That was my impression as well. They’re not bad IMO but they don’t deliver what they promise.

Well good news for me I guess. If only it was Alzheimer’s instead…

I think if they’re unstable enough to threaten you, deliberately aggravating them further is a bad idea. I’m not qualified to say what the best solution would be, but it isn’t this.

Stanley from the Stanley parable. My life is a mundane existential nightmare that I have little control over.

I love my doggo and give him kisses regularly. If he weren’t such a twitcher I’d let him in bed with me. I get it’s a cultural thing. I was in a group of Lebanese people and got a big kiss on the cheek by an old lady I barely new after the briefest of polite conversations. I normally would not allow it because I have a very very strong sense of personal space, but I understood her intent.

Some people think dogs are “unclean” and find the idea of letting a dog share your bed to be weird. I find dogs to be furry little serotonin factories. I’ll even say thank you when a dog lets me rub his belly. Dogs are uncomplicated creatures. Their concept of love and trust aren’t very deep, but they are there, and I’m happy to foster them.

As far as the whole web, you can’t, and if you care about free speech you shouldn’t try to. Everybody talks about getting rid of these people, but the unspoken assumption is that the person making the statement or people in their in-group will be deciding who gets a voice. A rule of thumb I use when thinking about laws or administrative controls is to consider whether they could be used against me should someone who doesn’t like me gain power.

As far as individual sites, have clear guidelines and enforce them. Be open with people why they’re being banned (looking at you, YouTube). On the Fediverse, block and defederate.

I’d say purely based on usage time, my Bose Quiet Comfort headphones. I’ve had them since 2013 and have gone through a few pairs. My first set got chewed up by my then young now late guide dog. I was unaware you could replace the ear pads, so I bought a whole second pair. My bad. This second pair has lasted until today, though I upgraded to the QC ultra for the built-in bluetooth and use the old wired pair in my ham shack.

I bought them originally for work. I worked in a call center. The crappy plantronics headset they gave me wasn’t going to cut it for 8 hours a day, so I looked for something better. Ended up buying the QC’s plus an adaptor for a standard Cisco VOIP phone to TRS connectors. Used the QC’s plus a cheap lapel mic.

I’d say the name “quiet comfort” says it all. I didn’t care about how they sound since they handily beat the cheap earbuds that came with phones at the time as well as that plantronics nightmare from work. What they are is quiet and comfortable. They served me for 8 hours a day over four years.

The two games I can think of that deviated significantly from the formula, SF Adventure and SF Assault, did not do well IIRC. I bounced off of Adventure because it felt like a Zelda clone, and I was like “but Nintendo already owns Zelda. If they wanted to make a Zelda game they can just make a Zelda game.” Now I want to replay it because I only recently learned it was made by Rare. Assault I really liked. It wasn’t as divergent as Adventure but tried new stuff.

The other problem, IMO, is like a lot of Nintendo games the characters and story are secondary to the gameplay, so I’m not really interested in what Fox and company are up to.

Also here’s a random factoid that I have nowhere else to put: Falco is actually a pheasant.

Devs are, by and large, computer people, and computer people are, by and large, not people people.

…Aurora borealis

I enjoyed that movie. I love stop motion as a medium

Most of the graphical changes seem… fine I guess. The characters faceplant right into the weird hyperrealistic uncanny valley tho.

Yeah, I’m not thrilled. Anthro animals with hyperrealistic human proportions give me the jibblies. Reminds me of this old (meme?)

Yeah I also really liked it.

Absolutely! It seems to have a lot more staying power judging by how often its referenced.

I think a lot of that is due to the genre of the game. I’m not sure what you can innovate with a rail shooter. There’s a video that argues exactly this. Can’t find it right now unfortunately but it talks about Star Fox as well as Katamari and Banjo Kazooie, basically great games that exhausted their entire premise after two installments, leaving nowhere else to go but down.

Mostly, though you have to remember ham radio is the progenitor of all the other electronics hobbies. RadioShack was founded all the way back in the 1920s, and is named thus because a shack is where you put your radio equipment, even if it’s just a table in the corner of the living room. Casual intercontinental communication was out of reach of most until the internet, and casual mobile communication until CB radio, which was itself repurposed spectrum formerly occupied by hams. Older folks are still in it for the “talk around the world” angle, but younger hams have other motivations now that it’s no longer novel.

It’s a broad hobby. I myself enjoy satellite communications as well as packet radio. I got a web server working over VHF AX.25. There’s also AREDN and other mesh networks like Meshtastic.

In the end the best way I’ve heard the hobby summed up is “It doesn’t matter what we’re communicating, only that we communicate”. Having a robust globe-spanning network of stations that uses no intervening infrastructure has an appeal all its own. I like the fact that I can generate a varying voltage in a long copper wire that induces the same varying voltage in another long copper wire somewhere halfway around the world with no cell towers or satellites.

Cool I guess. Nintendo doesn’t seem to know what to do with the franchise. They’ve remade SF64 twice now.

Am I the only one bothered by the fact Fox’s ears stick out of his helmet? I certainly wouldn’t wear headgear that left the most fragile and sticky-outy parts of my head exposed.

I really miss the worldbuilding subreddit. There was always cool stuff to see and read because the community was big. The equivalent !worldbuilding@lemmy.world is much less active, and I seem to be the most frequent poster. I think conlanging is also underrepresented, but that’s even more niche.

I also wish the threadiverse had a large and diverse-enough userbase to support the sort of hyper-specific subs that show pictures of a specific animal (or plant) doing a specific thing (looking at you, /r/treessuckingatthings). The community was even big enough to spawn subs based purely on inside jokes from other subs. I’m pretty sure the above mentioned /r/treessuckingatthings inspired /r/treessuckingonthings, and while I can’t confirm, /r/talesfromcavesupport was probably from a joke in /r/talesfromtechsupport.

There were even multiple subs for the same content that would have slightly different community culture, and both subs would be reasonably active. /r/dogs didn’t allow pictures, so you had /r/picturesofdogs, not to mention active subs for every breed of dog, and often every coat pattern of said breed. Yellow, black, and chocolate labs all had their own active subs, and that’s on top of the regular labrador sub.

As it is, Lemmy is too small, and the userbase is either tankies or almost but not quite tankies, repelling people who aren’t tankies.

I used to have multiple 3d printers going. But after one broke down, I didn’t have the motivation to fix it.

I’m in this awkward position with my 3D printing journey. I bought an A1 Mini in 2024 as a toe in the water for the hobby. I’ve used it many times for fun and practical things (even printed a surprisingly good door jam because we keep losing them at work). But the mini is so, well, mini. I want a bigger printer, particularly with an enclosure, but I’m not sure I use the mini enough to justify it, and I certainly don’t have the space for two printers.

I meant to buy the regular A1, but put the wrong item in my cart. That’s the 1-2 punch of ADHD and blindness for you.

I used to do a lot of DMing but its a lot of work to keep the campaign up, dealing with players who just don’t show, and a million other frustrations.

Where on earth did people get the idea that D&D is for pasty-faced socially anxious nerds? I looked into TTRPGs as a hobby back in 2019 and determined it was too socially involved for me.