For me it’s chaotic good vs lawful good.

D&D divides character alignment along two moral axes, good vs evil, and lawful vs chaotic. Both can be neutral, and if you’re neutral in both you’re True Neutral. Heroes are good, but most are lawful good, like Superman in American comics and All Might (My Hero Academia) in Japanese ones. For chaotic good, that’s someone like Batman. I think that’s an anti hero.

Whereas villains can be lawful evil or chaotic evil, that doesn’t seem to matter as much. Darth Vader is lawful evil — he is evil, but he follows a set of laws. The Sith code or whatever. Trump is more chaotic evil, he makes his own rules and just wants to see the world burn.

I think most of us are close to true neutral. We might lean towards good but I don’t think most are pure good like a hero would be. Some of us lean toward lawful but aren’t pushing it like lawyers, judges, good cops I suppose… and some lean toward chaos (like say movie pirates) but they’re not trying to make the world burn, they just wanna watch stuff for free. The four extreme alignments are really reserved for heroes, villains — the movers and shakers.

Thank you! Subscribed to both and found a few things to sub to in the second one.

Thank you! I’m mostly treating it like “Reddit but for left leaning people” and enjoying learning the differences.

Here’s what’s wild though. At first with music streaming it was largely just American, Western, popular music. I left Spotify for Apple Music because the latter had Japanese music and I was tired of sideloading it into Spotify. Now Spotify has Japanese music too.

The Japanese music market is super weird. Anime is to Japanese music in the 2010s and 2020s what MTV was to western music in the ‘80s and ‘90s. It’s the international hit maker. So anime is bringing western eyes to all this music, not you go in YouTube and a lot of them have “YouTube edition” videos that are like half the video. Because they don’t fully trust us I guess? Sometimes the video is on Apple Music though.

I know Japanese music is more expensive than ours. I mean like the cost of a CD. So when bands would release a Japanese album, they’d add bonus tracks to help increase the value. Western bands do it too. Look up an album you know on Wikipedia and see if there’s a Japanese version with some bonus tracks.

I’m wondering how Apple Music and later Spotify more or less tamed the Japanese music market but TV and movies are so much harder.

I’m doing my part! Just joined a couple days ago. Thought I could stick with Reddit but it got too far to the right for me. They crossed a line I can’t ignore, but I like the format, so I’m here. I knew Reddit was going to be winding down soon so I didn’t put as much effort in. I’d like to start a couple communities here, whereas I wouldn’t have tried over there. I just hope the toxic people who run the communities there don’t see what I’m doing and try to invade. I mean we could use the numbers but not the toxicity — though I feel that that comes with any influx of new users.

When the kid can stand on their own. Some never learn. Sometimes it’s the parents’ fault, sometimes the kid is missing something (some mental or physical or maybe psychological deficit).

When I was a kid, there came a time when I wanted as little to do with my folks as possible. I’d be out until just past dark (“when the streetlights come on” was the time we’d start heading home) and from a pretty young age. Like 9-10. We’d go for a mile or two, explore the world around us. Ride bikes to another neighborhood or (later) get on a county bus and go to another town. We didn’t have cell phones, let alone pocket computers like kids have now.

I see kids as old as 8-10 still needing to cling to mommy’s skirt or daddy’s jeans. That could never have been us. And when they’re not clinging to their parents, they’re playing Minecraft or Fortnite or Roblox on a hand-me-down phone that doesn’t call (and probably has its serial blocked for non-payment so it just works on WiFi) or a tablet. And I’m not generalizing. I know kids like this. Kids in my family are like this. I have no control over it. I’ve tried to tell them they should be out playing. They won’t hear it. Family doesn’t care. I’m the old man shouting at clouds. I imagine those kids will be living at home at 30 being told when to take a shower and when to go to bed. It’s not just this generation, either. I have a couple aunts and an uncle (young Boomers/elder GenX) who were the same way. Minus the electronics, naturally.

Parents: Raise your kids to be independent, or they’ll be your babies forever.

Thanks I guess? Surely Mac and Linux users can be friends or at least allies against Windows. Linux comes from UNIX which macOS is based on so they’re very similar, only one is FOSS — which I suppose is the point — and the other is not. But another commonality — Macs and PCs can both run Linux.

If you like chicken, go to the corner of 53rd and 6th and find the halal cart with the longest line. Ask for the chicken and rice. Go around back and squirt half a gallon of white sauce and maybe a little red on it. Cover it up, walk about half an hour to work up an appetite, find somewhere comfortable to sit, and thank me later.

They have a chain now but nothing beats the OG cart. Even the pizza. Rose’s Pizza in Penn Station has my vote. May not be the best but it’s good! First pizza I had in NYC and while others were good, I haven’t found one I liked much more.

Absolutely. But to clarify, Apple Music pays more per stream than Spotify and others. Spotify trends to cut bigger checks to popular musicians because they have more subscribers.

Also — someone feel free to fact check this — I’ve heard that if, say, you put an album out on BandCamp but not streaming, and I buy it and sideload it into both services, and you later add it to both services, Spotify won’t pay you for my streams because I’m streaming the sideloaded copy whereas Apple will match it. I keep the metadata if it’s different but you’d get paid for the streams because it matches it.

Insofar as humidity exists everywhere… I suppose it is.

Speaking as somebody who’s lived where humidity is stupidly annoying… no, it’s not. And those of us who have experienced real humidity love it for that reason. We love getting out of really bad humidity.

I mean, I suppose it could get humid. I’ve only visited. I also suppose any coastal area could get humid, due to proximity to the ocean. But the South ain’t playing when it comes to humidity, and that’s what I meant.

Yep. The kids born in the late 80s/early 90s were my little buddies, kids, who kids my age, would look after. Just like the kids born in the late 60s/early 70s would look after us. But now, I work with people that age, and we’re all just old. Like you’re still young in your 20s, you hit 30 it starts to be over for you as far as doing young people stuff. I have friends in their 30s, 40s, and 50s and I identify with all of them age-wise. 60-65 and up I respect but I think of them as “older and wiser.” Younger people (20s) seem like they’re too young to relate to. We’re cool, but they’re a generation apart.

As far as generations go, I’m technically GenX, but I identify with most of GenX and older Millennials. I feel like we had a lot of the same experiences. I don’t really buy into generational divides anyway. They’re fine if you’re in the middle. When you get closer to the edge and start mashing the names together, I feel like you’re admitting the groups are not that distinct after all.

I switched to Mac after my old Asus laptop went out. I figure why bother with a PC laptop, it’s not gonna game and let’s see what the fuss is about. Love my MacBook Air. So then our desktop dies and I give my wife 3 options. A Mac, a cheaper PC, and a more expensive PC. She’s Android, figured she’d want to stick with Windows, but she picked the Mac! So happy. I mostly game on Switch and Xbox these days so that’s fine.

I keep feeling like I left Windows at the right time.

A little, but none of us are young anymore. ‘79 here. Love being able to claim the 70s though I don’t remember them.

Never lived there but I’ve visited CT. Went to a movie with my wife. The first Narnia film, so it was like 3 hours long? It was nice when we went in. It was nice when we left. However, during the film there was a blizzard, seemed like it dropped snow a foot deep! That being said, the city had cleared all the roads. They know how to deal with the snow. Of course when you get to side streets it’s a bit dicey, but the main roads? Like to our hotel? Clear as you like. The roads are twisty and windy up there, and people drive crazy — well, they drive appropriate to the state of the roads, to be fair — and I never felt unsafe despite being unaccustomed to driving in snow.

Beautiful area. Summers get hot, winters get cold. You gotta plan for each. But it’s nice and not too humid.

I’m using Voyager. I don’t really care if it doesn’t get the Liquid Ass interface. When I was still on Reddit, I was testing an app (Lander) that used it. It looked so bad on iOS 18, but on the 26 beta, it looked a little better. Very crash happy though.

(I like Liquid Glass, but I’m not gonna use that name. I say “Liquid Ass” with nothing but love. It looks great to me!)

Anyway, I like how it looks. Like how Apollo used to.

Anyone who uses something different, why? What’s it got over Voyager? Android and iOS answers valid — I have an iPhone 16 Pro Max, and a Galaxy S10. The -E version with only two cameras and the side mounted fingerprint reader/track pad. Currently rocking Voyager on both. But always open to change!

Voyager is free but it has tips, so there are IAPs for that.

I think it’s based on Apollo source?

What’s cool is it’s also on Android (I have one of each). Apollo was never on Android. And it’s neat, being on Android and you open Voyager and you’re using an iOS-looking app in Android. It’s not the first. I also have Apple Music on both of them, and yeah, that’s iOS design language through and through. Some Google apps are Android-themed on iOS, and that’s fine… for the people who use them. I really don’t, except Gmail.

Wouldn’t “GPT it” be easier/more likely to say?

I generally don’t use these, but Copilot (in Windows) uses one of them (I’m not sure which) and I’ve thrown a few questions at it when I’m bored. Nothing that matters. We have Windows 11 machines at work. I find AI amusing but I don’t take it seriously, and I don’t use it at home or on my mobile. It’s really not for me.

I don’t like Grok but they have a good name. I mean I don’t “like” any of them, but I like that one less because of its… the stuff it’s said. Mostly because of who’s been training it. But “Grok it” sounds better than Chat/GPT it and sounds almost as good as “Google it.”

I’d have to ask how old this system is. Ours was black, made by Kenwood, and had a wooden cabinet. Tinted glass door. Tape player was a dual front loader. That looks like a CD cartridge loader. We had that too. Our cartridges held six discs and they swiveled out.

Wasn’t mine, it was my mother’s, and she still has it. It still works. The doors on the tape deck have snapped off (we were rough with them) but you can still snap tapes into it and they play.

I remember when my mother got it. She’d just gotten divorced, had a bit of money, walked into a Circuit City (this woulda been like 1989?) and asked for the best stereo they had. And I think either she or I asked about Sony, because I remember the guy saying Sony was for people who want people to think they have an expensive stereo. Kenwood was for people who wanted a good stereo. I don’t know how true it was. Maybe he just wanted to make a commission. I think she paid a couple grand for it. I don’t recall. I didn’t pay for it. I bought my Super NES from that same Circuit City though, and I paid for that out of my allowance. $150. I didn’t bring the tax though. My mother did cover the tax. But anyway.

But while it wasn’t mine, I was the one who put it together, because back then you didn’t have Geek Squad (which is Best Buy, but you get the idea). I think they might have had “professional home installation” but that has never been cheap or affordable. Plus, my mother’s oldest son (me) was a computer guy. She figured, if he could put together a computer (that is, connect a monitor, keyboard, and mouse to a computer and turn it on — I wouldn’t start building them for another 15 years — I could assemble a stereo. Which just meant stacking them on the shelves, and connecting them via the wires in the back. Two wires — one red, one white — connected to each component and plugged into the… switcher? Whatever it was called. Pretty easy. Did it again when we moved. And then again when it came from the garage, which was like a family room, to the living room when we turned the garage into a granny unit for family who would move in. And then, when I did that, I was able to connect the TV to it, which greatly improved our sound.

Oh yeah, OP doesn’t show the speakers. Did that Sony kit include them? I’m sure it must have. My mother’s Kenwood came with speakers as tall as the cabinets! Two of them. The speakers only lasted maybe 20, 30 years though? My brother, then grown, found her better, more modern speakers to hook up to it.

There’s an easy solution to this. I pay for Apple Music because I get access to pretty much all the music I want. I can sideload what they don’t have, which isn’t much. They have better audio quality, and aren’t stiffing artists to pay some right wing nutjob science denier like the other streaming platform of note. I pay because I love music and want to support what I love. Why isn’t there a similar service for TV and movies? That’s the solution. Let us pay for what we love and make it easy. Apple figured it out with music. Valve figured it out with games.

I think they don’t want to solve the problem. I think they want to solve a different problem. I think they’re making this a problem so they can push legislation to protect their profits.