I learned my lesson about “lifetime” thanks to SiriusXM.

When Howard Stern got lured to SiriusXM they offered a deal where you buy the receiver and pay $500 for a lifetime subscription with unlimited transfers to different receivers. Fat forward to 2017ish when I bought my last car that had the receiver built into the radio and tried to transfer to the new one. I was told that was the last time I would be able to do that and in the future I’d be paying a $75 transfer fee and be forced into a monthly subscription.

Lifetime is a hoax.

Song; Hunger Strike by Temple Of The Dog

Bands: Linkin Park and Soundgarden

Kurt Cobain was the first death that really freaking hit me as a teenager, but I am not bothered by Nirvana.

When Dime got killed it took me a while to be able to listen to Pantera again. That was a damn gut punch.

Chris Cornell and Chester Bennington still haunt me to this day because I felt like I was seen when I listened to their music — especially Chester. I’ve struggled with depression and anxiety my whole life and have attempted 3 times (along with being an alcoholic). Those two bands just remind me of the dark times and I never want to go back.

Hunger Strike just because Cornell was part of that band and I loved the hell out of that song.

Bonus song: Bother by Stone Sour

Take everything I said above and multiply it by 100 with this song. Every word feels like a mirror on my soul and things get ugly

Ben Stiller

I just can’t. He makes me anxious just seeing him on screen. I so want to watch Meet the Fockers because DeNiro is one of my faves, I just can’t do it.

I dunno, I enjoyed the hell out of his acting in Sons of Anarchy

I don’t know if it’s necessarily a problem with AI, more of a problem with humans in general.

Hearing ONLY validation and encouragement without pushback regardless of how stupid a person’s thinking might be is most likely what creates these issues in my very uneducated mind. It forms a toxically positive echo-chamber.

The same way hearing ONLY criticism and expecting perfection 100% of the time regardless of a person’s capabilities or interests created depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation and attempts specifically for me. But I’m learning I’m not the only one with these experiences and the one thing in common is zero validation from caregivers.

I’d be ok with AI if it could be balanced and actually pushback on batshit crazy thinking instead of encouraging it while also able to validate common sense and critical thinking. Right now it’s just completely toxic for lonely humans to interact with based on my personal experience. If I wasn’t in recovery, I would have believed that AI was all I needed to make my life better because I was (and still am) in a very messed up state of mind from my caregivers, trauma, and addiction.

I’m in my 40s, so I can’t imagine younger generations being able to pull away from using it constantly if they’re constantly being validated while at the same time enduring generational trauma at the very least from their caregivers.

Trump has said that although he was “confirmed at a Presbyterian church as a child, I now consider myself to be a non-denominational Christian.”

Uhhhh…he’s not even Catholic? That’s kinda a prerequisite for THE LEADER OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH!

He’s completely trolling, right? I mean it’s gotta be cover for something happening that he wants to distract people from. He can’t be that stupid that to think he can actually be Pope…can he?

You know, with all the crap going on in the U.S. right now I’m ok with the watermark

8 currently in my 40’s. When I’m 70 I can’t even imagine

Correct, from the Asahi Linux website:

Is this a Linux distribution?

Asahi Linux is an overall project to develop support for these Macs. The majority of the work resides in hardware support, drivers, and tools, and it will be upstreamed to the relevant projects. Our flagship distro is Fedora Asahi Remix, which is a collaboration between Asahi Linux and the Fedora Project, and serves as both a polished end-user distribution and a reference for other distributions who wish to incorporate our work.

Other distributions are already working on implementing support for these platforms, and we expect to have more options officially available in the future. Check out our Alternative Distros page for a list of ongoing distro integration projects.

I only know this because I’ve been seriously looking into running Linux on my M2 MacBook Air and trying to peel myself out of the Apple ecosystem but found there isn’t many options right now where everything works – especially TouchID. I’m not new to Linux, I just needed dependability and stability that I always seemed to mess up in my Linux days in the late 2000’s/early 2010’s and got sick of Windows.

Well that 2 hours flew by without me realizing it. Thanks! 😆

While that sounds cool to me, it kind of defeats my main purpose of switching to an e-reader in the first place. I have trouble holding physical books for a long time due to hand pain. I had a similar issue with the e-reader, just not as bad, until I put a PopSocket on the back of it. Now I can hold it with the PopSocket resting in-between 2 fingers and can read significantly longer.

I switched from Kindle Paperwhite 1st Gen to a Kobo Clara Color a month or so ago. It was cheaper than Amazon’s color Kindle offering plus Amazon not letting readers download their books pushed me out. I did try the jailbreak for the Kindle and…I gave up on it after numerous issues that I ran into probably relating to the age of my Paperwhite.

I mostly use Overdrive (Libby) to get books from my library. The Kobo has Overdrive support…mostly due to Kobo store availability and whether or not you have multiple library cards with multiple libraries. I’m in NY state and have a library card with my city library and then one with the NY Public Library. This isn’t really a reflection on Kobo, more so Overdrive being shitty and not willing to update their Kobo app to work with how they migrated from the Overdrive app to Libby.

This is where Calibre comes in handy, I download the book to my phone from Libby, transfer it to my Mac and use Calibre to add it to it to my Kobo. It’s not pretty like Overdrive’s Kindle integration where you basically press a few buttons in the Libby app and the book is sent to your kindle.

As far as reading the book in general, I don’t really notice that huge of a difference other than better technology. I did have some slight bugginess when I first used it, but after a full charge and a few reboots it seems to be fine now. I don’t have a current gen Kindle to compare it to, so someone else can speak to that. I do wish it wasn’t such a hassle to get my library books to it, but at least I have access to all my books!

I want one too! Only because I love Lego 😆

Thank you, I needed the laugh

Jokes on them, I have facial paralysis!

It looks like (at least here in the U.S.) that this is the only model that allows selection of the OS. I looked at cheaper models of different product lines by them and they all include Windows 11.

I don’t understand why companies don’t offer more Linux options these days, there’s zero excuse

That’s good to hear, because back then that wasn’t the case. I know no matter what model iPhone I get, if it’s new then support is the same for every model from that year.

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2024/05/06/global-top-10-best-selling-smartphones-all-from-apple-samsung/

The only good thing about most Android phones is that you can install a different version of Android devoid of all things Google and get an interface that isn’t Samsung. That’s my plan when this subscription crap comes around or the phones are too expensive that I can’t afford them anymore. I’m too tied into Apple’s ecosystem with mail, iCloud, and Music.

Also, buy some other brand that’s cheaper because Samsung makes garbage and don’t support their hardware unless they’re flagship. Admittedly, it’s been almost a decade since I’ve had anything but an iPhone, but I had a couple Samsung Android phones were an update broke the phone and Samsung wouldn’t release a fix because it was an update from Google. One in particular was a Samsung Moment on Sprint where it would enter into airplane mode silently and still look like it was connected to services until you went to use said services. They refused to provide an update to resolve the issue.

No “average” person is aware because they are too busy trying to just survive. Nobody wants to chance losing what they’ve worked so hard for. The only people who watch the news are seniors and disabled people, and they’re being misled if they just watch TV news.

People who call themselves Republicans are happy with what’s going on. People who call themselves Democrat are not happy but think they need to work within the system to solve the issues and wait until the next election. Libertarians have sided with the Republicans. Socialism is still a taboo way of thinking for the most part here.

Then you have disabled people (like me) who are watching what is happening in horror and have sky high anxiety wondering if they’re next to be disappeared or homeless. I can stand for maybe 30 minutes at most, holding a sign maybe 15 minutes at most. So I’m doing what I can and that is trying to live as if things are “normal” to continue on my mental health recovery and sobriety journey at the same time being horrified and terrified of what’s to come. It’s a weird duality that I don’t like. I told my therapist the other day that I have hope for the future for my recovery but I have lost all hope in what is going on politically and in the news.

A lot of this I also blame on false American beliefs fed to us in school that we were safe from all of this nonsense because of our constitution. The American Dream and all that B.S. They sugar-coat our history as a country in schools – at least they did when I went to school in the 80’s/90’s, I don’t know about now. It’s as if America only has a rosy history, even the Civil War is glorified in false narratives.

It’s easy to see how we got to this point as a country. The question is, how do we get ourselves out of it?