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  • Here’s what’s wild though. At first with music streaming it was largely just American, Western, popular music. I left Spotify for Apple Music because the latter had Japanese music and I was tired of sideloading it into Spotify. Now Spotify has Japanese music too.

    The Japanese music market is super weird. Anime is to Japanese music in the 2010s and 2020s what MTV was to western music in the ‘80s and ‘90s. It’s the international hit maker. So anime is bringing western eyes to all this music, not you go in YouTube and a lot of them have “YouTube edition” videos that are like half the video. Because they don’t fully trust us I guess? Sometimes the video is on Apple Music though.

    I know Japanese music is more expensive than ours. I mean like the cost of a CD. So when bands would release a Japanese album, they’d add bonus tracks to help increase the value. Western bands do it too. Look up an album you know on Wikipedia and see if there’s a Japanese version with some bonus tracks.

    I’m wondering how Apple Music and later Spotify more or less tamed the Japanese music market but TV and movies are so much harder.

  • I’m doing my part! Just joined a couple days ago. Thought I could stick with Reddit but it got too far to the right for me. They crossed a line I can’t ignore, but I like the format, so I’m here. I knew Reddit was going to be winding down soon so I didn’t put as much effort in. I’d like to start a couple communities here, whereas I wouldn’t have tried over there. I just hope the toxic people who run the communities there don’t see what I’m doing and try to invade. I mean we could use the numbers but not the toxicity — though I feel that that comes with any influx of new users.

  • Loved Voyager but feel like Elite Force was about the only good Trek game. I also don’t feel like the games I like are conductive to what Star Trek is about. Starfield came close and could have been that game. Constellation has a lot of similar ideals to the Federation but they’re so generically good, that you get into situations like, pirates have taken over a ship, you have to disable the shields, dock — no transporters here — and board, and you can shoot the pirates and you’re fine, but shoot their leader and they all hate you for some reason? There’s no diplomatic solution, the leader is trying to kill you just like the rest. Easy solution, don’t travel with Constellation but then what’s the point? Maybe with mods… but that excludes something like 90% of the players.

  • When the kid can stand on their own. Some never learn. Sometimes it's the parents' fault, sometimes the kid is missing something (some mental or physical or maybe psychological deficit).

    When I was a kid, there came a time when I wanted as little to do with my folks as possible. I'd be out until just past dark ("when the streetlights come on" was the time we'd start heading home) and from a pretty young age. Like 9-10. We'd go for a mile or two, explore the world around us. Ride bikes to another neighborhood or (later) get on a county bus and go to another town. We didn't have cell phones, let alone pocket computers like kids have now.

    I see kids as old as 8-10 still needing to cling to mommy's skirt or daddy's jeans. That could never have been us. And when they're not clinging to their parents, they're playing Minecraft or Fortnite or Roblox on a hand-me-down phone that doesn't call (and probably has its serial blocked for non-payment so it just works on WiFi) or a tablet. And I'm not generalizing. I know kids like this. Kids in my family are like this. I have no control over it. I've tried to tell them they should be out playing. They won't hear it. Family doesn't care. I'm the old man shouting at clouds. I imagine those kids will be living at home at 30 being told when to take a shower and when to go to bed. It's not just this generation, either. I have a couple aunts and an uncle (young Boomers/elder GenX) who were the same way. Minus the electronics, naturally.

    Parents: Raise your kids to be independent, or they'll be your babies forever.

  • My last PC was a 4th-generation Xeon build. It lasted ten years. I ran Cyberpunk on it.

    I use Macs now, but I will always be proud of that build.

    Honestly didn't think they were still making Xeon chips. The deal back then was, you were getting i7 power at less price because it didn't come with an iGPU. Back then, gamers wanted Xeon because it was more bang for your buck than i5 or i7 and we were gonna use a GPU anyway. So it sounded like a great deal.

  • Thanks I guess? Surely Mac and Linux users can be friends or at least allies against Windows. Linux comes from UNIX which macOS is based on so they’re very similar, only one is FOSS — which I suppose is the point — and the other is not. But another commonality — Macs and PCs can both run Linux.

  • If you like chicken, go to the corner of 53rd and 6th and find the halal cart with the longest line. Ask for the chicken and rice. Go around back and squirt half a gallon of white sauce and maybe a little red on it. Cover it up, walk about half an hour to work up an appetite, find somewhere comfortable to sit, and thank me later.

    They have a chain now but nothing beats the OG cart. Even the pizza. Rose’s Pizza in Penn Station has my vote. May not be the best but it’s good! First pizza I had in NYC and while others were good, I haven’t found one I liked much more.

  • Absolutely. But to clarify, Apple Music pays more per stream than Spotify and others. Spotify trends to cut bigger checks to popular musicians because they have more subscribers.

    Also — someone feel free to fact check this — I’ve heard that if, say, you put an album out on BandCamp but not streaming, and I buy it and sideload it into both services, and you later add it to both services, Spotify won’t pay you for my streams because I’m streaming the sideloaded copy whereas Apple will match it. I keep the metadata if it’s different but you’d get paid for the streams because it matches it.

  • I'm sure some are, but I stand by my assertion that I've met flat-earthers who were simply sceptical and pushing that particular point of view.

    This was also when they were new. I'm not sure if those people represent the whole or if I just met an outlier (and online, at that, where anyone can say/claim anything). I certainly don't mean to speak about all of them.

  • Insofar as humidity exists everywhere... I suppose it is.

    Speaking as somebody who's lived where humidity is stupidly annoying... no, it's not. And those of us who have experienced real humidity love it for that reason. We love getting out of really bad humidity.

    I mean, I suppose it could get humid. I've only visited. I also suppose any coastal area could get humid, due to proximity to the ocean. But the South ain't playing when it comes to humidity, and that's what I meant.

  • Yep. The kids born in the late 80s/early 90s were my little buddies, kids, who kids my age, would look after. Just like the kids born in the late 60s/early 70s would look after us. But now, I work with people that age, and we're all just old. Like you're still young in your 20s, you hit 30 it starts to be over for you as far as doing young people stuff. I have friends in their 30s, 40s, and 50s and I identify with all of them age-wise. 60-65 and up I respect but I think of them as "older and wiser." Younger people (20s) seem like they're too young to relate to. We're cool, but they're a generation apart.

    As far as generations go, I'm technically GenX, but I identify with most of GenX and older Millennials. I feel like we had a lot of the same experiences. I don't really buy into generational divides anyway. They're fine if you're in the middle. When you get closer to the edge and start mashing the names together, I feel like you're admitting the groups are not that distinct after all.

  • I switched to Mac after my old Asus laptop went out. I figure why bother with a PC laptop, it’s not gonna game and let’s see what the fuss is about. Love my MacBook Air. So then our desktop dies and I give my wife 3 options. A Mac, a cheaper PC, and a more expensive PC. She’s Android, figured she’d want to stick with Windows, but she picked the Mac! So happy. I mostly game on Switch and Xbox these days so that’s fine.

    I keep feeling like I left Windows at the right time.

  • I like how this list excludes anime. With anime it wouldn’t be fair and you wouldn’t have any live action content. Being an anime watcher made most of these easy to shrug off. The end of Your Lie in April. The end of Sword Art Online II. The end of the second season of Clannad. The second episode of Inuyashiki (NOT Inuyasha, that’s a kid’s show). There are more but those stood out.

  • Honestly the first season was good. Later seasons have their moments but it steadily gets worse and worse. Same with the books. I haven’t even read the fifth and most recent book, Dance With Dragons, because the one before it was so boring. The author clearly lost interest midway through.

  • I like Quentin Tarantino but mostly in theory. He makes classic Hollywood type movies because that is what he loves. I don’t often agree with him though. Like others, I think Pulp Fiction is his best work. It’s the most fun and that’s important to me. It also stars people I like, and that shouldn’t matter, but it does.

  • Never lived there but I've visited CT. Went to a movie with my wife. The first Narnia film, so it was like 3 hours long? It was nice when we went in. It was nice when we left. However, during the film there was a blizzard, seemed like it dropped snow a foot deep! That being said, the city had cleared all the roads. They know how to deal with the snow. Of course when you get to side streets it's a bit dicey, but the main roads? Like to our hotel? Clear as you like. The roads are twisty and windy up there, and people drive crazy — well, they drive appropriate to the state of the roads, to be fair — and I never felt unsafe despite being unaccustomed to driving in snow.

    Beautiful area. Summers get hot, winters get cold. You gotta plan for each. But it's nice and not too humid.