cleared out. If there's going to be any messy containers filled with miscellaneous junk in the house, it'll be boxes stored in the garage or basement - not a random drawer.

When my parents first moved in to my childhood home in the mid-'80s, the 6-acre property was wide-open fields next to plowed farm land, with a handful of freshly planted trees scattered around the property. I loved to run and play across all the open land as a child.

When I was really young, my dad decided to let sections of our 6-acre plot of land go back to nature, because he didn't have the time nor energy to care for it all.

When I was old enough to use our riding mower by myself, (around 10 years old) I made it a personal goal to reclaim some of the land. Which got me in trouble every time my dad caught me mowing down the tall grass. But apparently, my mother was also upset about the lost lawn. When my dad wasn't home, she would go out and trim back the overgrowth so we had some semblance of lawn around the house.

When I turned 18, I joined the military and left home. About a decade into my service, my parents divorced and my mom moved out. When I retired from the service after 20 years served, my wife and I moved back in with my dad.

It turns out that my dad spent the past decade ignoring large chunks of the lawn. I came home to a literal forest on the property, where trimmed lawn and open grassy fields used to be. My dad was old and suffering from Parkinson's Disease, so he wasn't able to mow much anymore and pretty much gave up on the lawn. I did my best to keep it trim around the house, then I started cutting back overgrowth and the new trees forming in the yard.

It's been almost 3 years since I moved back in. My dad passed away almost a year ago and I inherited my childhood home from him. I'm still spending my summers cutting back overgrowth and trimming/removing trees. This will probably take me another decade by myself to reclaim the land, but I intend to turn it back into a beautifully manicured property instead of the tangled, overgrown nightmare my dad left it to become.

I started 30 years ago on this side project and I'm still going today.

Whenever I get this, I open the settings for uBlock Origin (click the gear icon in the Firefox extension) and manually update everything in the filter lists. Just click the clock symbol at the end of each item and it'll spin for a minute, then turn green.

After that, I completely refresh my YouTube page (Ctrl+F5 on PC; close tab and open a new tab on mobile) and it will load videos again.

Google and uBlock Origin are in an arms race, trying to one-up one another. Once you get a notice from YouTube, usually uBlock Origin has a fix for it within the day.

Tech notes for those interested: When you browse to a webpage, it stores a copy of the site on your PC, so if you go back to the site later or hit refresh on the page, it will load the local files instead of downloading the whole page from scratch again.

But if you want to force a website to load completely from scratch instead of grabbing recently cached files, hit Ctrl+F5. You need to do this to fully reload the YouTube page, it else you'll just get the notice page again.

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.

That's a shame. "Narrative-driven, story-rich games" are mostly all I play. Just because people spend more time in strategy or MOBA games doesn't mean they're more popular, just that they take more time and don't have a designated end point, so people come back to play more often. But we still enjoy story-rich games and they'll still sell.

This is why Call of Duty has turned to garbage. Because they realized they could get more gameplay out of the multiplayer mode, so they stopped making good campaign modes and focused all their energy on multiplayer and pushing microtransactions. It's literally prioritizing money over quality gaming.

And I know, they're a business and the goal is to make money, but who can remember a fun multiplayer level? What even is the point in getting invested long-term in multiplayer when they're releasing a new game every 1-2 years? Counter-Strike has been mostly the same for decades and was extremely popular because it was so well-known and hardly changed. It only recently released a sequel, which was basically just a huge patch to the original game. Meanwhile, my memory of Call of Duty multiplayer games is fuzzy because I've played so many over the years and none really stand out to me.