cobysev

Take YouTube Shorts for instance. I’ve made it clear I hate these things, but they keep popping up on my homepage every other week.

🤔 What’s the deal with this endless pushing of features we hate? Are they just ignoring user feedback entirely, or is there some secret strategy I’m not seeing?

TikTok is insanely popular among the younger generations, so YouTube, also being a video hosting site, wanted to jump on that bandwagon and leech some of the revenue from that style of video. So they came up with YouTube Shorts, to mimic the popular short-form upright video style.

The problem is, YouTube is NOT TikTok. Most of their user base doesn’t go to YouTube for short-form videos. So getting their audience to engage with YouTube Shorts requires them to shove it in our faces until we just get used to it.

That’s the strategy; beat us with it until we give in. They know we’re not going to go away. People aren’t organized enough to properly protest against features in a way that will scare a company into fixing it. So they’re going to keep harassing us until we’re so used to seeing it, we just don’t care anymore. Or until their content attracts the TikTok generation and successfully feeds a whole new category of revenue for the company. That’s the enshittification process for you; as long as it’s profitable, it’s going to stay.

I forget how I did it, but I blocked YouTube Shorts from showing up in my feed. I use Firefox with uBlock Origin and that removes all ads on YouTube. I even blocked the YouTube app on my phone and redirected all YouTube links to Firefox.

I used to have another extension that blocked YouTube Shorts, but I don’t see it in my extensions anymore. But they still don’t show, so maybe uBlock Origin is doing it for me?

I also don’t allow YouTube to keep a history of my activity. Which makes my homepage just a blank screen. I’d been fighting them for years, trying to remove all suggested videos from my homepage, and now it’s so simple: I just don’t save my activity and they don’t recommend anything to me.

I have subscriptions that I follow and that’s it; I don’t let them suggest videos for me to watch. I don’t need to feed their algorithms or help them build a better profile on me. I’m very anti-advertisement already, and I do my best to not let companies influence my economic behavior.

Movies have actually been a huge influence on America’s view on sexuality, if not the largest influence.

There’s one organization, CARA (the Classification and Rating Administration) who provides ratings for movies and TV shows in the US, and they’ve heavily censored nudity in film for decades, giving films shockingly high ratings if even a breast is flashed on screen for a moment.

This has caused studios to limit nude scenes, or to be extremely creative about sex scenes, to avoid higher ratings. Because the higher the rating, the smaller the audience will be, and they want to appeal to a larger audience.

If you watch American films from the 70s and earlier, seeing casual nudity in a film was a pretty normal thing, whereas you have to buy a porno just to see any nudity today.

This had a nasty backfire effect, where our culture now associates nudity with sex. We don’t appreciate the natural human body unless it’s under the context of sexual desire or procreation.

The crazy thing is, nobody really knows who the members of CARA are. Their identity is kept secret. The heads of their organization are known; you can check them out on their official website (https://www.filmratings.com/About), but the organization as a whole keeps their members’ names secret. So we have no idea who these people are who are censoring nudity in American films.

This depends on a lot of factors. If you’re part of a targeted demographic due to race, gender, religion, etc., then it might be safer to flee before you draw attention to yourself.

If you’re not a targeted demographic, then it might be best to stick around and stand up for your fellow citizens. But this could also lump you in with the targeted demographic and might eventually lead to your own persecution, so it’s a risky choice.

Either way, I still advocate for standing up to any oppression or persecution going on in your home country. No one should ever lose their home to dictators and/or fascists.

This is actually how a lot of states get divided politically. People see a place as a “red state” or a “blue state” and decide to either avoid them or move away if their political ideology doesn’t line up. But that just further entrenches the area into a political leaning. By sticking around and advocating for human rights and better community and respect, you can help prevent the splitting of communities and stop divisive concepts like fascism from forming.

IMPORTANT NOTE FOR CURRENT PLEX PASS HOLDERS:
For users who have an active Plex Pass subscription, remote playback will continue to be available to you without interruption from any Plex Media Server, after these changes go into effect. When running your own Plex Media Server as a subscriber, other users to whom you have granted access can also stream from the server (whether local or remote), without ANY additional charge—not even a mobile activation fee. More on that later in this update.

I was worrying about this change because my Plex server provides free streaming for several of my friends and family and I didn’t want them to have to start paying for it. The whole point was to get them away from Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, etc.

But this sounds like, since I’m already a Plex Pass subscriber, my remote viewers will still be able to access my stuff for free. Do I have that right? Because if so, this change is just business as usual for me.

A childhood friend of mine worked as a developer for Riot Games over a decade ago, when League of Legends first became popular. He tried to get me to play it with him, but the community was so toxic, it’s the first and only game I ever quit solely because of the community.

If you didn’t play specific characters with very specific builds, you were just wasting everyone’s time and any losses would be blamed on you. It was really bad.

I love the content and lore that comes from LoL (Arcane, K/DA, etc.), but I can’t stand the game itself.

I mean, I am the source. This was my personal experience while serving in the military.

But if you want official reports to back up what I experienced, here’s you go:

Intelligence officials withheld sensitive information from Trump while he was in office because they feared the ‘damage’ he could do if he knew.

I was working in an Intelligence unit when Trump was president (not the one directly briefing him) and it’s all anyone talked about at the time. They had to be extremely careful what information they shared with him because he would just go and post details on his social media accounts.

My unit had to change a lot of their missions and coordination because Trump would expose our secrets online. It ruined a lot of ongoing missions we had planned, and we had to scrap and rebuild a lot of our programs after he blabbed about them.

Trump fires top US general in unprecedented Pentagon shakeup

This was more recent, after I retired. But he basically fired our top military leaders, then made his own suggestions for replacements, completing ignoring the official promotion system we have in place.

He didn’t want people with years of experience and exemplary service to lead our military, he just wants his own loyalists in charge so he can control the military. He nominated highly unqualified people for the positions, with the only seemingly common quality being that they were loyal to Trump.

He was also annoyed at how hard it was to replace key people and wanted to circumvent official processes so he can hire and fire people at will, like his old businesses.

I retired from the US military 3 years ago. Yes, they can refuse unlawful orders. If I was still serving, I’d be abusing the hell out of that regulation right now.

During Trump’s last presidency, our intelligence community actually held back a lot of details in his intelligence briefings because we knew he couldn’t be trusted to keep his mouth shut. He has a top secret clearance, not because he could be trusted with it, but because it was a requirement for his job. And he also reversed our decision to withhold clearances from sketchy members of our government, so a lot of untrustworthy people also got access to our sensitive data, and thanks to that, we had a lot of compromised missions during his first tenure as president.

But we also had a majority Democrat government, which kept him in check. This time around, he’s attempting to replace everyone he can with his “yes men” so he gets no push-back. He’s even been trying to replace military generals with his own loyalists. If he can control the military, he can basically stage a coup overnight and no one will be able to stop him.

Things are getting really dangerous right now, so that regulation about refusing unlawful orders is very important, and I hope our current military members are willing to exercise it as needed.

For some reason, this just sparked an ancient memory of the Geek Code, which was a sort of signature block you could append to your emails and online bios to show off how much of a geek you were in the geekiest fashion possible.

Goddamn I’m old.

“They Live!” A guy finds some strange sunglasses that lets him see the subliminal messages hidden in all our print and media and advertisements. He can also see aliens walking amongst the population, disguised as regular humans!

Turns out, Earth had been invaded by aliens long ago and they’ve been keeping us under their control with subliminal messages for decades.

I’ve been shaving since I was 12 years old (I’m 40 now). For most of those shaving years, I liked to get really close to the mirror, to ensure I didn’t miss a spot, so I always leaned far over the sink to get that close shave.

Unbeknownst to me, spending decades leaning unsupported over the sink for 7-10 minutes every morning gave me very strong lower back muscles, which also helped to stabilize my core. I never had back problems, even when all my friends, family, and coworkers started to develop back pain later in life.

About 7 years ago, I discovered the wonders of shaving in the shower. I put a small mirror on my shower wall and shaved without all the additional hassle of cleaning a sink and counter. It was wonderful… except I wasn’t doing my morning lower back routine because I could stand upright, right next to the mirror. My lower back started getting weaker over time.

About 4 years ago, I slipped while going down my stairs and landed hard, injuring my back. I used to be able to bounce back from a fall like that, but I actually had to go to the ER to ensure I hadn’t broken something; I couldn’t even sit up straight without pain.

The pain lessened but never really went away and I found myself finally stuck with permanent back pain.

I’m considering getting rid of my shower mirror and shaving over the sink like I used to, to help rebuild my lower back muscles and better support my spine. My wife deals with permanent back pain thanks to degenerative disc disease, and the things that helps her the most is building a stronger core and lower back muscles, to take the support away from the areas that want to cause pain.

I think it was paid… But it’s been years so I couldn’t tell you.

It’s currently $3.99 in the Play Store for me, with a crossed-out list price of $6.49. Not a bad deal.

The films disproved this theory. Every actor has shared experiences across the movies, so it’s not a codename. Well, except for Daniel Craig, but his Bond was a reboot.

George Lazenby’s Bond submitted a letter of resignation to M, then cleared out his desk, pausing to reminisce on gadgets and memorabilia from the Sean Connery films as each film’s theme played. So they’re the same character.

George Lazenby’s Bond also got married to a countess named Theresa, and his new wife was murdered by Blofeld. Roger Moore’s Bond visited the grave of Theresa Bond in the opening of For Your Eyes Only, to pay respects to his late wife.

In License to Kill, Timothy Dalton’s Bond refuses to catch the garter from Felix Leiter’s new bride. When she asks Felix what’s up, he explains that Bond was married once, a long time ago.

George Lazenby’s Bond did research into genealogy for an undercover role and looked up his own heritage. He found the coat-of-arms for the real-life knight Sir Thomas Bond, who had the Latin phrase, “Orbis non Sufficit,” or, “The World is Not Enough” emblazoned on it. Pierce Brosnan’s Bond claimed in The World is Not Enough that the expression was a family motto.

So they’re all the same Bond, except for Daniel Craig, who was a reboot. They showed the start of his career, and he was James Bond before he even became 007, so that was his actual name. Also, he was given an undercover name to use for the poker tournament, but used James Bond at the hotel front desk and told them the reservation could be found under the undercover name. If James Bond was already an alias, why give him a second one on a mission?

I’d be interested in hearing that podcast. The franchise was only rebooted once officially in 2006, plus a soft reboot in the '90s when Barbara Broccoli took over. She wanted to modernize the franchise (and Bond) for a long time, which is why the Pierce Brosnan films had less drinking, no smoking, and more strong women alongside/against Bond instead of pretty damsels in distress.

We had a Casino Royale spoof in 1967, then the Austin Powers movies starting in 1997. Plus tons of tributes in media over the years. I’m not familiar with any other big parodies, although there have been some other spy films that have made tributes to the classic Bond films.

Daniel Craig is done with Bond, so I doubt we’ll see him again in the role.

I saw the credit at the end as, “We’re not done with the franchise, more Bond films will be made.” Not necessarily that this particular James Bond will return. That caption is a standard on almost every Bond film ever, so of course they had to include it.

Although I admit, in my movie theater viewing, there were a couple little old ladies sitting near me who waited to the end of the credits with bated breath, then heaved a sigh of relief when they saw the caption. It was so cute!

The only type of Bond show I’d be in favor of is a TV series that faithfully recreates the Bond novels in their respective era (1950s-'60s). I would love to see the books remade as a period drama series. Hour-long episodes for each book, maybe multiple episodes if the story was really detailed.

That would be an amazing series, and a unique take, as film Bond is nothing like book Bond. Except for the Daniel Craig era. That’s about as close to book Bond as we’ve ever had. That, and Timothy Dalton’s License to Kill film. Book Bond was a very dark and gritty character.

[…] sleep with barely legal teenagers

Funny you should say that. Roger Moore gave up the Bond role when he realized that his Bond girl co-star was younger than his own daughter. He felt really icky having romance scenes with her and decided it was time to end his contract.

Albert R. Broccoli was the original co-producer of the Bond franchise (along with Harry Saltzman). Barbara Broccoli is his daughter, who helped him with production through the '80s and took over the franchise starting with GoldenEye in '95.

She’s responsible for the more modern era of Bond that started with Pierce Brosnan, and also the rebooted era with Daniel Craig. She specifically rebooted the franchise because of Austin Powers, which satirized the Bond films and basically turned their tropes into a joke. She had to reinvent Bond so people would stop comparing her films to Austin Powers.

?:)

I personally see “bloodline” as a specific, direct line of descendants through a certain genetic-based family, title, position, etc. Whereas a family tree is literally everybody you’re related to, directly or not.

EDIT: As an example, I have an uncle on my mom’s side of the family. He’s not genetically related to me; he married into our family. He also brought a daughter from a previous marriage, so she’s legally my cousin, but we’re not genetically related at all. They married into my bloodline, but they aren’tof my bloodline, if that makes sense. They’re part of my family tree.

I learned about trunk-or-treat while living in South Carolina. I didn’t live in the highest quality town at the time. Apparently, one Halloween over a decade ago, a small boy and his dad went up to a house in our town while trick-or-treating. The guy inside was strung out on meth, though, and thought he was being raided by the cops when the child rang his doorbell. So he responded by emptying a full clip of an AR-15 through the door, killing the little boy and his dad.

Ever since then, local families always did a trunk-or-treat instead. The local school would open up their parking lot for trick-or-treaters. Adults would line up their cars in the lot, with their trunks open and, typically, the inside of their trunks were covered in Halloween decorations. And they would just hand out candy from a stash in their trunks. Kept everyone safe, made traveling on Halloween secure in a well-lit environment, and you could collect tons of candy with just a quick circle around the parking lot.

It wasn’t the traditional way to go trick-or-treating, but it was better than cancelling Halloween altogether because of a few crazies in the town.