_NetNomad

i use mobile sites whenever possible, but if it’s something i use often and the app is more convient i’ll relent. looking at my home screen it’s all mostly things that don’t have a web equivalent. i’ll use an app for things that i WANT notifications for, so really only mastodon and email. for mbin specifically i use the PWA because i’m not sure if any kbin/lemmy/whatever apps work with it, and the user CSS themes are pretty neat

my favorites are Christmas Wrapping, Last Christmas (never got the hate!) and basically everything off of the Phil Spector and Mannheim Steamroller records. (edit: and Brian Setzer! how could i forget!) the only ones i really dislike are All I Want For Christmas Is You and any time someone covers and upbeat christmas song as an acoustic ballad- people think that’s an easy way to make something emotional and meaningful but it actually takes a lot of skill to pull of, and i’ve yet to hear anyone pull it off with a Christmas song!

this is my go-to music for building various contraptions to erradicate the local wildlife to make room for factories to make even more contraptions

https://youtu.be/44gWxAKXCDI

i see a lot of comments saying how the current situation is better than if streaming platforms became fragmented like TV, but part of why streaming services for TV became so popular is because TV and movies are things you don’t often return to- aside from a few favorites, you might watch a show or a movie only once every five or ten years, whereas you listen to your favorite music over and over and over again. imo if Spotify were to collapse, it’s less likely that people would shell out a fortune for WB+ and Sony+ and more likely that they would just go back to buying an album every month or two, which is a win win because it’s cheaper for them and way more money going to the artist. hell, even if 98% of people just went back to limewire and 2% started buying music again, that’s still ultimately way more money for artists

the thing with NYC is thay everyone is moving so slow it stops being driving and starts being walking in a crowded hallway. it looks like a clusterfuck, mostly because it is a clusterfuck, but if you take it easy and be patient it’s very managable. once you cross the throgg’s neck, that’s when you’re in for a really bad time. although that too can be predictable: just assume everyone on the road is going to do the single most malicious thing possible and you’re right nine out of ten times

oh boy. here we go.

Faith of the Heart is great. the arrangement is a little weak but the tune itself rules and the words capture Archer so well i was shocked to learn it was a cover and not purpose-written for that

The Wrath of Kahn is just ok. it’s less Star Trek and more an action movie celebrating the characters that we love, which makes it just the same as the later movies everyone hates. the only ones that are really feature-length Trek are Motion Picture and The Undiscovered Country. Into Darkness would be listed there too if the plot didn’t keep getting hijacked by Wrath of Khan nostalgia baiting, ironically

the soap opera vibes in Discovery make sense in universe. they never really got a chance to be a peacetime exploration vessel and then it turned out their captain was secretly a space Nazi. compare and contrast how Pike treats them and the Enterprise crew- he seems to be aware of this and treats them with kid gloves. whether or not that was intentional and/or if it makes for good TV is left as an exercise to the reader

Dear Doctor was a good episode. they didn’t condemn those people to die, they offered them a multigeneration treatment that just kicked the can down the road. it’s not about the decision so much as the decision to not make a decision (which granted, Rush tells us is still a choice). it’s messy but that’s the point. Cogenitor is the episode that deserves the hate. it may very well be the single worst episode in all of Trek

i’ve been watching LD as it comes out but only recently finished ENT and there have already been a few jokes i would have missed otherwise this season. i’m honestly glad because once i finish VOY i’ll have an excuse to tear through LD again

i don’t think it’s so much that they’re actually the baddies as it is that they became too dogmatic and process-oriented to be able to do the good that they were trying to do. on the micro scale they were too inflexible with their rules to always do the right thing, and on the macro scale they could bend the rules however they wanted in the name of The Greater Good. protecting the Jedi order so that they could hypothetically do good later was more important than admitting to mistakes and exposing themselves to criticism to do tangible good in the moment. in less words, they meant well and had their heads pretty far up their asses. the Dooku episodes of Tales of the Jedi demonstrate this very well

whether or not this is just the Jedi Order or the larger light-side-user community is up for debate. a lot of people point to the prophecy of balance being brought to the force and say that that required an equal number of Jedi and Sith, and that idea seems to have seeped into Disney canon, but at least originally Lucas seemed to intend for the light side to represent balance and for the dark side to be a corruption of that, in which case the Jedi Order being assholes meant they also weren’t really Jedi to begin with

another commente argues that of course they’re assholes because they’re a religion, but i’d argue that they’re assholes because they’re an organized religion. if being a Jedi is about harmony with all life and the force, as opposed to using it and abusing it, you can’t create Jedi by using and abusing life forms the way a beaurocratic institution invariably does. it’s not a coincidence that all of the great Jedi heroes throughout SW are either deviants within or otherwise estranged from the order. standing up for people and doing the right thing almost always involves sticking it to The Man, and the Jedi Order were The Man

honestly i’m not even sure how the author of this managed to boil down feed UI preferences into “questions” or “options” or whatever. all of the same content is there, it’s just a matter of if it’s expanded or collapsed by default- merely information density. what it really comes down to is older sites collapsed things by default, newer sites expand things by default, and most people like whatever they grew up with. i’m gen z and much prefer the older style just because i was on forums and old reddit right around when my peers opened their twitter and instagram accounts. there is definitely a discussion to be had there about which format is healthier and why companies prefer the latter format these days, but to skim right past that into the bit about third parties makes me think that was the real point the author wanted to make and contorted their UI argument to get there

finally, an NEC PC-108

metaverse 3 will use ai 2 which is on the blockchain

the two Who rock operas are chock full of stuff that went over my head because i heard them when i was younger than i probably should have been. in this case the songs are written from character POVs so i wouldn’t say they make me think less of the band because of the content, but jeez, 10 year old me never would’ve figured Love Reign O’er Me for example was about a suicide attempt as opposed to, you know, feeling loved

in theory voting through mail would be easier, but in practice it’s a nightmare. i needed absentee ballots for two elections when i was away for school- one arrived late and one didn’t arrive at all! much easier to just do in-person voting in my experience

we here are bluesky are thrilled to accept Series A funding for Face-Eating Leopards, Inc. despite this we ensure that Leopards will not eat your face

i’m really interested to see where this goes. i feel like a lot of the dorks (i say affectionately as a dork) who use the fediverse and people who do this kinda shortform video are two circles that don’t touch, so this could very well die on the vine- no pun intended- or it could give the fedi the jolt it needs to enter the mainstream

i totally get that, although being able to resub to all the same categories beats starting from scratch entirely somewhere else. my experience at fedia.io has been great so far

i’m not sure, i’m sorry. i just use the web interface as a PWA

kbin has a few extra bells and whistles, like it can also do mastodon-style “microblogging” and custom themes per user. it’s since ceased developement but mbin is a fork continuing it. other than that, the experience is the same

hell i went one step further and abandoned lemmy entirely for mbin