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cobysev

@ cobysev @lemmy.world

Posts
18
Comments
482
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • What do country names (ones you are affiliated with or know of) mean in their own language?

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  • United States of America: We're made up of a bunch of states in North America that, ideally, are united. Although we've hardly lived up to that sentiment since the original 13 colonies fought for independence in the American Revolutionary War.

    Technically, we didn't call them "states" until the Declaration of Independence was drafted in 1776 (they were "colonies" before then), so I guess that was the first and last time we were ever truly united.

  • What sort of grill needs a firmware update lol

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  • I guarantee this update didn't drop on Thanksgiving. Photo OP probably hasn't turned it on since their last BBQ months ago and is just noticing - on Thanksgiving - that an update pushed a while ago that they now need to install to get started.

    Pro tip: Start up your electronics a day or two in advance of events, so you can pre-patch anything that needs it.

    Source: Former IT guy here, who had to ensure that updates ran at the most convenient times possible for thousands of users. "Patching Tuesday" is an unofficial but well recognized "holiday" for IT folks. It's not first thing Monday morning, which could throw off the workflow for the week, but it also gives the max amount of time to resolve any issues that patching might cause, so we (hopefully) don't have to work through the weekend.

    Pay attention to when your stuff requires patches. A lot of the time, it'll pop up on Tuesdays.

  • The Steam controller was ahead of its time

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  • I have two original Steam controllers and I absolutely hated them. The track pads, whereas a cool innovative technology, weren't good for 90% of my games. I needed that D-pad, or at least a joystick. I hardly used my controllers, and now I just hold onto them as a piece of Valve history.

    Mine came with the physical Steam Link box. I bought two of those boxes, so I could use Steam from a couple different places in my home away from my gaming desk. Instead of the controller, I just plugged in a keyboard and mouse to the Steam Link box. They did away with the hardware though, and now it's just an app on Smart TVs and app stores. So I can't use my keyboard and mouse without some extra steps.

  • People who made a single terrible financial decision that still haunts you to this day - how did it happen?

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  • I had been in the US military for around 4 years when I was sent to a mandatory financial education course. Turns out, it was just a guy promoting TSP (Thrift Savings Plan), a sort of optional 401K-type program the military offered. This was back when the military still had a pension program instead of a mandatory 401K option.

    I didn't know anything about financial investments and the guy was basically speaking an alien language to me. But one thing stuck out to me: he claimed that if I started making the max monthly contributions from my paycheck at the beginning of my career (which the govt would match with their own contributions), I could have roughly $1 million saved by the time I was retirement-eligible at 20 years of service.

    I was already 4 years into the service so I was way behind, but it still sounded like a good opportunity. I raved about it to my dad, who had spent a lot of time working on his own personal investments. He grew up dirt poor with barely enough money to feed and clothe himself, and by the time I was born, he and my mother were considered upper-middle class for the '80s. He was very money-focused and a living example of the old Boomer mentality of "picking yourself up by your bootstraps," so I usually trusted him for financial advice.

    He told me that he'd never heard of this "TSP thing" and that it sounded like a scam. He told me to avoid it and look into other "more legitimate" options for investing my money.

    So I didn't enroll in TSP. I knew nothing about how to invest money or who could get me started, so I did nothing else with my paycheck, besides stashing as much as I could into a savings account.

    For all my dad's knowledge on money and investments, he was awful at teaching anything. He didn't have any detailed step-by-step advice, just generic stuff like "set up a Roth IRA" (whatever that was) and "pay attention to what's happening on Wall Street." I really shouldn't have turned to him for advice, but I was young and naive and he appeared to know what he was doing.

    Fast-forward a decade later, my wife (who was also serving in the military by that time) mentioned something about her TSP account and asked me about my contributions. I told her I never signed up for that program. Her jaw dropped. Over a decade of service and I had invested nothing?! She immediately signed me up for TSP and had me dump as much as I could into the account.

    Today, I'm 3 years retired and I got a decent chunk of change tucked away in my TSP; enough to get me out of a financial struggle if need be. But it's nowhere near $1 million.

    All I had to do was sign up and tell it to take money out of my paycheck before I got paid. That was it; it was so simple! I could've had over $1 million in investments by now. Instead, I'm surviving on my measly military pension and some disability payments from the VA.

    I'm not hurting financially, but I'm also not rich by any stretch of the imagination. Minus my debts (mortgages, large repairs, county-mandated home projects, etc.), I'm probably breaking about even, if not a little in the red. So I don't really have money to throw around.

    I had a solid govt paycheck for 20 years! If I had just created a TSP account all those years ago, I could have tons of money to retire with. Heck, if I had learned even a little bit about investing my money, I might have been able to "class-jump" like my dad did all those years ago. Later in my military career, I made a point to educate our young service members about their financial options, so they could get the head-start I missed out on.

  • These are the thoughts that form grey hairs

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  • That's a young James T. Kirk in the opening of Star Trek (2009), the J.J. Abrams reboot film.

  • McDoonolds

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  • In 2018, there was a show called She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, which was a sort of reboot of the old '80s cartoon of (nearly) the same name. The girl in the comment above my OP is Entraptra, one of the princesses. She's obsessed with miniature versions of food.

    OP's post had a miniature-sized combo meal in the last panel.

  • Going on a rampage

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  • "...Are you crabs yet?"

  • McDoonolds

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  • I get that reference.

  • Can't believe I'm almost Cid

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  • How the hell am I way older than these guys?! When'd that happen? I was a child when I first played these games.

  • The Harbinger of the Dystopia

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  • I was born in the early '80s. The 2000s picture was what my McDonald's always looked like throughout my childhood. I've never seen a McDonald's that looked like the '90s pic.

    The 2020 pic shows current McDonald's, but they changed to that sometime in the mid-2010s.

  • me_irl

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  • This used to be me. I enjoyed pretty much everything I watched. I figured, since a lot of people put a ton of time, effort, and money into making a film, it must have at least some redeeming qualities. No one trusted my opinion on films because I "loved everything."

    It wasn't until I watched a ton of movie reviews from various reviewers that I started to be able to tell the difference between a good film and a bad film. Now I'm pretty critical of films, and even made a review blog to discuss what I like and dislike about certain films.

  • Removed

    How many of you use Lemmy and ONLY use Lemmy vs Reddit?

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  • I only use Lemmy. Fuck Reddit. And this is from someone who spent over a decade using Reddit religiously. I dropped them during the whole API scandal. I had been growing more and now dissatisfied with Reddit and that was the last straw.

    The only mainstream social media program I use is Facebook, and I don't really use it anymore. I only keep my profile because I've met people from all over the world who I stay in touch with through Facebook. Plus all my childhood friends and family members are there. But Facebook (and Meta as a whole) is garbage and I have a bunch of tools to prevent them from feeding me garbage content and recording my data while I'm trying to keep up with my friends and family there.

    I have a Bluesky account, which I don't know what to do with. Twitter always felt like social media for celebrities; there wasn't much going on there for us normal people. I created a Bluesky account just to get away from Twitter, but I don't have much to post and none of it gets attention from anyone, so I just feel like I'm talking to myself. I don't have anyone really interesting to follow there either.

    I also use Discord to stay in touch with my closest friends, on a personal server I built. That's pretty much it. I don't trust any other social media programs. So Lemmy is my main source of news and content.

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  • Ugh, this is my mother. I was diagnosed with ADHD at 37 years old. She still doesn't believe I have it because I was "normal" all throughout my childhood. But I spent my childhood running everywhere, climbing everything, and on the verge of tears if someone made me sit still for 2 seconds. My grades were awful because I couldn't focus on the teacher in a classroom environment, and all my life, I've had the worst time processing auditory instructions.

    I see some of the same ADHD symptoms in my mother as well, but she refuses to acknowledge she has it. She just thinks she's highly productive. She has no clue that her productivity is boosted by a need to constantly be doing something.

    She's retired in her 70s but still needs to be involved in her community, running organizations or helping with local events. She can't just sit still and enjoy retirement.

  • 2025-06-19

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  • I just passed 40 recently and I was aware David Letterman had a gap in his teeth, but I didn't know people joked about it. So it took me a moment to realize this was targeted at him specifically.

  • If you've got kids. Make plans to get them out of the states.

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  • Ideally, there shouldn't be a draft. That's why we have the Reserves; so we don't need to enact a draft ever again.

    Source: I served for 20 years in the US military. When the 2003 Iraq War kicked off, a bunch of people joined the Reserves to say they were doing their part without actually having to do anything. They were shocked when we sent them to war first.

    The active duty military were already running operations at dozens of bases around the globe. We couldn't just drop everything and go join a war. So we sent the Reserves to set up new bases in the Middle East and started trickling in active duty members as the bases became more established. I didn't get to Iraq until 2007.

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  • Can I get a different scale? I don't think my respect and appreciation for kids lies anywhere on this line graph.

  • What anime do you regularly rewatch?

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  • Meh, not as good as the original series honestly.

  • What anime do you regularly rewatch?

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  • FLCL is a quick, fun six part jaunt I love to revisit.

    FLCL is now an 18-episode series. They dropped a season 2 and season 3 in 2018. But personally I don't feel like they were as good as the original series.

  • What anime do you regularly rewatch?

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  • They dropped a season 2 and season 3 only a few months apart in 2018. They're both 6 episodes long, like the original series.

  • What anime do you regularly rewatch?

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  • Project A-ko (the first film) is probably one of my favorite anime films of all time. I saw it for the first time when I was a pre-teen back in the '90s and I've re-watched it a ton over the last few decades. Something about a super-powerful girl who can run at mach speeds and wreck machines with her bare hands just appealed to me as a kid. It was very inspiring and I always dreamed of growing up to be as strong as her.

    I discovered Ghost in the Shell (the first movie) while I was living in Japan in my late teens and it really resonated with me. I got to watch the TV series, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex as it was releasing in Japan. I'm actually re-watching that whole series now, since they've announced a new series coming soon. The new Ghost in the Shell show is animated in the unique style of the original manga, so I'm excited to see if it'll be faithful to the manga.

    I discovered a ton of anime while I was living in Japan in the early 2000s, so I have a bunch of classics I regularly re-watch. Excel Saga is another one. I love how chaotic and over-the-top Excel is. The anime is way different from the manga, but it was made when the manga was only partway complete, so it didn't really have a direction and chose to be chaotic and disjointed instead. Which really works well.

    D•N•A² is another classic I love to re-watch periodically. I dunno why I like that one, but it's a fun comedy/drama romance story.

    Golden Boy was such a ridiculous and perverse show, but it encouraged me to continually seek out knowledge and experience, so I enjoy watching that one over and over again. Too bad the original manga creator is a narcissistic, mysoginistic piece of shit. I enjoy both the show and the manga, but learning about that dude really sours his work. It's no wonder Golden Boy never got more than a 6-episode OVA; most people can't stand to work with him.

    I was living in Japan when Naruto first released and I followed that show religiously. I remember reading articles about this "hidden gem" in Japan that would never be imported to America because of some issue with the rights being tied up in a handful of studios. I guess they got it worked out though, because by the time I moved back to America, Naruto started showing up everywhere. I never actually finished that whole series (I got about 100 episodes into the original series), but I've restarted it a handful of times. I plan to finally finish it soon.

    I'm currently on my third re-watch of One Piece. At over 1,000 episodes, it's a slog every time; I've spent months slowly picking away at episodes and I'm going to catch up to the latest stuff soon. I also just re-watched the live action series last night, since I've recently learned they've started filming for season 2.

    Finally, the first anime anything I ever watched was a movie called Puss 'n Boots Travels Around the World, the third in a Toei Animation series of Puss 'n Boots films. I grew up watching it on VHS as a little kid and had no idea it was anime until I sought it out as an adult many years later. I have a lot of love and nostalgia for that film, so I re-watch it a lot.

    EDIT: The Toei Animation mascot is actually Puss 'n Boots from these old movies. I dunno why I never pieced that together until I was much older.