Yeah I bought my N64 when GameStop was liquidating their stock to make room for the next gen stuff. It was like $50 for a refurb console, two controllers, and a few games. Plus games and peripherals were only like $3 each because they were trying to clear their inventory.

I walked in with like $150, and walked out with a fully fleshed out console (four controllers, memory expansion pack, memory cards, etc) and a full library of games.

Near mint original copies sell for ~$2000. If you just want to legally play the game without emulating, go pick up the DS version for like $80. It’s pretty widely regarded as the best/most definitive version anyways.

For what it’s worth, emulation on the Steam Deck works really really well. And it’s a touch screen, so the touchscreen controls work flawlessly. The only real potential issue is that you can’t close a hinge, which breaks one particular Zelda game with a puzzle that requires closing the DS.

Yeah there’s a reason retirement homes serve breakfast at like 5AM and dinner by like 5PM. As you get older, your circadian rhythm tends to drift more towards waking and sleeping early.

The dude’s arguments sound like the kind of stuff that is frequently parroted by SovCits. My bet is that this dude is so nutty that no lawyers were willing to take him on as a client even if he asked. But I doubt he asked, because SovCits often believe they know more than the lawyers do.

The stuff about not owning the company reeks of SovCit “I’m a man acting as an agent on behalf of my name” bullshit. The rest of his arguments also sound like common SovCit “throw legalese at the wall like it’s some sort of cheat code” stuff.

I mean, they landed Gary Bowser in prison for 10 years for something very similar. Dude was just installing mod chips in Switches. He got out after only a few years due to a degenerative disease, (I think he has ALS, but that’s just off the top of my head,) but he still owes Nintendo $10M and they’re basically garnishing 30% of all of his pay for the rest of his life.

Alex Jones was a CIA plant, to make conspiracy theorists look crazy… And it worked really really well.

The government was nervous because there were some conspiracy theories that were a little too close to reality. Shit like MK ULTRA and the Harvard mind control experiment sound fake, but we have the declassified docs. We know they happened. And there were lots of conspiracy theories that were likely hitting just a little too close for comfort. But outright disputing the conspiracy theories would just add credibility to them, in a “methinks the lady doth protest too much” sort of way.

So instead, they set out to discredit the people making the claims. They wanted to poison the well. So they found a dude named Alex Jones who had potential. He’s easily manipulated, so they can basically feed him wild conspiracies and he’ll eat them up. And all they had to do was boost his message. Jones never even needed to knew he was a plant, (and in fact, it would work better if he remained clueless.)

They gave conspiracy theorists a face. Before Alex Jones, conspiracy theories were something the average person jokingly threw around while drunk at the bar. But suddenly, conspiracy theorists were up front and center. And here’s the important part: the theories didn’t have a good spokesman. Suddenly, the average person’s view of conspiracy theories shifted. They weren’t funny anymore; They had your crazy uncle ranting about dead kids being fake.

By giving conspiracy theories a face, then having that face spew the most insane bullshit alongside the true (or nearly true) theories, the government was able to discredit the true theories. They were able to poison the well, because the main person ranting about the conspiracy also thinks Sandy Hook was a hoax.

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.

it’s far easier to start a business than to get a job

Also why so many Koreans run donut shops or nail salons, and why 7-11’s are almost universally franchised by Indians. They’re all relatively easy businesses to start, can be run out of any strip mall near a neighborhood, and all have the potential to hire and train your family members. And if your cousin owns a donut shop (and you’ve worked there enough to know how it works,) you can go open your own across town. Because if you come in on a work visa, your ability to stay in the country is held hostage by your employer. But if you start your own business, that’s not an issue.

a semi-auto (AR-15 like looking weapon) slung over his shoulders, a handgun in a holster on his waist, and a lump on his right ankle above his boots. And two knives on his belt. Dude looked like he was ready for some urban warfare.

Ironically, the lump might have been what gets him into trouble. If he’s concealing a firearm without a permit, it can land him with some pretty hefty penalties. And if he has a permit but is printing (meaning the concealed weapon is visible through his clothes, like a lump) then it can also land him with some penalties.

It’s dependent on where you were, as each state has their own concealed carry laws. But in general, you’re not allowed to conceal a firearm without a permit. And if you do have a permit, you’re not allowed to have that concealed firearm be visible (even indirectly, like printing.)

Plus if you’re open carrying, Walmart internally bans them anyways. They’re a private business, and have the authority to dictate what people are or are not allowed to do while in their stores. The company has a blanket policy against open carrying, and (assuming they’re not barred from doing so by state law) the dude should have been told to leave his guns outside (like in his car) or be trespassed.

You don’t need to run it on a pi. In fact, I’d actually argue against it; A pi will be underpowered if you’re ever needing to transcode anything. Transcoding is what Plex/Jellyfin does if your watching device can’t natively play the video. Maybe you have a 4k video, but you’re playing it on a 1080p screen. That video will need to be transcoded from 4k into 1080p for the screen to be able to display it. Or maybe the file is encoded using ACC (a fairly recent encoding method) which isn’t widely supported by older devices. This often happens with things like smart TVs (which often don’t support modern encoding and need to be transcoded even if the resolution is correct.)

Basically, if you’re 100% positive that every device you’re watching it on will never need transcoding, then a pi is acceptable. But for anything else, I’d recommend a small PC instead. You can even use an old PC if you have one laying around.

Or if you want to use a new machine, maybe something like an HP Elitedesk. They’re basically what you see in every single cubicle in every single office building. They’re extremely popular in corporate settings, which means there are a ton of used/refurbished systems available for cheap, because IT destroys the drives and sends the rest to refurb when they upgrade their fleet of PCs. So for the refurb you’re basically just paying the cost of an SSD they added in (to replace the one IT pulled out), plus whatever labor is associated with dusting it out and checking the connections to make sure they all work. You can pick up a modern one for like $250 on Amazon (or your preferred electronics store).

Worth noting that the elitedesk generations are marked by a G-number, so google the model (like an EliteDesk G9, G7, etc) to see what kind of processor it has; Avoid anything with an intel 13th or 14th generation CPU, (they have major reliability issues) and check with Plex/Jellyfin’s CPU requirements list to see if it supports hardware accelerated transcoding. For Intel chips, look for QuickSync support.

For storage, I’d recommend running a NAS with however many hard drives you can afford, and one that has extra ports for future expandability. Some NAS systems support Plex and/or Jellyfin directly, but the requirements for full support are tricky and you’ll almost always have better luck just running a dedicated PC for Plex. Then for playing, one of two things will happen. Either the device is capable of directly playing the file, or it will need to be transcoded. If it’s directly playing, the plex server basically just points the player to the NAS, and the player handles the rest. If it’s transcoding, the PC will access the NAS, then stream it to the player.

As for deciding on Plex vs Jellyfin, that’s really a matter of personal preference. If you’re using Plex, I’d highly suggest a PlexPass sub/lifetime purchase; Wait until Black Friday, because they historically do a (~25% off) discount on their lifetime pass. Plex is definitely easier to set up, especially if you plan on streaming outside of your LAN.

Jellyfin currently struggles from a lack of native app support; Lots of smart TVs don’t have a native Jellyfin app, for instance. But some people have issues and complaints (many of them justified!) with Plex, so if the FOSS sounds appealing, then consider Jellyfin instead. Jellyfin is also rapidly being developed, and many people expect it to have feature parity with Plex within a few years.

And if you’re having trouble deciding, you can actually set up both (they can run in tandem on the same machine) and then see which one you prefer.

And the nice part about using a mini PC is that you can also use it for more than just Plex/Jellyfin. I have the *arr suite running on mine, alongside a Factorio server, a Palworld server, and a few other things.

Most of the episodes aired before at-home VHS was common, and TV stations weren’t in the habit of archiving their old footage for nightly broadcasts; The show was viewed as transient since it dealt with current events, and nobody expected people to want to re-watch old episodes. It’s likely that a lot of them aren’t available simply because nobody (including the tv station) has recordings.

Cold water and dish soap is the way to go. Hot water runs the risk of delaminating the coating layer, and hand soap tends to have moisturizers that will stick to the lens. Microfibers are too abrasive, and don’t adequately lift debris away from the lens. Just lather a drop of soap to cut the oils, then rinse. If your oleophobic coating is still good and water slicks off the lens, you can even turn the faucet low and just run a trickle across the lens to dry them. So you literally never need to touch the lens with a towel or microfiber cloth.

If you only ever use soap and cold water, your oleophobic coating will last for literal years. I’ve had my current pair for almost two years now, with no scratches and my oleophobic coating is still just fine. Lens cleaners, glass cleaners, etc all strip that coating away. And microfibers are bad about causing tiny scratches that build up over time, since they drag dust and debris across the lens as you wipe them. In contrast, water gently carries dust and debris away without scratching, then the soap removes the oily fingerprints and smudges without damaging the coating.

Ding ding ding. Make it technically possible to private the sub, but then add 5000 bots to every new sub so it’s not actually possible.

Apollo had this same bug before the API-colypse, and it’s supposedly because iOS memory management doesn’t actually alert an app that it’s being closed in the background. When you swipe away from an app, the phone automatically determines when to close it in the background; Even if it is still visible on your list of running apps, it may actually be closed. (This is also why iOS doesn’t bother giving you a “Close all background apps” button like android does. It just automatically closes background apps.) It closes it without warning, and the app is forced to refresh the next time it is opened. The app maker has zero control over this; It’s something the OS does automatically.

So maybe you swipe away to do something small, and your comment is fine when you return. But maybe you swipe away to something more memory-hungry (like maybe you want to go grab a video link.) Now your phone goes “oh hey I need a lot of memory. Time to dump some background apps.” And so even though you were only gone from the app for a few seconds or minutes, the phone still purged it.

Could it be fixed? Yeah, probably. AlienBlue (the precursor to Apollo) solved it by saving your progress occasionally, but that had problems of its own. For instance, your cache would eventually balloon to massive sizes, and it also caused excess power drain from constantly writing to your phone’s memory.

Job postings like yours are extremely common when the applicant has been pre-selected but the company still requires an external posting. Your applicant likes off-grid hiking, is a hobbyist drone pilot, and enjoys grilling?

Now the job posting for a IT position requires an applicant who is capable of accurate pathfinding using a paper map and compass, two years of drone pilot experience, and four years of culinary experience.

Bathroom attendants are there to discourage drug use and bathroom sex. That’s literally their primary purpose. The fact that they have towels and mints is secondary to the fact that they’re just a walking overdose deterrent.

That’s why they’re commonly seen in clubs and bars where people would be inclined to do drugs or have bathroom sex.

Yeah, something like that. Dump five gallons of apple juice and two pounds of glucose into a carboy. Add champagne yeast, cap with an airlock full of vodka, and let sit for a few months.

The result is an extremely dry apple wine that’ll kick your ass. If you’re not a fan of dry wines, just add a splash of sprite or 7-up to the glass to back sweeten it.

If your drink has more than one type of alcohol in it, you need to go to the ER. Methanol is horribly poisonous, and it is not a pleasant death.