It’s a good platform, but it absolutely does not cover the same breadth of content as YouTube. To me, Nebula feels a bit more like old-school discovery channel before it got all crappy. I pay for Nebula, but I still watch 99% of my online video on YouTube. Of the range of different types of content I watch on YouTube, I’d say Nebula covers about 5% of it. It is pretty nice for when a creator is dealing with copyright bullshit on YouTube, but I can still watch the video on Nebula.
I have a small ~$5 desk fan that I got from AliExpress. First time it broke, it was because the mount points for the micro USB charge port were glued on instead of soldered in place. Then the tiny crappy button which presses a smaller surface mount button inside got bent and no longer clicked the actual internal component. Then the button snapped off completely so I replaced it with a 3D printed one. Then my initial soldering broke loose because I admittedly half-assed it the first time. When it was sitting on my desk, disassembled for the 5th time, I mentioned how many times I’d cracked it open to someone and they bought me a different fan as a gift, essentially freeing me from the curse of repairing the cheap fan again, and giving me permission to just trash it…
I still fixed it and now I have 2 fans. I must’ve fixed it pretty well this last time because I’ve dropped it twice pretty hard and it’s still holding up. Repairing shit is awesome. It usually doesn’t take that many tries though…
Here’s an episode of the podcast Citations Needed all about how much Mike Rowe sucks.
No problem. I was concerned I went way overboard so I’m glad it’s helpful. Just be aware that if you also use Freestyle Dash, basically anyone who’s familiar with 360 modding will be like “…why are you using that?” It’s over a decade out of support. Aurora is much lighter and up to date, but I’m old school and I’m nostalgic for Dream Theme. The good news is if you want, you can configure Dashlaunch to have both. You just hold some button you choose on the controller while booting and it will boot into FSD, Aurora, or straight into xexmenu if you want. Before I settled into a preference, I put both FSD and Aurora on all the consoles I modded.
Very true. All my shit’s automated these days anyway, but I remember back when Mr. Robot was still on air, I’d always be checking the torrent sites starting about 10 min after the episode dropped and I very rarely had to actually wait a full hour for it to appear. Fun times, and a very fitting show.
RGH was the first mod I learned. Back then, you needed to use an ace v3 mod chip. Now with RGH 3, you only need a resistor and a diode for most models. I still prefer RGH because it persists between boots. Mod once and have a cracked console forever.
Honestly I mostly forgot that bad update was a thing while typing that comment. Back when I was still paying attention, you needed a specific game to make it work. Naturally, that game instantly became way more expensive on the resell market. Also the exploit used to take a few minutes to run, but I’m pretty sure that’s much shorter now.
If you have the game you need or it no longer requires a specific game, then I guess there’s no major reason to hard mod as long as you don’t mind running the exploit each time you power up the console. I haven’t done a mod in a few years now, but was planning to do another soon. I’ll probably look into bad update just to familiarize myself, but I imagine I’ll still do RGH 3 because it lets me set everything up, install all the games I want, customize the dashboard, make the menus pretty by getting all the full box art for every game, and then the console just stays that way forever and cleanly boots directly into the custom dashboard with virtually 100% success. I also prefer Freestyle Dash over Aurora which makes makes me somewhat unusual, but I very much prefer having separate categories for 360 games, original xbox games, xbla games, homebrew apps, and emulators (I could only ever find SNES so that’s all I have). Also I just really like customizing the look and feel with the Dream Theme installed on Freestyle. Scrub through that video to get an idea how crazy customizable Dream Theme is. Aurora has one look and one category with all games as far as I know, but most people go with it over Freestyle Dash.
All that to say, I mostly just enjoy doing an RGH mod because it’s fun. I mentioned how the whole process makes me feel like an actual hacker, and that first time you see the xell screen pop up (meaning the hack was a success), it’s worth it for the dopamine hit alone. Also these days if I’m modding a 360, I’m probably doing it for a friend and it’s much easier to give them something that requires no special knowledge to use.
I mean, it’s a perfectly functional free public tracker that can be thrown in with a handful of other free public trackers in prowlarr which when added together, cover about 98% of all my media needs. I don’t go to the pirate bay, but I would imagine my arr stack probably uses it from time to time.
Some shows are online before it’s even done airing because people have cracked the streaming platform and can download directly as soon as it drops. Hour long show that premieres at 9pm? If it’s popular, it’ll be online by 9:15.
Sometimes I feel anxious because I’m not sure what category I fit into and then I remember the source of my anxiety is actually just the insistence that I must fit into a category.
When people are difficult about accepting cash as thanks, I’m a fan of hiding some money at their place or in their stuff. Depending on the person though, they might figure it out and thus begins a pretty silly back-and-forth battle.
I like it much better with the last 2 frames included.
It feels like people are upset about running into users who are politically left-leaning… on federated social media.
That’s like being upset about encountering queer people in the arts, or chuds in the weightlifting space, or conservatives at the gun range. What the hell did you expect?
I’d highly recommend modding an xbox 360 if you’ve never done so. Very achievable if you’re somewhat technical, and you get to feel all the hackerman vibes because it requires soldering some wire leads to the motherboard and using a raspberry pi pico to read and write the nand. Most original xbox games also work if you install the compatibility files. So many incredible games from the 360 generation, and the consoles can still be found for around $50. Just make sure you get a “slim” model console because the phats don’t live as long. This site has basically everything you need to know. It’s an extremely good resource.
Ok so I’ve never been diagnosed ADHD, but I’ve also never heard a description of living with ADHD that didn’t describe my lived experience to a T. Maybe next time I have healthcare I’ll get around to getting it checked out. I never got around to getting checked last time I had coverage… or the time before that.
YouTube started doing a thing for me a few days back where every video that I moused over for a few seconds counted as a view and went into my watch history. Only took me about 30 min to notice because my algorithm suddenly turned to shit and I was getting the most content-slop recommendations. I could actually tell something was off with my account they were so bad. Looked at my watch history and noticed like 15 videos I never watched. Removed all of them and it went back to normal, then I had to Google how to turn off mouseover autoplay to make it stop.
There was a brief period of time where they were actually on the “right” track IMO. You’d pop the headset on, call your friend(s), and when they answered, immediately your VR avatars would be standing in the same virtual space or in your room if you’re using passthrough mode, and you could “look at” and speak to each other in a way that felt extremely natural. You’d start gesturing and naturally moving your body as you speak in the same way you would in a face-to-face chat. The same way you can be at a Halloween party and after a few minutes, you’re having a completely normal conversation with Abe Lincoln or a frog or whatever. Even though the avatars weren’t perfect, there were times that three of us just stood around for 30-45 minutes just chatting and catching up before anyone suggested playing an actual game.
To me, the main selling point of VR is that it’s the best way to feel present with someone who isn’t physically there. It’s better than a video call or a traditional online game. It’s really the closest thing to just “hanging out” with someone who’s somewhere else.
Of course, it only worked that way for a month or two before they made it so that you couldn’t gather like that unless you were inside the horizon worlds app, which everyone always hated. Typical dark pattern enshittification as usual.
This is all beside the fact that it’s Zuck, Facebook, and all the other things everyone hates, but much like the perv glasses seem to be catching on, I think Zuck’s metaverse could have been somewhat popular if they hadn’t done… basically everything they’ve done to it.
I have to imagine that the customers BMW targets probably like ostentatious consumerism, right? Maybe something like “these plebs don’t even get premium ads on their car dashboard.”
I mean I have no idea. I’m just guessing. They could afford another car, right? They must like it. Or are BMWs only for people that are like the “McMansion” level of rich? It’s not like it’s a Bentley or a Rolls, right? Those are car words. Aren’t those the “old money” type of brands?
50% of all consumer spending is done by the top 10% of income earners. Maybe BMWs are the bottom of the barrel economy cars for that 10%. 🤷♂️
I once drove an hour with a pretty severe concussion because I planned to just go home and sleep off what I would later learn was a small crater in the front of my skull. After I got home and was poking at the injury in the bathroom mirror, I realized I could feel pieces of my skull moving around so I decided I should probably go to the hospital…
The process of getting my skull fixed with extremely shitty insurance was a whole other set of horrors that in some ways sucked even more than the skull crater.
Sometime last year, I heard someone say something to the effect of “I think the pandemic had a pretty major effect on all of us,” and for a moment I thought “honestly I think I got through it fairly unscathed” because I was only considering my tolerance for the disruption to my life at the time. I was in a financially secure position and had plenty of social contact with friends through online gaming. I never felt any more depressed than normal throughout “quarantine” insofar as we even had one. Got my vaccines. Never tested positive. Didn’t lose anyone close to me (to the illness). Overall, I thought I’d made it through pretty alright.
Then I thought for just a few seconds more and I realized that the pandemic is what caused me to literally give up on humanity. Seeing how little everyone cared about anyone who was actually affected. People making posts online about how it was “fake” when people all over the world were dying. The ones who refused to wear a mask. Such a simple fucking request. Put this cloth over your face for a while and you can help not get people killed, but they still wouldn’t do it. I lived in a more rural area at the time, so it took a while for things to get really bad there. I remember thinking “you idiots will change your tune when it’s your grandmother dying” and then they just didn’t… Their own friends and family dying around them and most just slid further into conspiracy and paranoia.
The whole experience just fundamentally reshaped what I believe about humans and I don’t think anything will ever be able to switch things back. It reminds me of the scene in Terminator where John Connor says “We’re not gonna make it are we? People, I mean.”
Just a quiet resignation to the reality that left with nothing more than our own devices and all the resources we’d need to persist until the heat death of the universe, we’ll likely end up going extinct due to something completely preventable and probably caused by us. We choose our own destruction.
I didn’t feel this way before covid. I used to believe we’d eventually figure things out. Not anymore.
At any point that I’m about to make a post online and I realize that the emotional energy required to continue engaging is more than I’m willing to commit to this particular discussion, I just bail. No reply, no downvote, just peace out. It’s really not worth it.