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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I thought it was referring to “standup meetings,” which is what we called weekly meetings with the commander in the military.

    Everyone stands for the commander when he enters a room, then each person presenting needs to be standing while briefing the commander.

    It’s military protocol for a high-ranking officer, although the cool officers would tell everyone to buck protocol, remain seated, and just give them the bullet points so we can get back to work.



  • I worked at an Arby’s back in high school (over 20 years ago). They told me free refills were a thing because most customers don’t refill more than once, if at all. Also, the soda water costs pennies and the bags of concentrated soda syrup were only like $10 (at the time). A single bag of syrup, mixed with soda water, could fill customer’s soda cups for maybe 2-3 days before it needed to be replaced. Fast food restaurants make insane profits on soda, so they don’t care if customers refilled multiple times during their visit.




  • I’ve spent nearly 2 decades connecting with friends, family, coworkers, and associates through Facebook. I hate Facebook, and actually use F.B. Purity to remove 90% of the content, ads, promotional junk, games, marketplace, etc. from it. But as the main way I’ve stayed in touch with people I’ve known over the course of my life, I just can’t dump it.

    Besides that, I have Lemmy (of course); LinkedIn, which I’m not really using anymore since I retired young; Imgur, which I mostly just use for browsing memes; and Discord, which I only use to communicate with a few close friends whom I game with weekly.

    I created accounts for Instagram and Whatsapp, but I’ve never used them. They were too self-promoting for my taste. When they first became a thing, they were all about taking selfies and sharing your face with your friends. I wanted discussion and interesting content, not to see selfies. They created the generation of “social media influencers” who think they’re entitled to things in life because X number of people follow them on social media.

    I also avoid TikTok like the plague. I was in the US military (working as an IT guy) when TikTok became popular, and we discovered it embedded itself in your phone so deeply, you couldn’t fully remove it even when uninstalling. Plus, it gave itself full admin rights to your phone, then started trickling your data to Chinese servers. Which is why the president made such a big deal about TikTok being a national security threat. It’s not because we didn’t get along with a Chinese company; it’s because a foreign government was collecting personal data and building profiles on American citizens. I will never touch that program as long as I live.

    I’m 40 years old, by the way. A lot of people say Facebook is only used by old people, and yes, I just turned 40 and am finally becoming an “old person.” But I’m still relatively young compared to people’s expectations of Facebook users. And I have a lot of Facebook friends who are much younger than I am.




  • you can’t understand that people like your movie as it was originally created

    George Lucas has said in the past that he had bigger plans for the original film(s), but the technology to pull it off didn’t exist yet. So he had to make do with what effects he could. He even invented many film effects for the original trilogy, creating his own visual effects studio to pull it off.

    In the '90s, he realized CG technology had advanced enough that he could finally fill in the gaps that he couldn’t do back in the '70s, and so he released the Special Edition trilogy, which he considered the final and complete masterpiece.

    Of course, a lot of people had experienced 2 decades of the original Star Wars trilogy by that point, so adding changes now seemed like inappropriately extending what was already considered a masterpiece.

    George Lucas was never satisfied with his films anyway. He kept changing the story, even as they were filming, and it was purely by accident that they ended up being a massive hit. (Which is probably why his prequel trilogy was so hated by fans) I remember reading once that his original plot starred Luke Starkiller, and Leia was supposed to be General Organa and not related to Luke. Also, Luke was originally supposed to fall to the dark side and become the new villain, replacing Darth Vader. Mark Hamill was excited about that twist, until it was changed for a happier ending. He would later go on to play villains in other films, being famously known as the voice of Joker from Batman The Animated Series.

    Also, I watched a documentary on VHS back in the early '90s where George Lucas laid out his plan for a 9-movie series. The first trilogy would be about the crumbling of the Galactic Republic, then the second trilogy would be about rebel forces fighting against the new Empire, then the final trilogy would be about rebuilding the Galactic Republic.

    But George Lucas thought it would be boring watching 3 whole films about a government slowly collapsing, so he decided to jump into the meat of the conflict and start with the middle trilogy. It was a wild success, even if the plot kept changing as he was filming, and so when he got to the prequel trilogy, he decided to make it about one of the biggest characters from his original trilogy - Vader. Which changed the focus of the prequel films and made them less boring than just a series about space politics, but not nearly as interesting as his original trilogy.

    Star Wars fans are a pretty contentious bunch, and the hate for the prequel series caused George Lucas to give up his dream of making 9 films. He eventually sold the franchise to Disney, who immediately started up their own sequel trilogy, plus a ton of spinoff TV series. And it’s been pretty strange since then. Episode 7 was basically a modern remake of episode 4, to draw back the fans of the original trilogy. Then Rian Johnson was given the reins for Episode 8, and he hated seeing the same cast of characters in every Star Wars film, so he tried to branch out away from familiar faces. It didn’t go well, so Episode 9 shoe-horned in as many familiar characters and stories as it could, to win back fans. The whiplash between films made for a pretty awful and disjointed series.

    Personally, I’m on board with the idea that the original trilogy (in it’s unedited state) is the ONLY Star Wars series. The rest, I just consider to be non-canon fan films. There’s so much that could’ve been done to add onto the original series. And even the official book series (before Disney marked them as non-canon) had great additions to the plot. But then we got a prequel series about the biggest badass in the galaxy… and it turns out he’s just a whiny brat who’s manipulated into being a bad guy. Then the sequel series was all over the place. And the spinoff TV shows have been hit-or-miss. So yeah, I consider them all non-canon, including George’s Special Edition. And I look forward to seeing the original unedited trilogy in 4K one day.


  • Oh damn, I’m starting on the Boomer habit of complaining about Zoomer culture when it’s actually Alpha culture.

    It feels like yesterday, Boomers were complaining about how annoying millennial kids were, when we were actually adults in our 20s/30s at the time. I’m just realizing that was over a decade ago, and now I’m doing the same thing to Zoomers. Someone please stop time before I get any older; I want to get off.


  • Had to guess on the boomerang. I’ve seen boomerangs but didn’t know that’s what they’re called nor have I ever posted one.

    I’ve never heard of a “boomerang” that wasn’t referring to the Australian tool/toy. I totally guessed on that one too. I don’t post videos to any social media platform, so I was totally out of the loop on that one.


  • cobysev@lemmy.worldtoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlThe Millennial CAPTCHA
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    6 months ago

    Skibidi toilet? As a 39-yr old millennial, I’m aware that was a thing like a year ago, but I assumed it was a Zoomer meme or something. I can’t get past that captcha.

    EDIT: Upon looking at it again, I see it just wants me to type in “what is skibidi toilet” into Google, not answer what it is. Ugh, I’m turning into my Silent Generation/Boomer parents.


  • It’s my first name and a single syllable of my last name. This is my standard user account that all my family and friends know, so if they want to find me online, they know what to look for.

    I used to do private user accounts so I could post things that I didn’t want people in my life to find, but then I realized I just didn’t care to use them. I stay true to myself, even online. Anything I post is what I would happily share with anyone in my life anyway, so there’s no reason for me to maintain multiple accounts anymore.

    Also, I’m retired now, so it’s not like I need to watch what I say online. I don’t have to fear my boss finding less-than-professional social media content I’ve posted. My friends are all still working and they get really nervous about broadcasting our chats, like when I’m trying to stream our gaming sessions on Twitch. They sometimes vent about their work, and they’re afraid of their employer finding it. (BTW, I don’t record our game sessions.)

    One friend in particular will ditch our game nights completely if I mention it’s going to be livestreamed. I live halfway across the country from him and I don’t even know his employer, but he’s paranoid they’ll somehow stumble across my Twitch stream and recognize his voice or something. I’m lucky if I get 2 viewers all night long, so I’m pretty sure he’s safe.




  • I’ve been maintaining a self-hosted music library for so long (30+ years now), there used to not be any tools for editing metadata. I used to have to go into file properties and manually edit the data for each individual MP3 file. Nowadays, I use Mp3tag to manually edit entire albums at a time. I have ADHD though (the hyperfixation kind), so I’ve literally dedicated thousands of hours to manually fixing metadata.

    I guess I never bothered to look for more advanced tools to auto-update metadata. I had to go in and manually fix stuff that updated automatically from the Internet in the past, so I guess I stopped trusting online databases. But they’ve really advanced since the last time I went searching for tools, and their databases are a lot more complete in this day and age. I’m gonna play around with some of these programs and see how well they work.

    I host my music library through Plex, then use Symfonium on my phone if I want to stream my Plex music remotely, just because I like their interface a little better than Plex’s.


  • That’s standard in the US too, except almost no one tests with a manual car. Why make the test harder on yourself? They don’t test how well you understand your own vehicle, just that you can drive it safely on public roads while recognizing signs and performing good driver’s etiquette. Might as well test with an automatic and have less things to focus on during the test.

    Once you earn your license, then you can take the time to figure out how to drive a manual with the help of a friend/family member. That is, if you even care to learn. Most Americans don’t drive stick, and many never learn how.

    I drive manuals exclusively. It’s a good way to ensure your car never gets stolen in the US. Most people can’t drive them, so you’re almost guaranteed to never lose your car.


  • I lived in Germany for a couple years, about a decade and a half ago, and was hard-pressed to find automatic cars anywhere. My German neighbors all told me there was no point in paying for that “luxury” when the standard manual cars do just fine. So I guess that drives home the point that us Americans are lazy and willing to pay more for the convenience.

    I exclusively drive stick-shift, so it was great to have options in Germany (and most of the EU I traveled through), but moving back to America made it difficult to find manual cars. I didn’t realize the 5-speed manuals were going out of style. I actually drive a 6-speed right now, the first I’ve ever owned, but it’s a touring edition so I thought it was just part of the upgrade. Didn’t realize 6-speed is standard for almost all manuals in the US now.


  • cobysev@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzthe internet
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    7 months ago

    A cargo ship lost power and couldn’t steer, ended up crashing into a bridge and took it down. Drivers were stopped from crossing in time, but there was a construction crew on the bridge who fell with it. Several reported dead.

    Now Facebook warriors are arguing that it’s some sort of conspiracy.