RiffTrax. Especially the Star Wars prequels and the Twilight trilogy.

You’ve got my bow…

Beyond the practical advice in this thread, I’ll add that there have been more times I’ve gone fishing to sit and think in the quiet outside than to actually catch fish. I find it just as fun to wander around the bank of a pond or paddle around a lake or river trying to fish as much as actually fishing.

I grew up with bait casters and cane poles and a family that loved fishing, but now I’m learning how to fly fish and I feel kinda stupid. I’ve always wanted to fly fish and never had access to it, so now I’m basically starting from scratch: new method, new species, new environments.

Here’s my strategy and thoughts on fishing and hobbies in general:

1. Learn how the equipment works. I’ve never used flies or a fly rod before, so I’m taking the time to learn how to use it and understand how it works. I like manuals and books, but others have pointed out that there are a lot of video series out there for fishing.
2. Learn about the fish in my area. I grew up primarily pond and lake fishing on either the bank or by boat for primarily panfish, catfish, crappie, and largemouth bass. While those fish are in my region, I also have access to trout and other species I’m not familiar with. New regions and species also mean new regulations and laws; don’t forget to learn about daily limits or mandatory catch and release. You don’t want to end up accidentally having a protected species in your creel or on your stringer when a game warden stops by.
3. Set reasonable expectations and achievable goals. This isn’t my primary hobby and I don’t have the time to disappear every weekend on fishing trips. It’s going to be a slow process and I’m going to make mistakes. I also don’t expect to catch a fish for a long time. My goal is to learn something new and practice doing it. What’s your reason for fishing?
4. Don’t over indulge on gear. You can drive yourself mad trying to get the best gear, especially the way it is marketed, but I’ve had just as much fun fishing for bream with a cane pole, a box of crickets, and a styrofoam bobber older than I am as I’ve had with a collection of tackle boxes, high-end bait casters and a bass boat. You can catch panfish with stale bread and catfish with hotdogs.
5. Be honest with yourself about your learning style. Some people can teach themselves a new skill, some people need lessons. How much can you teach yourself before you need help, or how much money (for you) is it worth spending to learn how to fish?

The compliment to the quote above should be “misery loves company.”

There’s a variation of this that I like better: “It’s not your fault but it is your responsibility.”

Framing it this way shifts the tone from passive to active; you have a problem, but you take responsibility. It also helps the responsible party set themself up for correcting the behavior in the future. Saying you’re late because of traffic and accepting the consequences is fine, but recognizing that you need to leave earlier to accommodate traffic is better.

I had a teacher who would ask for an explanation, not an excuse. If the explanation started to place blame on someone or something else, he’d just shake his head and say “no excuses.”

Ten years ago two-day shipping meant two days from order to delivery. It now means two-day delivery once shipped in one to five business days. Most prime eligible purchases now just mean “free shipping.”

I got attached to Prime as a student where two-day shipping and a $50 annual student subscription made it a useful service. There are Prime features on parts of the Amazon website I couldn’t find my way back to the same way twice. The site is riddled with dark patterns from customer service to Prime video.

I haven’t been able to transition my household fully off Amazon, but I have switched to alibris.com as an alternative storefront for books and other media. Used sellers like thriftbooks, half-price books, and goodwill are all Amazon booksellers on alibris for the same price. They’re all shipping via media mail anyway, so Prime is useless on both sites.

Yep. Apollo shutting down is why I created an account, deleted all my content and my Reddit account once things started getting really fucky.

As with remote work, it really depends on what you’re doing. Some jobs and classes are tailor made for remote, some are nearly impossible to accomplish remotely. COVID inspired some really creative uses of technology but at the end of the day, it was an augmentation not a drop-in replacement.

I think online courses should be available as much as possible whenever practical, but what we all have to realize is that designing an effective online curriculum is expensive and difficult. We also have to realize that certain activities will never transition to online and we just need to accept that. Taking a lecture with 300 students? Put that that thing online. Learning an instrument? You need to be in-person for your lessons and ensembles.

What needs to change is how in-person workers are compensated and how institutions support the development of online programs. It’s not either/or, it’s both/and.

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I’ll help you on your quest for downvotes because this seems fun.

Is this enshittification or the convergence of objects into the same design due to regulation/demand/function/etc. (I’m sure there’s a name for this but I can’t recall it)?

Cell phones are certainly enshittified with planned obsolescence or incompatible text messaging protocols or ‘walled gardens’, but what else should a cell phone be besides a cellular networked pocket computer with a camera?

What features (besides a dedicated headphone jack) is missing from a modern cell phone that your old one had?

Baudrillard’s notion of hyperreality comes to mind.

Hyperreality is the inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality.

However, after thinking up some doom and gloom shit about the future, I reversed course: Why speculate about future kids when most of us grew up with a manipulative media diet? Saturday morning cartoons were wildly manipulative, the emergence of social media damaged a lot of people’s expectation of reality, and the last three election cycles in the US were heavily impacted by the ability of certain populists to generate memes.

AI will speed up the content generation process and introduce some absurd elements like six-fingered watch models, but I don’t think it will be more manipulative than media already is, just weirder and faster.

My ultimately positive forecast: the kids of the future will create their own networked spaces outside of the mainstream internet and just continue on with their lives ignoring what doesn’t interest them and seeking out what does. Regardless, we’ll never understand it anyway.

Wow, what a terrible design. My experience with QMK- powered keyboards didn’t let my mind entertain the thought of that being controlled externally from the board. I knew people shit on Razer and other “gamer” products but I always chalked it up to aesthetics and advertising gimmicks.

True, but I’d take a bluish/purplish white over ever having to desolder a through-switch led ever again.

Even a RGB board should have controls for color, brightness, and pattern. Shouldn’t be too difficult to turn it off or adjust the color to something more natural.

That said, none of the keyboards I currently own and use have anything more than an indicator LED.

And the ‘it’s just a flu!’ people pissed me the fuck off.

I think many people haven’t actually had the flu or have had it after a vaccination or a during mild year.

That shit is awful, and it can and has killed. Hell, 100 years before COVID there was the 1918 Flu Epidemic which killed nearly three times as many people as COVID. So when some chucklefuck prattles on about “it’s just the flu,” my response is always, “that doesn’t make it safer.”

I’ve experienced the language skills of Nederlanders first hand! What I found to be most striking was hearing people having trilingual conversations especially in restaurants where the waitstaff were actively communicating individually with dozens of people in two to three languages.

I’ve tried to keep up with language skills but starting a language in high school or college just didn’t work for me. Especially since the application of those skills prioritizes written communication. I always end up with an understanding of pronunciation, some grammar, and a handful of vocabulary that I can’t actively use.

I don’t think any Americans are judging you too harshly for UK spellings. I think keeping track of all the slang and colloquialisms would be the greater challenge. I was taught “grey” and “colour” as a kid and the only problem I have is with spellcheck. 😂

That’s one way to do it!

I had problems with TSA before because my real ID confused them and they didn’t believe it was a valid US ID. Granted, this was at a regional airport, but it’s literally the ID that complies with requirements set by Homeland Security for the specific purpose of use in airports by TSA.

Edit: and my ID isn’t even from New Mexico!

Your English is also better than people in my family whose ancestors were 18th-century British colonists.

I once had a heated argument with a coworker about where the capital of the US is located. He was of the opinion that Washington state was the capital and Washington, DC was a US city located in Colombia (he also had difficulty understanding that Colombia and Columbia were spelled differently). He wasn’t trolling; when I finally got to a map (pre-smart phone days) and showed him where DC is located, he got really mad.