Are you dating Rentaro?
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I also enjoyed Red Dragon by Thomas Harris.
The whole Hannibal trilogy is one of my favorite series of books. (Red Dragon, Silence of the Lambs, and Hannibal; respectively.)
There's a fourth book, Hannibal Rising, that serves as a prequel/origin story for Hannibal Lecter. But it was written under duress by the author.
Thomas Harris didn't want to explain Hannibal's origin, as it removed the mystery surrounding his character. But Hannibal had become globally famous through the films, and Harris was basically told by the film producer, Dino De Laurentiis, that if he didn't write an origin story, someone else would. So in order to maintain some control over his own character, he begrudgingly wrote Hannibal Rising.
And it shows. The writing style of that book is very different from the other three. Unlike the trilogy, which has a way of weaving an intricate and mesmerizing story, Hannibal Rising just feels mechanical and methodical, like it's just checking boxes and getting to the point as quickly and efficiently as it can. It told a basic story, which was immediately pumped out as a low-budget B movie 2 months later.
If you get into the Hannibal books, I highly recommend skipping Hannibal Rising. It's poorly written and removes the mystique behind Hannibal Lecter.
I'm genuinely surprised to find this article here and not posted to one of the various "FuckCars" communities on Lemmy.
- JumpRemoved
Lara Croft is a Sociopath
But she's the Hero™ fighting against the Bad Guys™. Branding is everything.
But yeah, viewed objectively from a third party perspective, a lot of heroes in games and movies are actually borderline villains. Inserting themselves into a situation they don't need to be involved in, and then the end justify the means. They may murder tons of no-name henchmen, but a greater threat to society has been eliminated!
I actually find it interesting that a lot of superhero characters came from healthy, sane family environments and fight to protect the Status Quo™, while most villains come from hardship and trauma and attempt to change the Status Quo™ that allowed their injustice of a life to exist, so others don't suffer the same fate.
But some happy-go-lucky hero always comes by and stops them because their plan changes the Status Quo™. And we can't accept changes to our structured social environment!
Is it a reference though? I'm pretty sure this is just a furry redraw of a Calvin & Hobbes comic panel.
I served in the US military for 20 years, from 2002-2022. At least twice that I can recall, they didn't pass a budget in time and we were told that we wouldn't be paid until it was resolved, but to keep working like normal and we'd eventually get paid. Both times it was a very short time before it was resolved and we did eventually get paid again. I think the longest time was about two or three weeks.
For members who used USAA for a bank (a company exclusively for military members and their families), the bank automatically deposited our paychecks in our account on time, because they said they knew the US government was good for it. Anyone who used another bank just had to wait for the government to actually pay us.
If you know anything about military members (especially young service members), a decent amount of them live paycheck to paycheck, not because they have to, but because they're irresponsible with their money. The military pays you well, while also providing food and housing allowances on top of your pay, so your necessities are covered and your base pay is basically pocket money to spend as you like. As such, a lot of service members go out and spend that money and end up with very little in their savings.
So when a government shutdown hits like this, suddenly that safety net of a monthly housing allowance is gone and service members need to pull their own spending money to pay for rent and utilities. Which can be hard to scrounge up last-minute for some.
I was always very fiscally responsible during my service, but most of the people I worked with would go out partying and drinking every week (some every night!) and would be struggling for cash by the next paycheck. Which came bi-monthly for us; we were paid on the 1st and 15th of every month. So there was always a lot of stress and anxiety when the government announced a shutdown.
As someone who is in his 40s and still trying to catch up with all the Star Trek series, I'm actually grateful for the short series. It lets me explore scenarios and relationships in a tight-knit story, without a lot of fluff. Longer than a movie, but not drawn out over dozens of episodes.
It keeps the story more focused and less about a handful of random storylines with over a dozen characters who all get lengthy screentime. I'm likely in the minority, but I feel we need more of these brief kind of seasons.
Granted, it's easy to say this after the fact when I'm binging multiple complete series, but I do get the frustration when you're waiting on a new show and it seems like it's over before it even began.
There's so much green in this comic, I thought the white guy was just talking to himself until I re-read it.
And I only re-read it because I didn't understand why he randomly said "forg" in the first panel.
[...] the Internet (it was a written with a capital I back then)
Back then, an internet (lower case "i") was a small internal network of computers that communicated with each other.
The World Wide Web, being a massive collection of computers across the globe that are interconnected, quickly earned the title of "THE Internet" (upper-case "i"), to differentiate it from smaller isolated networks.
"World Wide Web" turned out to be a mouthful to say, so we replaced it with "the Internet" instead. Although most websites still start with "www" to represent their global reach.
Nowadays, we've stopped using the word "internet" to describe smaller networks, so the word mostly just refers to the global network. And as such, if doesn't really matter if you capitalize it or not.
However, I was there when the web became accessible to the public and the nomenclature has stuck, so I always capitalize the Internet when referring to it.
It's not FOSS, but Plex does that. I host my music from a server I built at home (you can literally just use your desktop PC) and then I have access to it from anywhere. I like to stream it to the Plexamp app on my phone, which I connect to my car via Bluetooth, then I have my own homemade "radio" on the go. No ads, just my own music that I can shuffle through.
I paid for the Lifetime Plex Pass, which gave me full access to all their features and apps. It's expensive, but it's a one-time payment, vs. their monthly subscription which can add up over time.
I actually got annoyed at Plex for remembering exactly where I was in every song. I'd return to an album I hadn't heard in a while and it would skip right to where I left off in each song instead of playing from the beginning of the song
Sometimes while trying to find a particular song, I'd skip around in a track, then move to the next until I found it. Then when I returned to that album later, every song would start somewhere in the middle. I eventually needed to turn that feature off. It still remembers exactly where I left off the last time I played music, but it doesn't save my place in each individual song anymore. Just the last one I played.
On the app, it keeps a list of all the playlists I've recently played, so I can pick up on my latest playlist or scroll back in the history and start up one I played a while ago. This is great because I like to just shuffle my entire library as a playlist while I'm mowing my lawn, but my wife likes to hear specific genres or bands while we're riding in the car together. So I can just keep alternating back and forth between playlists depending on the situation and it remembers where I left off in each one.
cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/6197747
^ This is what's going on. This originated from Hexbear.
I feel like Pedro Pascal is this generation's Burt Reynolds.
When Facebook started refreshing my feed every time I came back to the app or scrolled to the top.
Also, when it wouldn't let me swipe out of the app, forcing me to manually close the app itself just to escape. It's stopped doing that now, but attempting to swipe out just brings me back to the top of the feed and refreshes it again. I need to swipe a few times before it lets me leave.
I actively avoid Facebook now because half my feed is suggested content instead of my actual feed from my friends and family. It's a nuisance to change my feed to just friends and it resets when I leave the website, so I just stay away as much as I can.
I block all ads on my computer, but I wouldn't doubt that Facebook is drowning in ads too.
Maybe I'm just old, but I read that last line in Popeye's laugh instead of Mr. Crabs.
I also use Voyager. I browse by "All" and subscribe to communities that look interesting. I figured I'd whittle down my interests over time until I have a nice custom feed to browse, but because Lemmy is so much smaller than Reddit, I still continue to just browse by "All," even after being here for about 2 years now.
I've only blocked a few communities, but they were just some foreign-language communities that were dominating my feed for a while. Whomever owns those instances didn't mark a language for them, so they're showing up with everything else uncategorized.
I think one of the big concerns is that Trump is looking for any excuse to deploy the military against our own citizens. If he can start something violent in the streets, it justifies declaring martial law and taking over Democrat-run states. But in this digital age, everyone has cameras on their phones, so he needs the citizens to start shit first. He's not brave enough yet to directly contradict video evidence of crimes (although he's getting there).
That's one of the big reasons Americans are trying to keep their protests civil. If we turn it violent, Trump gets his way and we get don't stand a chance against a military invasion on our own land. Like in California, when Trump sent the National Guard to quell protests against ICE in LA, nothing came of it because no one wanted to start a fight. Protestors showed up, but none of them directly engaged with the military. Eventually the whole military campaign fizzled and the National Guard was recalled home.
We're dealing with that again in Washington D.C. right now. Trump created some fake crime emergency to deploy the National Guard in D.C., despite an all-time low crime rate right now. Protestors are showing up in force, but nothing's happening because they're not directly confronting the National Guard. Just standing their ground and peacefully protesting.
I'm all for revolution; I think the only way we'll fix our broken system is to tear it all down and rebuild from scratch; there are too many corrupt officials, on both sides of the fence, to repair it as is. And too many corrupt laws and regulations in place to function effectively. But you can't just go in with violence. It's a delicate situation right now and violence should be the absolute last resort. Trump has no problem sending millions to their deaths for his ideals and he'll gladly invade our own nation to cement his dictatorship. We can't give him the excuse to do it.
I was serving in the US military when Trump got elected the first time, and that was a scary time for us. He spoke very favorably about various dictators and wanting to reshape America like their countries. But he had a majority Democrat government that kept slapping down every BS thing he tried, so his first term was mostly uneventful.
This time around, though, he has a majority Republican government and enough supporters in high level positions that he's surrounded by yes men. He's been a lot more bold. I'm really glad I retired when I did because there's no way I could follow his unlawful orders.
I think that's the biggest difference between the US and Europe. Europe isn't going to deploy the military to break up violent protests and then use it to enact martial law and overthrow that nation. Trump will, if given the chance.
I refuse to use TikTok, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc. I only have Facebook because 90% of my friends and family are there and it's the primary way I stay in touch with them, but I'd like to get rid of that too.
Regarding TikTok, I was serving in the US military as an IT sysadmin when it became popular. But we discovered that the app embedded itself deep in your phone's hardware, granted itself full administrative access to your phone, then started trickling all your data to servers in China. And you couldn't fully uninstall it once you'd installed it once. Your phone was completely compromised if you ever installed that app.
It became a huge security risk and we were told to never use it. It was a horrifyingly effective spy tool China could use to easily collect data on us. That's why President Biden pushed to ban TikTok in the US.
But of course, TikTok became super popular among our civilian population and they refused to give it up, which led to a lot of pushback against the ban. It never held, and now people are still using it and sharing all their private information with China.
Meta does something similar with Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp, but we at least can keep tabs on what they're doing with your private data, since they're an American company. They mostly use your information to build advertising profiles on you, to better catch your attention with ads. But that information could easily be used against you if federal organizations wanted to. ICE could use it to identify non-white Americans and their daily habits and easily intercept them.
Still, if you don't want your private information being potentially stolen by these companies, it's best to dump these programs. I don't install them on my phone or tablet and I keep Facebook's website isolated on my computer, since it likes to read other open windows and use those sites to fine-tune advertising data for you.
Google has turned into one of these companies that collects data on everything you do, so I'm in the middle of de-Googling my life right now. But it's really hard because they're embedded everywhere.
We're living in a dark time where the only way to prevent corporations and governments from collecting information on you is to stay offline. Which is nearly impossible nowadays. We don't get privacy in this modern Information Age. Not while Capitalism is still a thing.
Yup, because of his comic about it, paleontologists have officially named it the Thagomizer.
I've just been using a Swiffer WetJet mop. I don't really need a vacuum; the thick mop pads are pretty good at picking up most stuff. Anything it doesn't handle, I just use my regular vacuum on bare floor mode.