Because that is the goal of any totalitarian regime. You think Putin has the welfare of his country in mind? Or Kim Jong Un? No. Money and Power is the only goal. There was an article recently on North Koreans saying how they’re starving and just waiting to die. The people are simply the means to generate wealth and exercise power. Their welfare has nothing to do with it.

I used to think the Republicans were wannabe dictators, but in the last few years they’ve demonstrated that they are actual fascists and a dictatorship is their endgame. There is no way to deny this anymore. If someone tells you who they are, you should listen to them. Republicans are no longer hiding it.

Listen, this is hard thing for me to type but I think is relevant to the Republican mindset. Hundreds of children are being murdered in their classrooms. Literal murder. Of children. This is not enough to sway Republicans on gun control. If actual murder of 6 year olds doesn’t have any effect on them, surely 6 year olds being hungry is not even going to make them blink. This is the reality with these people. They simply do not care about you, or your children, and everything they do is governed only by money and power.

I’m sure you’re right about this. Probably the framerate bounces all over the place which feels much worse than simply locking it to 30fps and having a consistent experience. I think a PC has the potential to simply brute force it into 60fps, but an Xbox simply cannot. Which is probably fine. The game is said to run at 4k and 1440p depending on which Xbox you have, and for a game like this where exploration is going to play a big role, those visuals will do a lot of silent storytelling.

I would rather walk over a hill and see an incredible alien sunset on some moon, than have more frames, especially if those frames are bouncing around between 60 and 40 and going over that hill stutters and jerks spoiling the immersion.

I can’t say that I have. I’ve never used lidarr though so if there is an issue with that I’m not the person to ask.

I find Plex to be pretty bullet proof, and I have family scattered all over the US, and one in Europe, who all use my server and we don’t run into many issues. Very occasionally I’ll get a message something isn’t working and just restarting Plex always seems to fix it. I like self hosting but I’m not any sort of tech wizard. If it took a lot of work to maintain or had a lot of problems with multiple users I’d probably just abandon it, but I’ve been running it for the better part of 15 years now and it’s pretty solid/dummy proof in my experience.

Plexamp has completely replaced streaming services for me. Plex will now sonically scan any music you add and is able to give recommendations through Plexamp for sonically similar tracks, and also use that data to build mixes based on mood and style.

There are all sorts of auto generated mixes that Plexamp will make on it’s own based on the music you have. You can also make a playlist of say, your top 20 tracks and when the playlist ends Plexamp will just start playing songs that match the sonic theme of what you’ve been playing so far. Note that I say sonically similar rather than of a similar genre. I love this because genres are often very subjective, and while Plex does take into account the tags you’ve given things, it also will group songs based on how they actually sound. You can control how many degrees of separation too if you want to keep the theme close to your playlist or just let it wander through your collection.

For me at least, Plexamp is every bit as good as Spotify. My music collection has grown to around 20,000 tracks over the years and it’s pretty easy to get stuck on the same handful of artists. Mixes and auto playlist generation in Plexamp has helped me rediscover music I forgot I even have.

Yes, I was praising that. I may have worded it in a confusing way.

The Witcher 3 is probably the greatest video game I’ve ever played.

The Last of Us 1 & 2 is probably the greatest video game story I’ve ever experienced.

These 3 games are something I think about in some capacity very often and are, in my mind, the benchmarks that every other game is held to.

Mass Effect and Dragon Age are my notable mentions.

Yeah, exactly this. While I’m somewhat uneasy that a huge corporation has a bunch of data on me the most they can do with it is spam me. When the government has the same data their power is orders of magnitude greater and who knows how what you may have said 10 years ago can be used against you now.

There is a reason they’re not allowed to have this data without a warrant. Just because this data is for sale doesn’t mean they suddenly have the right to it. The power of the government is too great to trust with this, and we all know it, which is why those protections exist in the first place.

I’d rather see consoles be limited to what they can handle than a game to be limited for everyone because of what a single console can handle.

I want this game to be huge and look beautiful. If my PC can handle 60fps I don’t want to locked to 30fps because that’s all an Xbox can handle. And if I want to play it on an Xbox I don’t want it to be a blurry mess to get 60fps, I want it to look as good as it possibly can. Especially in a game like this where the visuals do a great majority of the storytelling when it comes to exploration and finding new things.

Personally I find AdGuard (not to be confused with AdGuard Home, they are different products) to be the best adblocker out there, both for MacOS and iOS. What’s great about it on MacOS is that it’s not a browser plugin, it’s an application that runs on the Mac itself. This means you can add any app you want to be filtered, not just the browser. I use a messenger app that likes to show ads. I added it to AdGuards filter and now it’s clean.

Also with all the changes that are potentially coming to browsers (chromium) not allowing adblocking this is a future proof solution because again, it’s running at the OS level and not inside the browser. It doesn’t matter if Google tries to stop you from blocking ads because it’s all done externally from the browser where they have no control.

You can add a bunch of other features as well like advanced stealth which randomizes your browser fingerprint, helps to avoid deep packet inspection by your ISP, encrypted DNS, encrypted Client Hello (in beta currently)… it’s really the whole package. I feel like it’s worth paying for because it does much much more than a simple adblock browser extension.

I’ll probably get roasted for this but… Pokemon. It just seems like endless copy/paste and might be one of the laziest game franchises I’ve ever seen. I’ve really tried to get into them. I was there when the Pokemon cartoon started, I saw it rise to the phenomenon it is today, but damn if it isn’t the most boring grindfest ever.