cobysev

it’s not super common

I’m 40 years old. This was pretty common to hear when I was a kid. But as the younger generations grow up, the language changes, along with the public mindset. Possessive phrases like this used to be considered romantic because it meant you were desired by someone. In today’s culture, it’s creepy because it sounds more like someone sees you as a thing to own.

It’s actually been a long time since I heard someone use this particular phrase.

I think it’s great for a ground-floor investment in a YouTube competitor. It draws more people to the platform, gets a chunk of money flowing up front to help boost the service, and they can always sunset the lifetime option if the site gets popular and revenue starts to get tight. As long as they continue to honor it for everyone who paid initially.

Like I said in my original comment, a Nebula subscription is only $6/mo. A lifetime access payment is over 4 years of subscriptions up front. That’s a nice chunk of change to help get them established.

I saw someone’s video about how Nebula works (I think Legal Eagle? He was advertising it hardcore on YouTube for a while) and the subscription service is how they pay content creators. He said it’s a more stable income than YouTube, where your videos earn advertising money based on trends and visibility. If you’re not YouTube famous (and the algorithm doesn’t make you visible), you’re not going to make any money on the platform. But Nebula gives you a more solid income, plus the freedom to make the content you want. No AI moderators flagging videos because it thought it detected the word “suicide” or something. No forcing you to include key words or pushing regular videos on a tight schedule to ensure the algorithm keeps recommending your channel.

Yeah, like I said, it needs more content creators to dump their libraries there. It could be a fantastic competitor to YouTube if only more people knew about it and used it.

Find me a self publishing video platform with the reach of YouTube that doesn’t require self hosting and I’ll happily move my content there.

Nebula is the next best thing to YouTube, but not enough content creators have moved their stuff there, so it’s easy to run out of interesting videos to watch after a while. Some of the bigger folks I follow share their content on both platforms, and the incentive to watch on Nebula instead of YouTube is that content creators have more freedom with their videos on Nebula. They can post bonus/extra footage that would be automatically flagged and blocked by YouTube normally. Don’t need to dance around the censors on Nebula.

Nebula is subscription-based, so they don’t show ads anywhere on their site. But if you don’t want to pay for another subscription service, you can also do a one-time payment to have lifetime access to their site. It’s $300, which is the cost of just over 4 years of their subscription service ($6/mo). Considering I’ve had an account for over 3 years now, it’s almost paid for itself.

I don’t see this as stealing, as conversation therapy is a fraudulent and cruel practice in the first place. Bro actually did a form of conversion therapy in a safe and mentally supportive environment. Granted the “conversion” part may have been inadvertent, but he did help someone deal with a potentially traumatizing situation and saved him from harm. Which gave OP the time and space to really look at himself and discover who he truly is. I think that’s worth the $1K that would’ve gone toward a far more evil practice.

I’m terrified of Gabe retiring or passing away. He’s been amazing for the company and I don’t trust anyone else to not want to use Valve for their own greedy purposes. The next president of Valve will likely ruin all the good things about it, thanks to late-stage capitalism.

I firmly believe in voting with your wallet; I normally don’t invest much long-term interest into businesses because you never know how they’ll change over time, but I’ve been so happy with Valve that I’ve gladly given them thousands of dollars over the decades for Steam games. My library is sitting at just over 3,500 games right now. I don’t know what I’m gonna do when Valve crumbles one day. I really hope they give me an option to download and play offline all the games I’ve bought, because that’s a massive library to lose.

I’ve never given a penny to Epic Games, and unless they get on-par with Steam’s functionality, I won’t ever buy or play any of their games. The one thing that might make Epic Games competitive (and could convince me to use their platform) is letting Steam users copy their libraries over, so we’re not just starting over from scratch with a new service.

That’s what got me on Steam in the first place. Back around 2010 or so, I discovered that if you had a physical PC game that was also in Steam’s store, you could type in the serial number on the game box and it would register and add it to your Steam library. That’s how I got my collection of early Call of Duty titles on Steam, as well as Half-Life and some others. I moved my physical game library over to Steam and I’ve been a Steam loyalist ever since.

I’ve spent nearly 2 decades connecting with friends, family, coworkers, and associates through Facebook. I hate Facebook, and actually use F.B. Purity to remove 90% of the content, ads, promotional junk, games, marketplace, etc. from it. But as the main way I’ve stayed in touch with people I’ve known over the course of my life, I just can’t dump it.

Besides that, I have Lemmy (of course); LinkedIn, which I’m not really using anymore since I retired young; Imgur, which I mostly just use for browsing memes; and Discord, which I only use to communicate with a few close friends whom I game with weekly.

I created accounts for Instagram and Whatsapp, but I’ve never used them. They were too self-promoting for my taste. When they first became a thing, they were all about taking selfies and sharing your face with your friends. I wanted discussion and interesting content, not to see selfies. They created the generation of “social media influencers” who think they’re entitled to things in life because X number of people follow them on social media.

I also avoid TikTok like the plague. I was in the US military (working as an IT guy) when TikTok became popular, and we discovered it embedded itself in your phone so deeply, you couldn’t fully remove it even when uninstalling. Plus, it gave itself full admin rights to your phone, then started trickling your data to Chinese servers. Which is why the president made such a big deal about TikTok being a national security threat. It’s not because we didn’t get along with a Chinese company; it’s because a foreign government was collecting personal data and building profiles on American citizens. I will never touch that program as long as I live.

I’m 40 years old, by the way. A lot of people say Facebook is only used by old people, and yes, I just turned 40 and am finally becoming an “old person.” But I’m still relatively young compared to people’s expectations of Facebook users. And I have a lot of Facebook friends who are much younger than I am.

My favorite ending.

AskJeeves and Hotbot! Man, that takes me back. I also enjoyed Excite and Infoseek back in the pre-Google days.

Proton’s top tier service for individuals (Proton Unlimited) is only $7.99/month if you pay for 2 years of service. Gives you full access to all their services.

Proton just announced last month that they’re turning the company into a nonprofit organization, because security is more important to them than making money. That’s why their services are dirt-cheap; they want to ensure it’s affordable for everyone, and the only reason they collect money at all is to keep the servers online.

I’m currently de-Googling my life. Moving all my services over to Proton, testing other search engines, etc. Trying to slowly cut out/replace all services that Google provides me.

Oh, and I’m sticking with Firefox with Ublock Origin, to ensure Google can’t ever advertise to me, even incidentally.

It’s being sold via ConcernedApe on that Steam page I linked in my previous comment. So he’s earning the money from sales.

Uhh… I guess it’s not technically DLC, but ConcernedApe is selling the game soundtrack for $5 on Steam. It’s in the game’s DLC category, but unlike some other soundtracks on Steam, it’s not dependent on owning the base game to purchase.

But it’s also downloadable content, so it is DLC… I guess it depends on how you want to define DLC nowadays.

I knew a guy when I served in the US military who got caught cheating in a semi-related way. He got assigned to a base in a new state and his wife refused to relocate their whole family for the few years he’d be assigned there, so he went by himself, leaving his wife and kids in his home state.

Turns out, he was sexting one of his younger subordinates at work. One of his daughters found out when she tried to use an old tablet and found out his account was still synced to it. She saw all his texts updating in real time.

He was ultra-conservative and didn’t believe in divorce, so he was doing everything he could to save his marriage. His wife forced him to install security cameras in every room of his apartment and banned him from going anywhere after work. She knew his schedule and expected him home immediately after work ended. He was basically on house arrest until his job was done and he could move home.

The last I heard, he told his wife the landlord needed to paint the walls, so he removed all the cameras, dunked them in the bathtub, then played dumb when none of them would work when he set them back up again. He was seen inviting young women over to his apartment after that. So, you know… he didn’t learn his lesson.

I’m still annoyed that they were making a live action Zelda series on Netflix about a decade ago, until word of it leaked and Nintendo had the whole project scrapped. I was really looking forward to that series. I hope this movie lives up to it.

I actually prefer Lemmy because it’s less active. I browse Lemmy’s version of r/All and I have more than enough content to keep me entertained for hours. Plus, when I find a popular thread, I can actually contribute to it and my comments aren’t buried under 10K other comments within a few hours. I feel like I can actually communicate with the community here, instead of shouting into the void like on Reddit.

Personally. I don’t consider it a vacation until I’m cut off from everyone and everything. Let me relax in peace for a while, without distractions.

I have no idea what PT means in this context. They use it twice in the article, but it’s not defined.

I know of two meanings for PT: the most commonly understood version is physical therapy. Which makes no sense in this context.

The other is from my military days. We used PT to refer to physical training, our acronym for exercise/going to the gym. Also not applicable here.

I was referring to PlexAmp. It’s decent, works well, but I just liked the interface for Symfonium better. It seemed more functional than PlexAmp when I switched over to it.

I actually haven’t used PlexAmp in a few years, so maybe it’s gotten better lately. I guess I’ll have to compare apps.

I’ve been maintaining a self-hosted music library for so long (30+ years now), there used to not be any tools for editing metadata. I used to have to go into file properties and manually edit the data for each individual MP3 file. Nowadays, I use Mp3tag to manually edit entire albums at a time. I have ADHD though (the hyperfixation kind), so I’ve literally dedicated thousands of hours to manually fixing metadata.

I guess I never bothered to look for more advanced tools to auto-update metadata. I had to go in and manually fix stuff that updated automatically from the Internet in the past, so I guess I stopped trusting online databases. But they’ve really advanced since the last time I went searching for tools, and their databases are a lot more complete in this day and age. I’m gonna play around with some of these programs and see how well they work.

I host my music library through Plex, then use Symfonium on my phone if I want to stream my Plex music remotely, just because I like their interface a little better than Plex’s.

We were all greasy and nasty in basic training. There was practically no time to shower. They implemented a thing called the “car wash.” There were 8 shower heads; 4 on each side of an open bay. We all lined up naked, then walked under each shower head, pausing for maybe 8 seconds before moving on. You had until the last shower head to soap, lather, and rinse before you were done. You weren’t allowed to get back in line.

Suffice to say, nobody got a proper cleaning and we all reeked.