Yeah the scale of infrastructure needed for video hosting at a scale needed for creators to move over is nutso. The creators won’t move without the audience, the audience won’t move without the creators. Only way it could work is if another “megacorp” decided to take on YouTube and incentivised creators to move.

Pretty much only Apple and Microsoft have the funds to pull that off.

Also stopped using Insta after the fuckers randomly blocked me and demanded access to my ID to release. I’m not giving them my passport just so I can doomscroll.

I dumped Twitter in the first wave after Elon took over and found a new home on Mastodon. Deleted my Reddit accounts during the API crisis (I still visit but no longer contribute) and spend some time on Lemmy (haven’t yet found the community to be as engaging). Sadly there isn’t a viable alternative for YouTube yet.

https://youtu.be/KGmXGkIr7w0?si=xKOceCuPEXa3Mvt2

FRANK AND BEEAAAAAAANS!

If you want to do AA without the god bit, the Satanic Temple has something called Sober Faction (in case you didn’t know, Satanic Temple is an atheist organisation and doesn’t actually worship Satan)

The priest one that has a small child attached at the waist. I have a sick sense of humour

The theme song from Enterprise (“Where my heart will take me” by Russel Watson). So many Trekkies seem to hate this song but I genuinely love it. I normally skip through the intro songs to most Trek shows but this one I sit through every time (and I have the song in a number of my playlists).

Also Blood and Glitter by Lord of the Lost. Every year I listen to a playlist of Eurovision songs for fun. LOTL have stuck with me (and I’m going to see them live soon!!)

A couple of weeks ago my wife and I got jiggy for the first time in five years. After our third kid she just went completely off it and we’ve been in a dead bedroom situation ever since, she told me how she felt and despite my frustration I understood and respected her wishes. A couple of weeks ago I just opened up about how I was feeling unloved and then blam! It happened out of nowhere. I was in a daze and couldn’t believe it. Now I’m scared it’s going to be five years before it happens again.

Bill Making Stuff. He’s a dude hanging out in his attic making cool miniature sculptures out of junk. He has a wicked, dry, British sense of humour (also his brother “Dan Does” is also on YouTube but he tends to make more horror themed stuff). I also enjoy North of the Border, who makes awesome sculptures out of mostly polymer clays.

The way that I’m contributing is my reducing my own usage. I don’t drive a car (electric bike or public transport) I removed the gas supply from my house, signed up with a renewable energy supplier, insulated the ever living shit out of my house including triple glazed glass and installed a Heatpump. Cost a small fortune but I can say I put my money where my mouth is!

Carbon offsets are a scam. John Oliver did a piece on them last year. Lots of it goes to existing forests (which doesn’t help offset new carbon usage) or to the development of mono-culture forests which have all sorts of issues.

I’m a Mac guy so my goto answer would always be something from Apple. If I was looking for non-apple hardware though I would look at Framework laptops because lack of upgradability is my biggest peeve about Apple gear.

As a Satanist you have my vote!

I bought a low sided frying pan for when I make pancakes. It makes getting them out so much easier

We do offer “app exclusive” rates but they are supposed to be labelled as such (this is basically because we save a ton of money when people have our apps installed because we don’t end up paying it all to Google for PPC and can pass on some of the savings).

Are you certain in these conditions that everyone is looking at the exact same property for the same dates, same number of people, all logged in, same level in our loyalty program etc? All sorts of things can trigger different prices but the one thing that absolutely doesn’t is the type of mobile device you are using. We just don’t differentiate between types of mobile devices.

I work for one of the companies in the Priceline group and I can categorically say that this is not something we do. We do differentiate for logged in users vs not logged in and for different levels of our loyalty program. The hotels can change their prices on a whim though and many hotels update their prices multiple times per day depending on availability and other factors so it may just be a weird coincidence (you may be correlating an effect with something that isn’t actually the cause).

Cultures are just cults that have reached critical mass.

Same here but their back catalog is immense!

My wife used to work for one of those “paranormal investigation” companies. She saw it as a bit of fun but lots of people took it very seriously. One night I went along to a spooky old Manor House to see what it was about and I had this digital camera with an IR night mode. I took this one photo during the night and you could see a ghostly figure standing in the background. The camera used long exposures along with the infra red to get the night shots so I knew it wasn’t really a ghost but I showed my wife, she showed the organisers who shared it with the “community” and a few months later I got calls from a paranormal magazine wanting to run the picture.

Hanging out in old houses at 3am is super fun though and I enjoyed it a lot.