Understandable. FWIW members (15 USD/month at this time) get a discount and the option to use one of the credits you get each month. So Dune can be had for 14.99. I get the pricey books with credits, others I use the discount for. It’s a bit odd and I don’t love memberships, but I do want to support ownership models where they still exist.

If you share access with friends and family using a self-hosted audiobook server then the value really sky-rockets.

instead of giving money to a Bezos/Amazon owned service, you can support services like libro.fm that let you download/own the audiobook mp3 outright.

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All that inauguration money can only buy so much protection.

Has everyone forgotten that Trump mainstreamed the ban-TikTok rhetoric?

Yes. I encrypt because theft. I know PopOS and Mint make it 1-click ez. …unless of course you want home and root on a separate drives. That scales difficulty real fast. There’s plenty of tutorials, and I managed, but I had to patch together different ones to get a basic setup-- Never mind understanding exactly what I did and repeating it (the latest challenge I’ve been dragging my feet on). I do hope this is an area that sees more development in the near future.

People, listen to Juvenile and “back that thang up!” That man understand the importance of data redundancy.

Sorry, their comment hadn’t been posted when i loaded the thread. Much obliged.

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Playing different Antes, Decks and Challenges has kept it fresh and interesting for me: forcing me out of my comfort zone to find new combinations and strategies that works. It might help to change the game speed to 4x so it’s not so showy with the jokers and you can iterate different strategies faster. Or it’s not your thing. Nothing wrong with that.

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Facebook maybe, but I’m dumbfounded by how many people in my life are actively using Instagram.

I like easy tidying as a wind down activity. Mostly putting things back in their place. For bed, I have an ereader with warm lighting that’s been great. If I’m without it, something that calms my mental zoomies is practicing the alphabet backwards. I start forward with chunks, “abc - cba,” “abc, def - fed, cba,” etc. It keeps my mind active till I get bored and want to fall asleep.

In my experience, and from speaking with others, taking a break from cannabis can mean remembering dreams more vividly. It might be worth leaning into that: write dreams down when you wake and think about them when you go to bed. I find if I try to think through a dream and build on it, it puts me in that dream-state and I drift off.

Oh, and one last tip. Lights work better than alarms for some. So if you put a lamp on a timer, it may help normalize your wake-up time, if that’s an issue.

Good luck!

Glad to see people making videos about this stuff. I hope they continue in that direction and dabble in sharing on a peer tube instance or something similar. Creation is one aspect, but distribution also matters. Talking about breaking free of corporate control loses some credibility when it’s content for- and can only be accessed on- YouTube.

I respectfully disagree. While true that Houdini was one of the first visual effects softwares offering an indie license, it was by no means the only one. Substance comes to mind, before the Adobe acquisition.

The timeline is also unconvincing: a considerable number of years elapsed after Houdini entered the market and Autodesk/Maya offered an indie license. However, is does coincide with better blender documentation and rise in YT content that rapidly grew the blender community.

Houdini can do more than FX, sure, and I’ve consistently heard nothing but good things, but its professional use remains relatively [edit: departmentally] niche. So, it may seem to someone in the niche of FX that Maya is losing ground to Houdini, but on a macro level Blender has the features and price point to threaten a larger portion of Autodesk/Maya’s market share. In lieu of better data, I’ll refer to google trends of the three softwares in which Houdini is a flat line at the bottom. I will gladly consider data to the contrary if you have it.

Either way, my main point was that competition is good, and who is responsible for how much doesn’t change that.

I use youtube less and less because it’s not as information dense as other sources. When I do brave YT, I have a simple css override via stylus to hide thumbnails. It has helped reduce that sad feeling about the human spirit YT leaves me with.

The stylus snippet:

ytd-thumbnail {
    background-color: #000000 !important;
    display: none;
}

So small it fits in your bedroom

I’m confident Autodesk wouldn’t have introduced indie pricing if it weren’t for Blender’s rise in popularity. Competition is good for everyone (except a company like Autodesk trying to get the highest returns for the least effort).

Autodesk Maya. Autodesk being the company, Maya the software. I disagree with the framing that Blender needs to develop (more) new tools [for the purpose of] competing. Maya is industry standard in animation mostly due to monopolistic practices (EG: purchasing competitors), not innovation or development. Blender needs more money to develop more tools. Full stop. Many professionals have been disappointed with Autodesk’s offerings and development, and look to Blender for innovation.