spectere.net
The Chatterbox => Random Chat => Topic started by: Spectere on July 18, 2020, 01:06:12 AM
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So I realize that I made somewhat of a tactical blunder when I locked the existing happy/anger threads. I figured that it would encourage more long-form discussion through the creation of new threads, but by in large all it's done is remove a means of minor celebration or venting. While there are some things that have worldwide relevance (hello there, COVID-19) and are more than deserving of their own thread, things like my FedEx escapades really don't need more than a couple of posts to get the point across.
This is where you people rant about your fleeting moments of rage. It's sort of like the old thread, except…FUCK, there's nothing different at all about it, is there? Dammit!
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Well since this is back, I had a drink that lead to like 8 other drinks and may have said some things to some people...
NOTHING BAD...just yknow, embaressing. Playing damage control the next hungover morning before working all day is always fun, but I did it to myself so I can't really complain. At least the victims of my drunk talking found it funny.
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Facebook decided to throw their weight around and require a Facebook account to use social features with the Oculus Rift. I had a feeling it would happen, but I figured there'd be some warning about it. They just sort of did it and hoped that everyone would fall in line.
Suffice it to say, I'm now on the waiting list for an Index.
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I had the misfortune of having to download a large file from MEGA. Since the method they use to handle downloads is fundamentally incompatible with Safari and Firefox, I had to download Chrome.
Even though I have the application hidden, Chrome's renderer is consistently stealing 50-60% CPU. While this isn't as bad on Linux and macOS (they typically consider 100% utilization to be a equal a fully utilized core, not all the CPU time available to the system), it's not doing my battery life any favors. I normally get between 8-12 hours out of my laptop. If I used Chrome I'd be lucky to get 2 (I'm not exaggerating—after 20 minutes of using Chrome it went from 100% to 85%).
How is Chrome still so fucking bad at this? I'm actively using Firefox and it's using less CPU time and (by extension) less power. You'd think a company that brags so much about their green datacenters would give more of a shit about the energy consumption that's directly caused by a product that they foisted onto a majority of the Internet using people.
It's almost like that's all just meaningless posturing or something.
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(https://i.imgur.com/RfFLzys.png)
I know this is FAR FAR FAR FAR FAR from new, but are there really that many bots on the internet trying to advertise viagra to forums with like 3-4 active users?
Say I made my own website, with it's own forum, and 0 active users. Would it just be bot spam? Where do they come from, and who is the beneficiary? It's like the internet version of leaving food on the ground and as a little time passes, it's covered in ants.
Not rage, but not worthy of it's own topic, more curious than anything.
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Yes, there really are that many. Just yesterday alone there were 111 accounts created by spam bots, and that's with some (admittedly minor, by today's standards) protections in place. It's nuts.
There are a few harmless bots that swing by, like the search engine bots, the Internet Archive bot, etc, but yeah, there really are that many spambots hitting this site at any given time.
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I'm so irritated with Google's insistence on burying perfectly good products (https://killedbygoogle.com/).
When it comes to streaming music, I generally prefer Apple Music. Works great, integrates well with most of my hardware, it works as a music locker, and in general it works great. As far as web players go, there's Musish (https://musi.sh) and Apple's web player (https://beta.music.apple.com/), both of which use the Apple Music streaming web API (MusicKit) and generally work quite well, but there's a hard limit of 15 minutes per song. You can stream music to your heart's content, but the second you put on 2112, Thick As A Brick, or Octavarium (and I listen to all of them fairly often), or even the first track on Periphery's latest album, you can get part of the way through before it just completely seizes up and refuses to do anything. There's already an open issue on Musish's GitHub for it, and I just submitted a bug report to Apple about it, no doubt joining a tiny chorus of progressive and classical music fans.
Obviously, playing long songs works fine on both iTunes and the macOS Music application, but that doesn't help me much when I'm running any form of Linux.
What does this have to do with Google? Well, they're killing off Google Play Music at the end of this year in favor of YouTube Music. Google Play Music is a mature, functional, and reliable web app and music locker. It works well, has excellent audio quality (sounds as good as Apple Music to me) and has a solid UI.
Clearly, Google doesn't want any part in having a finished, reliable product, since they're shitcanning it in favor of YouTube Music, which is kind of a piece of crap. It features the same sound quality, sure, but that's about the only thing it shares with its predecessor. It supposedly lets you import your existing library and uploaded music, but I couldn't get that to work. The UI is a mess, with everything appearing overly large like it was designed to be used on a TV, with an ugly light gray on black font which offers way too much contrast, with no light theme available (which doesn't impact me, admittedly, but it's awful for people with certain vision problems). Not sure why they didn't just use the same light/dark theme as YouTube, but hey. Google.
The way it handles user accounts is a complete disaster as well. Instead of being tied to your entire Google account like Play Music, it's tied to your YouTube channel. This is kind of a big problem. For one, it will only let you upload music to your primary Google account, which is generally under one's real name, and when you change your channel on YouTube Music it changes your channel on YouTube as well! Second, I couldn't even get music uploading to work at all, even when I tried using Chrome. It would take its time uploading music before just coming up with a generic, impossible to troubleshoot error. Third, whenever you follow an artist on YouTube Music, it automatically follows them on YouTube as well. Uhhh, yeah, way to inflate my already unmanageable subscription account, Google. In addition to that, their subscription system is just buggy. It auto-subscribed me to Don Henley on YouTube Music (note that I'm not subbed to him on YouTube itself), isn't giving me the option to unsubscribe. Apparently it felt like I listened to the Boys of Summer enough to warrant that. What's worse is that it also auto-subbed me to The Ataris because I made the mistake of listening to their cover version once (an uptempo cover of a song about wistfully looking back at the past? Really?).
I tried for a week to use it before just outright giving up. It sucks, and knowing how Google operates they'll have it to a semi-functional state by around 2026, by which point they'll have damned it to the ever-growing graveyard.
I wasn't particularly keen on paying for another service (I pay for Apple Music, and I get Google's weekly offering along with my YouTube Premium subscription), but I decided to pay for Spotify for a month to see how it's doing in good ol' 2020. Let's just say, I'm more than a bit shocked to hear that they're using 320kbps Vorbis. Either Vorbis is really that much worse than AAC (doubtful!) or Spotify is doing something really, really wrong in their encoding process. Mids and treble sound overly harsh on everything I play, with the bass being a muddy mess. I've tried listening using both speakers and my headphones (Focal Elex, with a JDS Element II amp) and I get the same results on both. I figured it might just be an issue with the Linux Spotify client, but it sounds the same on the iOS app as well (with my phone connected digitally to my amp so that there's no headphone adapter bias). I'm not exaggerating when I say that I have 192kbps MP3s that I encoded in 2002 that sound better than that.
However, Spotify can play songs more than 15 minutes in length, and has a far better UI than YouTube Music (even if it is a little quirky compared to literally everything else). So, what do I do for my Tux Boxes? Use Spotify/YouTube Music for my progressive bullshit and use Apple Music for everything else? Ugh. Thanks, I hate it.
Oh, and I already tried running iTunes in a Windows VM (under both VMware and KVM). Yeah, that doesn't work particularly well. You either end up with stuttering for days (direct console into the VM) or a severe drop in sound quality (RDP audio forwarding).
Kinda thinking that the best long-term thing would be for Apple to fix their damn API. I have a hard time believing that they wouldn't have run into this at some point during their internal testing. Who knows, maybe their testing involved throwing the Billboard Top 100 at it and calling it a day. :|
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The Arduino IDE is so unbelievably good that I'm doing everything in my power to limit how much I have to use it. I've been mostly successful so far.
It's a shame. The Arduino hardware itself is generally good (pretty much the cheapest and most hassle-free way to get into the AVR ecosystem, really), and AVR itself is fine, but the software ecosystem around Arduino just feels kind of hacky by comparison.
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If one more customer gives me shit about our store's mandatory mask policy, I swear to god I'm going to disappear from this board for another four years.
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If one more customer gives me shit about our store's mandatory mask policy, I swear to god I'm going to disappear from this board for another four years.
I would rant about how stupid and wrong covidiots are, but I don't want to run my server out of disk space.
Sorry you have to deal with dumbasses like that. :/
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I had a guy a few months ago do that to me, he derogatorily called me a "Democrat" even though I had said nothing at all political at all. I swear he came from the ass end of georgia, was in cryo stasis for the duration of the pandemic, and my store was the first people he has seen in a few years, because even in my small ass town, it's M A N D A T O R Y to wear a mask in public places.
I hate masks as much as the next guy, always have, even when I see a doctor or dentist wearing one, it always has and always will creep me out, and I still fucking do it, suck it up people, it's not supposed to be fun.
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I love when people try to make masks a political issue. At the start of the pandemic our state's governor was very quick to mandate business closures, encourage social distancing and work from home (where possible), and things of the like. He also criticized Trump for not wearing masks, long before he was infected. It would have been interesting if he and that specimen you had to deal with ran into each other on the street since Gov. DeWine is a Republican and all.
It's funny how some people are so stupid that they have to be reminded that viruses don't give a shit about who they vote for.
As far as masks are concerned, considering that people working the front lines in essential businesses have to wear them for their entire shift, I'm pretty sure I can handle wearing mine for a half hour while I shop or pick up food.
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I love how no matter how many times I tell certain people "CIGAR SMOKE REALLY FUCKS ME UP" they insist on smoking them around me. I don't know what it is. I don't have any issues with cigarette smoke, but the second I smell cigar smoke I get a really bad reaction.
It's also kind of telling that my mom, who is a lifelong cigarette smoker, can't stand cigars.
I'm more than a little annoyed that instead of being able to work from my office, using my nice keyboard and monitors, I'm stuck with a near-boiling hot laptop on my lap (the CPU has been running at nearly 100°C for the past two hours, so the case is incredibly hot), in a room with the windows shut, typing on a mushy keyboard and using a single above-average quality 1080p screen. Fucking brilliant.
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Wow, that sucks hard. I smoke, and I have smoked the occasional cigar, but I always try to be as respectful of non-smokers as possible... other than when driving. I keep the window cracked, but unless theres a damn good reason I'm not forgoing my smokes in my car.
Also, fuck my employer. They fucking asked me to switch from afternoons to days for Friday and Saturday (they have us working 6 days a week right now) to fill in for someone in my home department (I'm lowest seniority, and there needs to be at least 1 weekend worker for me to actually get to work there) 2 weeks ago. I said yes. It fucking sucked. Then they asked if I wanted to go back on afternoons when I was scheduled to be on midnights so I could fill in again on Monday (last week). I said yes (afternoons is my preferred shift). I fucking knew they would ask me to switch to days again. This time I said no.
Well then as I was bitching about that before the start of shift meeting the... duck I dont even know his position's official name, head supervisor/douchebag extraordinaire decided to make a sarcastic remark as he was walking by.
I'm fucking sick of this place. With my recent depression and such I just dont have the patience any more. I've decided to quit and go back to college for programming.
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65 hour week + drinking + sharp objects to take the edge off = ill take my weekend whenever i can get it plz
I don't care how you slice it, how long you work on average, 9am-11:30pm is too long to work, when you gotta get up and do another 10 hours on your day off the very next day.
resorting to childish methods of relieving stress and i'd prefer to not going back to it.
*edit*
another 13 hours, idk how people do this on the regular without going crazy. one more day.
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Absolute bullshit, cops go on with.
Long story short, went out to have drinks with some friends, had a DD (Designated driver) and someone wanted me to demo my stereo. (Which I'm more than happy to do, cause I take pride in my car audio)
Showed the system, owner of the pub didn't like it and called the cops. Cops came, and told me to take a breathalyzer. Of course I wont pass it, because I'm at a fucking bar, drinking with friends and I have a DD. They claim it as "Because I was sitting in the front seat of my car (While giving a demo of my stereo), they consider it a DUI. Yet...My car is parked, in a parking lot, without the engine running, while I demo my stereo.
So, went through court bullshit, judge saw how bullshit the charges were and withdrew everything. Dumbest part. I still had to pay the $500 for impound fees, and 800 fucking dollars to reinstate my license. For something I DIDN'T FUCKING DO. Absolute fucking bullshit. The laws and the judicial system are absolutely fucked. I tried for WEEKS to fix everything and prove to them I shouldn't be penalized for something I didn't do, but alas, I still had to pay $1200 to get my license and driving privileges back, for a crime I didn't commit. All because the cop wanted to pull a heavy on me and be a piece of shit. Fuck this country and these stupid fucking "laws". Nothing more than a cash grab. Beyond annoying.
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Absolute bullshit, cops go on with.
Long story short, went out to have drinks with some friends, had a DD (Designated driver) and someone wanted me to demo my stereo. (Which I'm more than happy to do, cause I take pride in my car audio)
Showed the system, owner of the pub didn't like it and called the cops. Cops came, and told me to take a breathalyzer. Of course I wont pass it, because I'm at a fucking bar, drinking with friends and I have a DD. They claim it as "Because I was sitting in the front seat of my car (While giving a demo of my stereo), they consider it a DUI. Yet...My car is parked, in a parking lot, without the engine running, while I demo my stereo.
So, went through court bullshit, judge saw how bullshit the charges were and withdrew everything. Dumbest part. I still had to pay the $500 for impound fees, and 800 fucking dollars to reinstate my license. For something I DIDN'T FUCKING DO. Absolute fucking bullshit. The laws and the judicial system are absolutely fucked. I tried for WEEKS to fix everything and prove to them I shouldn't be penalized for something I didn't do, but alas, I still had to pay $1200 to get my license and driving privileges back, for a crime I didn't commit. All because the cop wanted to pull a heavy on me and be a piece of shit. Fuck this country and these stupid fucking "laws". Nothing more than a cash grab. Beyond annoying.
That is horrible. What a piece of shit. Our local news here in Altanta broke a story on a cop who pulls similar bullshit (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWyzPpYslYc) that despite being innocent cost citizens time and money. Like when they destroyed this guys home (https://reason.com/2019/10/31/cops-destroyed-this-house-to-arrest-a-shoplifter-a-federal-court-says-police-dont-have-to-pay-for-the-damage/) to get a shoplifter and the resident got zero assistance for the damage. It's disgusting.
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Absolutely fucking ridiculous. How fucking retarded has this world become. Seriously.
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Nothing surprises me anymore when it comes to "tragedy" I've lost this year, a bunch of people I know have lost this year, employees dropping like flies to covid, it's kinda normal now.
I even got it good, but even knowing that, I'm losing sanity by the week. Figure it shouldn't be much to iunno...go out and hang with people, but it just isn't a thing anymore.
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Little late to the "party" but I've been seeing more about this recent news.
RIP DOOM, 2 of my top 5 rappers are now deceased. Nobody is even close to sounding remotely similar to this guy, he's as original as it comes. Big blow to great rap music. Madvillain is probably the greatest album ever made, and I think I listened to it on loop over and over doing multiple 40+ hour gaming sessions being the first person in my guild to hit level 70 in WoW TBC. So much so that when I think the burning crusade, I can't escape this album, they go hand in hand to me.
The man was true to character, as he would send in DOOM bots to play live shows for him, while scummy, it's really honest to the character. Let's also not forget the man before he turned into a supervillain. (kid in the red hoodie is DOOM)
Last time I was affected this much from a "celebrity" death was when Ryan Davis of Giant Bomb/Gamespot fame passed. Im not usually phased by this kind of news, but this one is a real downer for me. One more fuck you from 2020.
Just remember all caps when you spell the man name (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewc1hixzYPY)
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Kinda getting tired of people only bothering to message me when they need something.
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Kinda getting tired of people only bothering to message me when they need something.
Depends on who it is. If it's very close personal friends or family, yeah. If it's anything less than my expectations have already been removed. To be fair you're a really smart son of a bitch with a lot of answers.
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Get home from long shift, turn on pc, windows wants to update, it takes a long time, windows finally updates.
Internet doesn't work. Internet is working, phone is able to use internet, switch, ps4, tv, all can use internet. PC says it is connected, says I have internet, I can ping google and get a response...steam/discord/any internet browser/twitch ALL ACT LIKE I HAVE NO INTERNET.
4 hours of troubleshooting later, no solutions work.
Next day, REINSTALL WINDOWS AGAIN NUKE SSD, hey, internet works on my pc again...make me think of alternatives to using a pc. Fuck windows. Im sure its great if you know what the hell you're doing on a pc, but as some random idiot who just wants to use firefox/discord/steam and not much else, it's annoying.
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Yeah, Windows is one of the driving forces behind me buying Macs as productivity boxes. There isn't as much of a selection in hardware (I'd love it if they brought back the chonky MacBooks), but I find them generally more pleasant to use than the alternative and still plenty powerful in their own right (they're still UNIX boxes, after all).
Linux is also becoming a great alternative if you want something you can throw on your existing hardware, or don't want to pay the Apple tax. I'm still not crazy about it as a games OS (there's a lot of technical hurdles that make it less than ideal, even for natively supported games), but it generally just gets the hell out of the way and lets me work. Lately I've been preferring Arch Linux with KDE Plasma as my desktop environment of choice, but prior to switching to that I was using Kubuntu on my work PC and Gentoo on my home systems.
Kubuntu is a fantastic choice if you want to try something that's functionally similar to Windows (albeit significantly more flexible) with fantastic developer support behind it.
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Every time windows be windows, I am one step closer to investing a weekend in seeing whats on the other side of the river in linux land. Even tempted to look into mac...but those machines are expensive and locked down, I enjoy picking my own components for my machine with the ability to upgrade at my leisure. Not to mention I am a pretty light user, literally just firefox, discord, twitch, steam, and a media player, not much else for everyday use. EVEN AT THAT, I went a few years without a pc just using the ps4 for youtube and my phone to browse, and I was more or less fine for anything that didn't require typing the amount of text I have in this post. The less my operating system annoys the shit out of me, the better, but I also enjoy knowing any given thing I want to do will work on my machine.
Just random issues I was not having before I had to wipe my machine that I have to fix now. Why do 1/5 youtube videos I watch have no volume, even though my mixer shows there is audio...well a rare issue that google helped fix. Well now firefox aint showing twitch streams via my fighting game chat website (https://www.fightanvidya.com/html5). "firefox can't open this page", well it fucking did before I was forced to reinstall my OS. I would call it a firefox problem, but reinstalling windows to fix one problem, opened this one up. *edit* shit is blocked with opera browser as well, odd.
And in the few hours on my time off being on my pc, I had two fucking windows updates, just stop. I don't know if my pc will be functional after any updates, so it's annoying as is.
So how's this linux stuff work anyway? Do some research on the 20,000 different variants and pick one? Then try using that for my every day use, and when I want to play a game or something, boot up windows somehow and run my games via that? Kinda thinking about getting one of those new raspberry pi 400's to muck about with linux away from my main desktop pc, so if I don't like something I can just wipe everything and try again without my main machine being affected. Not sure if great idea or not though, but I have been looking for reasons to buy one (they look cool but I don't really "need" one).
I was always curious how people pick and choose what flavor of linux to use, in my head installing an OS is annoying as is, so to get one, use it, then get another, try that, seems like a lot of time investment.
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Sometimes it's just best to separate the two. I ended up investing in a Thunderbolt dock, so whenever I want to get shit done I just plug in my MacBook and my Mac becomes a functional desktop system. When I want to play games, I just swap over to my Windows box. Not all Macs are super expensive, with the Mini and Air being fairly affordable options (mini-desktop and ultrabook, respectively), and the new Apple M1 CPU absolutely thrashes most of the Intel options on the market (while the GPU won't compare, the CPU in a $700 Mac Mini is likely to be quite a bit more powerful than what's in your gaming rig, crazily enough).
Audio in Windows is a complete disaster. One thing that I've found that can help is disabling playback devices that you don't intend to use so that it doesn't randomly bounce to something that won't output any audio. On top of that, routing is sort of hit or miss, with some applications refusing to go to a different source until you close and reopen them. The biggest issue I have is that sometimes Windows will refuse to list my VR headset in the audio options, forcing me to go into the old Windows 7 sound control panel just to get the system to realize that the audio device is there. It's absolute lunacy.
Generally speaking, you'll want to stick with the popular distros if you don't have much background knowledge going in, as those tend to be better supported and are easier to install. That generally translates to one of the Ubuntu variants. Ubuntu (with the GNOME desktop) and Kubuntu (with the KDE Plasma desktop) are the two you'll want to focus on, methinks. I find that KDE's interface is a bit easier to slide into when you're coming from Windows, so I'd recommend starting with Kubuntu. I should also point out that the choice of desktop environment does not impact the applications that will be available. If someone recommends a piece of software in Ubuntu, you can easily use it in Kubuntu without any issues. Similarly, if a developer provides a package for Ubuntu, that package will work equally well in its variants.
The Raspberry Pi 400 is a good platform for tinkering, but one potential issue is that the UI is pretty distinct in order to cater to the platform's paltry hardware acceleration. Most desktop distros use something like GNOME or Plasma, and while you can run those on the Pi they tend to be a bit too heavy for it. If you just want to learn Linux itself, however, it's a pretty solid choice, and since it's based on the same system that Ubuntu is based on (Debian) a lot of command line stuff will translate over.
As far as how to pick the distro, you basically have to know enough to understand your needs and look into the distro's feature set and other unique utilities (package managers, mostly). Having a spare box to experiment with helps. Generally speaking, each distro is catered to a specific need. Arch caters to people who want bleeding edge software, Gentoo caters to people who want the ultimate flexibility and don't mind having to compile the source, Red Hat Enterprise is catered toward businesses who don't mind paying for support, while Ubuntu is catered toward the average Joe (not to say that it isn't powerful, but it's not exactly specialized). Honestly, unless you're unsatisfied with a particular aspect of a given distro, there's no reason to move from it.
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You can also add or remove whatever you want once you've picked your distro and have gotten a bit more comfortable with Linux, giving you even less reason to fully change to a different one.
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It's really cute when Windows randomly "forgets" file associations. Pretty sure I had to tell it to open FLACs in MPC-HC at least three times in 2021 alone.
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Think I may have been scammed.
USPS change of address, because I didn't know I needed to change it at more than the SoS office...but doing it on my phone in a hurry after work may have gotten redirected to a different website. USPS charges $1.05, and I was charged $79.50...
It's sunday so everything is closed, so I'm thinking, call USPS first thing tomorrow to see how bad I fucked up, then my bank, and from those two calls we'll see if I need to call the police.
It's all because of these damn stimulus checks, and they're going to the wrong house over and over, and I just now find out that changing your address at the secretary of state doesn't mean anything do it through USPS too. This is all dumb.
FUN!
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Jeez. Hope you're able to get that sorted out. :(
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Called the scam and fraud branch of usps, all they said was call my bank to get the charge taken care of. I asked if I should be worried about my card/information and they said "not really".
Didn't really give me much confidence, but, whatever. Bank can't deal with the charge until it goes through, as it's currently pending. It aint like they got my social security number or anything, so whatever.
Went from stressed to annoyed, so it's better than nothing.
*edit*
Woke up to seeing the pending payment did not go through. I think everything is alright now maybe? Either way, something happened in my favor.
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Being disrespected by a person who does less than 20% the work you do, for not working even more...
My peachy day has been upset.
*edit*
truncated because I am letting this incident get to me more than it should. Sometimes it doesn't matter what you do, how well you avoid conflict, sometimes it just finds you.
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I'm 99% certain this is merely a temporary setback, but I am absolutely *livid* with my township right now. They're saying I can't build my house, because there's a rule that says you can't have two houses on the same parcel of land.
The parcel of land I have is connected to my parent's property. That's all. Like, if you look at the property assessment website, you can see that not only are they two different pieces of land, THEY ARE LITERALLY ON TWO DIFFERENT STREETS.
I'm reasonably confident that it won't take much for me to clear this up with them, but ugh.
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Yay, bureaucracy. :/
Best of luck getting that sorted out. :(
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Damn, that's dumb as hell.
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Ok, so that's sorted out. They recognize that we've got two different properties now.
NOW the problem is that our entire area got re-zoned years ago, and our property is now considered Residential-3 zoning, which means single-family homes cannot be built on the property.
I'm seriously going to fucking cry. All these hopes and plans I had are going down the drain.
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I got mass effect legendary edition, because as a raging mass effect fan and the only person who didn't hate andromeda, I had to buy it.
Looks great, runs great it's good ole vanilla mass effect 1 in a better engine!...cept it's...not...
Websites list changes, and the important ones are under one little bullshit sized bullet point
-Some abilities have been rebalances
WOULD BE NICE TO KNOW WHAT THEY ARE SO PEOPLE CAN MAYBE...PICK A DIFFERENT CLASS INSTEAD OF WASTING A BUNCH OF TIME
I play soldier in ME1, shotguns with mods to weapon force to ragdoll everything I see, while using the immunity skill and health regen to tank my way on even the highest difficulty. Built correctly, and going with the commando subclass later in the game, you can have a 95% immunity uptime, and it's super fun.
Now it's duration went from like 10 up to 20+ seconds, to a static 6...6 seconds for all ranks.
I could play the original on pc which I own, but uhh, I originally played on the xbox 360, and I vastly prefer gamepad which is unsupported on the original, and IS on the legendary edition.
Basically this sucks, mass effect 1 is one of those games that I could call my favorite all time game ever, and being forced to play differently is just kinda bullshit. Reminds me of blizzard, or george lucas...
Yo I get changing the game balance, original game was pretty jank, but at least have a classic balance option available. Don't nerf shit in a SINGLE PLAYER RPG, guys, jeez.
*edit*
I am actually upset to the point where I requested a refund, HOPEFULLY it goes through. I own mass effect 1 2 and 3, already on xbox 360 AND pc, I do not need an inferior version of a trilogy I would rather play on older hardware.
*edit*
no refund, played 4 hours which is too much. I remain angry.
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NOW the problem is that our entire area got re-zoned years ago, and our property is now considered Residential-3 zoning, which means single-family homes cannot be built on the property.
I'm seriously going to fucking cry. All these hopes and plans I had are going down the drain.
WTF. :/
Any sort of loophole you can take advantage of to get around that?
mass effect legendary edition being brought up in this thread of all places
Goddammit, EA.
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To iterate, it's not a bad "remaster" but the whole "nerfing skills in an OLD single player game" is kind of...anti fun? No idea what they did to 2, and 3, so I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. To play devils advocate, when the enemies use the "immunity" skill, it's nerfed for them too. In vanilla ME1, when they pop that thing and their health bar goes white, they are basically unkillable till it goes away...but it's really only an issue on the "insanity" difficulty, in which, it should be hard since it's the hardest difficulty.
Either way I ditched the soldier for infiltrator, playing insanity, so far it's been smooth. Kinda paranoid now though, I played sentinel for my insanity run in mass effect 2, curious if that class got nerfed because I happen to have found success with it on the hardest difficulty in that game.
I need to run over a list of balance changes, which should be in game somewhere(but isn't), because having a character build around one skill working a certain way, for it not to work that way anymore kinda sucks.
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WTF. :/
Any sort of loophole you can take advantage of to get around that?
We're going to talk with the zoning board and whomever else they recommend we meet up with. The small bit of bright news is that it turns out that the father of a good friend of mine is on the zoning board, so maybe he'll be able to help us convince them that nobody in their right mind is going to build a condominium on that property, and to just let me put my damn house there.
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To iterate, it's not a bad "remaster" but the whole "nerfing skills in an OLD single player game" is kind of...anti fun? No idea what they did to 2, and 3, so I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. To play devils advocate, when the enemies use the "immunity" skill, it's nerfed for them too. In vanilla ME1, when they pop that thing and their health bar goes white, they are basically unkillable till it goes away...but it's really only an issue on the "insanity" difficulty, in which, it should be hard since it's the hardest difficulty.
Yeah, I kinda don't get why they'd mess with people's muscle memory. I get nerfing enemy skills to make the game more fun (because honestly, immunity was just plain annoying at lower difficulties) but it seems weird to do a global nerf like that.
From what I understand they left the balance of ME2/ME3 alone, so I imagine those should be similar, if not the same?
On one hand I'm tempted to pick it up to see muh dextro-bro in HD, but then I remember ME3's ending. Ugh. Maybe I'll just play up to the ending section and make up my own ending.
We're going to talk with the zoning board and whomever else they recommend we meet up with. The small bit of bright news is that it turns out that the father of a good friend of mine is on the zoning board, so maybe he'll be able to help us convince them that nobody in their right mind is going to build a condominium on that property, and to just let me put my damn house there.
Best of luck to you! If I'm remembering your property correctly, I don't even see how you could comfortably put a family home on that plot (though considering the homes I've seen pop up in my area, that doesn't seem to stop them from trying...).
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Welp, some progress has been made. My dad went to the magistrate (he still owns the property) and basically told them in a polite manner "Hey, this zoning here is stupid. I want to put a house here."
Aaaand everyone on the township boards agreed that the zoning is weird, and they see no good reason (other than the glaringly obvious legal reason) that he shouldn't be able to put a house on his property. They all agree that we should be given a variance.
So now, some guy on the board is going to help us get this variance, as it's apparently above them. We now have to make a case explaining why we think no actual business is going to want to come in and develop the land. Guy thinks it should be pretty easy to do, seeing as there are eighteen single-family homes all in the same R3 plot (also, oddly enough, the apartment building I'm currently living in a good mile up the hill), it's a relatively small parcel of land, and nobody in their right mind is going to want to build anything else there.
So yay, less ragey.
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I'm guessing it was probably some sort of overly-broad zoning change that shouldn't have affected that street. I mean, why use a scalpel when a chainsaw will do?
Glad to hear that some progress is being made. Stuff like that honestly makes my head spin.
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I'm thinking either that, or there was some plan to buy all 19 of us out and stick some cheap condos or an apartment building on all our land.
Either way, I'm pretty irritated.
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The more I read about Windows 11 the more I want game companies to start targeting Linux.
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Windows has had me wanting a replacement OS for a few years now, but I do not understand software enough to understand why there isn't a replacement for windows for gaming or something. The way I use a computer is more or less, I don't need a computer unless I want to type something, and also gaming. If I don't need to type something, or if I don't need to play something on PC, I kinda don't need a computer/windows. If I could run ALL my games on...not windows, I would do so.
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Windows kinda has that nice blend of market share (by a healthy margin), performance, and open hardware support (at least until Windows 11 locks that down).
Like, Linux has the benefit of running on just about everything, but its windowing system is probably its most limiting factor. X was originally written to support networked display terminals, and the sheer number of gross hacks it's collected over the years are a testament to that. Wayland, its slated replacement, still has enough outstanding issues that I can't even use it for my work system, let alone a gaming rig.
macOS has performance down pat (no joke, I was using an iMac--running macOS--as my main gaming rig for a while, with Steam in-home streaming filling in the gaps), but there are a few issues there. The first and most obvious one is that they've largely left compatibility behind, what with them phasing out 32-bit and eventually switching away from Intel-compatible processors. This isn't a bad thing by any stretch, considering their $700 Mac Minis now easily rival $2000 PCs in computational power, but it does mean that a lot of titles got left in the dust. The other is that due to Apple's chosen form factor you can't just plonk a 3060 in one of their rigs (unless you're running a Mac Pro) and call it a day. eGPU solutions exist (at least for Intel Macs) but that tends to be an imperfect and expensive solution.
Windows has leading market share, offers solid performance, and allows PCs to have just about any configuration. Furthermore, unlike Linux, devs don't have to worry about users using--for example--a completely different sound system than what they're expecting. It's just one of those cases where the alternatives are just too much of a hassle to support in many cases. Engines like Unity smooth over a lot of that, but even then there are a bunch of weird, random issues. Even simple games like Undertale require additional work and testing to properly support Linux and macOS due to some gaps in GameMaker's OS support (from memory, there are/were some issues when you first enter Alphys's lab on non-Windows builds).
Of course, with Windows 11 they're so eager to copy Apple's aggressive deprecation stance (oh, and they finally ripped off their rounded window borders) that Microsoft basically told people with 5 year old CPUs to go fuck themselves. Considering macOS Big Sur still happily runs on 2013 hardware (and earlier, albeit with minor issues) that seems just a tiny bit absurd. Oh, then there's the fact that the UI is such trash that I legit thought it was a 2010-era Android launcher with a Windows skin on it when I saw screenshots of it.
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Microsoft basically told people with 5 year old CPUs to go fuck themselves.
Correction: my i7-7700 that's barely over 4 years old isn't supported by Windows 11, and apparently some 8th gen processors from early 2018 also aren't supported, so it's more like 3-3.5 years 8)
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Correction: my i7-7700 that's barely over 4 years old isn't supported by Windows 11, and apparently some 8th gen processors from early 2018 also aren't supported, so it's more like 3-3.5 years 8)
Oh shit, you're right. For some reason my geriatric millennial brain thought that the 8th gen CPUs came out in 2016.
I know the Dell chonkbook I bought in late 2016 isn't supported. 6th Gen Core i7 CPU...LOL, who even has one of those, am I right?
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Will my Ryzen 7 1700x be supported by Windows 11? If so, ok. If not, I don't care and fuck Windows 11. Lol.
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Will my Ryzen 7 1700x be supported by Windows 11?
Nope, at least not with the current supported CPU list. Only the Ryzen 2xxx series and up are supported because...reasons? Their hardware support seems arbitrary as fuck.
Supposedly (in the current beta, anyway) it'll just tell you it's not supported and run anyway, but who knows what the final release is going to do.
fuck Windows 11
A-fuckin-men, brother!
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How to get taken advantage of: say the words, "Yeah, I'm pretty good with computers."
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macOS Wake Timers: Wake up from sleep, check the mail, chime if there's new mail, immediately go back to sleep.
Windows Wake Timers: Wake up from sleep 20 minutes after the the computer is suspended, visually remind the user (who is not at their desk or logged in) that a Windows update is ready to install, stay awake.
What the fuck, Microsoft. How have you not figured this out yet?
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Gotta say, out of all the technologies I use, HDMI-ARC is probably the absolute fucking worst. I've never seen it work reliably. It'll be fine for a month or so then bam! Suddenly you won't get any audio out of your soundbar. Unplug everything, plug it back in, and it might work for another couple of weeks before it randomly decides that it doesn't want to work anymore. I've worked with three soundbars connected to three different TVs from three different manufacturers and they've all had issues like this.
Also, here's an honorary fuck you to whichever company (either Google or Samsung) keeps popping up full-screen update nag screens on my phone while I try to fix this stupid thing. Congrats, you're worse than Microsoft, and every time it pops up I get one step closer to just popping my SIM back into my iPhone and calling it a day.
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So between today I ended up getting something like 18 phone calls and 10 e-mails from job recruiters over a two hour span.
Turns out Monster decided to relist my resume without permission. From what I can gather they redid their site somewhat recently, and I would assume that there was an issue with data migration. Okay, fine. I'll unlist it.
Except, every time I log in it acts like I don't have a resume on file. It only gives me the option to create a resume or upload a new one. What? Suddenly, I get an idea and download the Monster mobile app. I log in and it tells me that my resume has been migrated. I check the permissions. Public. fffffuuuuuuuuu---
Tap "Private." Save. Delete app.
Now I get to spend ten minutes of my lunch break replying to recruiters, telling them that it was a big understanding (never hurts to be polite!) and that I'm not actually looking for work. Thanks, Monster.
On the bright side, at least my skills and experience are incredibly marketable.
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First world problems.
My phone updated to Android 12, and took away everything I have been used to. I don't want to re learn how to use my phone, how is this a good user experience?
EVEN THE CLOCK ON MY MAIN SCREEN IS CUT OFF, do they even test these releases?
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It took less than a year of Android to make me want to switch back to iOS. Maybe this is a Samsung thing, but I also love that feature where system updates bring up a full-screen popup that you can only dismiss a limited number of times.
Oh, speaking of updates, my PC automatically restarted for updates while I was uploading a fairly long YouTube video last night. Naturally, it decided to kill the upload at 98%. Thanks for that. I love uploading 20GB files twice.
What makes that even better is that after rebooting it logged me in automatically! I'm sure that's good for security.