I read all the Jack Ryan books. Jack Ryan has a daughter (cisgender) and I think she’s a teacher like her mum. He has one son, Jack Ryan Jr, ego isn’t trans either.

I don’t know about his real family. No minor characters spring to mind.

Also a bunch of people write as Tom Clancy now.

I’ve never been scared by scary movies. I’m reading IT by Stephen King (for the second time, I first read it when I was 11 or 12, or about the same age as the kids in the book) and it’s good, but it’s not scaring me. Neither did Pet Sematary. Next up will be The Shining. King makes some good scary situations, but they don’t really make me scared.

The only thing that’s really triggered a fear-like response (more like anxiety though) is movies with scenes of domestic violence (particularly towards kids).

Black Mirror had an episode about this.

Surprised it took someone this long to actually make it.

I forget the name of the episode. If you’re curious, it’s on Netflix, it’s in season 3, and it’s right before San Junipero. It was bleak AF, which is why the only happy (and arguably the best) Black Mirror episode came right after it.

Gen X here. My mother (boomer, hippie) would have friends over and they’d smoke, they’d send the friend’s kid up to my room, upstairs and around the corner. Didn’t matter if the door was open or closed, they were in the makeshift den (converted garage) stoned outta their gourds. I had a few girls up, and I remember one flashing me and being nervous about it. Looking back I think she was giving me a hint, somewhere between “I wanna see yours” and “come get this.” But I was a dumb teenage boy and I think I just played on the Nintendo or the computer (had both in my bedroom). But yeah, had a few girls up there, and it didn’t matter if we had the door open or closed, if we wanted to hook up, our parents wouldn’t have known (except my bedroom was directly above the garage, though my mother would also play her records, so maybe they wouldn’t have heard thumping).

Straight guy, but again, I wasn’t really interested in hooking up in those days. And when I say “friend’s kid” I mean boys or girls, as young as 5 or 6 and as old as 16 or 17. I was 13-15 when I lived there. If it was a little kid, I was designated the babysitter and would entertain the kid. I was pretty good at it. Only one or twice was it a girl my age. About half the time it was a boy, and about 3/4 of the time they were way too young — not that I was really into girls, or enough to try to make a move even if they were the right age. They were all, as the guy says in Fight Club about airplane neighbors, “disposable friends.” Or was it “single-use”? So I never made a move on the girls my age; whether they were attractive to me or not, we just played Nintendo or computer games or looked at comic books or something.

Anything by Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp). Facebook literally got people killed by volunteering their location data to a tyrannical government in a third world country. Don’t think they won’t do that to Americans.

Android (the mobile OS) kind of is. The only reason Google bought the hobby project to put Linux on smartphones was because they could collect more data with it than they could with Gmail. You can get a Pixel device and install GrapheneOS on it, but not even 1% of Android users are turning off telemetry (which only anonymises it), let alone installing custom firmware that doesn’t have it. I’m not saying iOS isn’t — because it’s not open source, we don’t know — but I am saying Android definitely is. And I don’t just mean Pixels — to use the Android brand, Google requires certain things of OEMs like Samsung, from having Gmail and/or Chrome on the main home screen, to having Google Play Services, which does the data collecting, installed. (I’m pretty sure the Play Store actually requires it. Forks that don’t use the Android branding, like Amazon’s Fire OS, don’t have this restriction, but Amazon probably has plenty of other crap in theirs.)

Now, I never said Android was a honeypot, and it may not be. But Google was just sued for antitrust, and they made a deal to keep Chrome and Android under their banner. We don’t know what the terms of that deal are. I would consider both of them to be compromised by bad actors (potentially they always were since Google was selling the data). Don’t think so much about who you call (though that can be valuable) but like, your Maps data, anything you put in Health (like if you’re female, like if you miss two or more periods but not eight or nine and then start back up again, I’m sure the GOP would love to know that — for the dense fellas, it could mean she got pregnant and then terminated it, or the pregnancy failed somehow). Tim Cook’s advice of “get your mom an iPhone” doesn’t sound so far fetched now. Your sister, too. Heck, specifically regarding Health, Samsung put out an update last year, maybe the year before — that is, before the current administration — saying if you keep using Health, they can sell your information to whoever they want. Either agree and keep using it, or disagree and they delete your data. At this point, no stock Android phone can be trusted to keep your information private. It’s different if you use GrapheneOS, but that requires buying a Pixel, putting money in Google’s pocket. The Pixel 10 is what, about as powerful as an iPhone 11? A 12 maybe? And it costs the same as an iPhone 16. You decide. Personally I don’t think it looks like a very good deal.

Yeah, no shit. But they nearly doubled the price. I canceled my membership, but I doubt enough did to actually matter.

I was fine paying $60 a year for Office. I was never gonna use the AI stuff. When they said it was $100, I bailed. So now they don’t get the $60. But enough people will go on paying that they will actually make more money on Office in the next year, not less.

Not enough people are willing to vote with their wallets or even their feet to effect any meaningful change. At least not when it comes to their tech toys.

Greater than zero.

You wanna tweak your melon a bit? Look up “Last Thursdayism.” It’s a thing — due to the way short term and long term memory work, the theory goes that anything before “last Thursday” is a lie. It’s an arbitrary day of the week. The movie Dark City played off of this, when the — I forget what they were called — did their tuning and rearranged things and swapped peoples’ memories around.

The sound of silence. I don’t mean Simon & Garfunkel, and I definitely don’t mean Disturbed (though, it’s a good cover).

Honestly though, I can sleep to whatever. My younger brother used to sleep to death metal. I’m not kidding. It was annoying for about a week. We’ve had noisy neighbors and my wife will ask if she should go yell at them or something when I’m about to go to bed (she stays up all night, I wake up early). I say nope, it’s not an issue. And it never has been. I don’t think I can sleep to a baby crying or a shrill alarm though. Anything high pitched. I’m pretty sure I even fell asleep to loud sex one time. As I was drifting off, I could have sworn I heard moaning and thumping. I remember having a bit of a chuckle over that. Hot college girl used to live next door, she’s getting railed TF out of like 2 feet away through a wall, and she’d be embarrassed if I saw her in her underwear (I never tried to look, just saying). But you don’t really think, there’s another room right there, another bed up against the same wall, and somebody who always leaves before the sun comes up is probably in there. So yeah, anyway, I’m a heavy sleeper.

You don’t believe it’s ever happened?

I don’t know why the CSS isn’t loading on this CNN link, other than maybe because the link is 16 years old. (Probably older than the waifu in question.) But here you go: https://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/12/16/japan.virtual.wedding/index.html

Rest of the world: Yeah, we know. Except, it wasn’t just in Poland.

X is owned by a guy who supports fascist causes in Europe. He used to support one in the US until they had a falling out. He did the Nazi arm gesture (albeit with the wrong arm, IIRC). Then (or perhaps before) he got rid of a bunch of content moderators.

We know exactly where he stands and what he stands for.

That said, there are still good people on Twitter. My wife and a bunch of her artist friends. I keep telling her, it’s bad news up there, it’s supporting a bad dude… but this whole community is up there and they won’t move. I’m not sure what it will take at this point.

Honestly all social media is kinda trash these days.

Facebook has literally had people killed. Some anti-government rebels were using Facebook in some third world country (I forget the name), and Facebook gave their location data to the government. Volunteered it even. Guess who stopped using Facebook. Wonder what happened. Oh yeah, and you know what Mark Zuckerberg calls his users? “Dumb fucks.” Literally. Can’t make this shit up.

Reddit was built on CSAM, they even sent one of their early moderators a physical award for running a subreddit with upskirt shots of underage girls. (He was very publicly outed. Guess who didn’t even protect the guy who helped build their empire?) They also tried to falsely accuse a third-party app developer of blackmailing them, but the guy recorded the conversation. A bunch of people rebelled but they all came back around. I myself got banned for suggesting stiffer penalties for child abuse, and I lost the appeal (I figured maybe an AI tagged me but a human would overturn it, but no). So I figure they did me a favor.

I think it’s mostly the same people who use all these services, from Facebook to right here on Lemmy. And in any group of people, you have a few bad apples. But I think you have to look at the people leading it. What they stand for, how they see the world, the kind of world they want to make.

I think it’s an interesting solution to a growing problem (the industry of meat). But I’ve never had “fake meat” that tastes like real meat, though I don’t actively try a lot of them.

I remember when the Impossible Burger came to Burger King. I got one of each, a regular Whopper and an Impossible Whopper. The regular Whopper was the typical Burger King sad burger, the same taste you expect. The Impossible Burger tasted like what I imagine a well used ashtray tastes like. To simply say “it tasted burnt” doesn’t cover it. I took a couple bites and threw it into the trash.

I think vegetarianism and veganism are noble causes, but they aren’t for me — I say, eating an omelet with pepper jack cheese and turkey sausage. I’m also a bariatric patient, so I need 80-120g of animal protein a day. Vegans will say “um no actually you don’t…” but before any wanna start, I’m gonna take the advice of my medical team over some people on the Internet with an agenda who won’t lose a wink of sleep if I get sick. I’m not the one. I can’t be the one. But I’ll root for you from the sidelines (and offer a bit of an olive branch — ahead of chicken and turkey, I find fish to be the best protein).

Replies are more valuable, but I’m finding the replies to be not much higher quality than Reddit, which is a bit disappointing.

That said, for every 10 replies, you may get a good one, and that one is worth sorting through the rest.

So you’re using SponsorBlock as well, or you’re watching videos without sponsors.

They might target, but sometimes they buy information too.

For example, my wife and I use Visible. It’s Verizon but cheaper (and it’s owned by Verizon). They also sell your number to scammers. So we get a lot of scam calls and voicemails. We just ignore them. Reporting them does nothing because the carrier is who you report them to (on an iPhone) and the carrier is the one that sends them. But I do it anyway. Most of them come in when I’m at work (and without my phone) anyway. So yeah, so they know who we are (name, town we live in). We just don’t engage with them.

Like an agent? Actors and sports players have them. People who get paid in the millions. So they can hire people to act on their behalf to get them work while they sip martinis by the pool.

Why pay for premium anyway? Let alone a family plan. You still get ads. They can be skipped too — SponsorBlock will do it for free. Google could use this but chooses not to.

They want YouTube to be like cable TV. You pay for it. You watch ads. You pay more for premium channels.

I have an answer, but I don’t covet it — I found it somewhere.

In Japan, there is an awesome trailer for Makoto Shinkai’s 天気の子 (Tenki no Ko; Weathering With You), a 2019 film. The trailer starts with an ultrawide montage of all Shinkai’s previous films, showing that, essentially, he’s been making the same movie for years. Characters having their names said to each other. Characters being thanked or apologised to. And some other stuff — I don’t understand most Japanese. Just a few dozen words. I know arigatou is “thank you” and sayonara is “farewell.” I also don’t know the Japanese words, but when the voice actors from his last film before 天気の子 say “Nothing more or less than a breathtaking view,” I know they’re saying it because it’s from 君の名は。(Kimi no Na wa.; your name.) because that’s the best film I’ve seen, and I’ve seen it enough, including in Japanese without subs, to know what they’re saying. Anyway, it’s this montage of his previous films. Then a short teaser for 天気の子, THEN the trailer. The whole thing is like 5-6 minutes long. There’s a crappy copy on YouTube, it’s like 360p. I have it in 1080p. It’s awesome to watch. It’s in Japanese with no subtitles. I don’t care. Still love it. And 天気の子 is not half the film 君の名は。 is, but I don’t care. (君の名は。 has its own version of this trailer, but it’s not as long and it’s not as good. I have that too!)

Adopt the kid, gets around the moral issue of bringing a child into the world. The kid is already in the world, you just provide for them.

Different reasons, but I don’t really get the point of it either. It only works on Pixel devices, which means you gotta pay iPhone prices and reward Google’s bad behavior. If you’re fine paying that, you’re probably not too far against Google’s behavior and thus, why are you using Graphene? If you’re against Google’s boorish privacy practices, get an iPhone. Apple is sort of trying to take a stand against privacy invasion (at least to Google’s scaling; they aren’t perfect) but the fact remains, a lot of people don’t care about privacy. Pixel+Graphene is objectively better for privacy than iOS, sure, but there are tradeoffs and people who love Graphene are willing to accept them.

The biggest problem with iOS is, it’s closed source and we don’t know what Apple will do tomorrow. As a Mac guy I don’t have a problem with Apple vis a vis my Macs. However the iPhone is kinda silly for a few reasons, but I still prefer it to the alternative because I don’t want to be playing around with custom firmware. That’s a younger man’s game. It was my game when I was a younger man and I don’t want to be in that scene anymore. My choice. I know it’s a good choice for others. Android isn’t really open source either, though. AOSP is — but forks of it, like the Android on Pixels, like OneUI (I still wanna call it TouchWiz), HTC Sense, and all the others, are not. Of course, if you’re running Graphene, or Oxygen (again, I still wanna call it Cyanogen), or something like that (I used to be sweet on an AOKP fork called LiquidSmooth), you’re playing with open source so you do have that. But you also give up a lot.

I do think it’s a bit weird Graphene is only on Pixel. But I guess by keeping the device list small, they can focus on what they want to do, which isn’t support every phone, it’s supporting ones they know they can.

At the end of the day, Graphene is a better option for privacy than iOS, which is better than any commercial Android OS by default due to not having Google Play Services.

I’d say you have to really assess what kind of privacy you need. Maybe iOS is enough. If it’s not, Graphene is a good bet. I don’t need Graphene. Heck, I’d be fine with Pixel Android, but I have an iPhone so I can afford to claim the high road in privacy. Just not the highest road. I know where I stand. But I know where I need to be and I’m standing pretty close to it. If someone needs to be in another place, what works for me may not work for them.

Lemmy-Status says it’s back up but it’s back to that bug where the content warning never goes away when you hit the green button. Sometimes it works and you can clear it, other times you can’t.

There may be a way around it but pretty much every time I check, no luck. Is there a better way to access it?