I saw the writing on the wall when Netflix was forced to remove shows due to licensing.
Like many of you, I was on the “Yay Netflix” bandwagon for a while. And I remember the moment I realized I had to fish my black tri-point hat and eye patch out of the bin. It was the early 2010’s and I was living in a single rental bedroom (student style). I had Netflix and I’m in Canada, but I was experimenting with ipv6, and I realized that Netflix’s ipv6 geolocation stuff was flawed. I wasn’t using a VPN, but my V6 address was a “US” address, so if I turned off IPv4, I could watch US Netflix. I was watching the show “Arrow”, which I got really into early on. After a while, poof, it vanished. A bit of research and the license was pulled. It didn’t take long for me to piece it together. They were going to make the show available on their own streaming platform.
Suddenly, I saw the whole picture. It was like cable, but worse. Each studio was going to have a streaming service and like cable packages, you’d have to subscribe to their streaming service to see their shows, while getting access to a bunch of crap you didn’t care about, then have to find some way to track what shows were on which platforms and stay informed as to when new episodes were released, etc… Same as with cable. I said to myself, hell no.
I got my hat and eye patch, hung my flag, and I’ve been sailing the seven seas since. Fuck that noise.
My main issue with it all (beyond the obvious cost) is managing, monitoring and using multiple services. I wanted a central dashboard of shows that will update with new episodes from shows I watch as they are released. I found Plex. I’ve been using it for something like 10 years or more, and I’m pretty happy about it.
Cable had the merit of channel flipping. You could easily flip from one studios station to another without barriers. Now, you have to go to a completely different app/website/whatever, to change. You probably have to log in, etc. It’s a whole thing. What was a simple push of a button is now an entire ordeal. No thanks.
I knew this would be the eventual outcome and I was entirely right. My friends, if you haven’t already, it may be time to dust off your own hats and eye patches and set sail once again.
I look at this and think, it’s almost right. If you reverse the direction, or simply see it flowing the other way (there’s really no directionality on the image except for what’s implied by the physics of light), trans kids go in… People who were born trans and trying to figure themselves out, push them through almost any system of oppression (schools, church, you name it), and out the other side comes “normal” (and deeply unhappy) kids.
This is why, as a straight dude, I wholeheartedly support everyone in the LGBTQ+ community. They’re people, just like everyone else, and I’m sure there’s some that are just terrible people, but on the whole, they’re just folks trying to find their happiness just like everyone else.
I consider myself an ally, and I’ll use any power I have to promote equality for everyone; whether that entails voting against people who would take their rights away, or try to silence them or whatever, speaking out against tyranny or judgemental asshats… It doesn’t matter.
IMO, we are people first. Your choice in name, pronouns, gender identity, sexual orientation, etc, are all secondary to the fact that you are a human person deserving of all the same rights and privileges afforded to everyone else.
My favorite (tongue in cheek) comment, specifically about (gay) marriage is that LGBTQ+ people should have the right to be just as unhappy as the rest of us, in marriage.
While there definitely is a trope about “wife bad”, and it’s fairly common, people complaining about their spouse is nothing new. Men were able to insert it into pop culture far more frequently in the boomer days before there was even a facade of equality (both for gender and for race).
Now at least, there’s a facade of equality if not genuine equality and as others have indicated, a lot of the spouse demeaning comedy has fallen out of favour.
So from the etymology of the trend, it could only be “wife bad” boomer humor to achieve the meme-like status that it has, when equality became a more important issue, those jokes fell out of favour.
To be perfectly clear, my statements are largely genderless, and that is very much on purpose. Since a husband may not have a wife, and a wife may not have a husband. Equally a spouse may not have a husband or wife.
I have done a lot to ensure that the language I use isn’t gendered because there are people who don’t identify as a gender or don’t identify as a single gender. To which, my comments are largely taking about people, not men and women, so genderless terms are more correct to what I mean by my comments.
Yes, it’s a little cringe to imply that all marriages are unhappy marriages. I tell this joke because it falls in the arena known as “dad” jokes, which I personally enjoy. Additionally, it subverts expectations by implying the negative of what would be normally expected, which is the bread and butter of my preferred humor.
This is emphasized by the fact of who I am and how my personality works. I like to give people something unexpected; I’ll give you one easy example of not being funny but also not doing what’s normally expected. If I walk into a room where a group of people are watching a sports game, I’ll ask “who is losing?” Since most people would ask “who is winning?”. It’s weird, I’m weird, and I’m okay with that.
Do with that information as you will. The fact is I like going with the opposite of whatever most people would expect when it has no bearing on the information, it only inverts it. So rather than saying “the same right to be happily married as everyone else” I simply went for the opposite as I do with everything else. It’s a quirk of my personality.
Thanks for replying to this. I’m not in Lemmy nearly as much as I would like.
I just want to note that the comment you replied to is wrong. Call it a quirk of my personality, but I like to ask the opposite of what’s expected. The example I gave in another reply was walking in to a room where people are watching sports, instead of asking “who is winning?” As most would, I instead ask “who is losing?”. The information is the same either way, provided you know who is playing, stating the loser implies who the winner is.
I don’t mean to imply all marriages are unhappy, I just simply flipped the script, so to speak, and instead of saying they have the same right to a happy marriage, I say the opposite, not because I think they’re doomed to be unhappy in marriage, but because people usually expect an implication of everyone being happy in marriage.
I think the reason I do this is because it makes people think about their response more than if they’re asked what people expect them to ask. But IDK, I’m no psychiatrist.
Either way, I appreciate your comments here, and I wanted to leave you a note to say so, and provide a bit of information. I hope you have a great day.
The pain was that you had no idea what the image really contained until it was downloading. Sure, thumbnails existed, but they were like 20x20. So you didn’t know if you were getting someone naked, or someone wearing a beige body suit or some other nonsense.
About halfway through you could usually make a judgement call on whether you wanted to finish the download or try a different picture.
It makes me sad because Google used to be great. The main feature that made Google great was the click rejection. Basically the search would know when you clicked on a link and didn’t come back to the search results. This action would add weight to that result as “this probably has the information that was being searched for” so it would be nearer to the top later when others made similar queries.
This was their killer feature, it basically crowd sourced the correct information. After a small amount of time, the correct results would kind of float to the top so subsequent searches would put those results near the top to help satisfy queries faster.
Now? They seem to want to give you results that satisfy their partners, and keep you tied to the results page as long as possible. The focus seems to have shifted from being a good search engine with accurate results, to a meme of how to make money.
Never before has this shift been more clear to me than right now, directly in the wake of I/O 2024; an event my friends have taken to calling AI/O. Pretty much every single presentation was about Gemini and AI generated garbage, but this isn’t what made Google’s new direction clear to me. In the last 20-30 minutes of the event it was made perfectly clear what they were doing with I/O. And to drive the point home, every I/O has showcased stuff you can’t use yet, stuff they’re working on, and other cool shit. Some of it cost money, but there was usually some stuff that was just done because it could be done and it would be made available at some point, a nontrivial amount of it was free. At AI/O, the entire focus was on AI, with little to no non-AI stuff in there, at all, then at the end, they kicked everyone in the shorts. Here’s our prices to access this shit. Buy it. As far as I’m concerned AI/O was a gigantic marketing circle jerk to sell their AI.
It seems that Google has entered the final phases of enshittification.
Agreed. I won’t get into it, since the trolley problem has taught me that there’s a lot of opinions on it, which makes it seem relevant, but there’s nearly zero consensus on what the correct analysis of the situation is. At the end of the day, the dilemma is a near impossibility.
The courts have made up their mind on it and that’s all I’m going to concern myself with for the moment.
If I’m seeing this correctly, those are from ESS, aka, eye shield systems. I owned a pair of their ICE eye shields for a while.
They use a bullet resistant material for the “lenses” which can help reduce the impact of some projectiles, in the hope that it will save you from losing your vision from being shot in the face.
I believe their benchmark was some kind of shotgun round at a few meters, probably birdshot or other small/sprayed shot.
I bought them because they’re roughly equivalent to most safety glasses, and I was doing work at the time that required such personal protective equipment. Mine came with three “lenses”, one clear, one that was amber, and one they called “smoke” which appears to be what this character is wearing.
I liked the eyewear, but I seem to have lost mine over the years. I would buy it again simply for the durability, as driving glasses. However, since I’m not a kid anymore, and I have financial responsibilities, I can’t really justify $100+ on eyewear unless it’s a prescription or something else I require in order to live.
I assume this guy has ESS because he is a GUN fanatic. So he wears them while being unsafe with his GUNs.
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Source
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