I believe this is a meme concerning the film Inglorious Basterds. In it, Michael Fassbender’s character was an American lieutenant working undercover in Nazi Germany and used the wrong hand gesture to ask for another round of drinks. It got him and his team outed as American spies.

I cut all streaming services out of my life last year, except for Curiosity Stream, a sort of “Netflix” for educational documentaries.

But I haven’t even been watching that in a while, so maybe I should stop paying for it.

I just got sick of rising prices and invasive ads despite paying to avoid them. I use Plex now. I paid the one-time fee for the Lifetime Plex Pass and now I have access to all their advanced tools and streaming content, plus I can rip my movies/TV shows/music to my PC and stream them myself through Plex. No ads, no extra junk, no “are you still watching?” pop-ups. Just hit play and enjoy.

If checking age on social media is all it ever does, then sure, whatever.

You’re forgetting an important detail: you submitted an official ID to prove your age. Which means your face, address, and legal name are also on record. So every time you get age-verified, you’re basically checking in with your full legal identity, leaving a breadcrumb path across the Internet of everything you do. That data can be used to track your online activities and build a database on who you are as a person, based on the things you access.

THIS is why age verification is a terrifying thing for computer access. It’s a form of government tracking that should be illegal. Cops can’t legally barge into your home anytime they want and go through your stuff. They can’t take your computer and scan it for data collection. Not without a court order.

With age verification embedded within your OS, it won’t matter if there’s a court order or not. If your computer is connected to the Internet, you’ve just publicly broadcast all your data to the world, and anyone - cops or not - can tap into that data and build a profile on you. You don’t even need to be browsing the Internet; if your OS is verifying your age, it could also be broadcasting that verification for every program you use locally on your computer. None of your data is safe; it’s all tied to your legal identity and trackable.

Arr 🏴‍☠️

100% accurate. My wife is my best friend in the whole world.

During COVID, a lot of married couples divorced because they were forced to spend time together at home every day and realized they can’t stand being around each other so much. Going to a job every day got them out of the house and away from their spouse/family for a few hours, which made married life tolerable.

But for my wife and I, self-isolating at home was business as usual. We always hang out, even if we’re doing our own separate things. Just existing in the same space together makes us happy. Heck, we both retired young, so we’re now just sitting around the house all day long together. And we’re still enjoying each other’s friendship and love.

Find someone you can vibe with on a personal level, not just someone who’s pretty or has one or two traits you want to associate with. Marrying my best friend has been the best decision I’ve ever made and it pays out tenfold as you get older together.

Back in the day, “boner” meant mistake. The Joker made a mistake and was humiliated to have it posted publicly in the newspaper (they didn’t have the Internet back then).

That’s Google for ya! Their motto was, “Don’t be evil.” That was the two original founders’ motto, which was silently changed sometime after the company was sold.

I’d need more context than a single screenshot and a second of audio. What’s happening leading up to this sound? What came right after? Can you make a video clip with at least 10 seconds of audio to pair with this specific capture? Visual cues and a bit more audio around the event will help make sense of it. As is, it doesn’t sound remotely like whimpering. Or anything recognizable.

Also, The Amazing World of Gumball is an excellent show! I’ve re-watched it 3 times already, and I’m in my 40s. Despite being a kid’s show, it’s highly entertaining no matter your age.

When I became a sysadmin 24 years ago, I figured the general public was still adapting to the rapid overnight advancements and integration into the tech industry. I assumed that as people figured out how to use software and computer technology in their daily lives, help desk support would practically disappear and we’d be able to move our efforts toward fully maintaining systems instead of customers.

I had no idea how resistant the general public would be to actually learning and understanding technology. We went from recommending customers avoid certain bad programs and hardware, to being forced to incorporate them into our infrastructure because the general public didn’t want to give them up.

My professional opinion was overruled many times because someone higher up the food chain wanted to use a device or app that hurt our client base or mission parameters, but was familiar to them, so they wanted it included in our suite of tools.

I’m grateful to see a lot of public resistance to AI, even if corporations are doubling down on their investment into the technology. But I don’t have any hope for the future of technology or the general public who use it daily. AI is just the latest excuse for people to not learn how to use technology efficiently.

I expected younger generations to be raised on this tech and be absolute wizards in its use, understanding it even better than I do! Instead, they were raised on slop and ad-riddled ADHD-promoting garbage apps that rotted their brains and prevented them from learning basic tools and functions. As a millennial, I’ve spent the better half of a decade teaching boomers how to use this tech, and then the next decade trying to reeducate zoomers on how to properly use tech and break their life-long bad habits.

I retired from the IT industry after only 20 years. Now I enjoy tinkering with technology in my free time. I always enjoyed teaching people how to use their personal computers and smartphones, but I can’t spend another minute on a help desk, fielding calls from people who still don’t know how to read error messages that pop up in their face. AI will be the death of the industry if integrated into everything and left unchecked. Maybe it’d be for the best.

“There is no war in Ba Sing Se.”

NOTE: Spoilers for a 33-yr old film ahead…

As a kid, I enjoyed Mrs. Doubtfire for the Robin Williams comedy. But I hated the ending, because it felt like all the effort of the film was wasted. Robin Williams’ character doesn’t win his wife back and he has to accept the initial conflict of the story is permanent and unresolvable. It felt like a gut-punch and left me feeling sad and unsatisfied.

As an adult, I understand that this film had a more realistic approach to family and relationship conflict and I appreciate it more… but I still feel uneasy about the ending. I can’t get myself to sit down and rewatch it because it just feels so tragic to me. I’d consider this the opposite of a feel-good movie.

It’s kind of funny because I really enjoy gritty realism in my films today. But back in the '90s, films were a happy, wholesome escape from reality. Most people didn’t watch movies for a reminder of their real lives, they wanted to watch a conflict get resolved and everyone live happily ever after. It made us feel better about our lives, like we could find our happily ever after too. Having a “family comedy” that ends with the family broken up and moving on is so heartbreaking and sad. It’s a twist ending that most people never saw coming back then.

I have a Firefox extension called “Hide Shorts for YouTube” that keeps the vertical shorts from showing up in my feed. I totally forgot that YouTube still has those.

I only use YouTube for long-form videos. I really hate vertical videos. And my ADHD is bad enough; I don’t need to feed it short-form content all day long. I’ll never get off my phone!

Chronologically, Metal Gear Solid 3 is the first game in the series. It shows Snake’s origin story, which leads into the original Metal Gear 1 and 2 games for the old Nintendo Entertainment System (long before the Metal Gear Solid series). So it’s a perfect place to start if you’re picking up the Metal Gear franchise for the first time.

Metal Gear Solid ∆ is just a modern remake of Metal Gear Solid 3, so it’s basically the same thing but better graphics and controls. I read once that due to the falling out with Hideo Kojima, Konami can’t legally re-release the original MGS3 game, so a remake from the ground up was their legal compromise.

Now Metal Gear Solid 4 is the only Metal Gear game that hasn’t been re-released on any other platform since it debuted on the PlayStation 3. But Konami plans to finally release it for PC and all modern consoles in August this year. Woo!

I had planned to review Metal Gear Solid ∆ for my Lemmy screenshot series, but I was having so much fun with the game, I forgot about preparing a review and just played my way through it. MGS3 is my favorite of the entire franchise! There’s something rewarding about actually trying to avoid detection in a game. It’s easy to go in guns blazing, but sneaking past guards and not alerting anyone? That takes skill and dedication.

I gave up Reddit the day I moved here. Haven’t been back to Reddit since. I much prefer it here.

This gif is from an episode of Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin’? It was her and her brother’s YouTube channel before she became a famous voice actress.

Each video short was a comedy sketch loosely based on a particular video game. This one was based on Civilization 5, and is much funnier than what’s shown in the gif. Here’s the video.

The bearded guy at the table is her brother who made the channel, the other girl was his girlfriend (dunno what their relationship status is now) and the old white dude is their dad.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard him laugh.

It’s like posting “lol” or “roflmao” in text, when your face doesn’t even change IRL. Except we’re voice chatting, so he’s using a laugh track instead of “lol.”

I voice chat with friends on Discord pretty regularly. I have one friend who, instead of laughing, will click a laugh track on our soundboard, filling the voice chat with boisterous sitcom laughter. I don’t know why, but that’s kind of unsettling.

Same. How could a machine steal its own IP address? It doesn’t make sense!

TL;DR: “Making democratic threats legible,” i.e. spreading the word about how every action Trump takes is a threat to our democracy. It has been proven in several other countries run by authoritarian governments to be effective at stomping out fascism before it can take hold.

Saved you a click.

I live in a forested countryside in the Northern Midwest. Leaving the windows open invites in bugs and other small critters. Even with screens on the windows, insects crawl through the cracks, and I’ve definitely had several field mice chew their way through screens. I also have rabbits and possums who tend to nest up against the foundation of my house, and if a lower window is left open for prolonged periods, I sometimes find babies nesting in the window frame.

If I open my windows, it’s for a limited time to get some fresh air moving through the house. I’ll turn on strategically placed fans in various rooms to encourage rapid airflow through the house so I can close the windows sooner.

I only open windows in the winter if I need to cool a room quickly. For instance, I’m renting my first floor to a friend and I live on the second floor. But I only have one HVAC unit and thermostat for the entire house. The first floor always stays a few degrees cooler than the second floor (heat rises), so I keep it a little extra hot upstairs to ensure I’m not freezing out my friend. But I’m always hot in general, so I’ll either have fans on me all winter, or I’ll occasionally shut myself in a bedroom and open the window for 15-20 minutes, just to lower my body temp a bit and help me tolerate the hot house.

There have been a few winter nights where my wife and I have left the bedroom window open to cool down our bedroom, while burying ourselves in thick blankets. We don’t sleep well if we’re sweaty and stuck to the bed. I usually get up a few hours later and close the window, so we don’t freeze overnight.