Yeah, I tired Audiobookshelf and gave up after fighting with it for a day or two. It refused to read or write any data on my NAS, so it couldn’t actually save/load any audiobook files.

This is the third time today that I have seen a reference to the sword of Damocles. Almost as if the entire fucking world feels like it’s only a thread away from destruction…

Honestly, my initial guess was that the department used a fake name to refer to the officer. Because it’s giving big “the hardest part of making a new character is thinking of a name” vibes.

I had an idea for a community along the lines of /LeastSupremeWhites which was the same basic premise. Based on an old comment I saw a while ago, which was along the lines of “why are white supremacists always the least supreme whites?”

They also fired the workers who handled most FOIA requests, so there is nobody to fulfill them anyways.

And here’s a reminder that if you run a Plex server, there’s an app called Prologue which turns it into a fully fledged audiobook server.

Plex doesn’t natively support things like audiobook bookmarks in m4b files, and tries to just play them straight through like a gigantic 4 hour long music track. But Prologue does support bookmark data. Prologue simply uses Plex’s service to access the files, (because admittedly, Plex is good for letting newbies remotely access their content) and then it ignores Plex’s built-in “lol just play it like music” instructions, and actually parses the files for bookmark data.

As someone who couldn’t get Audiobookshelf to work properly, (something about not being able to access network drives via Docker), Prologue has saved my audiobook library by allowing me to just host it via Plex instead.

The server owners can’t see your phone number. Discord allows you to set a minimum verification level for users in your server. The lowest is simply having a verified email on their account. The highest is a verified email, a few minutes old (so no brand new accounts), been in the server for a few minutes, and a verified phone number. It’s just a bot prevention thing, because spammers/scammers are a big issue on large Discord servers. Especially early in Discord’s history, it was a big issue where bots would raid a server and just totally shut it down with spam links. So Discord started allowing server owners to set minimum verification levels before users could interact and send messages.

I’ll admit that Douglas Adams hit the nail on the head in regards to AI. In the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, AI exists but everyone hates dealing with it because it’s so damned annoying. They avoid it whenever possible, and only interact when forced to do so via things like smart devices that use AI for basic tasks.

For instance, doors are programmed with AI and emphatically love opening and closing for people. In fact, they love their job as a door so much that they have a tendency to loudly and repeatedly thank people for using them, to the point of annoyance.

It was an impressively fast decline too.

So fast that many people think they never actually intended to have it survive. They simply didn’t want to compete in the future, so they bought it before it was too big to compete with. But they had to reframe the massive purchase to shareholders as a potential profit-making venture, so they publicly stated that they were doing it to move into merch sales. And then they just nosedived it as soon as the purchase was complete, so they could shrug their shoulders and go “oops, well we tried!”

GameStop likely could have pivoted into something akin to the Steam storefront, or fully jumped into merch/apparel sales and become something like BoxLunch for licensed video game stuff. But instead, they clung to physical games for far too long, while only dipping their toes into merch sales. And now it’s likely too late for them to fully shift into merch sales, because competitors have already had a full decade to establish themselves.

I’ve seen people saying “oh the AfD only has like 20% support” like the US didn’t vote Trump into power with only 25% of the population. Also, 20% of a population supporting literal nazis is something to be concerned about.

OPM is the most important in the “keeps the gears of the government moving” sense. It’s basically the federal government’s HR department. Without OPM, no federal workers get hired, get paid, etc… It’s not glamorous or politically charged work, which is why you rarely hear about them. But they recently hit the news because Elon kicked their doors in and illegally installed his own servers to capture personal data about every single federal worker.

Honestly, I don’t think that the current administration’s tactics would work without social media. Social media allows people to feel the outrage and feel like they’re making an impact, all without doing a damned thing to actually stop the current admin. Social media allows you to post online and feel satisfied with the engagement it got, because “maybe someone else will step up because of my post.” But it doesn’t actually spur any action on the poster’s part.

I’d argue that posting about it is the best case scenario for fascism, because as long as people are allowed to post they won’t be motivated to actually start fires.

And here’s a reminder that the US Army handbook on simple sabotage suggests more passive forms of sabotage if active sabotage isn’t possible. If you want to sabotage enemy war production efforts, the handbook suggests getting a job in management and then subtlety doing everything you can to grind things to a halt.

Basically, intentionally become the manglement that every office drone and factory worker hates.

Until I learned the whole story about Musk’s takeover of Tesla, I had no idea how bad and overconfident he was at engineering and business, but once I learned that, a lot of things started to make a lot more sense.

Yeah, my cousin used to work at SpaceX, and it’s sort of an open secret that they need to actively keep Elon away from the engineers. They have entire teams of people dedicated to shoving menial decisions and distractions in front of him, so he doesn’t have time to wander over to the engineers. Like as soon as he steps out of his office door, there are multiple people whose sole job is dedicated to subtlety redirecting him off to other non-critical wings of the building to keep him distracted. Because if he ever talks to the rocket engineers, he’ll try to one-up them by dropping some asinine “we’re going to do it this dumb way instead” decree that requires them to scrap their entire current project and start over from scratch (for the third time this week.)

Sure, but this is a little like saying “there is no moral consumption under capitalism, so I choose not to participate in it.” The reality is that the entire society around you is fundamentally built upon something, to the point that only the people who aren’t financially struggling can afford to insulate themselves from it. If someone is financially hurting, telling them “lol just move across town to an apartment that costs 6x as much so you can be near a station and take the train to work” is a fucking deranged suggestion.

The only critique I have is that there should have also been an iPad with a minimum 25% tip.

There’s a huge difference between a game featuring politics as a sandbox for players to play around with, and featuring political themes as a main story driver.

Civ is a good example of the former; It has politics present in the game, but the politics aren’t presented in a hero/villain way. They’re presented as potential advantages for the player, potential disadvantages for opponents, etc, but the actual policies themselves aren’t central to the system.

The game pulls from historical political systems as a way to present them to the player, but it could just as easily forego that and call the system some made up word besides “political systems”. Because the politics and policies aren’t actually important to the gameplay; All that matters to the player is what potential benefits and drawbacks they provide. You don’t actually care if a particular civ is “democratic” or “totalitarian”, because those titles could just as easily be replaced with “A” and “B”. The only thing that matters to the player is how that particular civ’s political affiliation will affect their actions.

But if a game heavily features political themes and messages as part of a plot line, then it’s not something the player can avoid or ignore. If it’s central to the story, one side (likely the side helping the player) is inevitably going to be presented as the hero, and another side (likely the side working against the player) is going to be presented as a villain. Final Fantasy X, for instance, is a good example of the latter. It heavily features anti-religion themes and messages. It’s impossible to play through the game without receiving “religion bad” messaging, because they’re central to the game’s plot line, with religious leaders as the main villains. We can draw direct parallels to real-world examples. And if you’re someone who is religious, those parallels may make you deeply uncomfortable, because religion is being portrayed negatively no matter how you play the game.