My pet peeve is when a show or movie ends and they immediately try to play a trailer for another show. I actually enjoy reading the credits! Or maybe I’m looking for the mid- or post-credits scenes. Either way, they give me like 10 seconds or less to cancel the next preview.
Oh man, since setting up my Plex server, I almost never use streaming services anymore. I mostly just keep them because my wife is obsessed with true crime shows and I don’t have any of those on my Plex server.
I tried the smoothies route once, about 2 years ago. I bought a Ninja blender, so I could make a personal smoothie to-go and not have to clean up a separate blender every time I made it.
Turns out I suck at making smoothies. I thought it’d be simple. Just throw some frozen fruits in a blender, along with some ice and a liquid like milk or something to help it mix. But that was horribly bland. I tested a bunch of other recipes online that also mixed in kale, honey, flavored protein powders, and/or other ingredients and they also came out weird.
I eventually found one recipe I liked that a friend recommended. But by that point, I was kind of burnt out by the whole thing. I only found one good recipe overall, and hunting online to test more recipes was getting to be a chore. This was supposed to be quick and easy! And now it’s consuming too much of my time, just trying to figure it out.
So… my blender has been collecting dust in my kitchen for the past couple years now.
When I was a child, my mother had to travel to Kentucky for work and I told everyone who asked that she was at “Kentucky Fried Chicken.”
My dad pointed out where Kentucky was on the map, and I almost immediately saw the chef and pan in the state shapes. I’ve never forgotten where Kentucky was since then.
I don’t know exactly when SpongeBob SquarePants first released, but I was about 19 when I first discovered it. I was working night shift in the US Air Force and my fellow night shift crew discovered it was playing on TV every night, so we watched it pretty much every night. We worked a 24-hr IT help desk, and no one called us at night.
I just turned 40 last month.
Will Smith passed on playing Neo in The Matrix to do… Wild Wild West. He had previously said it was his biggest regret in acting.
Way back in my senior year of high school (around 2002), we had a debate project where everyone partnered up, picked a controversial topic, picked a side of the topic, and then researched and advocated for their side to the rest of the class, including a Q&A at the end, where the class could challenge their position.
To our surprise, the two hottest girls in our class picked prostitution as their topic, and advocated for it to be legalized. The teacher was also surprised, and curious enough to let them present their topic to the class.
We all thought they were joking with their topic, to get a rise out of all the horny boys. After all, as 17/18 year olds, our experience with prostitution came from movies or TV documentaries, where it was generally shown as a disgusting and degrading act; the last resort for a woman down on her luck.
But the girls’ presentation was incredibly well researched, with figures regarding the number of deaths, violent crime, drugs, and human trafficking involved in illegal prostitution, compared to Nevada’s legalized prostitution since the 1970s, which had practically no numbers to report.
They even did a deep dive into a brothel in Nevada, where the women were paid very well and treated kindly and fair and not like they’re just a piece of meat. Plus, they had regular checkups and practically free health care because of their profession. They even walked through the various services they provided, since some people (they serviced anyone, not just men) wanted other forms of intimacy instead of just sex. It was a safe and judgment-free environment, on both sides of the table, and the women employed there actually wanted to do the job, with the option to quit anytime. Unlike illegal prostitution, which removed the woman’s autonomy over her own body and placed her in dangerous situations, exposed to violence and drugs to barely make a living.
In the end, the girls did a fantastic job on their presentation and convinced a whole class of seniors that prostitution could be an honest and respectable position, and should be legalized. I’ve never looked at it the same way since.
That analogy doesn’t make sense. Volkswagen is a brand; PC is not. Every personal computer is, and always has been, a PC. That’s why we differentiate between desktop PCs and laptop/tablet PCs in the industry. Macs are a type of PC. I know this; I worked IT in the federal govt for 20 years and there’s is no name brand just called “PC.”
What you’re confusing for “PC” is specific name brands of PCs, with specific hardware. When they added PC to software designation back in the day, they were letting you know it was specifically for a personal computer; not a VHS, not a record, not a game cartridge, not a cassette tape, etc. That was the designation, and then there would be more details about what specific hardware/software was required to use it. (e.g. Windows 95 with 512 MB RAM, at least a Pentium III processor, etc.)
When Apple started marketing their PCs, they built their own unique system that wasn’t compatible with other PCs, so they started pushing the Mac vs. PC campaign to separate their equipment from the rest, which eventually culminated in those Mac vs. PC ads many years later. Products started receiving a Mac label instead of PC, to show that they wouldn’t be compatible with the rest of the PCs on the market.
It helped that the rest of the PC industry started standardizing their equipment, to be compatible across all systems. Macs stood out from the rest, by refusing to be compatible with other PCs and forcing their users to stick exclusively with Apple products. It was a very anti-competitive practice, preventing users from sharing across systems, and one of many reasons the federal govt never went with Apple computers; we need to be able to share data with a variety of systems across the globe.
But Macs still fall under the umbrella of a personal computer. They are PCs. Even if they prefer no one calls them that.
On a side note, the EU just forced Apple to standardize their cables to USB-C, so they’re getting rid of their Lightning cables and finally joining the rest of the world in cable standardization. But they’ll fight tooth and nail to prevent any other changes. They’re still fighting against Right to Repair laws, as they want to force you to return to them directly for any maintenance.
As an IT guy in the early 2000s, it was really annoying to see all the “Mac vs. PC” arguments. PC stands for Personal Computer - a Mac is literally a PC! When I was a kid in the '80s-'90s, my schools all used Apple IIe computers (and later versions of Apple products as I got older), but they always called them PCs.
But those Apple ads convincing people to ditch the frumpy old guy PC for the young, hot Mac guy did their job, and pop culture decided that a Mac wasn’t a PC.
I was referring to PlexAmp. It’s decent, works well, but I just liked the interface for Symfonium better. It seemed more functional than PlexAmp when I switched over to it.
I actually haven’t used PlexAmp in a few years, so maybe it’s gotten better lately. I guess I’ll have to compare apps.
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.
Honestly, I always felt the $60 price tag for games (now $70+ for AAA titles!) was way too much, so I usually wait about a year or more, then buy it on sale.
So I get to sit back and watch the shitshow when people pre-order games and then get screwed when the game is garbage.
Dragon’s Dogma II was super hyped up recently, and even I got the free character customization demo to pre-build a character. Then it announced day-one microtransactions the day before release and pissed off the gaming community.
Remember when games used to be a finished product on a cartridge/CD? You just bought it at the store for a base price of a video game and that was it. Any bugs found in the game became widely accepted, and maybe even exploited by competitive gamers. But there was no patching, no updates, no DLC. You paid for a game up front and that was it.
I miss those days.
Paige, no!
I read this joke with my grandmother’s New England accent. She always said “idear” instead of “idea.”
Your example is from the '80s cartoon show, but Alvin and the Chipmunks are far older than that. They were a band (originally David Seville and the Chipmunks) formed in 1958, using a sped-up technique developed by David Seville (real name Ross Bagdasarian).
It did have a cartoon spinoff in 1961 named The Alvin Show, then later after David Seville’s death, an '80s cartoon show named Alvin and the Chipmunks. And then in the early 2000s, a series of live-action/CG films.
When I was a kid (in the early '80s), my parents had several vinyl records of David Seville and the Chipmunks and I used to listen to them on repeat all the time. They also had a vinyl record of David Seville’s “Witch Doctor” single, which pioneered the sped-up chipmunk voice effect. That song was an earworm! We’d be singing it for days after hearing it once. It’s no wonder Alvin and the Chipmunks became a hit sensation.
He’s a… method actor. He’s one of those guys who will literally live in the role until production is finished, on and off camera.
He got a lot of hate for playing Joker in Suicide Squad (the first one), not only because their version of Joker was a cringey edge lord instead of the brilliant psychopath he’s usually portrayed as, but also because, while he was “in character,” he did a bunch of awful things to his costars, including mailing them used condoms. All because his character would’ve done those things and he was trying to live out the role in real life.
Then he acted in Morbius and was again awful to deal with until filming was wrapped, and it sparked a whole debate over whether method actors were even good actors in the first place.
I mean, as far as I’m concerned, if you can’t seamlessly slip into a role when the cameras turn on, then you’re kind of a shitty actor. If you need to adopt the role and be that character for the entire production timeline, then you kind of suck at acting. But that’s just my opinion.
I served in the US Air Force for 20 years. You aren’t eligible for service with an ADHD diagnosis, but if you’re diagnosed after serving - and it’s not negatively affecting your job - you can contribute to serve.
I had suspected for many years that I had ADHD to some degree, and I decided to get an official diagnosis in my last year of service. The military doctors, of course, said there was no way I had it. After all, I had served almost 2 decades without any issues. But I insisted, so I got a referral to a civilian ADHD specialist for a diagnosis.
The specialist said I had one of the worst cases of ADHD she’d seen in her 11 years as a doctor.
It was recommended I get medication for it. But I have the hyperfocus type of ADHD and it actually made me very productive at work. While other people would get burnt out from staring at their computer screen all day, I could sit still and do menial, repetitive tasks without rest. I was highly efficient at work and rarely missed details.
I feel like medication would make me “normal,” and then I wouldn’t be very good at my job. So I’ve opted to stay unmedicated. But I’m glad I’m diagnosed, because it helps me to understand certain behaviors I have, and it’s good for my medical history. When I stress out and bury myself in work instead of tackling my problems, I know it’s because of ADHD and I could resolve it with medication if I needed to. It’s not just a personality quirk for me to overcome.
Thinking in terms of words and sentences always felt really slow and tiring, so I took the “picture is worth 1,000 words” metaphor literally and just visualize thoughts instead of using words. I could spend a few seconds/minutes piecing together a scene or conversation with words, or I could just instantly see it in my mind and have an innate understanding of the concept or situation, almost immediately.
Of course, this makes it harder for me to communicate verbally (especially since I’m an introvert), so I’ve had to spend years practicing conversations out loud. And since I think in terms of images, I’m basically translating visuals to words every time I open my mouth. So I can be a bit awkward and fumble over words sometimes. I spent a lot of my youth just lost in my own head, because dealing with the real world was like trying to translate a foreign language in real time. It was exhausting, so I was just the quiet kid growing up. Kept to myself, for the most part, and just absorbed information about my surroundings.
In the novel Hannibal Rising, they explain Lector Hannibal’s brilliant mind as a sort of visual hallway, with many rooms branching off of it. Any time he needs information, he takes a mental stroll down the hall and into the various rooms, where he’s filed away all sorts of knowledge. It’s how he can recollect fine details about almost everything he’s exposed to; he visualizes filing it away in a particular room in his mind, so he can go back to retrieve it anytime he wants.
I always loved that concept of a visual recollection, but I feel it’s too complicated a visual for myself in particular. It takes time to take that mental stroll down a hallway and go through files in my mind, so I keep it simpler and try to just jump right to the visual I need. If I can’t find it, then I can’t find it. Trying to keep mental files of everything just seems like way too much work for me, even if it would work as a shortcut to memory recollection.
When puberty first struck me (about 25 years ago now), I found myself in a strange battle for control over my mind. I felt split in two directions: my intellectual side, which I felt was my true self. And my instinctual self; the impulses that tried to betray the strict moral compass I had in place. Almost a sort of Jekyll and Hyde thing, now that I think about it.
I actually had a mini-struggle with this concept of a mental “self” when I was in elementary school. I was obsessive about details and had to do things in a particularly structured way. But I noticed that my peers were very lax about details and just did the bare minimum to accomplish tasks, sometimes very messily. It bothered me, and I spent several weeks agonizing over whether I should relinquish control and just be a messy, disorganized person like my peers, or if I should keep suffering under my mental structure and discipline. I didn’t want to stop hyperfixating on minor details, but I felt like life would be less stressful if I could just give up trying and go with the flow. Little did I know I was already suffering from ADHD, even way back then. I wasn’t even diagnosed until I was 37 years old.
But as I started to mature both physically and mentally, that split between being “normal” and being “organized” became my instinctual and intellectual sides, and I spent many years fighting to hold true to my morals and personal beliefs. ADHD won in the end, and I refused to give in to my instinctual impulses all my life. And the older I get, the easier it is. As my hormones and testosterone cool off with age, I get less impulsive drives. I’m more careful and more patient, with less effort.
In regards to OP’s mental “depths”… I don’t like to avoid topics just because they give me a negative vibe or emotion. I’m a realist, and I’ve always wanted to understand the world I live in, including the good and bad. I don’t want to trick myself into a false understanding of the world; I want to see it as it truly is, so there’s no misunderstanding a situation I find myself in.
So unlike OP, who has layers of their mind where they tuck away negative thoughts, I prefer to process and deal with them up front, come to some level of understanding, and then file them away. Once I’ve processed it, then it doesn’t hurt me as much in the future and I’m able to deal with it in the moment without freezing up or suffering from emotional reactions when I least expect it.
It makes me more adept at handling real-world situations as they come at me. Which was really handy when I served in the US military. When you’re being attacked by an enemy force, you don’t have time to be horrified at the carnage around you; you need to be present in the moment and focused on the next step to survival. If something truly shocking happens, I can set that thought aside while I focus on what needs to be accomplished first. Once everything’s said and done, then I can sit down and process that shocking situation I dealt with.
TL;DR - I visualize thoughts instead of speaking or forming words in my head, because it’s much faster. Also, my ADHD mind is a battlefield, wrestling for organization over impulses. ALSO also, I’m a realist who prefers to process everything up front, good and bad, instead of just tucking away negative thoughts and emotions and not dealing with them.