Don’t know why anyone would want to fart into a bong

I don’t know what to tell you beyond what I’ve already said.

I’m not denying that it’s a serious goddamn problem. I have acknowledged that in every single comment I’ve made about this. Please stop insisting that I’m saying otherwise.

Once again, I am only saying that despite the high numbers, it is not just some ever present part of life over here to the degree that every American, or even a majority, has experienced gun violence. Everyone from the outside seems to think that’s true, but it’s insanely, laughably not. The quite overwhelming majority of Americans have not experienced gun violence, and won’t within their lifetime.

Our population number is roughly equivalent to 3/4 of the entire European Union’s combined population. Any of our numbers relating to people are going to look high unless you bear that in mind.

That’s… some pretty blantant disordered thinking.

A huge chunk of life is things outside of your control. You only have control over how you react to those things.

Beyond that, if you got yourself into a mess, you can get yourself out. Any time where you’re only fighting against yourself is a time where the odds are better in your favor than usual.

It’s will draining work to fight yourself into a better state, can be soul crushing, and it sure as hell isn’t fucking easy, but it is possible.

Self-care isn’t always giving yourself grace to fail, but it’s also not just beating yourself up for past failures. Survival is a perfectly ok goal. Then attempt for comfort and vague happiness. Then maybe you should consider trying to “make something of yourself”.

Very few of our names will live on past the people immediately surrounding us. That can be freeing if you can frame it the right way. Very few “make it”. Most just “get by”, and that’s fine.

While that’s not the nicest way to say it, I think accepting that is a huge part of growing up, IMO.

I am intelligent, and I am skilled in some things that are incredibly difficult to others such that those things are almost effortless to me. But I’m not the best. I’m definitely not the most intelligent by any fucking metric. There’s tons of people more skilled than me in what I’m good at. There’s countless more skilled than me in general (not just in my skillset), and even more than that skilled at what I’m not skilled at.

And that’s ok. I’m good enough.

The world is complicated, and the story that the most skilled always rise to the top, that so many gifted children hold onto through their youth, isn’t universally true. That can be depressing, but what I find important is this: There are countless people less skilled than you who were and are able to find a place to fit and a way to make it, and you never know when you’re going to find someone better than you that forces you to re-evaluate just how good you actually are at something. Take those as opportunities to learn.

Just be you. You can find a way to make it.

You don’t have to be the best. Not being the best doesn’t mean you aren’t applying yourself or working hard enough. The world isn’t separated into the categories of only first place and losers.

Smaller games collection this year, but better quality.

Yeah, hence why I didn’t say anything to counter anything else, or that it was a good place to visit anytime soon.

Got any other mindblowing facts for us?

Perfectly valid, and thanks for not just jumping on the US bad dogpile and instead citing some stuff.

I’m just speaking up because I’ve seen a lot of people online from outside the US running with this idea that gun violence is like, a daily occurence that every US citizen deals with regularly, when that’s so fucking far from the reality.

Yeah, things are a powder keg over here lately and the accessibility of firearms doesn’t help, but I’ve met only one person in my almost 35 years of life who’s ever been held at gunpoint and they’re the only person I know who has ever been through any form of gun violence.

There’s plenty of reasons to avoid this place for a good long while unfortunately, but I feel like the gun danger has been overblown.

I have and do, likely more than you. Thanks for patronizing!

That doesn’t change my point, that the danger of gun violence is a problem, but is considerably made out to be worse than the reality by the media.

Like, we have states larger than some European countries. If you took the reporting on all the bad shit happening over the equivalent space/population amount in Europe it would be pretty fucking harrowing as well.

I’ve known multiple people fall into a life of constant anxiety due to overexposing themselves to the media. Convinced that every city was a fucking gun violence warzone. That horrible things were happening all the time. They didn’t know anyone who knew anyone who had experienced the things they were convinced were regular horrible occurences. And they knew more than one person (mutual friends) that worked and lived in the US city with the highest homicide rate at the time. None of those people had been even in the vicinity of gun violence.

I’ve been around for nearly 35 years, and I enjoy talking with people. I’ve met only one single person who had been a victim of gun violence, in that they were robbed at gunpoint while working nights at a gas station in a rough area.

There are fucking studies about this shit that are over 15 years old that show that exposure to news media back then caused people to ridiculously overestimate the frequency of crime (and especially violent crime). News has only become more emotionally charged since.

I’m not saying America is some amazing place. I’m just saying that the news would have you believe that almost everyone here has had a gun violence experience, or that visitng the US is unsafe because of gun violence, when that’s not the case.

How… how much gun violence do you think actually happens here?

There’s a lot by number, and that’s a serious fucking issue, but the US is also massive. It’s not a regular or frequent danger of normal life here.

Even those numbers are pumped up by the fact that suicide by gun is counted in the exact same “gun violence” statistics as gang violence, and the “school shootings” statistics include all from the “gun violence” stats that occur within a certain radius around, regardless of when it happened (summer break, middle of the night, etc) or if it was any danger to students.

News overfocuses on shit like that because it pulls eyes and clicks, and therefore ad revenue.

Again, it is a serious fucking problem, but it’s not the kind of thing you’re going to experience in daily life or as a tourist.

Depends on the officer you’re dealing with. There’s multiple stories, from before Trump ever took office, of people being detained for up to a day for saying this or refusing to grant access to their phone. I can only imagine it’s worse now.

Translation: Creating a recurring meeting to look into changing to the our processes to have better PR while not costing any money.

Roughly translated from management speak: We’ll need to come back to this specific aspect of the discussion on its pwn later, so we can more directly focus on this one part.

Could be blowing smoke to get someone stuck on something to let go so the meeting can move on, or a legitimate “this part deserves its own dedicated discussion”.

There’s a decent bit of good “steering” of groups and discussions that comes out of management speak, but the word choice and phrasing makes it needlessly opaque, and very “fellow kids”.

Sometimes the opaqueness can be intentional too, to avoid making someone feel like their idea has been dismissed, or to slow down somebody while they parse what was just said so they can’t keep rapid fire talking and dominating the conversation.

I’ve been lucky enough to find a job under capitalism where I have more than enough freedom and power in my environment to feel myself.

Checkmate Marx! All that stuff about worker rights is bullshit! /s

But seriously, I wish that wasn’t such a ridiculous unicorn of a thing to find, because that aspect in and of itself has become it’s own shackle. I’m afraid to seek out more competitive pay and lose the (relatively) happy/fulfilling aspects of my job.

Exactly. You need a level of autonomy to be trusted to solve things, and to be given the permission to try.

No matter what I’m being paid to do, I’m going to try to do it as best I can. Gives some minor goals, pride, and accomplishment. Helps the drudgery go faster.

Yeah. There’s not enough naturally occurring forage to support everyone, hence why argiculture is a fucking thing that existed before explicit monetary systems.

You also have the inherent issue of greed. Not everyone out there collecting the forage wants to share. I guess that’s an abstracted version of “building fences”.

You can’t find a solution to things if you’re going to ignore the path and reasons why things ended up like this in the first place. That reason is that some humans suck, and selflessness has not always been a virtue over time. There is purpose and survival value to selfishness in certain scenarios, so even if we could magically erase it, it might not be the best idea in all situations.

“Put on your own mask before helping others.” “Don’t set yourself on fire to keep others warm.”

Like a lot of things, moderation is key.

This is also why so much of so many cultures, society, and even religions are attempts to create external motivations to look out for your fellow man.

“The world would be so much bettee if people weren’t, you know, people.” is not a particularly groundbreaking thought, lol.

Also, “No one can explain why effort feels good but work doesn’t.” Because you don’t enjoy your job, which is fairly normal, unfortunate, and not a guarantee. More often than not I get all those warm fuzzies of stretching myself, solving a difficult problem, and accomplishment from what I do for a living. It’s one of the big reasons I haven’t fucked off into the woods. Not every day is enjoyable, but more are than aren’t.

The way I see it, if I enjoyed it too much they wouldn’t pay me to do it.

Revanced Extended was created by someone who was contributing to the main Revanced project. It was made as a test bed for new patches and a place for some patches they didn’t think would get accepted into the main Revanced project. That’s where it branched off.

After a while they stopped maintaining their own Revanced Extended patch manager separate from Revanced and just had users point Revanced Manager at their Revanced Extended patches in order to use Extended.

Then a little while later they after that they got most of their patches into the main Revanced project (folded back into the main thing).

They then stopped maintaining Revanced Extended as a separate thing, but they still contribute to the main revanced project.

Granted, this is all info that’s a few years old. Might be out of date or misremembering things.

Revanced extended folded back into revanced last I heard. But yeah, Smarttube is kind of like that for Android TV boxes/dongles.

That’s fucking terrible.

Unfortunately in my roughly a decade in IT, I’ve only seen a vendor failing to deliver a core feature tank a contract once. It’s completely fucking absurd how many systems/softwares/products are in use because contracts were signed based off specific feature promises, that then were never completed.

Does this shit happen in other industries? I have a hard time imagining some company signing a contract for delivery trucks that for instance, ran on diesel, the truck manufacturer saying they didn’t have those yet but would by time of delivery, delivering gas trucks anyway, and the company that ordered them going “Well I guess we’ll just suck it up. No need to have legal get a chunk of our money back. No need to stop doing business with that truck manufacturer. We’ll just make the fleet mechanics retrofit them with no extra budget, time, or headcount. Let’s go do lines in the executive bathroom.”

But that’s what seems to happen with software products all the fucking time.

If you’re into emulation, it’s a legitimately good sidescrolling shmup, and if I remember right, the music was great as well.

It’s just that absymal translation that launched it into meme status.

I want to be the first, but I am definitely closer to the second. I’m trying to find a reasonable middle ground.

Like, I want to have a nice home network with a proper NAS, Pihole DNS, Plex/Emby/Jellyfin media server, all my music properly tagged, little mediaplayer/emulation/game streaming endpoint boxes on each TV, etc. But I don’t have the time or money to do it right at the moment.

So I have my desktop set up to share out my media folders as SMB shares when it’s powered on, and I’ve used a few tools to get my video content organized right for Kodi. I’ve got Kodi installed as an app on the Xbox Series X plugged into the family room TV. The other TV has a Chromecast dongle with VLC sideloaded and set up to connect to the SMB shares, because I’m too lazy to get my Kodi setup on it. Every room in the house has an ethernet port, and most rooms have a dumb switch so as much hardware can have ethernet connection as possible. I’ve run my music collection through MusicBrainz Picard, and separated it into a properly tagged and organized folder, and one for stuff that isn’t.