cobysev

The "Work/Government Issued" one make me laugh because I served in the US military, and a handful of years ago, they approved gender reassignment surgery for trans people.

You're allowed to receive one "cosmetic" surgery for free while serving in the US military, and this counted for that. So you could literally be "issued" a new gender by the government, for free.

Trump became president, and while military people were signing up for gender reassignment surgery, he randomly ordered that trans people weren't allowed in the military and had to be kicked out immediately. So a bunch of people who outed themselves to take advantage of the surgery suddenly were at risk of losing their jobs.

Fortunately, the Department of Defense put a hold on those orders and managed to talk Trump out of kicking people out for being trans. But I guarantee, if he becomes president again, he's not going to be talked out of it again.

I'm terrified of Gabe retiring or passing away. He's been amazing for the company and I don't trust anyone else to not want to use Valve for their own greedy purposes. The next president of Valve will likely ruin all the good things about it, thanks to late-stage capitalism.

I firmly believe in voting with your wallet; I normally don't invest much long-term interest into businesses because you never know how they'll change over time, but I've been so happy with Valve that I've gladly given them thousands of dollars over the decades for Steam games. My library is sitting at just over 3,500 games right now. I don't know what I'm gonna do when Valve crumbles one day. I really hope they give me an option to download and play offline all the games I've bought, because that's a massive library to lose.

I've never given a penny to Epic Games, and unless they get on-par with Steam's functionality, I won't ever buy or play any of their games. The one thing that might make Epic Games competitive (and could convince me to use their platform) is letting Steam users copy their libraries over, so we're not just starting over from scratch with a new service.

That's what got me on Steam in the first place. Back around 2010 or so, I discovered that if you had a physical PC game that was also in Steam's store, you could type in the serial number on the game box and it would register and add it to your Steam library. That's how I got my collection of early Call of Duty titles on Steam, as well as Half-Life and some others. I moved my physical game library over to Steam and I've been a Steam loyalist ever since.

I usually eat it on its own. Maybe a glass of milk to wash it down. Maybe some chips if I'm really hungry.

For me, a PB&J is usually a snack if I'm feeling hungry between meals, so I usually eat light if I'm having one.

I would've gone with:

Crocodiles! Do not swim here

I feel like this is more accurate:

I have a genetic predisposition to be a night owl. I proved it with a DNA test, comparing my results with actual scientific research on various genetic-related conditions. Plus, my mother's side of the family always stays up super late every night.

Unfortunately, I signed up for the US military when I was 17 and they require you to get an early start every day. So I spent 20 years going to bed when I'm not tired and getting up at godawful early hours of the morning. I would basically get a lack of sleep for a few days until I was so tired, I'd pass out early and get a solid night's sleep, then start the cycle over again. My days off were the only days I got to sleep in.

Now I'm fully retired and have nothing important going on each day, so I can finally let my body adjust to its preferred sleep schedule. I'm wide awake until 2-4 AM (sometimes later), then I sleep until 10 AM to 1 PM. It's so nice not having to set an alarm anymore and naturally wake each day. I've never felt so rested!

When those services are the only place with a license to provide the content you want, and your choice is to either suck it up and deal with their enshittification, or pirate the media you want... guess which option is the preferred choice?

I tried watching Dragon Ball once. Someone was charging for an attack, and it literally took them 3 episodes to charge it (while cutting to other characters dealing with their own drama elsewhere).

When they finally fired their charged shot, it missed. I turned it off and never went back to that show. What a waste of an hour and a half.

I was actually living in Japan at the time, and I've learned why some shows drag on like that. It's because a manga series is super popular and it gets licensed for animation... but the manga is incomplete and still being made. So eventually, the anime catches up to the latest volumes and then they need filler to keep the series going while waiting for the manga-ka (author/artist) to make more stories. So they stretch out scenes and stories to cover multiple episodes instead of just getting to the point and moving on.

That's why we get lengthy shows like Dragon Ball, One Piece, Naruto, etc. They're made before the manga is finished, so they will run out of material and abruptly end unless they stretch their story arcs out over dozens of episodes.

The other route is to find a decent place to end an anime series without a full resolution of the plot. For instance, the '90s Berserk anime just told the story up to the eclipse, which was just about where the manga was when the show aired. The series is still being made now, 2 decades later (even after its manga-ka passed away last year), and there have been a couple attempts to make new anime series telling more of the current plot. But they're not stretching the story across hundreds of episodes to keep it going.

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.

"Main goal" sounds kinda like "mango." OP was making fun of the way someone said "main goal" and didn't realize his mic was unmuted.

I was in the US Air Force for 20 years, working as an IT guy, and our computers were so locked down, you couldn't use password managers at work. Nor were you allowed to bring them in.

Almost every office I worked in was secured; no removable electronic devices allowed. No cell phones, no flash drives or removable drives. Heck, CDs were a controlled item. You had to check with a security manager for approval before bringing in a music CD, and and data CDs required a log of their use and physical control by a trusted agent.

Plus, the computers themselves had a custom-configured OS and you couldn't install any software on them that wasn't on a pre-approved list. Half the time, normal users needed to talk to an admin like me to install something, and I might not even have the rights at my level to do it.

I didn't get to mess around with password managers until I retired a couple years ago, and they've been a game changer! In the military, we needed unique complex passwords for everything, can't reuse passwords, can't write down passwords, and you had to change them every 60 days.

Having a password manager makes my personal accounts so much more secure. I can have super complex passwords for everything and not need to remember them. I currently have Proton Pass (been de-Googling my life and switching all my stuff over to Proton lately) and it's been wonderful.

I don't know why the military doesn't get some sort of password manager approved for use. This is far more secure than what they've been doing in the past. I had 3 standard password templates, then made minor changes to them for every unique account. If they got too complex, I'd forget them (and again, we weren't allowed to write them down). Now I can just auto-generate a 25+ character complex password and I don't even need to remember it. I love it!

Technically, my Microsoft account. I created a Hotmail email account around 1997, my first ever online account. At some point, Microsoft merged my Hotmail login with their Microsoft login, and I still use it today; although I've changed the email address to a more current one. Microsoft killed Hotmail a long time ago, in favor of Outlook.