cobysev @ cobysev @lemmy.world

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Joined

2 yr. ago

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.

He's foreign born. He can't legally be president... unless someone changes the US Constitution.

I used to be big on Deep Rock's Galactic, but I've hardly played it at all this year. The other dwarf game I played was The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria.

Is it just me or does this not exist on Steam anymore? This SteamDB page just redirects me to the Steam homepage when I click on the game's store page.

Yes, I was curious enough to click for more information. 😒

You guys don't share your Steam Relay publicly and put it in a showcase on your profile?

/s... but I totally do that. I'm not ashamed of my gameplay.

EDIT: I just read the article and saw the mention of the "Dwarf" category. It's maxed out on my spider graph, and I've only played 2 games with dwarves this year, out of 180 individual games I've played.

I chose not to participate.

I joined the military as soon as I graduated high school, got a solid 20 years of free food, free shelter, free college education, free travel, and plenty of life skills/experiences, all while collecting a solid income. Then I retired at 38 years old, collected a pension and a 100% VA disability check for the rest of my life (which includes free medical/dental for life), and inherited my childhood home in the countryside when my father passed away this year.

I do what I can to help out my local community, but I'm not working and have no need to contribute to capitalism. I make my own schedule each day, do whatever hobbies/goals I have the energy for, then call it a day whenever and start again the next morning.

My wife gets the same VA benefits, although she didn't serve long enough to collect a pension; she was medically discharged. So we're both just enjoying a quiet life in the countryside, no jobs, just focused on whatever makes us happy each day.

This is the life everyone deserves to have, and I'm upset that capitalism is basically the opposite of this lifestyle. They preach that if you're not working, you're a drain on society. Because the fewer workers they have, the less money that's generated for the rich elites running the capitalist regime. That's why our retirement age keeps going up. The longer people live, the more time they have to be productive members of "society" (read: capitalism). No thanks; I retired at 38 and I'm happy enjoying my youth while I still have some semblance of it.

EDIT: I just want to point out that military life was basically democratic socialism, with all our needs met, the govt ensuring we had food and a home, education was free, most all work-related expenses paid for. (uniforms, travel, etc.) Our paycheck was basically just spending money for us. We didn't have to worry about covering bills because we received a separate "allowance" to cover rent/mortgage and utilities. Food was another allowance on top of our paycheck. If we were reassigned to another base somewhere in the world, the govt would foot the bill for movers and they packed your house for you. And you basically had to break the law to be kicked out of the military, so job security was excellent. We all got paid based on our rank and time in service, so it didn't matter if you were a geothermal physicist or just handing out towels at the gym; everyone got the same wage across the board. It was an ideal situation. You'll be hard pressed to find something similar in the rest of America.

I love that the photo is grainy, as if there's so much radiation in the air that he can't get a clear picture of it.

Seems pretty straightforward to me. They want someone to run their Digital Development department. Overseeing the department in a managerial role, but they also want someone with technical skills so you actually know what's going on and can effectively manage the personnel/job requirements, and communicate what it is your department does and plans to do to shareholders.

As far as the "technical skills" you need? Well... without knowing what this business is, I can't further define that. Considering it's a Digital Development department and they talk about "continuous improvement and embracing change and new technologies to drive our business forward," it sounds like they'd be leaning on you to introduce new and innovative technologies to improve the way they do business.

That's about all I can get out of that job ad without knowing the business or their technical requirements.

Is this commentary on the game's anti-corporation story, or about Microsoft shutting down this game's studio after this highly successful release? Or both?

Here's the comic on the left (titled "Loss") and its shorthand on the right that people sneak into everything to reference it.

The webcomic (called "CTRL-ALT-DEL") was mostly comedy, but then pivoted out of the blue with this dark, dramatic, wordless strip. The whiplash in tone led to a lot of jokes and people trying to meme it and slip references to it into everything.

The father used knives to create the Loss shorthand on the countertop. He called it "Rick-rolling" because he knows that word is associated with online trolling. He's never seen the original Loss comic, so the arrangement of knives on the counter is more akin to hieroglyphics than anything; an arrangement of symbols to convey an idea.

Considering Ubisoft is struggling to stay relevant after saying players should feel comfortable with not owning games anymore, poor sales with Star Wars: Outlaws, and the controversy over their upcoming Assassin's Creed Shadows game, I'm sure they're doing everything they can to draw people back to their games right now. Achievements bring some replayability to their old titles.

Basically, you can't just claim you tipped off the feds and collect the reward money. The feds have to officially acknowledge you as the actual tipster who led them to the suspect (and I believe there's something in there saying the guy has to be officially convicted before a reward is handed out, to ensure people don't give false tips just for the reward).

The process to be recognized as the official tipster by authorities is complicated and probably includes a bit of paperwork to process. And I'm sure that's a very low priority compared with actually arresting and charging the guy, not to mention waiting out the whole trial process to see if they're convicted of the crimes.

After all that, if they even remember you tipped them off and are willing to nominate you as their official tipster, then you might be able to claim a reward. So it's not a guaranteed thing.

Steven Universe is one of my favorites.

Also, OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes is excellent, and created by Ian Jones-Quartey, the spouse of Steven Universe's creator, Rebecca Sugar.

He used to write a webcomic that I followed a couple decades ago, which he officially ended in an episode of OK K.O. His webcomic was called RPG World.

I mean, Disney put out a casting call several years ago for little people to fill the dwarf roles for a live action Snow White. But Peter Dinklage balked at it, claiming that it was oppressive to cast little people just because they're little and not giving them serious acting roles based on skill or merit.

However, a lot of little people in Hollywood got mad at Peter Dinklage for ruining job opportunities for them, because they're rarely cast for anything else and they had no problem taking the roles based solely on their height.

But it was too late; Disney pulled the casting to avoid controversy and now we're stuck with this CGI abomination to replace little people in this film.

My mother used to work a state govt job. I don't think she ever had a "take your kid to work" day, but there were a few times when she brought me into the office for the day. She was the manager of an entire wing of her building, so she could just bring me in anytime and no one said anything about it.

Her coworkers were always so nice and had apparently heard all about me because they all seemed to know me intimately. I sometimes wondered if her coworkers were only nice to me because I was the boss's kid. But my mom was a genuinely nice person who was always looking out for others, so I wouldn't be surprised if her coworkers actually liked her.

Sometimes I'd get tours of various offices, sometimes my mom would just set me up with something to do to entertain myself. I drew a lot in my childhood, and my mother would always put up my artwork in her office to show off to her coworkers.

My dad ran his own business and as long as I could remember, it was just him and his secretary renting out a large office space in the cities. He had a partner originally, but his partner died really young, so my dad was left with the whole company to run himself. Fortunately, my mom's govt job paid the bills, so my dad didn't need to make a ton of money with his small business.

Every time I went to my dad's office, he would set me up at a computer near his secretary and I would spend the day either playing Wolfenstein 3D or Pac-Man. This was back in the early '90s, so you had to boot these games from a command line. The computers themselves were Windows 3.11 or so.

EDIT: I never had kids of my own, and I retired young, so I won't ever get to experience taking my kids to work.

When I was living in Japan (about 20 years ago now), I was dating a Filipino woman who spoke very good English. But I quickly learned that she didn't understand colloquialisms.

There was one day when she kept calling me multiple times throughout the day. After the 5th or 6th call, I picked up the phone and said, "Jeez, you're killing me!"

She immediately started crying and asked, "Why would you ever say that?! I would never kill you!" Which got a laugh out of me and just made her cry even harder.

I quickly realized she didn't understand English expressions. I explained it to her, but she said she didn't want me to ever say it again, because just hearing the accusation hurt her, even if I didn't literally mean it.

While dating her, I became hyper vigilant to the amount of expressions we use in English. I had to continually rephrase everything I said because I caught myself using so many colloquialisms that she just didn't understand. She took everything so literally!