100% this. Lots of Americans would be on board with things like universal healthcare, except that they genuinely believe that private healthcare is better. The propaganda machine has them thinking we’d all be forced to pay like 147% of our income in taxes, while also being stuck on a waiting list for 18 months (determined by a shadowy death panel, who arbitrarily decides who is allowed to live and who must be surgically executed) for even the most basic procedures.
Pacifism is only a choice if you have the capability to enact violence. If you don’t have the ability to exert force, pacifism isn’t a choice; it’s a chain that your oppressors have put on you, while calling it jewelry. The entire point of pacifism is to send the message “we can if we want to, and we choose not to. This is your chance to start negotiations in good faith, because the only thing stopping us is that active choice.”
In short, pacifism without the capacity for violence is simply sparkling victimization. Speak softly, but carry a big stick.
So early, in fact, that they went ahead and showed the middle finger to everyone living there before the US even existed as a country.
This list was how I originally discovered Toonami Aftermath. Now it has a permanent spot on my second monitor.
The timing is… Odd. We know that Aang died somewhere in his 30’s. Maybe in his 40’s. And Korra was born when he died. TLOK starts when she is 18. So yeah, TLA’s cast definitely looks way too old for the timing.
Nope, it takes place with the main cast from The Last Airbender in their 20’s. So ~10 years after the end of The Last Airbender, and probably 25-30 years before the start of The Legend of Korra.
Yes, it is real. The “first” movie was the live action version that was universally hated. It was an attempt to retell the first season to The Last Airbender, but it absolutely failed in that regard. This new movie has absolutely nothing to do with it.
This new one is a sort of bridge between the end of The Last Airbender and the start of The Legend of Korra. It’s with the main cast in their 20’s. So ~10 years after the end of ATLA, and probably 25-30 years before the start of TLOK.
The new movie is… Alright? The animation is gorgeous, and the fight choreography definitely feels more modern and fluid. It proves that The Last Airbender would have done really well in HD+widescreen, instead of the 4:3 SD that it originally aired in. The cast is more experienced in combat, and their teamwork is much more natural. My biggest complaint is the lack of substance. The big finale fight feels fun to watch, but there is very little substance because the individual characters simply haven’t had enough screen time. It would likely work better as an extended/director’s cut, because at only 90 minutes it feels a little too short for what they were trying to accomplish. Certain parts feel rushed, and I was left wondering where the rest of the movie was when it finished.
There’s also the whole “we already basically know how it ends, because we know how TLOK starts” problem. Since it’s a tie-in between the two series, we already know which characters come out of it and which don’t. So the stakes never really felt particularly high.
Bean Soup Theory in full swing. I fully believe that algorithmic feeds have heavily contributed to the rapid decline in reading comprehension. One of the biggest parts of reading comprehension is being able to identify the target audience for a piece of work. And most of the time, the answer is not “me”. In previous decades, if you saw something that didn’t pertain to you, you would move the fuck on.
But algorithms changed that. People got used to having feeds that are laser-focused on their personal interests. And this has led to a decline in reading comprehension, as people simply aren’t using that part of the skill anymore. So now when they encounter something that isn’t meant for them, they have a tendency to try to make it about them.
The phrase “bean soup theory” comes from a recipe for bean soup, which was full of angry commenters asking things like “but what if I don’t like beans” and “what would you replace the beans with if you don’t like eating them?” The obvious answer is that if you don’t like beans, don’t make bean soup. This recipe is clearly not meant for you. You should move the fuck on to find a recipe you’ll like. But those commenters are so used to algorithmic feeds that they have lost the ability to recognize when something is not aimed at them. So instead of going “oh, this isn’t about me” they got angry and tried to make it about them.
To bring it back to the main post, there are several incredible games on this list. Many of them are absolutely worth playing. But the above commenter had to make it about them, instead of going “eh, not interested” and just moving on.
There will inevitably be some YouTube video that explains how to do all of this, and it will be followed without question by thousands of 12 year olds who don’t understand the security implications. They just want to play the new shiny game, and their parents told them they’d only buy the game if they got all A’s on their report card. So now their computer is orders of magnitude less secure (and likely running some mining/botnet in the background) because they wanted the game for free. This is just going to be the current generation’s version of “accidentally nuked the family computer with LimeWire downloads.”
Yeah, a “torrented” cassette? That’s called bootlegging or ripping, depending on how you recorded it onto the cassette.
Bootlegging is setting the recorder up against the radio and hoping your parents/siblings stayed quiet long enough for you to record the whole song. Or maybe you simply abandoned the idea of getting a clean bootleg, and recorded a mixtape where you added your own commentary/sang along/etc.
Ripping was running the audio signal directly from the radio into a cassette recorder, bypassing the whole “room noise” issue entirely.
Of course, every radio recording (regardless of whether it was bootlegged or ripped) would always have a few seconds of the goddamned DJ talking over the beginning/end of the track.
And CD piracy was a big deal back when consumer-grade CD burners first hit the market. I remember my dad checking CD albums out at the library and using his dedicated burning setup to copy the albums. He built an entire desktop with the express purpose of ripping CDs for himself and his friends. It had one CD drive, and like five or six burner drives right below it. So he could make five or six copies at the same time. He’d keep two copies (one for the house, one for his truck) and then the rest would get passed around to his friends. He even made custom CD labels with printable CD-shaped adhesive stickers, so he could peel the album art off of the page and stick it directly to the CD. He had a template saved that let him print out like four labels at once.
I mean, that feels a little like saying “Andrew Jackson’s plan wasn’t to kill all native Americans. He just wanted to deport them across the country. Then things just got worse and worse, and now the only thing anyone remembers about that deportation plan is the Trail of Tears.”
Suspect it was the way Sonarr/Radarr work their way through your monitored items but never get around to searching for some of them?
This is a common misconception, and is the exact thing Huntarr was meant to fix. The *arr stack doesn’t search for items on your list after it has been added. You can configure them to search when the item is first added, but there are no follow-up searches after that. None. Zero. Nada.
Instead, the *arr stack monitors RSS feeds from your configured trackers, and if it sees something that is on your list, it will grab the item. But it isn’t actively searching for anything on your list. It’s just getting a list of what was recently posted to the various trackers, and then comparing to your list of requested items.
But this presents a problem for lots of media. Especially older media that doesn’t get active re-releases or upscales. That content will simply sit on your Wanted list indefinitely, because nobody is posting them on your various trackers. And that’s exactly what Huntarr was meant to fix. It occasionally poked your *arr stack to tell it to actively search for content that was already on its list, instead of simply waiting around for it to pop up on an RSS feed.
But yeah, it was obviously vibe-coded BS. It was a neat idea, and did exactly what it said on the label. But it’s not worth the massive potential for abuse.
The funny part is that votes are public, to ensure they get counted correctly during federation.
Probably worth noting that FlareSolverr hasn’t actually worked to bypass Cloudflare in a while. They got noticed by CF, and CF started actively preventing their solvers from working. However, several trackers still require FlareSolverr to run before they’ll even try to connect.
In some cases, you can visit the site directly, and then manually solve the CF captcha. That will usually allow it to work, even when Solverr is broken.
Yeah, it feels like a “loose lips sink ships” situation… But on the other side of the same coin, there’s no way the TV providers were ignorant of this. They undoubtedly already knew, so it’s not like this article is going to bring anything new to light. If anything, it may put a target on the backs of some of the people who were quoted in the article for litigation, but that’s not going to actually stop the boxes from being sold in the long term.
It really depends on how low the bitrate is. A change from 320kbps (the highest “near-CD” bitrate that .mp3 supports) to 128kbps (standard .mp3) won’t make a huge difference, but a change from 160 to 75 will likely make a big difference… Bitrate tends to be a game of diminishing returns, where a difference between 96kbps and 128kbps is typically noticeable, even by laypeople… But a difference between 320kbps and 640kbps is harder to hear, (or makes no difference at all), even though it’s a much bigger jump between numbers. As the bitrate continues to increase, you get fewer and fewer benefits while your file size begins to balloon.
To be clear, there is a lot of snake oil in the audiophile world. I’m not denying that. I work in audio, (peep my username), and spend a lot of time dispelling snake oil myths as part of my job. My current audio rig is easily a quarter million dollars, and is located in an acoustically treated room, because it’s built for an entire audience. I’ve also worked in recording and system design. So I’m probably fairly qualified to speak about this specific topic…
Like lots of snake oil, the bitrate conversation is built upon grains of truth; Just enough to be convincing to someone who only has a surface level understanding of the underlying principles. And audiophiles tend to focus a lot on hardware and manufacturer’s claims, instead of studying what makes that hardware work… Which makes them particularly susceptible to snake oil myths, oftentimes perpetuated by the manufacturers to sell more expensive products to unsuspecting customers. An extreme “low vs lower” bitrate difference is one of the few things that laypeople will be able to identify when presented with an A/B test. In fact, low bitrate comparisons are often used by scummy audiophile companies as a bad-faith “here’s what our competitors sound like, vs what we sound like” example. And to be clear, reducing from ~160kbps to ~75kbps is an extreme difference.
I want you to think of the most crunchy and heavily compressed “downloaded from limewire on the family computer for your iPod” .mp3 file you’ve ever heard. Full of artifacts, absolutely no high end, sounds like it was recorded with a landline phone, and it crackles when the kick drum peaks. That was probably at least 96kbps, because that’s the lowest bitrate that .mp3 compression supports by default. And that’s after the mp3 compression algorithm has done its lossy “eh, people probably don’t care about this particular frequency” thing. 75kbps is crazy low, and you’ll undoubtedly hear the compression as a result. But again, increasing bitrates will have diminishing returns as the number continues to climb. Going from 75kbps to 160kbps will be a marked improvement, but going from 160kbps to 320kbps will be a much smaller change.
The reason audiophiles tend to have difficulty with (or even completely fail at) identifying different bitrates is because audiophiles live in a magical land where going from 1200kbps (high-end FLAC quality) to 1411kbps (uncompressed CD quality) makes a noticeable difference. In 99.9% of cases it doesn’t make any difference at all, (because again, diminishing returns) but audiophiles will swear that the 1411kbps sounds better simply because the number is bigger. Again, the snake oil is built upon grains of truth, (differences in low bitrates are immediately noticeable) but only enough to be convincing to people who don’t understand the underlying principles, (at a certain point, bitrate stops impacting audio quality and only makes your file size bigger).
All of this is to say that yes, the posted bitrate of 75kbps is laughably low. And even laypeople will absolutely be able to hear a difference between the two in an A/B comparison. Because as the bitrate approaches 0, the differences get more and more apparent. And (at least when compared to things like FLAC and CD quality) 75kbps is remarkably close to 0.
I don’t think they do, and this will probably be what changes that. I’m fully expecting the site to lose their remaining TLDs as a result of this.
Can confirm
Yeah, I actually agree. If game devs want to remaster old games, they have every right to do so. Ideally, these remasters would bring meaningful quality of life upgrades, while still allowing the fans to replay the game as they originally did.
One of my favorite old games is Final Fantasy X, and the remaster was actually really good. They botched the character face models, but added a lot of QoL improvements that you wouldn’t typically find in an emulator without jumping through a few hoops.
Things like 2x/4x speed which disables during cutscenes, so you’re not wasting time watching the same battle animations constantly. Auto-battle, for when you’re already completely overpowered for an area and don’t want to mash X to keep attacking. An across-the-board buff that makes grinding a breeze. The option to change the random encounter rate, to make them more frequent or non-existent. An option to choose between the classic or remastered music tracks. Etc…
Sure, lots of those things could be implemented in some way by an emulator. But having them baked right into the base game allows for things like the speed boost to automatically disable during cutscenes. Plus it opens the door for native mod support. Untitled Project X is a wonderful mod that is only possible because the game isn’t running inside of an emulator. Even my complaint about the character faces can be fixed via a simple texture swap mod.
All of this is to say that I’m happy to emulate things when needed. But since that FFX remaster launched, I haven’t felt the need to boot it up on an emulator. Because the remaster gives me anything I would want from an emulator, and then some.
To add more to this: Retail and food service both heavily encourage people to start smoking. Managers give extra breaks to smokers, because the managers all take extra breaks to smoke and “it’s only fair, right?” So the employees start smoking to get the extra breaks. Because nobody wants to be the only server on the floor during the peak Sunday post-church lunch rush, getting screamed at by geriatric cunts about their food taking too long, when every single one of your coworkers is outside the back door showing each other memes while puffing on Marlboro reds.
And so those employees start smoking to get the extra breaks. And then those employees become the managers a year or two later, and continue to only give extra breaks to smokers. Because “well I had to start smoking to get the extra breaks, so they can start smoking if they want the extra breaks too.” And the cycle repeats ad infinitum.
And a lot of people work retail and food service when they’re in their late teens/early 20’s. Which means a lot of them start smoking early, and then struggle to quit as adults because they’ve smoked for basically their entire adult life.