Eyedust

Geminarch

Government officials, via scare tactics and fabricated statistics, are sinking hooks into lazy parents and overly-protective grandparents in a wild seize for the power to rescind your rights to freedom and privacy.

I was annoyed about the seatbelt laws, but I was a little kid at the time. I came from an era of riding in the back of dad's truck and enjoying the breeze. Hell, I went from New England to Canada in the back of a capped truck. I was eight years old and never thought anything of it.

However, as I got older into my teens I got more adamant about using a seat belt, even when the laws were still sorta gray here (you were let off with no warning most times). Now its second nature, even if I'm heading 3 mins to the store. Some people still don't because they think that they're only endangering themselves. Thing is, I have a brother in law that's a first responder. He's seen people torpedo out of windows in head-on collisions and into the other car, injuring the other driver/passengers.

Honestly, I don't get what the whole problem is. You barely even notice them on you. Most people who don't put on a simple and comfortable safety belt are just being fucking stubborn children who don't like being told what to do. I'm glad I grew out of that way of thinking. Some my family are those "good ol' natural borns". They'll tell me I don't have to put my seatbelt on and every time I adamantly say, "I always do". My other brother in law will literally crank the radio so he can't hear the seatbelt alarm. Drives me insane, but I love the idiot.

I got big into pens for a bit before settling on my edc one-size-fits-most pen. During my travels, I saw that the Fisher Space pens are still highly regarded as great writers even for us grounded folk. Yeah, there's better, but for the size and build quality they're great options. I went with the Ti Arto by Big Idea Design instead. Just so I could use basically any pen cartridges (except cheap bic roller ball).

Huh, the Arto used to be 70usd. I'd say not worth anymore. I got the black one and the paint has already chipped plus the clip is not titanium unless you buy an expensive "premium" clip.

I have three go to genres. Old westerns, old martial arts movies, and the old Godzillas. Run them at low volume and off I go...

Yeah, I'm fucking over this clown. Every tech hobby I have is not American made, nor will it ever be, because some materials need to be imported even if they want it to be American made.

We're on a one track train to the dark ages...

I found a decent GUI ripper for YouTube Music. I was using CLI before, but in this case a GUI was a lot faster. I've ripped a lot from Spotify, and I think my newest patched app lets me download directly. I agree, though; 90% of Spotify streaming apps and rippers are just taking from YouTube but using the Spotify indexer.

Yeah, I have heard a lot about Soulseek and I'll have to check it out. That's another service that I wasn't aware of until recently. I do need an alternative to ripping off YouTube music soon, but for now it gets the job done. I also have my army of patched and FOSS apps for streaming (never use one; they always have downtimes, so having multiples let you jump around when waiting for fixes).

Damn, I hate when I find these things out too late, lol. Ah well, hopefully I can squeeze out these 3 months without incident and move to another service. Between AirVPN and RD I seem to be picking the providers that are standing on glass stilts.

Even late 00's. I started young enough to know that old song and dance. Disgusting behavior, imo. The underpaid suddenly have their lives ruined, jail time, and millions in debt just because they sought a way to save a little money. Family lives ruined for what would be considered pocket money for big corp. The people that sell pirated content, sure, but they've destroyed people that were just using it.

Which is why I'll never stop being a pirate. They've made examples of us for years by slaughtering the already destitute. Now the masks are coming off and their outstretched hands for your money, money that the common people don't have in a repression, isn't even subtle anymore. Those that never even looked to piracy are now seeing why its been done for years as subscriptions and buying content become more and more greedy.

Its a double edged sword, really. We need more people to realize and see the greed that's rolling off these companies. That will, in turn, get a lot of piracy tools outlawed and we'll have to get really sneaky and fly under the radar for a bit (much like the '90s and '00s). Imo, its a necessary evil. I'm just upset because I know we'll lose more good people. And trust will be at a low soon. I remember the rumor that YIFY sold out because every tracker for YIFY rips was suddenly infested with feds and being watched closely.

Honestly I just use my card. They can track my payments, but there's still nothing outlawing payment (yet) for services and they can't prove you're using those services for illegal purposes. However, realdebrid offers payments through crypto, not sure about the other debrid services.

Its so much faster to stream using debrid than over torrent, and as another mentioned here it taxes the network less. I'm 50/50 on it, because I'd much rather promote seeding what you take, but Stremio with the Torrentio addon setup for debrid is the fastest method with the most coherent UI I've used to date, and it lets you continue from where you left off, a lot like most streaming services.

Ohhh! Thank you! Once I can get my Pi NAS going and have ample storage, I'd be extremely interested in archiving eventually. I should honestly start now, seeing as I have a large amount of music. I don't have many full albums, usually just picking up songs that interest me, but all the metadata is properly tagged using MusicBrainz Picard.