I see you’ve never played “Dragon’s Lair”, where every scene was cell animated and the player “chose” the path that the animation would take.

Songs are cheap. Ever heard of buying something for a song?

It’s because that recording industry, the RIAA vs. the MPAA, has had a stranglehold on the industry and artists for much longer. They are much better at exploiting artists while paying them next to nothing.

Mpd + a frontend of your choosing, I prefer ncmpcpp, will run on just about anything and is remotely controlled through apps or ssh. Mpd is great when the server is physically connected to the audio output device. I use it to remotely control a speaker connected server that can also run Plex (because I prefer plexamp for streaming and syncing to my phone, other android devices, and smart speakers). They both look at the same directory of a collection near 30 years in the making with hundreds of thousands of files and a wide array of formats.

Drugs alter your perception, not awareness. Mediation and a philosophy class you didn’t take on YouTube will cure you of that confusion.

Hardlinking files to their new destination and your normalized naming schema. Using symlinks would be madness.

“On a previous android phone”

They’ve been incrementally locking down those features and options (or security holes) over the years. I’ve used Tasker almost from the very first android phone to automate tasks and watched those features it tied into slowly get stripped away or locked down to the point of being useless.

I like your schema. I’ve used something similar. My hosts have always been sci-fi space/time ships/stations, user accounts are characters from or Captain’s of said vessels. Over the years I’ve had a TARDIS, Serenity, Moya, Out of Bands II, Galactica, Millennium Falcon, Rocinante, etc. It’s usually whatever I happen to be discovering or binging at the time I setup the machine. For nearly a decade the TARDIS was my server/NAS because it was bigger on the inside that survived through several generations of smaller devices like laptops and raspberry Pi’s named after smaller lighter vessels like Serenity and Rocinante.

No, the title is a homophone for a slang term for ejaculation.

They knew what they were doing. Obviously this is (I assume) just more of the same step-family kink fad nobody asked for.

They shouldn’t be separate in the first place. It’s just bad design that’s prone to failure. And in this case that failure mode is VERY far from failsafe, it’s potentially deadly.

Too bad those “easily accessible manual releases” aren’t the actual door handle and are hidden so well you’d never find them if you were unfamiliar with the vehicle.

God what a naive and toxic attitude. This peak toxic troll thinking that has absolutely no place in any useful discourse. With all sincerity, you should really seek help. I really do pity you. This isn’t flattery. I’m not angry. I’m not celebrating you. I don’t care to hurt you. You’re just a sad fool and I hope you find a way to be better.

I’m very pro real books and as a result was hesitant to jump on the ebook bandwagon. That all changed after finishing a particularly large book early during a long trip, lugging those damn dead trees around the country for a while and unable to find anything worthwile to read in along the way. Now with my ebook any book and every book on my “to read” list taking up the same space, same weight, and I don’t worry about damaging them because the ebook is waterproof with a rugged cover.

I still buy hard to find and out of print books at used book stores, but those stay home and get gifted to special people when I’m done.

Yeah, the touch screen is awful, but just try finding a decent induction range without one and without spending twice as much for the privilege. (It seems that induction ranges are the most popular for this unfortunate design trend.)There’s not really any choices out there. You can lock the screen, which is great for cleaning. Just don’t do that while you’re using the oven or range because it turns everything off and cancels the bake.

I do love everything else about my induction range though. Cold searing stuff is faster and easier to get right. I can bring a pot of water to a rolling boil in about 4 minutes.

TV static in recent movies and shows that are set in the past almost always instantly pull me out of the narrative because no one seems to be able to get it right and some are just stunningly bad. It’s usually very subtle, so much so that I’m not sure I could even describe what’s wrong. Makes me feel old to notice it.

I’ll phrase it like a shower thought:

“Avoiding politics is about as useless as avoiding economics, math, science, or the arts; they permeate everything we do. We even use them to define what it means to be human. We might as well avoid breathing.”

I think avoiding partisanship and incivility might be more productive, but it has the problem of being more vague and requiring judgement, thus requiring more effort to enforce fairly and consistently. I don’t think there is an answer that will satisfy everyone. Avoiding politics may be a good rule for this community, even if it’s pointless.

The “E” (and similarly the “IE”) at the end is a very different pronunciation indicator than an “E” in the middle of the word.

There’s no need for the weird hate in your spoiler tag just because you don’t understand something.

Yes, I’ve done almost exactly this while traveling. You can even carry around a couple variously configured sd cards for different use cases. I had one with jellyfin for sharing locally and also Kodi for direct HDMI connection to TVs. There is a in app on Android for jellyfin called findroid that allows offline copies from the media server, which allowed me to not need the thing powered the entire time I wanted to watch something on my phone, just long enough to download it. Adding samba shares adds a other layer of accessibility. I had another SD Card with video game ROMs for retro gaming, but this one got left at home because it requires controllers and I didn’t think I’d use it that much. I had another with “little backup box” installed for automatically backing up my photos and videos after a day out exploring with my camera.

I used a Raspberry pi 5 for all of this, running from a battery backup, because I didn’t really need a keyboard once I had remote connections to my phone sorted out. Pick a rugged case and you case just toss it in your bag of chargers. It took up about as much space as a pack of cigarettes. Another option would be the Raspberry Pi 400, built into a keyboard. A little bulkier, but maybe more resilient in the face of technical difficulties.

Setting up Sonarr and Radar with docker isn’t all that complex. If you set up Prowlarr as well then you can still get the instant search and download aspect you mention except you can search ALL the good websites at once and (most importantly for my stress level) avoid all the bullshit ads and malware you’ve got to worry about blocking while browsing those sites through the web. Sonarr is perfect for following any show, not just those you might binge watch. Topical shows like SNL and last week tonight get picked up automatically. Long term favorites with unpredictable release cycles (looking at you Doctor Who) get snapped up when they’re most popular and download super fast. Cleaning up old seasons to clear out space is as simple as navigating a web page. Both radarr and sonarr can connect to other services like that.tv so less tech savvy household members can add a show or movie to their watchlist and it will automatically get added, searched, downloaded, and hosted without any extra interaction from me. You can even set up profiles so that certain lists meet quality standards, so for example the kids cartoons aren’t downloaded at the same high a quality as the adult shows.

My point is this, make the switch to automating the searching and downloading, not so that you can hoarde everything, but so that you can’t stop spending as much time being the home video librarian and more time enjoying it. On more than one occasion I’ve been out with friends and somebody mentions a movie they liked, I’ve taken a minute to add it to my list, and the movie is ready and waiting on my Plex (and/or Jellyfin) before I get home.

This is a gross misinterpretation of the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment and how the lottery actually works. That said, this is genuinely a shower thought because it’s logic evaporates as quickly as you dry off and put your thinking pants on.