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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • Yeah, I just wish there was a way to automatically update the port whenever it changes. It doesn’t change often since my server tends to stay on 24/7. But when it does change, it would be nice to have it automatically update.

    Back before my current server, I was just messing around with it in Windows. I discovered that qBit actually stores the forwarded port in the registry, and PIA has a terminal command that can print the currently forwarded port. I tried to write a quick .bat script to automatically run when the PIA network adapter connected. The goal was to grab the port number and update the registry for qBit any time the internet went out or my server was rebooted.

    And it seemed to work fine. It launched when PIA connected, and pushed the new value to the registry. But that forwarded port was also apparently being stored somewhere else as well, because just updating the registry wasn’t enough; When qBit launched it still showed the old port number, even though all of the documentation I found said it was simply a registry value. At that point I just gave up and manually updated it every time I turned my computer on.


  • I’m in Texas, so there is a lot of Mexican cultural exchange. Spanish was practically a second language in my public schools, and most people speak at least a little bit of spanglish.

    When a Mexican calls an American a gringo, they’re not being nice. “Gringo” is typically used as a pejorative, to refer to a specific type of “mayo is too spicy and I’m afraid of people who have melatonin” white people.


  • You may want to look up the study “Speaker sex and perceived apportionment of talk” for a potential explanation of why this could be happening.

    Basically, psychologists did a study where they asked participants to rate excerpts from a play. They started by attempting to control for male and female “role” bias from the script itself; They had university students read the scripts (with “A” and “B” listed as the speakers’ names, gendered pronouns swapped for neutral pronouns, etc) and try to intuit the sex of the characters in the play. So this gave them a baseline on the socially perceived gender of the roles in the script. So if one role was filling a more traditionally feminine or masculine role, had more fem/masc speech patterns, etc, this part of the study was designed to check for that.

    Next, they had actors perform the script, and took some recorded excerpts to play for participants. The excerpts had a male and female actor, and the participants needed to rate how long they believed the excerpt was, and how much they believed each actor spoke, from 0-100% of the conversation. So for instance, if they believed the female actor spoke 40% of the time, they would list 40 for her and 60 for the male actor.

    Virtually every single participant (both male and female) over-estimated the female actor’s participation to some degree. Female participants were closer to reality, but male participants were pretty far off. Some of the male participants began saying the woman was an equal contributor when she was only speaking 25-30% of the time. Interestingly, these numbers were closer to reality (not totally accurate, but closer) when they flipped the script (literally) and had the actors play the opposite roles. So the female actor was now playing the “male” (determined by the earlier script reads) part of the script. So societal role expectation does play some part in the determination… But it’s not the entire reason.

    It could be a large part of why so many terminally online men pipe up about “feminism is ruining my hobbies” whenever more than a token woman is added to media. Because many men genuinely feel like women are an equal contributor when they’re only a small fraction. Does it excuse the behavior? Absolutely not. But it could at least begin to explain it.


  • In doing so, they needed to reduce inventory, so they gave away the old laptops (sans drives) to their employees. I now own the same laptop (or a very similar one)!

    Yeah, IT fleet upgrades are a great way to snag some decent hardware for dirt cheap. My Plex server is running on an old HP EliteDesk that came from a cubicle. The hardware itself is often practically new, because corporate drones rarely do anything intensive enough to actually push the hardware. Just give it a quick spray with some canned air, and pop a new drive in.



  • They’ve been pro Israel the whole time. They’ve never been about defending Jews; They just defend Israel, and call any opponents antisemitic. The issue is that as Israel slid into fascism, the ADL found themselves having to defend it. Which means that now they find themselves having to defend Israel’s fascist allies, who are doing blatantly fascist shit.



  • Not weird, but funny and unexpected.

    I work in live entertainment. I deal with all kinds of shows, but the vast majority of them involve clients making/sourcing content to use in their shows. For instance, something as simple as a PowerPoint presentation on a projector, or music tracks for a dance show. So I use a lot of computers that don’t belong to me.

    The funniest interaction I’ve ever had involved a speaker for a Black History Month presentation. The speaker brought his laptop in, with his slides all ready to go. So we plug it into the projector and he opens it up. As soon as he logs in, we’re both greeted to some hardcore porn playing in full screen. This lady was handling a whole 12 inches like a champ.

    Luckily I had the projector blacked out, so it wasn’t catastrophic. It was only the two of us who saw it. What made it so funny was the fact that the dude wasn’t even ashamed of it. He took a beat, admired what was on the screen, gave a quiet “uh huh”, nodded solemnly, and then slowly moved his mouse cursor to close the browser tab. If he had acted flustered, it would have been a funny interaction. But the fact that he wasn’t in any rush to turn it off (despite the fact that I was sitting right next to him, waiting for him to boot up that presentation,) just had me fucking rolling.



  • The chocolate thing is because American chocolate manufacturers use butyric acid to preserve the milk. Basically, using fresh milk in chocolate is expensive, because you need to get it shipped directly and be located near enough to the dairy farm. So they intentionally spoil the milk in a controlled manner. This allows them to preserve the milk (as opposed to having it spoil naturally and go completely rancid,) which allows them a much more relaxed manufacturing process. This controlled spoiling method produces butyric acid in the milk.

    The issue is that butyric acid tastes like vomit. Americans are used to the sour taste and don’t even really recognize that it’s not what chocolate is supposed to taste like. To them, that sour note is just part of chocolate. But Europeans come to America (and are used to fresh milk in their chocolate), and they are horribly disgusted when they taste American chocolate for the first time. Because Europeans aren’t used to having that sour note in their chocolate.

    This is also why so many Americans fawn over foreign chocolate. It is seen as more luxurious, but most Americans can’t really place why it tastes so much better. The reason is the lack of butyric acid.



  • The Bible Game. It’s a game that was originally released on the GBC or GBA; I honestly can’t even remember which… I downloaded a ROM pack for my retropie and discovered it hidden inside. My buddy and I got drunk one evening, and decided to boot it up for shiggles.

    It has you running around trying to answer bible verse questions to get keys from demons. It’s the single most boring and unintuitive game I’ve played. It also blatantly got several of the Bible verses wrong. We looked it up online, and there’s also a version that was on the Xbox, but it apparently had wildly different gameplay and was more like a game show, where the players answered trivia questions.


  • My local library doesn’t use Libby, and it makes me want to riot every time I think about it. They use another app called cloudLibrary, which is inferior in every way; It doesn’t even have e-reader support. You’re forced to read the books on your phone or desktop, because cloudLibrary refuses to integrate with third-party services like Amazon or B&N for kindle or nook. You can’t even download the ebooks. You have to view them in the app or on your desktop browser, and it basically loads a page at a time.

    Needless to say, I own library cards to all of the libraries in the surrounding cities, because all of those use Libby.


  • He’s the incumbent. And that’s… Well… That’s the largest reason.

    The DNC learned a hard lesson when they split the vote in the 1980 election. Jimmy Carter (the incumbent at the time) was running in the primaries against Ted Kennedy. Carter was relatively moderate, while Kennedy was more liberal and wanted to move the party further left.

    Carter and Kennedy were pretty closely tied, but Carter actually lost a few primaries. And when Kennedy refused to concede, the party was split. And since the US uses First-Past-The-Post voting, this meant both democrat candidates were weakened by the split vote and Ronald Reagan won the election instead.

    So out of fear of splitting the vote, the DNC doesn’t run primaries against an incumbent candidate.

    As for other reasons, he has actually been fairly successful as a president. He doesn’t have the stage appeal of a younger candidate, but he has been largely successful in passing legislation that he wanted to pass. Throwback to when Nixon “lost” a debate against JFK, because televisions were still new and Nixon didn’t understand the importance of looking nice. Nixon was sweaty and slovenly, while JFK was polished and clean… So the public perceived JFK as winning the debate, simply because he looked more presidential.






  • Just an FYI, it’s best practice to actually type out the words the first time, then initialize them afterwards. If you never type them out, many people will have no idea what you’re talking about.

    It just reads like every military dudebro’s deployment story.
    “Ah yeah we had to FTP the RBO to the HEP, but before we could do that the ASO had to POI the BBU. And of course, that means we had to help the ASO set up their LKI before they could start the POI. All while EMGs were bearing down on us with their TGT-30’s. But once we got the LKI set up and the ASO was able to POI, the BBU went pretty quickly. So we got the RBO FTP’ed to the HEP in record time, and were back at the FOB by EOD.