I have a few personal rules about it, eg. I’ll try not to pirate smaller, independent things where it might conceivably screw over the creator, but other than that it’s all fair game IMO.

As a side note, it’s been interesting to grow up hearing non-stop from the corporate world that piracy is evil and is killing art or whatever, only to watch them do a full 180 in the last couple of years now that they need to pirate the entire internet to train AI.

Calibre can do this! If you go to ‘Edit metadata’ there’s a button to download a cover. There are also plugins that expand the search, so you can include Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Amazon etc.

Yeah it’s pretty much the same whenever the Money People get involved in anything. It inevitably stops being about making something really cool, or even just making a living from making something, and becomes all about shipping the absolute minimum viable product and then strip-mining as much cash as you can out of it at all costs, and then dumping it when people stop buying it.

And the thing that gets me is that this makes nobody happy. The creators hate it because they’re making trash, consumers hate it because they’re being ripped off, and the Money People aren’t even happy because they never are. They always want more.

I like the M Plus Code Font personally.

One time I was out walking and as I turned a corner a pug was running at me full speed, which is a sight to behold - every part of their face and body seems to be moving in a different direction at once. I was still doubled over laughing when the owner walked past me and she gave me a dirty look lol.

Yeah anything I put in /home has always stayed there, and things like customizations to KDE and whatnot always persist. I’m sure it changes a bunch of system files being an immutable OS, but I really don’t think it’d be anything a layperson coming fresh from Windows would ever really notice.

Out of curiosity I looked it up and I guess when it was built, the Statue of Liberty cost ~$250,000, which is only about $7.8 million in today’s money. And it costs about $6 million a year to maintain.

I have a long-running conspiracy theory that Google deliberately makes the UI’s of their various services (Android, Google Docs, Youtube etc.) baffling and they hide important features away so that you have to use Google to search how to do things.

I wonder if consent ends with the sale of the house? And if so, could you banish an already-invited vampire by selling the house to someone else for like $1 and then immediately buying it back off them?

Also if a vampire owns an apartment building, can they go into tenant’s suites without permission? Would buzzing a vampire in at the lobby allow them to go where they want, or only a specific suite?

I got curious and had a quick poke around, seems like it’s called “Prue Leith: Journey With My Daughter” from 2020, but the only copy I managed to find is in Chinese on the Internet Archive. If I find an English copy though I’ll let you know!

I have a disaster recovery plan, but part of my disaster recovery plan involves not posting the details of my disaster recovery plan on the internet.

I would say:

The Force Awakens: Not bad, basically a knock-off of A New Hope story-wise but it feels like Star Wars and is pretty harmless fun.

Rogue One: Probably the best of the Disney Star Wars movies IMO, although it does have a couple of dodgy “bringing back an old actor as CGI” scenes.

The Last Jedi: Lots of people hate this one, I’m slightly more forgiving. I think it tried to do something a bit weird and different, and it didn’t really work. But I do appreciate the effort of not just playing it safe.

Solo: A Star Wars Story: Another one that seems to get a lot of heat, but I thought it was pretty inoffensive. Although my brain did kind of delete most of it as soon as it was over lol.

The Rise of Skywalker: Legitimately one of the worst movies I have ever seen. I can’t even call it a bad movie, because it’s essentially just a random series of Star Wars-themed sounds and images that batter you for what feels to be about a year and a half before it mercifully ends, taking with it any good will towards the franchise you might have had left.

Yeah I used to be super addicted to Overwatch 1, but I bailed as soon as 2 came out. I can honestly say I’ve never played it since.

“Not only will America go to your country and kill all your people, but they’ll come back 20 years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad.”

• Frankie Boyle

Also even “Today” is not a happy song lol. From Wikipedia:

After the release and minor success of the band’s debut album, Gish, the Smashing Pumpkins were being hyped as “the next Nirvana”. However, the band was experiencing several difficulties at the time. Drummer Jimmy Chamberlin was undergoing an increasingly severe addiction to heroin; James Iha and D’arcy Wretzky had recently broken up their romantic relationship; and Billy Corgan had become depressed to the point of contemplating suicide and plagued by writer’s block. Corgan recalled that “after the first album, I became completely suicidal. It was an eight-month depression, give or take a month, and I was pretty suicidal for about two or three months.”

…

The dark, ironic lyrics of “Today”, describing a day when Corgan was feeling depressed and suicidal, contrast with the instrumentation. Michael Snyder of the San Francisco Chronicle said that the song is “downright pretty as rock ballads go” but that “Corgan manages to convey the exhilaration and tragic release he seeks.” Corgan told Rolling Stone that “I was really suicidal … I just thought it was funny to write a song that said today is the greatest day of your life because it can’t get any worse.” Corgan later compared writing the lyrics of “Today” and “Disarm” to “ripping [his] guts out”.

I use Betterbird as my main email client so I tried out the attachment searching. Searching by attachment name seemed to work well, but it doesn’t look like it searches for the text within the documents, at least not for PDFs. Not sure if there’s like an OCR extension or anything that would do it, but yeah just the base Betterbird install doesn’t do it as far as I can see.

I use BorgBackup with Vorta for a GUI, and I keep the 3-2-1 backup rule for important stuff (IE: 3 copies, 2 on different media, 1 off-site.)

openSUSE is right there lol

The full moon does something to people’s brains and makes them act weirder than usual.

There’s been more than one time when I’ve been out and thought people were driving crazier than usual or people on the bus were being more psycho than they normally are, and I’ve looked it up and it’s been within like 2 days of the full moon on either side.

People are ~70% water and the moon does move the entire ocean around, so maybe it’s something to do with that?

It’s the XCOM principle lol.

A shot with a 99% chance to hit will miss far more often than you think.

A shot with a 1% chance to hit will miss pretty much exactly as much as you think.