Everything I read about Plex vs. Jellyfin basically says that Plex is better, but Jellyfin is free. And that’s generally the end of the discussion. The biggest gripe about Plex is that it costs money to get access to all their features.

But I bought the Lifetime Plex Pass ages ago (when it was very affordable) and I’ve really enjoyed it. For that one-time fee, I’ve had full access to their entire suite for years now. I tried Jellyfin for a while, but the lack of features and configurability made it difficult for me to really get into.

For the record, I share my media library with friends and family and it was a mess to manage with Jellyfin. Plex has run much smoother for remote sharing, especially when numerous people are trying to access my server at the same time.

I think the only thing that would turn me away from Plex is if they revoked my Lifetime Plex Pass, or made me pay for additional features. With access to all their tools and configurations, it’s been the better product of any home streaming service I’ve used so far.

And yes, I know I’m saying all this in a Jellyfin community and will likely get skewered alive for not praising Jellyfin, but this place is kind of an echo chamber, so I’m humbly offering a differing opinion based on my experiences for the discussion. Please feel free to tell me all the ways I’m wrong.

Fences

I live in the countryside, so for decades, my area just showed up as a few main roads and a lot of empty map space. I’ve had delivery and mail vehicles fly by my house because they didn’t know where exactly to turn in. Inviting friends over was always a challenge because I need to describe distances and landmarks. Everyone misses the mailbox.

With OpenStreetMap, I’ve not only been able to put in driveways and outlines of houses on the map, but I put in the fences between my property, the 40 acres of conservation wilderness next to me, then the neighborhood on the other side. Now you can actually see the local neighborhoods out here! And every house has an address associated with it, instead of just a number next to the empty road that doesn’t quite match up with driveways.

And since updating it myself, I’ve noticed those details populating on Google and Bing maps too, so deliveries have been more accurate lately. I’m no longer getting mail for my neighbors, or having neighbors drop off my mail that was left at their house.

I volunteer for my town’s parks committee. Lately, I’ve been marking and labeling our parks and trails on OpenStreetMap because locals are always asking where they are. And my town’s homemade maps are ancient and awfully drawn. I spent my whole childhood living here and I’m only now learning about some of these parks and trails in my 40s!

I’ve spent a lifetime irritated with how little information is available on maps for my region, and now I get to update it myself! It’s been wonderful. I’ve even edited details in my local town as construction changed the street layout and no one updated public maps. It’s so convenient!

This is an absolutely brilliant move by Valve. Get more buyers purely for the quirky behavior of the controller, then sell even more when people accidentally break them from throwing them on the ground. They’re just printing money at this point.

A lot of open-world games give an “endless world” vibe, even if the game itself has a finite plot.

For example, games like Ghost Recon: Wildlands and Ghost Recon: Breakpoint, the entire Just Cause franchise, Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Tom Clancy’s The Division 1 and 2, etc. are all games that let you continue to explore the game and do whatever you want, even after the main plot has been completed.

My friends and I like to fool around in the Ghost Recon and Division games, even though we beat them ages ago. It’s fun to just explore and cause mayhem and destruction, fighting infinite waves of baddies. And there’s not much grinding required because we leveled while playing through the main story. As long as the world is immersive and you can find stuff to do, you could practically play forever.

Actually, a great example of this would be Enshrouded. It’s an open-world crafting/base-building game, but it’s set in a medieval fantasy world, so there are quests to accomplish, lore to discover, and gear/weapons to acquire, build, and level. And when you’re bored of that, you can just settle down and build your own fantasy city. And it’s all single-player, unless you want to invite friends into your game. Or you can make your session public and let strangers check out your game. You can lock down their access so they can’t destroy anything you’ve built or take any of your resources. Then you guys can quest together or build epic castles or villages or Hobbit homes together.

A similar game that just released is Windrose. It’s the same base-building/questing concept as Enshrouded except instead of medieval fantasy, it’s theme is pirates in the Caribbean in the 1700s. You get to build and sail ships in this game, and even duel against other ships!

Maybe that’s it. I only watched it on DVD back in the day. It was grainy and everyone’s faces looked plastic and uncanny. You couldn’t see facial textures or wrinkles.

EDIT: Nah, the hair in the meme is feathered. Everyone’s hair in the film was solid and plastic-looking. You can see in your example images that Skull’s hair is one solid piece. I still think someone at least touched up the meme a bit.

Where did this HD version of this meme come from? I’ve seen Monster House, and CG wasn’t that good in 2006. I’m pretty sure someone’s enhanced this image with AI.

Heck yeah! It was pretty much the only way I could play RuneScape.

Other people were the one thing I hated about MMOs. I just want to enjoy a massive fantasy world with no definitive end to it. But people kept being… well… people. Every time I had to deal with others, the immersion was broken. Most people were there to play the game, not appreciate it.

Even on RPG servers, it was hard to find anyone who wanted to explore the world and enjoy the setting. Everyone wanted shortcuts to fly through quests, dungeons, raids, etc. as quickly as they could. They just wanted to level up fast and min/max their stats, weapons, and armor build. People would genuinely get mad at me if I didn’t play a certain way, or understand how a boss fight works, even though it’s my first time in that dungeon. I’d need to do online research before entering a raid or dungeon with a party, and that just ruins the enjoyment of discovering a new challenge.

Even “newbie-friendly” guilds, which claimed to be more immersive and helpful for exploring and leveling, would either require regular engagement with scheduled guild activities to stay a member, or they would be dead, with almost no one online to play with at any given time.

And that’s just allies. If you’re playing a game with PvP, then you had to worry about being ganked out in the open. I could be out soloing a quest and suddenly a player just attacks out of the blue. Now it’s a game of survival and I’m already at a disadvantage. It’s either fight a losing battle or hope to run and hide.

Screw people. I prefer playing solo in MMOs. Just leave me alone to enjoy the game at my own pace.

Fellow millennial here. I’m in the same boat. Zero subscriptions except for Curiosity Stream, which is like Netflix for educational documentaries, and it’s dirt cheap.

I bought the lifetime subscription to Nebula. It’s been worth it; I have a few channels I follow and I appreciate the extra content and freedom of video producers to say/do whatever they want without platform censorship. YouTube has so many restrictions, no one can post content without bowing to Google censorship.

Parody laws should allow people to actually review or poke fun at other media, but Google will demonetize or block any content that they arbitrarily decide is copyright infringement. Most film review channels I follow have to be extremely creative in how they show clips of movies. Most of them mute music scenes, and some will insert their own public domain (or homemade) music over scenes to avoid a ban. It’s ridiculous how far the MPAA and RIAA have gone in locking down media from public consumption.

Under a fascist regime, yes.

If/when I shower at night, I just need to soak my hair in the shower, scruff it a bit, then towel dry. Then I can comb it out and style it as if I just took a fresh shower.

I’m a guy though, with relatively short hair. If I had long hair like this photo, it’d probably be a rat’s nest in the morning and need a full shower to fix.

The military is definitely all about following regulations and protocol, even if they don’t make sense.

[…] the military often does stuff in a dumbass way

I was in the Air Force when I served, but I deployed with some Marines once. Their motto, which they repeated all the time, was, “If it’s stupid, but works… it wasn’t stupid.”

They used this as an excuse to try very dumb ways to problem solve everything. And it led to very creative ways to do things; some of which actually worked.

But myself and a couple other Air Force folks got a kick out of watching the Marines figuratively smash rocks together, hoping to ignite a fire.

My favorite quote from that deployment came from one of the young Corporals in my office. He had just returned from a week-long forward mission and got stuck in an airport for 24 hours before his connecting flight.

He said, “I was so bored, I actually read a book from cover to cover! I don’t think I’ve ever read an entire book in my life!”

I expected that to be a joke, but instead of laughing, the rest of the Marines just solemnly nodded along. Wow.

Yup.

EDIT: I see someone else commented that they’re not the same. The truth is… it depends.

When I was serving in the military, we used the two terms interchangeably. They were basically the same thing to us. Although “military grade” is a more common term in the civilian sector, we would still use it when working with contractors on custom military equipment.

So if you want to be pendantic, mil-spec may be the more official term in the military. But in practice, we don’t really differentiate between the two terms.

Former military member here. There are a couple things at play here.

1.) The military will outline a specific requirement for specific equipment that contractors need to meet. Requirements depend on the mission, usage, tools required, etc. so “military grade” just means “we needed a specific product to perform a specific way.” This does not mean it’s good for any use. Just that it’s what we needed in the moment for a specific job.

2.) We are required to buy from the lowest bidder. We ask contractors to build products for us that meet the specific requirements we outlined, then compare/contrast prices. Every contractor that built our product are in the running to become our supplier for that product… if they can beat every other contractor in price.

So how does a contractor win a government contract while still making money on the product they’re selling? By cutting corners, using cheaper materials, and ensuring the product will last just long enough to meet our requirements before breaking. The cheaper they can build it, the more money they make while also selling cheaper than all their competitors.

So “military grade” just means it’s a cheap piece of crap that met some arbitrary request the military made for a specific tool at one time. If you want quality products, avoid military grade.

I always build my computers with a minimum of 64 GB RAM, so at first I didn’t see what the fuss was all about. But the article claims the Windows OS technically only needs 4 GB?!

And I see the push for more RAM is most likely to accommodate AI/Copilot, which needs a lot of resources to function. “Gaming” is just the excuse Microsoft is using to get people to upgrade.

This reminds me of a video I saw recently about how old computers didn’t have the space to waste code, so every line of code was micromanaged to perfection. But today’s computers have so much room on their hard drives, programmers don’t care how efficient the code is, as long as it runs. Which leads to your computer seemingly performing as slow (or slower!) than computers used to back at the turn of the century.

Our computers are more powerful than ever, multitudes more than the beginning of the Internet Age. And yet, we have so much wasted code because we have room for it, so our modern computers crawl. Imagine how fast our computers could perform if modern coders programmed like they did in the '90s and earlier.

This reminds me of an old Bill Nye clip I saw once, where he explains that, biologically, there is no such thing as race. We’re all one race, the human race.

From there, we tend to sub-divide ourselves by cultures and geopolitical origins, but we’re still all the same regardless of what we look like or where we come from.

For the few who don’t get the joke, “pain” is French for “bread.”

The soundtrack itself doesn’t have any credits listed. On their soundtrack store page on Steam, it says “Kraken Express” (the development company) is the artist, composer, and label, with an “other credits” featuring Seán Dagher.

I’ve been playing this game all week. It’s amazing! Exactly the kind of pirate game I want to play.

It’s basically Enshrouded, but pirates in the 1700s instead of a magic/fantasy world. It’s base-building with quests and adventures. And your can sail ships, battle other ships, build your own ships, etc. which is like Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, but way better.

I bought the soundtrack for the game on Steam and the entire second disc is just sea shanties! The first disc is the first four sea shanties spiced up with instrumentals for the trailers. Even when I’m not playing this game, I’m rocking this soundtrack while I’m working on my computer.

I’m really enjoying this game. I’m considering reviewing it for my “random screenshots of my games” series. It’s about time I wrote another one of those.

Old (early 40s) guy here. I exclusively discovered new music through the radio. I had several favorite radio stations that would introduce me to new music, then I’d use Shazam to find out what the song and artist is, then look up their albums.

But I’m extremely anti-advertisement nowadays, so I don’t listen to the radio any more. And I hate online music sources because they’re all algorithm-based and suggest similar stuff instead of new music I’ve never experienced before. It’s easy to get stuck in your own bubble with algorithms. Plus, they’re littered with ads, even if you pay for a subscription service. Which I’m also very much against doing.

So… I mostly discover new music through my wife, who is still using the radio and online music streaming sites. All the music I own, I rip to my PC in the highest quality I can, then stream it to myself through Plex, so I have my own ad-free radio station anywhere I go.