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cobysev

@ cobysev @lemmy.world

Posts
18
Comments
482
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • James Bond is responsible for many wasted vodka martinis

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  • James Bond was an alcoholic, with good reason. He didn't drink vodka martinis for the taste, he drank them to dull the pain and horrors of his job. As much as he drank, he probably didn't really taste the booze anymore.

    The original James Bond from the novels was a dark and brooding high-functioning alcoholic, who operated at his best with a drink or two in him at all times. He was pretty useless without the drink. A vodka martini would quickly get him in the right headspace to accomplish his latest mission.

    The movie Bond was reinvented to be this dashing, handsome womanizer who drank and smoked socially and was charming as hell. Basically, a 1950s ideal male fantasy. This Bond probably could've used a classier drink than straight vodka, but that's one aspect of the books they kept pretty loyal.

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  • Movies have actually been a huge influence on America's view on sexuality, if not the largest influence.

    There's one organization, CARA (the Classification and Rating Administration) who provides ratings for movies and TV shows in the US, and they've heavily censored nudity in film for decades, giving films shockingly high ratings if even a breast is flashed on screen for a moment.

    This has caused studios to limit nude scenes, or to be extremely creative about sex scenes, to avoid higher ratings. Because the higher the rating, the smaller the audience will be, and they want to appeal to a larger audience.

    If you watch American films from the 70s and earlier, seeing casual nudity in a film was a pretty normal thing, whereas you have to buy a porno just to see any nudity today.

    This had a nasty backfire effect, where our culture now associates nudity with sex. We don't appreciate the natural human body unless it's under the context of sexual desire or procreation.

    The crazy thing is, nobody really knows who the members of CARA are. Their identity is kept secret. The heads of their organization are known; you can check them out on their official website (https://www.filmratings.com/About), but the organization as a whole keeps their members' names secret. So we have no idea who these people are who are censoring nudity in American films.

  • Is it better to leave a country, or stay behind to fight for it? And what about the ethics of fleeing instead of staying behind?

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  • This depends on a lot of factors. If you're part of a targeted demographic due to race, gender, religion, etc., then it might be safer to flee before you draw attention to yourself.

    If you're not a targeted demographic, then it might be best to stick around and stand up for your fellow citizens. But this could also lump you in with the targeted demographic and might eventually lead to your own persecution, so it's a risky choice.

    Either way, I still advocate for standing up to any oppression or persecution going on in your home country. No one should ever lose their home to dictators and/or fascists.

    This is actually how a lot of states get divided politically. People see a place as a "red state" or a "blue state" and decide to either avoid them or move away if their political ideology doesn't line up. But that just further entrenches the area into a political leaning. By sticking around and advocating for human rights and better community and respect, you can help prevent the splitting of communities and stop divisive concepts like fascism from forming.

  • Plex is locking remote streaming behind a subscription in April

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  • IMPORTANT NOTE FOR CURRENT PLEX PASS HOLDERS:For users who have an active Plex Pass subscription, remote playback will continue to be available to you without interruption from any Plex Media Server, after these changes go into effect. When running your own Plex Media Server as a subscriber, other users to whom you have granted access can also stream from the server (whether local or remote), without ANY additional charge—not even a mobile activation fee. More on that later in this update.

    I was worrying about this change because my Plex server provides free streaming for several of my friends and family and I didn't want them to have to start paying for it. The whole point was to get them away from Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, etc.

    But this sounds like, since I'm already a Plex Pass subscriber, my remote viewers will still be able to access my stuff for free. Do I have that right? Because if so, this change is just business as usual for me.

  • dendrochronology

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  • A potential inhibitor of the Hedgehog signaling pathway has been found and dubbed "Robotnikinin"—after Sonic the Hedgehog's nemesis and the main antagonist of the Sonic the Hedgehog game series, Dr. Ivo "Eggman" Robotnik

  • Is there a way to use YouTube without ads and without a Google-account (with support for casting)

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  • Personally, I hooked up a micro PC to my TV to use it as a giant monitor. I use a small wireless keyboard and mouse to control it from the couch.

    Then I use Firefox with uBlock Origin (and Proton VPN) to block ads while I access YouTube from a browser on my TV.

    I'm very anti-advertisement, so I don't even watch TV anymore. My TV is a glorified streaming PC; I stream all my shows and movies online and block ads that way. No commercial breaks!

    I also built my own Plex media server and ripped all my DVD and Blu-ray discs to it (and even some old VHS tapes!), so I can stream my own media from anywhere; through my phone, tablet, laptop, etc. I primarily use it to watch my movies and TV shows on my living room TV.

    I also ripped all my old music CDs to mp3 and added them to Plex, so I now have my own ad-free music I can listen to on the go. I stream it through the Plexamp app on my phone, which I connect to my car's Bluetooth. It's like ad-free radio, except I can play whatever I want to listen to in the moment.

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  • I must've been tired last night... I stared at this meme for so long, not able to make any sense of it. What does the Cold War have to do with refrigerators?! I finally put down my tablet and went to sleep.

    This morning I picked up my tablet, saw this meme again, and immediately thought, "Oh, the COLD war." Duh.

  • xkcd #3063: Planet Definitions

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  • He fixed it. They're swapped now.

  • Bye bye Netflix

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  • I cancelled Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+ a couple months ago. No more streaming subscription services for me! I'm very anti-subscription.

    Except for Curiosity Stream, which is like Netflix but for educational documentaries. Even with the cost of my subscription doubling in the last 4 years, I'm still only paying about $30/year for it. Way cheaper than Netflix, and highly educational too!

    I also set up my own Plex media server, then ripped all my DVDs and Blu-rays to my computer so I can watch them anytime, streaming from anywhere. I don't have to worry about content disappearing because the only time something vanishes from my Plex server is when I manually remove it myself.

    Plex itself also has tons of free movies and TV shows streaming through it too. Mostly stuff that's open license. So even if you don't have your own media server set up, there's still tons of stuff to watch without paying for a subscription.

  • What games have the most toxic communities?

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  • A childhood friend of mine worked as a developer for Riot Games over a decade ago, when League of Legends first became popular. He tried to get me to play it with him, but the community was so toxic, it's the first and only game I ever quit solely because of the community.

    If you didn't play specific characters with very specific builds, you were just wasting everyone's time and any losses would be blamed on you. It was really bad.

    I love the content and lore that comes from LoL (Arcane, K/DA, etc.), but I can't stand the game itself.

  • Women in Metal

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  • I saw the "Women in Metal" title and thought this would be a thread about women in trade jobs (i.e. metalworking).

  • What is still considered a rivalry, even though it's mostly one-sided?

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  • In the US? Democrats vs. Republicans.

    According to the rest of the world, the US doesn't have a left party. Democrats are right wing and Republicans are extremist right wing. The left is completely unrepresented in our government. Both major parties lean conservative (from a global perspective) and care more about helping major businesses and the rich elite than actually representing the people.

    That's why there's a whole movement centered around "no war but class war." The American people are not actually represented and are instead pitted against each other in this fake "red vs. blue" distraction so we don't actually go after our political leaders, or weed out the source of the money behind the scenes that dictate their actions.

  • a girl have dreams

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  • I don't know birds, but I always assumed it was a species of bird that doesn't migrate for the winter, so hearing another bird talk about leaving for winter is blowing its tiny mind.

    Either that, or it's just the first winter it's experiencing, since it's confused about the color change of the leaves.

  • Just watched the movie Hacksaw Ridge. Got me thinking can people in the military turn down an order because they disagree with it on sensible grounds? Like Trump ordering them to invade CN?

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  • I mean, I am the source. This was my personal experience while serving in the military.

    But if you want official reports to back up what I experienced, here's you go:

    Intelligence officials withheld sensitive information from Trump while he was in office because they feared the 'damage' he could do if he knew.

    I was working in an Intelligence unit when Trump was president (not the one directly briefing him) and it's all anyone talked about at the time. They had to be extremely careful what information they shared with him because he would just go and post details on his social media accounts.

    My unit had to change a lot of their missions and coordination because Trump would expose our secrets online. It ruined a lot of ongoing missions we had planned, and we had to scrap and rebuild a lot of our programs after he blabbed about them.

    Trump fires top US general in unprecedented Pentagon shakeup

    This was more recent, after I retired. But he basically fired our top military leaders, then made his own suggestions for replacements, completing ignoring the official promotion system we have in place.

    He didn't want people with years of experience and exemplary service to lead our military, he just wants his own loyalists in charge so he can control the military. He nominated highly unqualified people for the positions, with the only seemingly common quality being that they were loyal to Trump.

    He was also annoyed at how hard it was to replace key people and wanted to circumvent official processes so he can hire and fire people at will, like his old businesses.

  • Just watched the movie Hacksaw Ridge. Got me thinking can people in the military turn down an order because they disagree with it on sensible grounds? Like Trump ordering them to invade CN?

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  • I retired from the US military 3 years ago. Yes, they can refuse unlawful orders. If I was still serving, I'd be abusing the hell out of that regulation right now.

    During Trump's last presidency, our intelligence community actually held back a lot of details in his intelligence briefings because we knew he couldn't be trusted to keep his mouth shut. He has a top secret clearance, not because he could be trusted with it, but because it was a requirement for his job. And he also reversed our decision to withhold clearances from sketchy members of our government, so a lot of untrustworthy people also got access to our sensitive data, and thanks to that, we had a lot of compromised missions during his first tenure as president.

    But we also had a majority Democrat government, which kept him in check. This time around, he's attempting to replace everyone he can with his "yes men" so he gets no push-back. He's even been trying to replace military generals with his own loyalists. If he can control the military, he can basically stage a coup overnight and no one will be able to stop him.

    Things are getting really dangerous right now, so that regulation about refusing unlawful orders is very important, and I hope our current military members are willing to exercise it as needed.

  • Spent half an hour on it. Felt good.

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  • SQL is the language. Its name is also an acronym, for "Structured Query Language."

  • Spent half an hour on it. Felt good.

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  • They're both acronyms, so yes? You always write acronyms in upper case.

    Structured Query Language (SQL)

    HyperText Markup Language (HTML)

    Some exceptions to the rule exist, like "Database" is usually abbreviated as Db in acronyms. For instance, IMDb (Internet Movie Database).

    Although considering database is a singular word, it makes sense to lower-case the middle letter of the word, as it wouldn't be capitalized in the spelled-out word anyway.

    EDIT: On a related note (and one that will really show my age), I always capitalize the i in "Internet."

    When I was a kid, and before the Internet was publicly accessible, we referred to a collection of internetworked computers as an "internet."

    Then the "World Wide Web" (WWW) became a big deal in the mid-'90s, which was the first publicly accessible internet of computers and servers. It was super primitive and took like 10 minutes just to load a small image on a mostly-text webpage. We referred to this new global internet as "The Internet." This was the biggest and most ambitious attempt at building an interconnected series of computers, so we called it The Internet (capital "i") to differentiate it from a regular internet.

    Fast forward several decades... for so long, the Internet has been such a commonly used term to refer to the World Wide Web. It's completely taken over the word; we don't really refer to small computer networks as internets anymore. So there's no point in differentiating between the two.

    But I remember, and I still keep up the old habit of capitalizing when I'm referring to THE Internet, versus a smaller network of computers.

  • YouTube doesn't let me watch without turning off my VPN?

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  • I've been paying for Proton VPN for a couple years now and I've never been blocked by YouTube.

    I'm also using uBlock Origin and Firefox as a browser. YouTube takes like 5-10 seconds to load videos, thanks to their built-in delay timer when ads can't play, but otherwise it works fine.

    Honestly, I'd gladly wait 30 seconds staring at a black screen than watch a 10-second ad. So their delay timer is pointless.

  • Tim Walz pushes back on GOP lawmakers who refuse to hold town halls

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  • It may be true but doesn't help me today

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  • My first car was a 1991 Honda Ascot. I bought it in 2003 in Japan, when I was stationed there with the US military. I bought it off a fellow service member who was leaving the country, for $1,000. I gave it to another service member for free when I bought a better car a year later.