The Earth King has pre-emptively invited you to Lake Laogai…

Yeah, I saw it for the first time when I was in my mid-30’s. Amazing show. Might be the inspiration for my first tattoo.

I saw one at the Goodwill last week for $20, so they’re still out there. Maybe you’ve been pretty good about clearing your space, but a lot of people just keep accumulating junk until they have to spenddown to qualify for a medicaid-covered nursing home, or, worse, leave it for their children to clean up.

And, yes, absolutely I love thrifting for the hunt… I’m I stopped watching Sex and the City at the end of Season 2 I have two copies of season 4 and one of season 5, but I’m waiting for season 3 to show up at the thrift stores.

That’s not hollywood, that’s humanity. We only have so much going on in our personalities, and whatever stories we tell have to to be relatable somehow. It would be perfectly possible to come up with a novel story, but it probably wouldn’t have any emotional resonance.

Horse opera to space opera is pretty hilarious, though. I’m spending more time with some older music–from the 1940s and 1950s. I firmly believe that 90% of everything is crap, and always has been; looking through the past is an almost automated “best of” filter.

That said, modern industry has some of its own tragic quirks; for instance, Netflix demanding its writers create shows assuming that people are only half paying attention (second screen viewing), or now AI’s ability to simulate music, at a time when the art of learning ANY skill, much less a musical instrument, is dying…

Thanks for the kind words about gaming; it was a struggle, because I loved how involved I got with it, but I’ve accepted it’s probably not going to happen again and it’s time to move on to other hobbies.

You’re making me reconsider typewriters. Handwriting is supposed to be “best” as far as our brain and learning is concerned, but typewriting is probably the next best thing with the added benefit of legibility.

My new girlfriend is constantly in the homes of dead people, so I could probably get a deal on a typewriter…

My English teacher taught me “free writing”, which was basically just writing without stopping. Pretty good for unblocking your process and training the mind. That’s what I think of journaling as; but maybe I don’t have the requisite level of narcisism to find my mind droppings that interesting.

I knew a youtuber that would obsessively go through his life and work through his issues via jouranling, but I have a very poor autobiographical memory (maybe related to my limitted ability to visualize), so that’s not really an option for me…

I find writing as a hobby unsatisfying because it’s pretty lonely; even though I’m a better writer naturally than a musician, I can at least subject the suckers at the open mic night to my guitar playing and singing, and without obnoxious feedback.

Remember how mad the music industry got when CDs came out, because a CD could change hands several times with no degradation, unlike with LPs and tape cassettes that got worse with every play? And now software is a license; even if you have all the install files, you might not be able to get verified by a server to install it.

Just saying, our late-stage capitalist system is moving away from ownership, and part of that is taking away the right to transfer ownership.

For medical stuff, it’s already a closed market. You can’t sell anything medical without violaiting a federal law and the marketplace administrators banning your account (I tried unloading some pet medications on a freecycle group once)…

I’d also say that people might be squamish to remove Aunt Gladys’ hip; though maybe if funeral homes want to make more money, they can lobby for their right to strip us down for parts.

You sound pretty well positioned to find yourself a used knee, though, I bet you already know where you can find one if you think about it.

I think the trick with this stuff is actually being in the right frame of mind.

I was really in a striving frame of mind at my last run-through of meditation, constantly critiquing, criticizing, wanting, and it was just a bad experience all around.

Since then, I’ve kind of come to a weird form of self-acceptance and also an understanding that everything is ultimately meaningless (including human social progress, which I have clung to unconsciously all my life)… think I’d have a better chance at getting something out of meditation now, which raises the question of it it’s unavoidably sometimes just used as more striving by people.

There’s a japanese art of being in the forest, which sounds like what you are already doing, but it seems more OFFICIAL when there’s a foreign word for it.

Shinrin-yoku: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinrin-yoku?wprov=sfla1

Peope keep telling me to journal, too, and I can’t stand it.

If you can find someone to install a knee you get yourself, you can try liberating some from the underground. Titanium lasts forever, seems perverse to bury people with perfectly usable joints.

I used to be obsessed with video games but slowly lost interest in them in my 40’s. It might be an attention span issue, but the novelty of most things is a lot less at my age because I’ve already played out the mechanics that interested me… kind of similar with movies, too, things get a bit too predictable. Last truly surprising thing i saw was an anime with naked dumb giant cannibals; then there was a movie about a teenage cello player deciding if she wanted live or die; surprises are few and far between, though there is still pleasure in a well-told story.

I wonder if you could dial-in your typing on the manuals to keep the volume down. From what I remember, you needed a lot of pressure and the throw on the key was pretty damn long, so if you’re typing at speed the best thing to do was building up a lot of momentum… I also wonder if there were typewriters designed to be a little easier to type with. I mean, piano keys have a pretty short throw, why can’t typewriters work the same way?

We also have to keep in mind that typing through 2-3 carbons was a use case for these guys, so they’d need to strike with more impact than strictly necessary to leave some ink.

Avatar: The Last Airbender, not to be confused with Avatar (blue aliens), or The Last Airbender (unproduced movie) or Avatar: The Last Aibender (live action, 2024).

A:TLA in internet lingo

My first burn targetted 4x and got to about 3.3 on average, I think. Failed. My second burn I realized one episode didn’t copy over for some reason, so I aborted. The third attempt was the lowest available speed–3x. I was using xfburn on Linux.

I was looking at M-DISCS, which you’re questioning the provenance of on Amazon, and they’re pretty pricey… you’re adding to the reasons to move to a media server–easily backed up to less-permanent HDDs, but easier to have multiple copies constantly updating.

I’m not in any rush; I just set the lowest setting and take the dog for a walk. Now that I figured it out, that is.

Congratulations on a very dull table! I’m glad you kept it.

Oops. I see we have many professors of dvdology here; I was referring to this fellow:

https://lemmy.world/comment/24024202

This is the original and brilliant animated TV show from Nickelodeon.

I only know about the movie from hilarious YouTube take downs. I’ve seen an army of earth benders perform a parade drill to throw a single rock like a thousand times.

Because I mostly watch TV through thrifted DVDs (and rarely blu-ray). What I don’t have the money for, I get through other means. A Blu-ray burner is pretty expensive, when I looked into it, and so are blanks, so DVDs it is.

Long term plan is to build a media server with a Raspberry Pie; might give me better survivability with magentic backups. I hear DVD quality has gone down hill.

I inherited an electric typewriter, IBM Selectric 2, which was the only thing that could keep up with my Apple ][-trained typing speed… but what I remember most is how dang loud they were.

I guess it depends on what concepts you are willing to let go of. If you think Jews have some kind of holy right to land occupied by other people, yes, things are goig to be complicated because you also want to protect your ability to think of yourself as a good person, and that precludes you from supporting ethnic cleansing and genocide

If, on the other hand, you see Israel as a settler-colonial project no morally different than the Dutch in South Africa or the British in North America or the Spanish is South America or the Belgians in the Congo, it becomes a much easier ethical calculus.

There are plenty of Jews who view Israel as the latter, and the fact an identity “makes things complicated,” points to self-interested decision. Just like being white makes the concept of removing barriers to employment by black people “complicated”, or being a man might make supporting female rape victims “complicated.” The fact that a choice might not benefit a group you identify with is not an argument in favor.

And, yeah, nobody should listen to “as a mischling jew.” That’s 1/4th Jewish.