Pomegranate seeds are the trick hidden in this treat.

No, manipulation is inherently dishonest. That’s how you know it’s manipulation and not just honest discourse seen in the meme.

First definition in the American heritage dictionary states this pretty plainly, “Shrewd or devious management, especially for one’s own advantage.”

I delight in reporting genuine emails from my company that look like sophisticated phishing attempts, bonus points if they send a follow-up assuring us that the previous sketchy email was in fact genuine.

If the fake phishing emails can be caught by my very rudimentary filter they weren’t particularly good anyway. Besides, I still have to look at those emails and report them, otherwise my IT still counts it as a strike against me. Win-win. IT continues to keep me on my toes and I don’t have to take another 30min training course because I ignored an email for a day or two.

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

Similar to when you “drop the dime” on someone, i.e. using a dime to call the cops on a payphone. Although in my lifetime, I don’t think I’ve heard anyone but Bradley Nowell use that phrase.

We need to drop the idea that filling every moment of our waking life with chatter, TV, music, media, etc. is typical or even healthy.

You can’t generalize population density across the entire continent like that. Montana and Wyoming have a wildly different population density than California or New Jersey and they’re all in the contiguous United States. Even just looking at the region east of the Mississippi to between the Mississippi and the Rockies, shows a striking difference in population density.

Also, Spain is like 1/16 the size of the US with mostly a singular population center in the literal center of the country. And, the Paris metropolitan area is comparable to the tri-state NY Metro area and a fraction of the size of the surrounding region from NY to D.C., which itself is a tiny fraction of the area we call the East Coast.

I read a few ebooks of questionable provenance. I’ve learned to see past the strange typos, beyond what the OCR recognized, to see the fuzzy imperfect typeset must have been.

They don’t even know cron exists and you’re going to throw them to the wolves by suggesting Systemd? That’s like calling in a drone strike to swat a mosquito.

In thousands of songs, I’ve never noticed Picard doing anything to the length of the files. I tend to manually review every album by running it through Picard and letting it handle the renaming and tagging. That structure used to be Artist/Year Album/Song. I’ve been less strict about naming the songs themselves. It’s always at least track - Title, but sometimes Artist - Album - Disc # - is prepended. Eventually I ran into a situation where I had multiple versions of a release/album with different enough content to warrant keeping both, so now I throw a release ID number (if is exists) after the album name, and inside brackets, for the directory name.

It’s a very flat structure by design, so I’m never quibbling about where I sourced something or what particular genre it is when I’m looking for it. That dramatically reduces the likelihood of duplicates too. Real metadata is better left to tags, since that’s mostly what any player will see anyway.

If I’m having trouble getting Picard to recognize something it always because: musicbrainz.org is missing the release, doesn’t have acoustic ID, or Picard preferred the album track when I’m trying to rename and tag a single or EP. Adding the release info and acoustic ID to musicbrainz is easy and I can usually use the info before the release is even reviewed, but often in trying to add the release I’ll find the correct one and now I can help fill out the data about it.

I treat musicbrainz.org as MY metadata database. If a release is missing or has problems, I do the work to make it better. It’s good digital citizenship and learning about their rules for releases helps me manage my server better.

Also Q*bert.

Correct. My mistake.

I don’t know if Clifford D. Simak is lesser known, but his work is pretty foundational for a lot of more modern sci-fi. Before there was “I, Robot”, there was “City”. Before there were Ewoks, there was “Little Fuzzy”. Before there were living ships like in Farscape, Lexx, or Xenogenesis, there was “The Visitors”.

I should have remembered that was H. Beam Piper. Also great.

A good environmental philosophy class would cover these same topics and more. My syllabus included works by E. O. Wilson (The Diversity of Life), Lynn Margulis (Microcosmos), and Rachel Carson (Silent Spring), and others. There’s probably and entire Dewey decimal section of you ask a librarian. Stewardship vs leaving nature to itself was a pretty hot topic with lots of debate. But generally anything we can do to support biodiversity is a net good specifically because species go extinct. There’s lots of explanations out there, but like LeVar Burton said, “You don’t have to take my word for it.”

Wildest dystopian cyberpunk movie ever made. In an underground dinosaur society once ruled by a benevolent fungal king and taken over by corrupt corporation developing trans-dino de-volution technology to control the masses, two sanitation engineers from Brooklyn become heros. To do so they must hack the mycelial network to find the lost king, survive an electric vehicle demolition derby style car chase, and save the princess.

Oh that’s all? Really? Have you tried to buy a “Not Smart” TV lately? Not exactly any options that are branded as TVs. I tried. I would have had to sacrifice quality and pay more for the privilege to buy a device intended to be used to display mostly static images as a menu board not be great at playing movies and high FPS video games. As a consumer, I was never really get a choice or a vote in this smart TV switchover decision.

I spent a little more to get the upgraded newest model of the android phone I’m currently typing this on, released in January 2021 and received by me in March. I had to replace my previous phone because the battery started to fail and it was failing behind in Android versions, meaning some newer apps could no longer be installed and some older apps could no longer be updated. Current phone still going strong, no signs of being any slower than it was originally. Mostly have used wireless charging and battery protection schemes in the OS, so USB port still works well and charges just fine either way. I feel like phones hit a performance plateau a few years ago and I see no reason for an “upgrade”. If my current phone needs to be replaced, I fully expect to be forced to pay more for less given the costs of memory these days. Previously I’d been basically forced to upgrade every 2 years because I always bought the contract special “free” phone and updates stopped or the battery pillowed.