Any time someone gets a big old smirk on their face while they say, “Oh, I’ve got some controversial opinions,” that usually means they’re just a degenerate edgelord. Like, making a big show about how spicy your hot takes are is just the attention-grabbing behavior of someone who lives off of criticism because they are incapable of getting along with others.

I mean, I have some controversial opinions. For example: let’s feed Peter Thiel to a shark, but a small shark, so that it takes a while. And sometimes you’re not in an environment where you can say that. But if that’s the case, then you just don’t bring it up. If you are in a place where you can say that, then have the confidence to just say it.

But some people need to first make the conversation about them, and about how damn controversial they’re about to be, before they’ve even said something in the first place. They’re just enjoying the attention. Like they’re edging to how heterodox they’re about to be. And they’re probably about to tell you that we were better off before women had college degrees.

It’s so weird how they flip both of those words around. Like, they’ll say “females” instead of women, but then, they’ll say “a woman doctor.”

pho-militaristic

Yeah, the tactical soup culture is really out of hand these days.

(…it’s “faux,” by the way.)

It’s still around, and a while ago had a cartoon about going back to a website!

One thing I’ve noticed is that, if a community looks dead, you can post in it and people will still see it. Like, there are communities where there hasn’t been a post in four months, but then someone posts in it, and it gets 10-12 replies. This seems to be very different from Reddit, where inactive communities would never make it to your front page, even if you were subscribed to them.

So, don’t be disappointed if you find a community about something you’re interested in, but it looks inactive. There might actually be like dozen people who will see your post and want to talk about it.

You mentioned music and manga in another post; a couple of related ones I’m subscribed to are:

• !vinyl@lemmy.world
• !albumartporn@lemmy.world
• !comicbooks@lemmy.world

I tried Librewolf for a while before switching to Waterfox. Librewolf has more built-in privacy features, but unfortunately it’s just enough to make web browsing a little inconvenient. For example, Librewolf doesn’t accurately tell a website what your timezone is, so the opening/closing hours on a store’s website will sometimes be inaccurate.

Oh cool, I had just assumed that it was Chromium-based when I first heard about it, simply because that’s what most of them are.

Waterfox and Zen. I switched to Waterfox a while ago and have had no problems with it. It’s basically “Firefox minus AI,” which is what I wanted it to be.

I started trying out Zen Browser a few days ago, too. It’s another Firefox fork, but Zen is more willing to try new things with the UI. So far I like it.

So it’s been Waterfox on Android and Zen on desktop lately. (Zen does not have an Android version.) They both support Firefox sync, and syncing works between the two of them. Pretty cool.

Morrowind for me, too. It came with a video card my parents gave me, along with Ghost Recon and Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project. I remember thinking, “I don’t know about this elf game, but Ghost Recon and Duke Nukem are cool.” And then Morrowind just absolutely blew my mind.

I only bought it on Steam a couple years ago; I was still playing that original CD copy until then. It’s why all of my gaming PCs have still had CD drives.

I switched from DuckDuckGo to Waterfox’s paid search engine (https://search.waterfox.com/) because I wanted to send a few dollars per month to a Firefox fork. It uses Google’s search index, so the results are good, and it has no AI-generated responses. I just want a Firefox fork to be financially sustainable, so I’m paying for it. I don’t think it has any advantages over noai.duckduckgo.com, though.

I’ll also check https://marginalia-search.com/ every once in a while, since I like the idea of an independent search engine with their own index. It also has some creative features around discovering small, related websites. Feels like an “early internet” search engine.

Yeah, this is me too. Although, to be fair to my younger self, back then a lot of new technologies actually were notable improvements over the previous tech, and older people were missing out by not trying them. I’m talking about going from cassette tapes to CDs, things like that.

Nowadays the new thing really is just worse than the old thing. E.g. going from a desktop environment to “the metaverse.” Those of us who didn’t embrace the metaverse were not just sticking to our old cassette tapes; the metaverse really was stupid as hell.

I think they mean https://www.collaboraonline.com/. That’s what’s used if you install the office addon for Nextcloud, if I’m not mistaken.

If there is one, I worry that it won’t possibly be able to keep up. Youtube is actively encouraging AI generated content now.

Unfortunately, I think a whitelist is the only option here. Subscribe to specific accounts that you know are legitimate, and use some kind of desktop app for Youtube instead of browsing the site, so you don’t get AI generated recommendations after the video.

I ended up subscribing to Nebula.tv last week, hoping to avoid youtube altogether. It’s definitely missing a few categories of content (in fact it’s mainly video essays and LegalEagle), but that’ll be my starting place for videos from now on.

Scrambled if you’re making a lot of them, or Spanish fried if you’re just making a couple. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jQD6S6v4TyU

Please remember that I gave you this helpful advice when you commence your invasion of our planet.

Yes, qwerty and Dvorak, although I have to guess and check with some special characters on Dvorak. I have an unlabeled Dvorak keyboard at work (this guy right here), but I only physically go in to the office once every few weeks nowadays, and I’m starting to forget where some of the symbols are.

I forgot that song was in it. Ok, now I have to watch it again.

I remember wanting to watch this at some point, but I think I got it confused with The Orville. I should check it out again.

1. Big Fan, a movie about an obsessive football fan, starring Patton Oswalt. I only saw it once, when it first came out (2009), but remember thinking that it was really good. A very prescient, dark comedy about a certain type of guy that is very relevant today. It made $230,000 in theaters according to Wikipedia.
2. Unreal 2, and specifically just the multiplayer. Unreal 2 was a pretty disappointing sequel, and it didn’t even have multiplayer when it came out. A year after its launch, they released a multiplayer addon and it was amazing. Completely overshadowed by Unreal Tournament 2004, never really had a chance of becoming popular, but it had a dedicated fan base for a while. You can get it for free now; I want to get a group together at some point.

I chose Piefed over Lemmy since I thought the UI looked nicer. The pace of development has been really impressive lately, and for my specific instance, I’ve been very happy with feddit.online.

Mastodon seems like the default answer for this question, and I do also like Mastodon. I self-host that one.

I use it for my music server and have enjoyed it, but I haven’t really used it in a “fediverse” kind of way. I’m just using it for my own music collection, for the same use case that most people would use Navidrome for.

I disabled federation after I first set it up, because all of the sudden a bunch of podcasts showed up in languages that I don’t speak, and I couldn’t figure out how to hide them.

It has been just fine as a plain old music server, though. I used it for podcasts for a while, too, but am currently switching to Pinepods, since that has more podcast-specific features that I was looking for.