Lorindól

I care, a lot. But this wasn’t always the case.

Before I was 13, I didn’t care much about music at all. Sure, I liked some songs I heard on the radio but I didn’t own any albums in any format. I considered music to be a harmless but mostly pretty meaningless.

Then my 7th grade music teacher gave me a really low grade, on the sole basis that I couldn’t sing in tune or play an instrument. I got good grades on the written tests, but this apparently meant nothing to her.

So purely out of spite I decided to learn how to play an instrument and sing. Getting music classes wasn’t an option due to my parent’s economic situation at the time, so I used my savings and bought my friend’s old acoustic guitar. I found good intro books from the library and started practicing.

I listened to the radio and recorded a few acoustic guitar songs on tape, so I could practice playing and singing along with them. This must have been a terrible few years for my family, but slowly I started to get the hang of it.

During this time I discovered some bands I really liked and copied their albums from LP’s from the library. My dad brought me an old discarded boombox from his work, it was big but had an excellent sound. I also scrounged enough money to buy a secondhand Walkman, so I could carry the music with me.

In high school I formed a few bands with my friends, I played rhythm guitar or bass, depending on the genre. We weren’t good, but I loved it. In university I had a chance to minor in music, which opened up whole new worlds for me. I learned to sing properly and had piano lessons.

By this time music had become a big part of my identity. I almost always had something playing on the background, if I wasn’t listening actively.

Nowadays I don’t have as much time for music as I’d like, but I’ve got myself a really good vintage Hi-Fi setup. It’s amazing to discover small things in songs I never noticed before in songs I have listened for decades. My gear may not look like much, but it’s got what counts.

When I was younger, I couldn’t afford good gear but now that I have some musical education and have learned to listen", I can’t really enjoy the music if the sound system is crappy. If it’s in the background it’s fine, but I just can’t use bad headphones anymore.

I listen to music from a large variety of genres, but hiphop/rap is something I just can’t get into. I’ve tried several times to approach it with an open mind, but there’s something in that genre that just rubs me the wrong way.

I don’t care if the music is a jokey meme thing or considered a masterpiece of it’s genre, if it clicks with you it’s good. I love symphonies as much as I love old simple folk tunes.

You are correct. It’s scary how things like these used to be just dystopic fiction. Now it is a completely plausible scenario in the very near future.

TOS had the “Eugenics Wars” / WW III start in the 1990’s, but the later series made alterations to the original timeline due to several time travel shenannigans. An easy way for the writers to explain why we aren’t currently living in a post-apocalyptic hell. All the major events will happen, just delayed accordingly.

Star Trek is supposed to happen in our future, so it’s hard to address our modern problems if they had to skip everything that happened after mid 90’s. Especially when the last 25 years have had a lot of mental stuff happening almost non-stop.

Back in the day my not-so-tech-savvy colleague bought a Windows 8.1 laptop that had a touchscreen. After two days she brought it to me and asked me if I could “rip this hellspawn out of this computer”.

Before wiping it we checked if there was anything to backup and the ~30 minutes I spent using Win 8.1 were hideous. It was the only time I ever had to use it, of which I am very grateful.

If it’s wakeup alarm, it takes about 5-10 minutes for my higher cognitive functions to get back online. If someone tells me something during this time, I most likely wil not remember it at all. And it doesn’t matter if I have slept 20 minutes or 10 hours, I’ll still be as groggy.

If there’s a loud sound in the middle of the night, it’s almost instantaneous.

Yep.

In one of the books he is on Earth without his shipmates and pretty quickly regresses back to sociopathic behaviour.

But he recognizes this and does not welcome it. After killing a stranger just to get access to gear he needs, Amos realizes that he is making the wrong choices and states: “I need to get back to my crew.”

He has an understanding of what is good and what is bad. He cannot understand why there are limitations to by which means “good” can be achieved. But he knows these limits do exist and should be respected, therefore he needs Naomi and Holden to lead him.

I read the entire Bible when I was a kid.

Atheism was the only possible path for me after that.

I share your opinion of Romulus.

The characters weren’t bad, I really liked the setting and how it managed to bind the original and Prometheus together. It’s a good Alien film and perhaps could’ve been even better, if they had just stuck with the horror tone instead of going full action in the third act. I got the feeling that the director/writer really wanted to blend the best parts of 1 and 2 into a single film.

Destroying the planet you are travelling to with a massive release of energy on arrival is one of the problems of Alcubierre warp drive:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive

I’d say this is the most likely source of inspiration for the Elborean drive.

Yes, I mean to try running them with VM. The software I need are old and light, so there’s a good chance that my laptop can run them.

I installed Fedora last Friday and I have no regrets. Win11 was never an option for me, my laptop is “too old” and I have no desire to touch that horror in any

~10 years ago I had a Win7/Ubuntu dual boot laptop, but I dropped Ubuntu when I upgraded to SSD and needed all the space I could get. Ubuntu was OK, but there was something with the UI that just didn’t click with me. I meant to try other distros but never found the time, so I just stuck with Win10 until now.

I have several legacy software that I need, so I went with dual boot again. If I can get them to run smoothly on Fedora, I’ll do a complete clean install.

The only challenge in installing Fedora was Windows’ crappy partition manager, which would not let me minimize C: for more than 54MB. I did every trick I knew and learned a few new ones, nothing helped. Then I just flashed Gparted to a USB stick and it worked instantly.

After that everything went smoothly, with the exception that Fedora didn’t recognize my Bluetooth device at all. I’ll dig into that single issue tomorrow, I’m fairly certain that a fix can be found easily.

Nowadays, definitely.

But a few decades ago in my backwater country this was reality. It happened to me twice on different regions and one of my friends who also had long hair told me it had also happened to him. I only got pocket change, but still enough to buy a can of beer ;)

At the time we deduced that there had to have been some broadcast TV show which had given them this bizarre idea, since widespread Internet access was years away at the time.

But as if this was not enough, the wierdest heckling I got was when I walking the dog with my girlfriend and a group of guys about our age passed us and called us “fucking gay”. My girlfriend was feminine, pretty and I was very far from both.

It was a very, very strange time.

Without any hesitation.

I had long hair (blonde, very thick and curly) in my late teens. Back then men with long hair were pretty rare outside the larger cities, so I usually got a large variety of insults nearly every time I went to countryside.

Sometimes people would throw money at my feet and yelled “Go to a barber, freak!” I always thanked them out loud and then I picked the money up.

Free money is always nice.

My grandma made the best meatballs. She showed me how she made them and I have the exact recipe, but I just can’t get them taste the same.

Our national broadcast company showed the execution live. I do not know why my parents allowed then 10 year old me watch it, but I remember it well.

My right pinky is severely bent at the topmost joint. It made learning the piano somewhat challenging, since the pinky sometimes “locks” itself if I try to extend my fingers too much. And if it does, I have to do a little wiggle movement to release it painlessly. If I try to force it, it makes a very loud snap and it hurts for a second.

Otherwise it has not affected my life in any way.

And I can make goose bumps / make my body hair rise up at will. It only lasts a few seconds every time, but it did make for a fun party trick when I was younger and a very hairy guy.

I did exactly this, quit after 15 years.

Lemmy has a tiny fraction users compared to Reddit, it took me a while to get used to the new rhythm of things here. But after a few weeks, I realized that this is actually much better for me.

In 2 years I have encountered only one troll. There’s a lot less content, yes, but I’ve learned that it’s still more than enough. I do miss some of the active niche hobby communities, but I fixed that by digging up my old hobby forum site profiles. The old school forums are just as active as they ever were and I don’t have to expose myself to Reddit’s neverending stream of garbage anymore.

The transition was actually pretty painless and I wouldn’t go back, even if they magically decided to clean the platform and restore the 3rd party apps. This is a smaller world and it fits me very well.

Paperiukkoketju.

IMHO, I vastly prefer the TOS Romulans. The TNG --> era Romulans with the bumpy foreheads and 80’s super-shoulderpaddings look just ridiculous. I remember reading that the network specifically wanted the TNG Romulans to have a distinct look from Vulcans, so that “the viewers won’t get confused who are the baddies”.

PIC had both Romulan incarnations and did a great job retconning this by just mentioning the “bumpy forehead northeners” out loud.

Movie/TNG Klingons were an unquestionable upgrade, though.

Doesn’t even have to be rust, wallpaper glue turns that colour when it gets wet. My grandma’s farmhouse still has a few small patches like these in some rooms. The old tile roof had tiny leaks in the 60’s, they fixed the roof but never had time to start tearing the room ceilings open while running the farm.

We had the patchy room ceilings checked for microbial damage and moisture ~20 years ago by a pro and they were all clean.