His attempt at a cockney accent in Mary Poppins would get him cancelled by today’s culture (and he still gets hate from British people for it). But fortunately, no one said anything about it back then, even though he was surrounded by actual British actors in the film. He claims he was taught the accent by an Irishman, which is why it’s so wonky. At least he seems to regret doing it.
That’s what the founders of Reddit believed when they started. We all jumped ship from Digg because Digg became too corporate and greedy, and Reddit was our safe haven.
Now here we are, over a decade later, and we’re jumping ship again because Reddit has become too corporate and greedy.
Lemmy has the advantage of being decentralized, with no single person or corporation running it, and you’re proposing a Reddit clone, run by an individual? Honestly, I love the ideas you have for Matrix, I love what you’ve accomplished with it, and I love your optimism for the site. But I’ve been burned too many times in the past by hopeful honest innovators who let money and power slowly corrupt them over time. Unless you can add your site to the federation, I’m gonna have to pass, even as enticing as your site looks now. I’m too jaded to trust a single entity/corporation to host social media content.
Not everyone can be an officer. They’re basically upper management in the military; there’s way more enlisted than officers, and the officers are held to such high standards, it’s hard to qualify to become one.
Source: I spent 20 years as an enlisted guy in the US Air Force. Considered going officer, but there was way too much politics and regulation involved. Screw that. Just let me do my job and go home at the end of the day.
I worked as an IT guy in the Air Force. I was always far removed from battles, and I joined right before the 2003 Iraq War kicked off. Serving in the military isn’t bad, as long as you pick the right career field. Army and Marines abuse the hell out of their people. They treat them like govt property and they always get the worst of everything. The Navy and Air Force actually take care of their guys, though.
Moe never found out who was prank calling him, so referring to Bart by his name shows this is a fake edit.
I was a sysadmin in the US Air Force for 20 years. One of my assignments was working at the headquarters for AFCENT (Air Forces Central Command), which oversees every deployed base in the middle east. Specifically, I worked on a tier 3 help desk, solving problems that the help desks at deployed bases couldn’t figure out.
Normally, we got our issues in tickets forwarded to us from the individual base’s Communications Squadron (IT squadron at a base). But one day, we got a call from the commander of a base’s Comm Sq. Apparently, every user account on the base has disappeared and he needed our help restoring accounts!
The first thing we did was dig through server logs to determine what caused it. No sense fixing it if an automated process was the cause and would just undo our work, right?
We found one Technical Sergeant logged in who had run a command to delete every single user account in the directory tree. We sought him out and he claimed he was trying to remove one individual, but accidentally selected the tree instead of the individual. It just so happened to be the base’s tree, not an individual office or squadron.
As his rank implies, he’s supposed to be the technical expert in his field. But this guy was an idiot who shouldn’t have been touching user accounts in the first place. Managing user accounts in an Airman job; a simple job given to our lowest-ranking members as they’re learning how to be sysadmins. And he couldn’t even do that.
It was a very large base. It took 3 days to recover all accounts from backup. The Technical Sergeant had his admin privileges revoked and spent the rest of his deployment sitting in a corner, doing administrative paperwork.
As someone with ADHD, there is no end to the number of things that fascinate me in life, and as such, I tend to obssess and nerd out on a lot of things. Probably my biggest nerd things are this:
Sonic the Hedgehog: I was gifted a SEGA Game Gear with Sonic 2 for my 9th birthday (30 years ago) and I loved everything about the world and characters. I’ve been a loyal fan ever since. I own every American comic book that’s been released, I’ve seen all the various shows and movies, and I’ve played most of the games (minus the rare arcade games and games on consoles I never owned, e.g. the Nintendo DS). I even built a website to keep a logical reading order of all the main comic series that have been released. It’s a few months out of date right now; my personal life got super busy these past few months, but I’m finally free to update it again. It’s considered a valuable resource in the Sonic fandom, as the comics can get really confusing without a reading order to guide you. Especially the old “Archie Comics” Sonic series. They had so many miniseries and spinoff comics that it gets confusing really fast.
James Bond: I dunno why, but I really got into spies back in jr high school. Back then, I loved the movie Harriet the Spy and enjoyed the film GoldenEye. The video game GoldenEye 007 came out for the Nintendo 64 and my friends and I were obsessed with it. Then my dad bought me two VHS collections (yes, I’m old) of all the James Bond films and I spent my summer vacation nerding out over all the old films, from the '60s and onward. I learned James Bond was the origin of so many action/spy tropes I had seen parodied in cartoons and movies. The bald villain with a scar and a Persian kitty in his lap. The gadgets, the cars, the well-dressed gentleman spy, plots to rule the world, etc. All pay homage to James Bond films. I really got into it.
I especially loved learning about Ian Fleming, the original author of the James Bond books, and how he was a British Naval Commander during WWII and worked Intelligence for the allies. His work was more boring desk work than save-the-world action, and his original novel version of Bond definitely had more desk work than his movie counterpart. I actually did a whole James Bond movie marathon, including all the official and non-official films, and reviewed them in depth on my movie review blog. I even compared them a little to the books they’re based on, where it was applicable. Most of the movies are completely independent of the books. Some only share a book title and nothing else, e.g. Moonraker. The books and movies are very different from each other.
Movies/TV shows: As you may have guessed from my last link, I also nerd out about movies and TV shows. I’ve watched thousands of films in my life and hundreds of TV shows. I still consider it a fun hobby; I haven’t gotten to the point of learning about filmmaking techniques, obsessing over actors or directors, watching awards shows, etc. But I really enjoy getting lost in a good story for an hour or two, and I started a review blog to analyze and break down just what is so good (or bad) about the storytelling in movies and TV shows.
My last movie marathon (a Studio Ghibli marathon) was interrupted by an Internet outage and I haven’t had time to pick it back up in a long while. But I finally find myself with loads of free time again, so I might finally complete that marathon in the coming months.
There are so many other things I’d consider myself a nerd of, but these are a sample of the larger nerdom topics I enjoy.
Hello from the future! Don’t mind me, just following a chain of Lemmy switcheroos.
As a kid, I was traumatized by the idea that I’d need to work until I’m old and then maybe spend another decade or two being too old to do the things I wanted before I eventually die. I was so distraught over “the way things are” that I constantly fantasized about running away and building my own tree house in the woods to live in, à la Swiss Family Robinson style.
And this was a time before inflation and property prices got out of hand. We were still fed the idea that getting a college education and a good paying job would help us live comfortably, while still saving up for retirement.
Then I joined the US military, thanks to the advice of my uncle who was a retired Air Force Chief Master Sergeant. 20 years later, at only 38 years old, I officially retired and earned myself a pension equal to about half my monthly pay, which I will collect automatically for the rest of my life. Unfortunately, the military did away with the pension program about 7 years ago, so any newbies will have to do their new BRS program. (Basic Retirement System; basically the federal govt’s version of a 401K) I was lucky enough to be grandfathered into the old pension program when I retired 2 years ago.
On top of that, a bunch of physical and mental injuries accrued over 20 years (thanks to serving during wartime) has earned me the coveted 100% Permanent & Total disability rating with the VA, which means I get free medical and dental for life, as well as a monthly paycheck from the VA that’s bigger than my pension. I’m making more money in retirement than I did while serving! So I can be fully retired now.
My wife also served in the military, but she didn’t make it to retirement. She was medically discharged about 12 years into service. But fortunately, her medical issues also earned her the rare 100% Total & Permanent disability rating from the VA as well. So she enjoys all the same benefits as I do, including a sizeable VA paycheck every month for life.
While I was serving, I bought houses in 2 separate places I was stationed, and I rented them out when I left. I hired on a property manager to act as landlord in my absence (since they’re in different states from where I currently live) and they take 10% of the monthly rent as their pay, which incentivizes them to keep tenants in the house, as they don’t get paid if it’s empty. They literally take care of everything; I only get contacted if they need to make a financial decision, i.e. hiring a plumber, replacing a washing machine, etc.
I make sure to charge afforable rates for rent, not price-gouge like a lot of landlords do nowadays. I’m not relying on income from these houses, so I don’t need to squeeze every penny out of them that I can. I’m very quick to fix issues, too. These houses were in excellent condition when I lived there (one was a brand-new build when I moved in) and I want to keep them in immaculate condition, so I make sure to do quality repairs and not just cheap patch jobs. I charge just enough to cover my mortgage (which was really cheap when I bought them around a decade ago) plus the property manager’s share. When both houses are paid off, that rent money (minus 10%) is just passive income to supplement my pension and disability pay.
I’ve also been living in my childhood home for the past couple years, which my father owned until he passed away last week, so I will be inheriting the house and all 6 acres it’s on. Basically a free house. Oh, and the military paid me a separate monthly housing allowance to afford rent/mortgage payments while I was serving, so I didn’t have to spend any of my own money on the 2 houses I bought. The military covered my mortgage while I lived there and tenants are paying my mortgage now. So I technically own 3 houses that I didn’t need to spend any of my own money on.
Besides all this, I also have some investments going through my cousin, who works for an investment firm. I’m pretending those investments don’t exist until actual retirement age, so they’ll accrue in value over the next couple decades and hopefully be a sizeable retirement nest egg.
So through a lot of dumb luck (and some smart choices), I’ve managed to not only avoid working until I’m too old to enjoy life, but I actually have some decent income to live comfortably on. I’m not wealthy by any stretch of the imagination, but I’m living cozy enough to relax and enjoy the second half of my life at my own pace, without a job to afford my way of life.
This is what life should be like for everyone. We’re not here to work for the rest of our lives, that’s just capitalist propaganda, fed to us since grade school. We only get one shot at life, so it should be lived! There should be plentiful options to make passive income in the second half of your life so you can enjoy living. But the capitalist machine doesn’t work if there are no workers to power it, so we’re stuck in this broken worker bee system for the majority of our lives.
Jam and jelly are two different things. Jam is made with actual fruit chunks (usually crushed or pureed), whereas jelly is made with just the fruit juice.
A decade ago, I was riding a motorcycle and slid it sideways on some gravel in a turn. The weight of the bike crushed my ankle, shattering it to pieces, while my knee got split open.
I had a metal plate put in my ankle, my knee was stitched closed, and I was bedridden for a month while recovering. Then I was hobbling around on crutches for several more months after that.
Unfortunately, I was serving in the US military at the time and they wanted me to get back to work ASAP, so they pushed me to do physical therapy and start exercising as soon as I could. We have to maintain physical fitness standards to continue serving, so I was on a limited medical waiver and was expected to get back in shape quickly.
Part of our fitness standards included running 1.5 miles in a certain timeframe based on our age. I kept getting extensions to my medical waiver because I couldn’t run, but they pushed me to hurry up and get back into running shape. Suffice to say, I was eventually able to pass my fitness test, but my ankle and knee would be throbbing in pain for the next day or two after.
A couple years later, I had the metal plate removed from my ankle, as it was restricting movement. I felt almost a jolt of pain every time I ran on that ankle. Removing the plate did make it less painful to run, but I was still barely passing my fitness tests. I just couldn’t make myself run any faster, no matter how hard I tried.
On top of that, both ankles and knees started hurting. Turns out, I had been favoring the good leg so much, I was over-exerting it and causing stress. I got an MRI and they said I had worn away about 1/3rd of the cartilage in my good knee.
Eventually, my doctor gave me a cane to help with walking and before long, I found myself using it all the time. I was continually going back to my doctor to receive more advice and care, and I was in and out of physical therapy for years.
Finally, my doctor considered me for a medical board. This is a process to review one’s medical ailments and decide whether they were fit to stay in the military, or if they needed to be medically discharged. My doctor asked me how close I was to retirement and I said I had 4 more years left. She then asked what job I did and I told her I worked in an IT role. She said I didn’t need my legs to do that, since I sat at a desk all day long, so she recommended to the board that I continue serving on a permanent “no walk/run” medical waiver. This would mean that I’m exempt from any run or walk fitness tests and I could basically just coast to retirement as long as I could pass my other fitness requirements (pushups and situps).
I managed to make it to retirement, although the lack of cardio in my diet meant that I gained about 40 lbs in those 4 years. I used my cane pretty much every day. Fortunately, my ankle pain pretty much vanished, now that I’m no longer running all the time. It’s easy to get a twinge of pain in my ankles if I’m not careful, but they don’t ache regularly anymore.
Once I retired, I registered with the VA and they immediately claimed they could fix my knees with a simple operation - something the military claimed would be a fruitless endeavor. I had minor knee surgery on both of my knees last year and surprisingly, I have almost no pain now!
I no longer walk with a cane, but it’s still easy to over-exert my knees and get sore/tired. I’m still within 6 months of my last surgery and they said it might take up to a year for me to fully recover, so I just need to be patient. But I’m excited at the prospect of being able to run again without pain. I’m hoping, by this summer, I’ll be able to get outside and exercise more and hopefully remove these extra 40+ lbs that have been weighing me down. It’s definitely not good for my knees to have extra weight on them.
Unfortunately, I’m about to turn 40 in a few months and every single one of my friends who hit 40 has claimed that that’s the year their body starts aching for no reason and it starts getting harder to do simple physical tasks. So I may be on an uphill battle from here on out.
As a kid, I was extremely active. I was constantly running everywhere, climbing trees, bicycling, swimming, rock climbing, canoeing/kayaking, and just constantly bursting at the seams with energy. I had never spent a day in the gym, but I had a natural 8-pack abs just from being so physically active. The military actually made me less muscular because they told me to slow down and stop running everywhere/climbing on everything. It didn’t help that I had a desk job, so I was told to sit still at my desk and work. If I wanted to exercise, they told me to go to the gym. But I hated the gym. It was so boring to just sit there and pick up/put down weights. Or run in circles on a track. I wanted an obstacle course, or something with a goal to reach, not just a boring, repetitive movement.
I was in great shape but still lost a lot of my strength/abilities while serving, because the military’s idea of fitness didn’t align with my own. Then my motorcycle accident severely crippled me for the rest of my service. And now, at nearly 40 years old, I’m hoping I can regain at least a little bit of that physical fitness back one day. I had built my whole life around the idea of being in excellent shape, and being crippled/broken has severely damaged my own personal image of myself. I feel like I don’t even know who I am anymore; my fitness and physical activity pretty much defined my personality and without that, I’ve had to seriously redefine who I am, which unfortunately comes bundled with insecurities, depression, and anxiety. But I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to be more active in the future.
My father walked anywhere from 2-10 miles a day just to stave off the symptoms of his Parkinson’s disease and he was a huge inspiration for me. Heck, he was a local celebrity in my town; he was known as the guy who would be out walking every day, rain or shine. Unfortunately, he passed away this past Friday, finally succumbing to his Parkinson’s. So it’s my goal, starting this spring, to pick up his daily walks in his stead and get myself back in shape. I’ve been living with him for the past 2 years (in my childhood home), so it’ll be easy to pick up his old route. Here’s hoping I can continue to improve, even into my middle-age years.
I tried to sell my car on eBay back in 2008 - the first thing I ever attempted to sell on their site. I’ve bought a few random things from eBay over the years, including my car 3 years prior.
My account was immediately flagged for potential fraud and locked down. The only way they’d clear it was if I photocopied my driver’s license and mailed it to them; they wouldn’t accept a digital copy.
I just created a new account and have been using that ever since. I ended up selling my car outside of eBay; I’m never attempting to sell a vehicle through their site again.
I’m actually just about to celebrate Christmas in the next hour or so. My dad’s health went downhill over the holidays and he needed to be moved to assisted living, so we had to delay Christmas for a bit.
I asked my family to get me gift cards because I don’t like receiving a bunch of trinkets/cheap toys. And the non-cheap “toys” I want are too expensive for my family to afford. So I’d rather they contribute cash toward something I really want.
I went in for a dental cleaning a couple years ago and the young technician said I had the cleanest teeth he’d ever worked on. He was genuinely impressed with my dental hygiene, said he almost didn’t need to do anything for my appointment.
I have a bad habit of forgetting to brush regularly (thanks, ADHD!), so I do it sporadically when I remember. As such, I typically have a cavity or two when I come in for my annual checkup. I had also just brushed and flossed right before that cleaning appointment; I did nothing else.
Also, this kid was really young. Like, barely 18 young. He had printed out a bunch of positive reviews from other dental patients he had cleaned, and taped them on the wall in front of the dentist chair. It was a little cringey.
Ninjas are typically silent assassins, not badass anime protagonists. (I’m looking at you, Naruto!) Their deeds are not generally honorable in nature. Historically, they’re seen as more of an unfortunate necessity to preserve dynasties. The honorable warriors are the samurai. Although history has shown that the whole “way of the samurai” thing was actually made up for Japanese theater and they weren’t historically honorable either.
Regardless, when it comes to modern-day Japan, they love the concept of an honorable protagonist who wins by sheer willpower, even if the odds are stacked against them. Giving their opponent the advantage and then still winning in the end is seen as a clean and respectful victory.
Having lived in Japan for 3 years and experiencing a lot of their culture, I’ve learned that the reason anime characters yell their attacks is because it promotes a fair, honest fight. Japanese people love friendly rivalries, and the only way to truly prove yourself better than your opponent is to give them every advantage and still come out victorious. Only a truly bad person would try to sneak in for an attack and catch their opponent unprepared. And that won’t settle any rivalry, even if they won the fight.
Plus, yelling your attacks just sounds cool.
That’s the route I took. I recently bought a 48" 4K monitor, hooked a mini PC up to it, and now I stream my movie and TV show collection through Plex. I still have Internet access on my “TV,” but I’m in control of what pops up (I block all ads on my home network). I just use a small wireless keyboard and mouse instead of a remote.
I haven’t actually owned a TV since about 2008. I have better media options through computers, and the technology just keeps getting better. Cable and public access television are a pain because you’re constantly bombarded with ads. With my own computer, I can circumvent ads and get a solid viewing experience.
Satisfaction is just a level of contentment for me. I’m in a good place, nothing’s wrong, I have all my needs met. I’m satisfied.
Whereas happiness is a higher emotional plane. I actually feel good, not just content. My emotions are elevated and it would take something drastic to negatively alter my mood.
Happiness is an elevated positive state of emotion, whereas satisfaction is more of a neutral positive.
come on we all go to reddit when we need to find some information because its almost always guaranteed to be there
Most of us dumped Reddit when third party apps went away. I personally haven’t been back to Reddit since creating a Lemmy account. Screw that place; they don’t deserve my patronage anymore. Or anyone’s, for that matter. Continuing to use their content is justifying their shitty business practices. It’ll never get better if people keep enabling it.
Also, what specific info are you searching for that Reddit can provide? Their search function has always been garbage. Or are you referring to general content and/or subs that don’t have an active userbase here yet?
John Cena claimed Taiwan was a country, then had to make an apology video - in Chinese - for referring to Taiwan as an independent nation. I hope he was just forced to say that under contract, but it’s kind of shitty he had to apologize to China. I’d respect him more if he stuck to his guns and stood up for Taiwan.