My high school had a “no hats indoors” rule and even that was regarded as dumb. No hats at all? Screw you if you wanna keep the sun out of your eyes I guess?

No hats. Toques are allowed, everything else is banned.

It’s always rough when a gang of Chefs take over a school.

Supposedly there was a similar policy at my elementary school early on, which led to a kid being forced to eat something they were allergic to. As the story goes, they vomited violently all over the lunch monitor and then had to be taken to the nurse’s office. Their parents were not amused. The policy did not stay in place.

I’ve had great luck with pine- and corn-based cat litters for low/no scent and low/no dust. Only problem is that they usually don’t clump, though they do make ones which do. Oh, and they’re all much lighter than the normal stuff. I’d say give one of those a try.

Played the Beta, thought it was… good. Better than 3 in some ways, but not up to that oppressive, almost claustrophobic ambiance in D1 that made it so damn good. That said, I loved rolling around as a Shaman Werewolf tanking everything. Was it the most effective? Nope, but I tanked Butcher twice and the World Boss and survived. Felt great.

Haven’t played the game proper on release though. Got drawn into other things actually. Am looking forward to it.

Diablo III. First time I played it was at the urging of my friend, who told me unironically, “don’t worry about the plot, the plot doesn’t matter.” Unsurprisingly my experience wasn’t particularly engaging and I lost interest, not seeing much reason to play it over any number of other games that didn’t have an always-online requirement.

Flash forward several years later. My then-girlfriend (now spouse) asked me if I’d ever played a Diablo game, and I related my experience. After she was done sputtering and emitting various noises of extreme outrage she insisted that I set things up so we could play through Diablo 1, 2, and then 3 together. I went in to D1 expecting to be similarly disappointed and instead found an incredibly dark, atmospheric, and compelling story. Oh and we did get The Butcher so I also shat myself. After that I was way hyped for 2, and by the time we hit 3 I was far more interested in playing. Loved the hell out of it, found myself not only enjoying the game but completing through the last stages of a season journey to score extra stash space and all that. Not out of obligation either, I was legitimately enjoying the grind.

Cheaper bulbs, definitely. I had a corner display cabinet I tried to switch over to using an LED bulb; the compartment for the bulb was nearly sealed and also lined with reflective materials, so the exterior got hotter to the touch than it ever did with an incandescent bulb. Damn thing started flickering and malfunctioning a few months in. Tried another LED bulb and the same thing happened only on a slightly longer time frame. Finally just gave up and went back to an incandescent bulb.

Sorta-kinda: I have an old launch iPhone that I’ve held onto so I can use it as an overbuilt iPod Touch. No apps, no phone service, it just works for playing music and does it well. I don’t use it super frequently, but every so often I just wanna play some music offline without having to worry about anything else, and it does a great job.

If I went out more not in the car I’d probably get another proper MP3/DAC player. Back in the day I had a Sansa Clip I bought as an impulse Black Friday purchase and that thing was absolute fire. Small, great battery life, showed up in Windows as a standard external storage device, even had an FM tuner built in. Only downside was that it only had 2gigs of storage, but that just made me be a bit more choosy with what I put on it. If the damn thing hadn’t wound up going through the wash on accident I might still be using it to this day.

It’s fair (from a personal taste standpoint) to say BBT isn’t funny; it’s not fair to say it’s inaccurate. Damn if the higher sciences and a bunch of academia aren’t rife with people like that.

Personally I find it amusing all the same, but I get why my Mother the PHD finds it mostly tedious.

Nope! Worst case the stream quality gets a little lower (some plugins pull from the overlay video that appears at the bottom right) but you don’t miss out on the stream at all.

Job security right there.

If it was a few bucks a month, sure. $14 a month? LOL no. Google’s one of the richest companies in the world, they don’t need the money, much less that much money. It’s just greed, pure and simple.

As others have said, Twitch adblocking still works just fine. There are multiple plugins which block their ads, and you can even paste in a few custom filters to uBlock Origin and bypass them.

In other words, it’s not inevitable.

Think of it this way: YouTube has to pay people to work on anti-adblocking tech, whereas pissed off nerds with a permanent “fuck you I do what I want” energy will figure out how to defeat those measures for free.

Kbin already has it. I’ve yet to feel the need to make use of it, but it works pretty well by all accounts.

I still act respectful in churches and other “sacred” places, not out of any fear of the Magic Sky Wizard, but simply because other people respect them and it seems like a useful thing to encourage, even if I don’t agree with the underlying reasoning. Having a place which most of society agrees should be a quiet, comforting sanctuary is not the worst thing at all, even if the comfort is derived from extreme wishful thinking.

Also, Christmas. Christmas music is great. A Charlie Brown Christmas is one of the best holiday albums ever, though we always skip “Hark the Herald Angel Sings” 'cause it’s such a tonal shift compared to the rest of the album.

I stopped using it for about 5 years because there was this truly cursed period where it wouldn’t remember manual connections if you weren’t logged in and wouldn’t work without an active internet connection if you were logged in. Even after they fixed both of those there was still a 50/50 shot it would treat logged-in local devices as remote devices and stream out via your internet connection and then back in to the client device. In fact I still don’t log my devices in if I don’t have to.

Unfortunately it’s becoming the norm. Some are less obtrusive or take up relatively little space, but every Smart TV I’ve used in the last year has some un-removable portion of the home screen that displays an ad. So far it’s almost entirely limited to TV shows or movies or services or otherwise TV-related things, but it’s really not hard to imagine that expanding to other goods and/or services.

Every smart TV is like that now. Every single one has ads of some kind, at least that I’ve tried. I mean there might be one weird knockoff brand that doesn’t but chances are it’s got even larger problems, and forget about finding apps for it.

But yeah, I have my TV connected to the internet. One of the things I had plugged in to my old “dumb” TV was a Chromecast, and the Android TV has one built in… but that requires it be on the internet for it to work. It is running Android so you bet your ass I loaded it up with all sorts of sideloaded goodness (Revanced, SmartTube, Retroarch to name a few). I just haven’t gotten around to replacing the launcher to get rid of the ads, since it’s a bit involved.

Oh, also it didn’t originally have ads, that came in an update about a year later. I’d care more if I spent much time on the home screen, but most of the time the TV’s just displaying the output of the Roku.

I’ve taken to calling people out who use the term unironically. Remind them that we’re adults and we don’t need cutesy euphemisms.

For what it’s worth, when I do the response is generally supportive.

It’s everywhere, and for no good reason. I’ve yet to find a Lemmy instance that will work without JavaScript enabled.