shikitohno

Even ignoring P2P predecessors to torrenting like Kazaa or Napster, there was still piracy early on. I guess it counts as piracy adjacent, but I got started buying bootleg anime boxsets off ebay, because the actual boxsets were like $200/season, and minimum wage was under $7/hour when I started, but I could get the same season on three DVDs from Hong Kong for $30. It wasn't too long after that, I found out about fansubs and started spending far too much time on IRC, downloading anime, manga and music off XDCC bots. I wasn't allowed to use bittorrent on the family machine, because "That's like Kazaa, we'll get sued into ruin," but those bots in fansub group channels were fine, especially since it wasn't immediately apparent looking at mIRC that I had one running too.

I have a risk mitigation strategy for them which ought not to be novel, but sadly seems to be, which could probably bring this risk down to statistically insignificant for most of these people. Don't build your business on amassing obscene amounts of wealth via trampling the rights and dignity of millions of people who are only one bad week away from destitution and having all they've struggled their entire lives to build stripped from them, who have literally nothing to lose when it all goes pear shaped. Consider not only the financial, but the social costs of your actions.

The executive and financial elites of this world seem to have forgotten that humans are animals, and an animal backed into a corner is at its most dangerous, prone to lashing out in unpredictable ways.

Since folks have left me the easy ones, a fair number of things ending in "wurst," like Weißwurst.

And where exactly did I call for that? I said "Fuck you" to them, and made some disparaging, yet accurate, comments regarding their character. I didn't call for any sort of action against them. Where on earth are you getting that I'm asking someone to harm them in any way by cursing them out on the internet?

Who said anything about hurting them? They did a shitty thing, I'll call them out for being shitty. It does them no harm, and if they have half a brain, might even lead to some reflection on their actions.

Get lost with your misplaced concern for a straw man.

I'd like to send out a special "Fuck you" to the asshole that called this tip in, whether it turns out to be the real shooter or not. I can't imagine being such a piece of trash to go do that.

Having lived in both, I rather like being in a dense neighborhood like I am at the moment, but long term, I simply doubt I'll be able to afford it, which I think may be a pretty significant factor for many people. I already live at the extreme northern edge of my city, but if my rent goes up by more than another few hundred dollars a month, I doubt I could afford to find another place in the city that isn't in a terrible neighborhood. NIMBYs make sure that the housing crisis keeps going strong, aided by the byzantine process of community board review for any project that doesn't manage to get killed early on.

Prices are going up in all the similarly dense cities in my region. My options for the future look likely to be sprawl in my home region, with somewhat tolerable conditions despite bad Democratic policies, or sprawl in another state, with worse conditions and worse Republican policies. It's unlikely I could even afford a place in a nice urban region in red states, as their lower cost of living tends to go hand in hand with substantially lower wages. I looked into it at one point, and while apartments in that city were much nicer for maybe 40% of the cost, I would have had to take about a 50% pay cut, while also needing to buy and maintain multiple motor vehicles, as public transit was essentially nonexistent there.

No, because I don't see any point to it. If they manage to catch him, they may as well just kill him on the spot when they get him, as I have no faith that his trial would be anything more than a farce to try and present some sense of following process and norms, while guaranteeing he gets some insane sentence, only to be found mysteriously to have hung himself. I'm sure that, somehow, a jury of his peers will be comprised solely of the 12 most ghoulish residents of NYC one could find, and they'll probably try to shop around for the worst judge they can to hear the whole thing.

MPD and whatever front end you like for what's the best music player going, imo. You can tweak your player to your liking, MPD will play any format supported by ffmpeg, has some forks for further functionality, handles big libraries like a champ (I'm sitting at 54,758 files in mine without issue), can serve music streams online and be remotely controlled, and even has ridiculous features like the ability to handle gopher urls for media/streaming.

It's also as lightweight as you want it to be. MPD+ncmpcpp for playback use a whopping 66MB of ram for me.

Closest I've come to this was twice, both from the same doctor. She was actually my favorite primary doctor I've had, up until my insurance changed and I could no longer see her without it being cripplingly expensive.

Looking at my lab work results, one time she goes, "This is really interesting, you've got all kinds of stuff going on, don't you?" and another was simply "Woah!"

Even if she wasn't generally pretty funny, would still be my favorite, since she pretty much nailed down diagnoses for several issues that had been ailing me for years within the first couple appointments, was great with giving me referrals and fighting with insurance about "Yes, this really is necessary, it's in your coverage agreement, so shut up and pay!" and got me back up to some semblance of full health in a matter of months. Like, exhaustion and joint pain so bad, I couldn't walk down the single flight of stairs to leave my apartment some days and migraines that made me have to lay in a dark room for an hour, to now just being generally always a bit more fatigued than I should be given the amount of stuff I do in a given day.

Explain to me how the MLA or APA rules for formatting citations are any different? “When it’s a periodical, you put this part in bold and that part in italics, but when it’s an entry in a journal…” Surely there’s a way to do this in plaintext with the rule of “list things about your source until you’re confident someone else can look it up.”

I'm still a bit puzzled why we can't just have various headings in the bibliography, if you want to make it absolutely unambiguous what sort of document you're referencing? Sure, your average Joe on the street might not know how to use a DOI to find a journal article, or an ISBN for a book, but what's the issue with something like this below?

Books

Cite your stuff here with all pertinent information.

Periodicals

See above

Journals

...

Films

etc.

It may not be as elegant and information dense as whatever style manual your field uses with placement and formatting of the information, but it's pretty clear what is what without needing to whip up a whole style manual that will be entirely unknown to anyone outside of your own field of study.

Then again, I'm quite firmly of the opinion that any style manual that advocates in-text citations is an abomination that deserves to have said manuals gathered up and burned, and their creators and proponents sent to re-education camps until they learn the error of their ways and admit the superiority of footnotes or end notes for readability, while maintaining ease of checking references. Personally, I favor footnotes to avoid having to flip back and forth, but I'm also a fan of end notes when there is any further commentary provided on the citation that is useful to know, but would be disruptive to the main text of the document.

I got a Steam Deck, so I've been playing a bit more now. I'm currently going back and forth between Final Fantasy II and going back to finally finish playing Umineko, so semi-JRPG for now, but mostly VN. I'm looking to gradually play through the mainline Final Fantasy games up until at least Final Fantasy IX, possibly Final Fantasy X. X was the game that actually made me take a decade long break from gaming entirely because I was so disappointed with it, so I want to give it another shot. I think part of the disappointment was that I loved IX and just wanted more of that, and that I originally traded my copy of Xenogears for a friend's copy of X in middle school, so hopefully with the passage of time I can enjoy it. Prior to the PSX games, I've only ever completed the original, so there should be lots of fun to be had.

Eventually, I'll copy over the files from my desktop that I need to be able to run the Grandia HD Remaster on it as well. That was one of my favorite games growing up, so I'm really looking forward to replaying it. Since it looks like Grandia II is playable with some tweaks as well, I guess I'll have to get that eventually. I would be really excited if they ever went and re-released the rest of the games in the series, as I never got around to playing any past the second.