Captain Aggravated

I actually just found this on knowyourmeme:

Handbrake can handle DVDs directly; you’ll need Make MKV for Blu-Rays.

A couple years ago I made a big project to rip all my DVDs.

Out of several hundred movies only 6 were unplayable. There didn’t seem to be a pattern to it either; age of the disc, wear or handling, big budget then current release or old movie slapped onto a disc in one of those cheap cardboard sleeves.

Out of my collection of TV shows on DVD, easily a quarter of the discs failed, and if one disc in a season of a show didn’t work most of them probably wouldn’t. Many had visible blotch marks in them. I figure they probably used a cheaper manufacturing process for TV shows where they were selling 3 to 6 discs rather than one, maybe two discs with a single movie on it.

We’re living it right now. It is my understanding that Truth Social is basically a fork of Mastodon.

On Reddit, before it went full goose step, you’d have the problem where the top mod of r/linux would be this weird open source zealot who would delete any thread that had any practicality in it. So actual discussion of using Linux would happen in r/linuxmasterrace, which was nominally a meme sub but it’s where the actual community landed. You could use Reddit’s vast namespace to steer around an individual top mod.

You couldn’t steer around Reddit’s admin though, they have root access to the servers, they can, have and increasingly do shut things down they don’t like. It’s double plus ungood.

Lemmy, and indeed the entire Fediverse, offers every user the Bender gambit. You can make your own instance with blackjack and hookers. There is no mechanism to shut it down everywhere. Instances are hosted by multiple people on multiple hardware platforms on multiple power grids in multiple countries under multiple jurisdictions.

The top mod of !linux@example.lol is being a shithead? You could make !actual_linux@example.lol, or you could start !linux@lemmy.world, or you could start your own instance and then YOU are in control of who gets to be a mod on at least one instance. No one person has the power to shut down everything everywhere; you start talking about severing undersea cables at that point.

I did once talk to Ukraine from some woods in North Carolina on 20 meters (~14 MHz) So when you say “long range radio” to me I think in hemispheres.

I’m not convinced this is new or unprecedented; we’re somewhere between the robber baron gilded age thing in 1920’s America and 1930’s Germany. Not saying either one is a wonderful place to be, but I’m not sure we’re on new ground.

I’m a ham radio operator; it just feels weird hearing someone call 400 MHz “long range.” Above, say, 60 MHz I wouldn’t count on anything beyond line-of-sight anyway, though I suppose the lower in the UHF band you are the more likely you are to punch through leaves and such.

You know what? Money’s no object, so why don’t we arrange a grand tour? We’ll do Europa, maybe stop at Ganymede and Callisto (I don’t think Io is a very pleasant destination spot), then head out to Saturn and check out Titan and Enceladus, head out to Uranus for a stop at Miranda, and then finish up at Neptune to spend some time on Triton.

Titan is a terrible place to view Saturn’s rings from; first of all the moon’s orbit is pretty much coplanar with the ring disc so you’re looking at something hilariously thin end-on. Second, thick opaque clouds. On the upside, Titan’s gravity is so low and the air is so thick given an Icarus suit you could fly like a bird. Or pedal power a Cessna Skyhawk.

You’d probably get a good look at the rings on your way in though.

Europa, Jupiter’s moon.

I have a feeling we’re going to regret a lot of the “From 201x all new cars have to have ibuttfuck.” It’s like paying to be assimilated by the goddamn Borg.

As much as I love barbecue I don’t and won’t own a smoker.

remember r/antiwork?

Who is writing this shit?

What sadistic prick is authoring this reality? Just…holy shit. In what culture is that how you win the war at home?

I kinda like the British word “satnav”.

haven’t bought anything from Amazon in years.

So I’m from North Carolina, for the uninitiated this is one out of fifty of the United States of America, which is a nation located on the continent of North America bordered by Canada to the North and Mexico to the South. If you were paying close enough attention you might have heard of us in the news recently. North Carolina is located on the Eastern coast, that’s adjacent to the Atlantic ocean, you’ll find it just across the Northern border of South Carolina, to the South of Virginia, and to the East of Tennessee. We also share a relatively short stretch of border with Georgia to the Southwest. You might find us after a few hours examining a globe.

North Carolina is almost as famous for our barbecue as we are for our barbecue. Two distinct styles of pork barbecue emerged in North Carolina, the Eastern style characterized by smoking a whole hog prepared with a dry rub and served with a spicy, thin, vinegar-based sauce, and the Western style characterized by smoking pork shoulders basted with and served at the table with a sweeter tomato based sauce.

In both cases, shoulder meat will be coarsely shredded simply by pulling it apart with forks or bare hands, done right it’s more tender than cooked hamburger. Piled high on an inch roll slathered in barbecue sauce and topped with coleslaw and you’ve got a pulled pork sandwich, serve it with a side of hushpuppies.

Fun fact: A candidate for North Carolina governor once lost the race because he was heard saying he was getting sick of barbecue. Nope, you don’t get to be chief executive Tarheel like that. That ain’t gonna work.

Didn’t you hear? All US presidents are baby fuckingly evil especially Obama.

I gave up on television sometime around the end of Stargate SG-1, somewhere in the middle of Eureka!.

It was right around then that only the 24 hour news networks were what they said they were; there was no Sci-Fi on SyFy, no history on History, no music on MTV, no discovery on Discovery…adult prime time television was going to the humorless “gritty realism” phase, and the only topic anyone would smalltalk about was Game of Thrones.

To this day I watch basically nothing but Youtube.