TELL ME
I’m a fake white supremacist on Facebook and have befriended thousands of Nazis. I report all their shitty racist posts and get their accounts banned, again and again and again.
When you remain as the last Nazi on Facebook, you can finally report yourself and then it will be all over.
That would be such a fitting ending but alas there are really a lot of them.
You’re the hero we need. Thank you for your service.
PS: how much trouble are we in, out here in the non-nazi segment of the population?
Less trouble than you’d think. I wouldn’t call them a particularly organized group of people. Also I have convinced many of the American ones that voting for Biden will kick off race war and they’re super into that stupid idea.
4-D chess player here.
This is a 21st century superhero story.
IDK how you can do it though… When I encounter shit like that it makes me like physically ill.
I think I’m so amused by the fact that I’ve totally fooled them and how fucking dumb they are that I get over the nausea. But not even kidding, one of the women told me her daughter killed her baby by putting meth in her bottle and I was able to correlate that, and I couldn’t read FB for days after.
Wtf……why?? Just .w.hat??
It was hideous. Apparently the parents and five young kids were all living in one room and somehow sleeping in one bunk bed, and they gave the baby meth in the bottle to stop her from crying. I’ll see if i can find the article.
Oh my god, is that how you find all the sov-cit stuff?
Yes!
Couldn’t you AI that? A chatbot, Fakebook-API…
Why? I’m really good at it.
But only 1 person with limited time and energy.
Great idea, btw.
In theory, he doesn’t know whether he’s the only one. They could all be fake Nazis and no one knows.
I work in Tech but I dislike most tech products. They are not repairable, are spyware, abandonware, shiteware and overall not a win-win situation that it is supposed to be. To be away from screens, I got into woodworking. To make things to old-fashioned way. To be repairable, to be sustainable and mostly to be imperfect. And yes, the imperfections are not on-purpose. I am doing my best to buy the old ‘Quality’ stuff that wont break and restore them to working order.
With shoes I buy second-hand Leather, Goodyear welted shoes and I splurged on Darntough socks. My feet are so happy. Currently I am seeking the best jeans, and almost all cotton seems to the trick.
So not the most niche per se, but I like it.
I used to prefer cotton and linen when I lived in the southwest, but now in the northeast its almost deadly. After the switchover to synthetics I realized how short the lifespan on natural fibers was. The Blaklader X1900 work pants I have use cotton ripstop as a base layer and it wouldn’t last more than 9 months without disintegrating, while the nylon parts looked brand new. Same with t-shirts, they’d start falling apart after 6 months or less sometimes. Probably the humid environment though.
Never knew. There is a right ‘tool’ for every job. I live in a rainy place.
Meshtastic long range radio systems. Off grid, user created, low bit rate but stupid long range.
How did you learn to not fuck up? I heard if you interfere with important radio frequencies (airplanes I think) you’ll get punished by the law.
Edit: I looked into transceivers at one point and saw that mentioned.
They operate in bands intended for stuff like LoRa and IoT. So there’s no danger of messing with other systems.
You a ham? Or is this LoRa? APRS?
This is LoRa but there’s heavy crossover with the HAM community.
Cool. I got licensed just before the pandemic, I’ve played with APRS a bit but never LoRa
Sweet I’m pretty inexperienced with radio stuff but I’ve been meaning to look into that for a while. Time to hop down the rabbit hole!
It’s just the right amount of DIY to be engaging and so cheap to get into. Plus the discord community is really active.
Like ham radio bounce off the ionosphere over the horizon long range?
Not that far. Most LoRa systems use UHF bands so you need LoS to get these super low powered radios to work.
That’s fascinating. I just picked up my first 10M radio, can you elaborate a bit?
I’m not much of an expert but it’s basically low power UHF radios that use a particular waveform and FFT process to decode signals that are well below background noise. My radio regularly picks up messages with an SNR -10. I like it to the GPS system’s algorithms.
The main drawback is that, because they’re low power, you have to have LOS between antennas.
I’m a massive networking nerd. I have literal stacks of old networking hardware, probably enough to connect a small town. It’s almost all used and some is damaged and I love the shit out of every scrap circuit board with those glorious ports.
I usually end up ranting about home networking on Lemmy, and the networking subreddits are generally the only reason I go back to that site every now and again.
I’ve become a wireless expert, and I regularly flex that knowledge at work. It always amazes me how bad some people’s wifi is and they just accept it, like, it do be like that sometimes… But it doesn’t have to be like that.
Because of this I often find myself ranting about what to do, or not do, when it comes to home networking projects. I always feel like this falls on deaf ears because I end up repeating the same or similar rants regularly.
That’s a pretty good interest to have. Do you happen to have a write up of good networking solutions to use for homes? Most people probably just grab a router on sale or use the one provided by their Internet provider and use the default settings.
I’m sure that everyone has bottlenecks that they could fix, but most people just don’t have the knowledge base to figure it out.
It really really really depends on the situation. How big is the home, how fast is the internet, future plans, coverage needs, etc. And budget.
IMO, most people don’t spend an appropriate amount on their internet network. They’ll spend hundreds per month for internet service from an ISP, but refuse to spend more than $60 on a router to get it from the ISP modem to their $1000 phone. It doesn’t make sense, especially when you consider that it’s a one-time cost that will serve you for many years; the per month cost of owning it is less than a cup of coffee a month, even if you buy something that’s 10x more expensive. People are so resistant to it that is crazy.
Even at $100, you’re going to get what you pay for, better than the $60 router, but it’s going to fall short of anything that’s worth keeping for extended periods of time.
Right now my blind go to, when I don’t know anything about someone’s situation, is the ubiquiti UDR. It’s an all in one device, around $200, with a WiFi 6 access point built in, and four ethernet ports, all 1Gb and two of them have PoE. The limitation is the 1Gbps internet link so anyone with an ISP connection faster than 1Gbps should go with something else. Most don’t, so this is my recommendation.
The reason I recommend it is that you can add additional access points to it as needed with basically no additional spend (beyond the ap itself). With two PoE ports, you can add two aps without worrying about whether or not you have power injectors or anything. Adding a small network switch is easy on any of the other two ports if four isn’t enough for you, and ubiquiti has some pretty cheap, small switches for that.
The UDR comes with a built in network management device (otherwise known as a “cloud key” in unifi) which puts everything into a single interface. So the access points (both internal and add on), switches, etc are all managed from a single system that’s local, and has local sign in, and has a convenient cloud interface which is free to use, and has all the same functionality.
As a starting point, this is excellent. Because having just the UDR you can service a small apartment without any add-ons. If your needs grow, you can build out as needed. If your needs grow beyond the UDR, you can upgrade to the UDM/UDM pro (or similar) and keep using all the add-ons you’ve purchased. There’s room for growth, and ubiquiti has proven themselves to be rather adequate at providing networking for the home. Unless you get into some very advanced features, it should serve whatever needs you have both now and in the future.
My recommendations obviously change depending on the situation. One person I worked with recently, I recommended the UDM pro and a pair of access points, because his ISP connection was in his furnace room. The UDM doesn’t have any WiFi built in, and the furnace room is usually a nightmare to get wireless into or out of. The connection will suck. So being able to move his access points (of which he got a couple), out of that area and into more open spaces, was critical. In that case I gifted him a Dell power connect switch and used PoE injectors to power the access points. I was able to provide a very good, very reliable network for him without ongoing difficulty or issues (which was his primary concern). Before this he struggled with the wireless from his ISP modem, and it disconnected and had very poor signal throughout his home.
Since the initial set up, I’ve heard nothing but good things about it. He’s very happy with the system. His situation had some unique challenges, and we even ran ethernet vertically up to his second floor office through what used to be a chimney stack and that had been used to install a forced air duct for the second floor. So the space was only that forced air duct from the furnace. The cable(s) share that space with the air handling duct (but are run outside of the duct for safety), and he has gigabit ethernet jacks in his office to get a reliable connection for his professional systems in the office. He probably doesn’t need the Dell switch in the mix, but it gave him extra ports for use for later.
I’ve done dozens of custom recommendations for people. At this point I’m thinking of making a website to point people to that has all the information about home networking you could need, generalized enough to always be correct. I want to include sections on different manufacturers and why wifi kind of sucks, explanations of different technologies, their benefits, pros and cons, that kind of thing. Etc… All in one place so I can link people to it and they can learn as much or as little as they want; with pages like recommendations, all time stamped so you know what’s current or recent, and deep explainer pages of different technologies and how they work and what benefits and stuff that they have if you want to know more.
It’s a huge plan, and it will take me weeks or months to write it all out. I will need to find cheap web hosting for it and get some kind of UI/UX design going for it, and build the whole thing so I can update it without having to work too hard to start the new page entry. Maybe a wiki style? Idk. I’m thinking of calling it something along the lines of “WiFi sucks” or something related… Like wifisucks (dot) com or whatever. I’m sure I’ll need help with it, mainly in the UI/UX, but it’s something I’ve been considering doing for a while, just to handle these kinds of questions continually.
I have a blog about it, called untangle the tubes, IIRC, and I go on long, in-depth rants about stuff. But it’s highly disorganized and random.
Thanks for an absolute bang of a write up. Absolutely fantastic! I’ll have to research some of what you wrote because I don’t know what PoE injectors are or some of the other things. I certainly think you should create a wiki/blog related to this. It’s fantastic and unfortunately is way beyond the knowledge of most people. As you stated, most people are underutilizing their bandwidth because of bottlenecks and don’t even know it.
Thanks again for such an excellent write-up and I look forward to reading more from you in the future.
There’s a blog. Nobody reads it, but it exists. I want to translate everything into a wiki. But before I go to build the site, I want to hash out some of the write ups first so that I have a starting point.
Mainly just taking my blog posts and cleaning them up, adding some useful images and such… Links, etc. You know.
It’s one of far too many planned things I want to do.
You know HAM radio? It’s kinda interesting, because people can use it to talk to each other and it technically doesn’t require any infrastructure. But there are also repeaters in cities that can increase the range.
I’ve been wondering why people don’t try to do something similar with WiFi? Some kind of city-wide WiFi network with repeaters. It’s probably difficult and I’m not sure if it would have any practical use. But the advantage over HAM radio is that it’s encrypted and doesn’t require a license. I imagine that people could use it to chat with each other and share stuff without having to rely on social media or the internet.
I’m a qualified amateur operator. I can operate on any ham bands up to 190W EIRP if I recall my countries regulations correctly.
The issue with doing something like wifi on ham bands technical issues finding radio chips capable of signalling at such a high rate of speed, on bands that are able to be used by hams. There’s also the requirement for hams to identify themselves on air, and the general use of AM/FM and derivative technology on ham bands and general resistance to the OFDM used as the main signal encoding for WiFi. So finding an OFDM capable radio transmitter/receiver for use in… say, the 2m band (144Mhz … ish) is basically impossible, and there’s no way to identify. You would have to build a new protocol and standard from the ground up and use very modified or rare/expensive radio chips, and likely build the drivers/firmware for it entirely yourself. People with the required hardware, software, baseband, radio, and firmware experience that are hams who want a product like WiFi for ham radio channels is extraordinarily rare.
As for city-wide WiFi/mesh networks: it has been attempted, and has seen some limited success, but doesn’t scale well with the usual protocols. Routing protocols like BGP, OSPF and IS-IS are meant for much larger IP blocks being routed between interfaces. A wireless mesh system would use a single interface (one radio) for both send and receive, which most protocols don’t support, and each “hop” or station on the mesh would only be advertising a single IP (or an extremely small set of IPs) per participating node.
Most routing protocols assume that every node on an interface can talk to every other node on the same interface and thus there’s no need to repeat or relay messages from an interface to the same interface.
There’s also no standards that allow wifi to use multiple channels/frequencies for tx/rx, eg, send on 5.45 GHz, and receive on 5.65Ghz. it simply isn’t something that any WiFi chip is capable of. So full duplex isn’t possible right now.
The common wifi frequencies are also extremely power limited and on bands that are prone to interruption. In the wild, there’s plenty of things that can disrupt 2.4Ghz and 5/6Ghz transmissions. With the power limits, to go any significant distance, you need directional antennas that limit free space path loss so the signal travels further. In the case of wireless internet service providers (WISP, not to be confused with the mobile carriers), they generally use panel or dish antennas to extend the range. For power output, at the high end, some bands allow for upwards of 5W of directional power, or 1W of omnidirectional power (in EIRP). On the low end, handheld ham radio units start at 5W of power, and can usually attenuate their transmitter to 1W or lower as an option. Household WiFi is usually around 0.1W of power per radio. Even cranking that up to the maximum legally allowed wattage won’t result in covering more than a few blocks of a city with a fairly poor signal overall; that signal is going to be fairly easily blocked, absorbed, reflected, or otherwise attenuated by just about everything, including, but not limited to the structure of your house.
Meanwhile, standing in my home with a 5W handheld transceiver operating on 70cm (440Mhz), I can hit a repeater that’s something like 10 miles away with a nearly perfect signal over FM, without assistance. OFDM signals would likely be scrambled beyond recognition at 2.4 or 5 GHz across that much of a gap, or even one that’s 1/10th as far, with only 1W of legal power, without using some kind of directional antenna or antenna array.
Don’t get me wrong, well configured wireless can go so far that you have to account for the curvature of the earth, but they’re always very very directional, using dish antennas or similar.
Don’t get me wrong, the ideas are great, but the challenges faced are enormous. It can quickly turn into a lifelong project to get something functional, and even then, there’s no guarantee that it will ever catch on as a product. The limitation for ham operators regarding encryption is problematic when it comes to data communication as well, since just about everything that’s data-driven on the internet implements SSL. Computers and systems expect encryption all over the place and bluntly, those messages cannot be sent over ham bands. There’s nuance to that regulation, at least in my country, but I won’t get into the fine print here.
Even so, there are some crude digital modes used by ham operators which are normally voice encoding or plain text encoding. Uses are limited on purpose. If you’re interested in longer distance emergency communications you could look into LoRA, which is relatively new.
There’s a lot more to say on this, but bluntly, I’ve said enough. It’s all interconnected, and I love it, but I’m just ranting now.
Thanks for a very detailed explanation! So it seems that this is almost impossible. Except for maybe a small part of a city.
The lack of encryption, privacy and anonymity in HAM radio would be an issue for me. Just like in mobile phones. But since you can use end-to-end encryption over WiFi (and some weaker, less useful encryption is used in mobile phones), maybe there are exceptions. I’ve heard of LoRA, but I wouldn’t want to use it, unless I’m allowed to encrypt the messages. It also seems that the message length is very limited, so using something like PGP might not always be possible.
You ever seen a Unify AP just chilling on the floor under a desk in a commercial setting while people complain the WiFi is always slow?
Pain.
Or when they put it inside or behind a metal file cabinet and wonder why the wifi doesn’t work unless you’re right next to the file cabinet
My favorite so far was a factory that put a giant metal shipping container in the middle of the shop between the AP and where they were using the wifi and complained that they couldn’t understand why that part of the shop got no signal.
I have a bunch of networking gear to sell, it’s semi recent stuff, all Cisco. How would I go about selling it? Are those websites that buy old network gear in bulk any good? I really don’t want to sell them individually on eBay
I don’t often (or ever) sell equipment. So unfortunately I may not be very helpful here.
I would suspect that the bulk gear shops are just going to individually list the items on eBay or something similar; if you want top dollar, you’ll need to sell them yourself on eBay. If you don’t care all that much, then hand them over to a highly rated bulk shop and let them do it for you.
If you have a list, I’m looking for a few pieces, and there’s others that I’d be interested in if I got them at a good price. We could work something out.
I’m also sure that there’s buy/sell communities and subreddits that you could try as well.
A short list of things I’m usually interested in is:
Catalyst switches, usually 3750 series, specifically anything PoE, but there’s other 3k/4k switches I’d like to get my hands on.
Aironet wireless, not the meraki stuff, that’s usually trash unless you have a contact and I don’t roll like that.
ISR G2 routers, usually the 19xx and 29xx series.
Anything newer than the ISR G2, like the Cisco 43xx routers and such.
I usually stay away from anything chassis based, it simply takes too much room and power compared to what I need and I get the same functionality in terms of commands and learning from smaller units, though they’re not as capable, they still function well enough for a lab/home use.
There’s other stuff I’d like to pick up, but that’s what I’m usually looking at… At least off the top of my head.
Hey thanks for the big writeup! Sorry it took me so long to get back to you.
It’s a bummer that Meraki stuff is less desirable, I just pulled it all out of the closet and it looks like that’s most of what I’ve got.
I’ve got two of the MR84, three of the MR36, a MS225-24P, some antennas for them, and three of some kind of IP phone CP-8841.
Is the Meraki stuff contract only? My buddies boss gave him this stuff from the closet at work. Says he didn’t want or need it. Then he gave it to me 🤷♂️ I know my buddy didn’t steal it, but I’m hoping it’s not considered stolen or something? Because you have to have a contract? Idk maybe I’m overthinking it.
Basically, you can’t configure it without a license. They’re all cloud managed. Some stuff, like the access points will refuse to function if there’s no license, they just won’t turn on the radios, other stuff like their switches might pass packets in the last known configuration, but are otherwise not useful. Their firewalls I think also need a license to work.
I’m not 100% on this, since I’ve avoided it wherever possible. There’s sometimes a grace period where it will continue to work without a license (so you can renew it), but it’s usually fairly short, like a month at most. Maybe two if you’re lucky.
Without a license, you can’t add the units to the meraki dashboard, and you can’t manage them for configuration. It’s a pretty cruel policy if you ask me.
The IP phones are not tied to the same licensing, and I have a small fleet of the predecessor phones (mostly 7960/7965/7970). But the phones on their own won’t really do anything, and require a PBX of stone kind to connect to. You can establish a lightweight version of this with most ISR routers, known as Cisco “voice” aka CME (call manager express). The PBX will basically provision the phones and assign them an extension, and provide connections to a SIP line or an analog line using voice cards (or VIC/voice interface card). I have such a setup at home for the 7900 series phones I have.
I might be interested in the 8800 series phones you have, I’ve been meaning to upgrade my 7900s to the 8800 series, but I haven’t gotten around to even planning it. Right now my voice system is in pieces. It has been in pieces since I decommissioned the first iteration of it when we sold my late father’s home. That system ran on a Cisco ISR 2821 using CME and a SIP connection provided by VoIP.ms, as well as an analog voice line for my father’s legacy telephone connection. It allowed me to call my father at his desk, or call my brother in another room without trouble. We could all also call out on the analog or SIP lines from each phone as needed. Default routing for my father’s extension was to use the analog line (if it’s not in use already, otherwise fail over to the SIP), and ring only when the analog line was receiving a call. It made it easy for us to communicate across the house. After that I moved into an apartment with my significant other and didn’t really need anything so elaborate.
Now, I’m living in a multi-family home so the need to be able to call between rooms and such has become more relevant again, and I just haven’t had time to take on the project to fix communication between devices and the PBX… But it’s a desired option. So I’ll probably pick up some 8800’s eventually either way. The 7900’s still work, even with the ISR 2911 that I’m using now, but they’re a bit older and I’m getting concerned about reliability moving forward.
As for the meraki’s, you may want to check into whether or not you can reflash them with firmware that isn’t from Cisco. I know there was a nontrivial number of people who acquired similar products that wanted to use them without having a monthly fee from Cisco for the privilege. The last time I looked at it, they were working on ways to put different software on the devices so that they would at least function without a subscription. I’m not sure if that is continuing or if the efforts have been mostly abandoned. I wouldn’t suggest to use meraki in a business/production environment with custom firmware, but for home or lab use, I don’t see an issue with it. I just don’t have enough experience with meraki to know, and I’ve avoided working with the products whenever I can because of all of this.
Let me know if you want to discuss about the 8800s, and we can link up on matrix or signal or telegram or something to hammer out the details. It might be a good idea to push the transaction through eBay, using a private listing if possible, just to ensure all the details of the transaction are good, but that’s a matter to discuss later.
No pressure. If you want to keep them, by all means do so. I’m in no rush to buy anything right now; so this is entirely your option. If anything about it bothers you in any way, feel free to say no, or back out of the deal at any point. I have no expectations and I will hold no grudges.
In every case, good luck and have a wonderful day.
Hey thanks man I really appreciate all your detailed help, and offer to buy those phones.
I contacted one of those resellers, and they unsurprisingly weren’t interested in anything. I probably won’t try to put aftermarket firmware on them, I looked into it a bit and it seems it never really took off. Plus I live in an apartment. I’ll try to offload them on eBay or something.
I’m certainly interested in getting you these phones, I have no use for them, and it seems like you do haha. Whatever is a fair price for you is fine by me, I’m not looking to get rich. I’ll try to send you a PM, I don’t even know if Lemmy supports that.
Birds. I guess it doesn’t feel that niche because I know lots of people are into bird watching, but it’s my thing.
There’s this app called Merlin that I swear to god is magic. You can just open your mic and it’ll listen to and identify all of the birds you’re hearing.
And it really works! For the longest time, it kept identifying a Carolina Wren in my yard, and I thought it was just wrong. I’ll be damned if I didn’t eventually see that wren, and now it frequents the bird feeder I set up on my deck. It’s just my shyest bird. But the app knew it was out there.
I’ve learned so much about birds and identifying them from using the app. And I’ve gotten really into how, when, and what to feed birds because I want to find more different kinds, and I just love watching them on the deck interacting. I call it my cat TV haha
I’m also learning a ton about owls specifically over on the superbowl@lemmy.world community. Did you know there are owls in the desert and owls in Jamaica? Come over to the community where @anon6789@lemmy.world makes the most amazing educational posts. It’s a lot of fun.
Theres a mysterious stone wall that I found in the middle of nowhere in the forest with no road access that I’ve been investigating for years and nobody else cares!
There are other weird characteristics nearby that are visible on Google maps
Why? Who made you?
Edit: Here is a link to a gallery of photos I’ve taken of some segments of the wall:
https://postimg.cc/gallery/KkPj5H1
Here is an annotated map of the area with unusual features, some of which may be natural:
Here is the location in google maps. The sat imagery has recently been updated: https://www.google.com/maps/@-32.2335528,116.1823985,644m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu
I’ve been out to this location 10 or so times, and in all my digging, I haven’t found a single railroad spike or tie, so I really don’t think it’s railroad-related. The bush is extremely dense, especially near the creek, and often impossible to walk through, hence the photos are from a distance.
The stone wall is not mortared, and I really dont think it would bear the weight of a train even in its brand new condition.
Its very old and someone put a lot of work into it, near as I can tell its at least 50m long, maybe much longer
I did find one very large iron nail, about 1m in length, and took it home with me, but I don’t have it any more.
On the raised band of black stone, the stones are about melon or basketball sized, much larger than railway ballast which us usually not larger than a fist. It could be a natural formation.
If I knew you, even casually, I would demand you take me to this mystery wall in the woods and completely disregard the risk of following relative strangers to an isolated secondary location.
I’ve updated my OP with more details
I wouldnt murderer you, but I cannot promise you will survive. Its very hostile terrain in Australia, after all.
I would brave the drop bears and an instilled false sense of safety to see this wall in the bush.
The forest definitely looks cleared, it is abnormally sparse in that 2sqkm vicinity compared to the surrounding area. The straight treeline adds to the artificiality.
That 1m “nail” may be a drill bit, the old type where you hold with one hand and rotate it while you hammer the end. Does the “head” of the nail have cracks at the edges? That would date it to mid 1900s or earlier.
I suspect it is a prospecting camp and that wall is a retaining wall for the camp perimeter. The wall looks like a common rubble wall that would be common in the early 1900s or earlier. That area is around a geologic boundary of productive granitic formations, so there are a variety of valuable natural resources that they may have been looking for.
All I can say for certain is that I have one thing to check out if I ever find myself in Perth for some god-forsaken reason.
Rabbits. Rabbits are fuckin’ awesome. Did you know they don’t have paw pads like cats and dogs? There’s just fur there, which means they have less traction on slick surfaces. They can be taught to use a litterbox, too !
They also have such different personalities from cats and dogs. Netherland dwarf bunnies are twenty pounds of bunny in a 2 pound body. They’re crazy energetic and need plenty of space even though they’re tiny. The bigger a bunny gets the more chill they generally are, but the bigger the bun the more likely there will be issues with their back or other joints as they get older.
Do rabbits need a companion, especially if their owners can’t match their energy level? Also, is keeping an indoor rabbit with cats a bad idea?
It’s better to have a pair, because rabbits are very very social animals. A lone bunny can get bored, anxious, and very very destructive. The trade off is that the pair may not be as cuddly and attentive to their owner as a lone bunny, but they will be immeasurably happier.
Cats are predators, and rabbits are prey animals. You can have cats and rabbits together but it’s not recommended - it takes less than a second for Kitty to go from “this is a friend” to “this is dinner”, or for BunBun to literally kick the guts out of its former pal. Same thing with dogs; bunnies can and will end up on the wrong end of the prey instinct and can either get destroyed or end up dead of shock/fright. And people are not fast enough to keep these things from happening in 99% of cases.
Side note: some people keep rabbits and guinea pigs together. This is a terrible idea because even though their diets and habits are similar, guinea pigs carry bacteria in their guts that can absolutely fuck up a bunny.
I intern at a scuba shop for free classes but the shop is incredibly poorly managed so I’m in a race to get all the certs before the business folds.
Mapping on open street map, with camouflage as a close second.
Actually my self esteem increased this past few years but I won’t pass up an ADHD infodump opportunity. DDR is, IMO, the most efficient path for videogamer enthusiasts to transition to healthy exercise.
DanceDanceRevolution (DDR) is an arcade rhythm game that is certainly not dead, much to your surprise perhaps. The Japanese arcade scene is a whole, far more in depth iceberg to chip at, but trust me when I say Konami focusing on machines did not (only) mean pachinko machines, it also meant their multiple arcade rhythm games under the Bemani brand.
I am not kidding when I say there was a DDR setup in my middle school in southern USA. I started a bit there, but I never got real dedicated gameplay until there was a new DDR cabinet installed at both Dave and Busters and a local arcade joint. Having access to a machine can be substituted by a home pad. Please, buy the L-TEK pad without the bar. Cheapest exercise equipment out there at 250 + shipping from Poland.
You start off just browsing the songs in the roster until you find ones you like. There’s some token English licensed songs, but the bulk come from Konami original songs and a selection from the massive library that is the Rhythm Game Song Genre™. Most weebs get their beginnings from anime OPs and TouHou and Vocaloid, so if you have early YouTube nostalgia jump right into Bad Apple and Night of Nights. Later on you get addicted to the super high BPM (400+) techno mixes of the “Boss” songs (more on that later).
So how is gameplay? Visually, four lanes of arrows travel from the bottom to the top, indicating when you have to step and in what direction on the four directional pads at your feet. You should learn quickly that keeping your feet on the arrows and never stepping in the center is the key to actual gameplay. The song’s patterns are designed to lead one into another. It’s far from dancing, but you transition from paying attention to each arrow to just stepping to the beat. You internalize patterns and you get better, right?
But then, there’s a hurdle. Some songs demand you turn your hips and move your right foot on the left pad and vice versa. Difficulty is based on number 1 to 19, so you keep track that you can pass 11s, but not 12s. Each new song introduces new patterns in ordering and timing. Your old highest level becomes your warmups as you get better and better. You start to take a liking to faster, more complex rhythms like triplets, syncopated notes, and more sounds that a drummer doing prog rock would grok. One particular song has you galloping like a horse to Japanese festival music. If you know, you know.
But there’s a catch, a limitation: your own body. Nearing difficulty 12 and 13, you’re doing the equivalent of a decent jog for around two minutes, right? You might start needing some time between songs to take a break and drink some water. At 14 and 15, you’re going for something called High Intensity Interval Training. That is, you go at your MAXIMUM SPEED for as long as the song demands you go. You don’t give up because that means losing and you paid for this arcade game, right? You push and push and sometimes fall over, but eventually you’re running ragged at 600 steps per minute begging that your life bar doesn’t sink anymore. You need more training. The next song is 440 BPM with 880 steps per minute.
You want it. You want to play the harder songs in the difficulty ranking. You start to jog outside of the game on treadmills and otherwise. You put on the same heartrending songs and you find yourself sprinting desperately for 2 minute bursts because it’s impossible to stop while the song is playing. I’m running for almost an hour straight, and I get a head start at running progress because of my DDR experience! It pays off and you can play up to 15s, but there’s still 4 more levels until you get to 19. Over 4 years (at college, see?) I bike to the arcade, I play my heart out, I bike back. My blood pressure decreases, I breathe slower and deeper, and my snacking habits are at least counteracted. Best videogame of my life.
Only downside? I can’t convince anyone outside of the rhythm gamers at the arcade that the music is good. The rhythms of those “Boss” songs are etched into your soul by the end. I can namedrop MAX 300 and everyone in the scene can practically play the song out in their heads. It’s literally a lifestyle hobby, and a rather healthy one at that.
You got me in the first half, not gonna lie.
I first thought you were going to talk about DDR in terms of RAM.
I’ve been teaching myself to make cheesecake.
I’m generally proficient in the kitchen but never bake or work with sweet things.
I’ve started with mini cheesecake and after a couple failed attempts, they’ve come out so good as to share with coworkers who tell me to make more.
One of these days, I’ll graduate to full sized.
Bonus: I’ve learned to make lemon curd from scratch. Did lime curd as an experiment once I got the lemon down.
I enjoy kitchen undertakings that are far beyond my capabilities and actually enjoy the initial fuckups because they represent progress toward getting it right.
I also tend to listen to a mix of eighties alternative and sixties jazz while I’m doing it because why wouldn’t those two genres go together?
Nice. My variation is to try food from many different cultures and it’s really helped both my kitchen skills and the breadth of foods my kids enjoy. It goes without saying that I love them all.
It’s all worked surprisingly well, except my ad hoc “fusion” meals. This past weekend, preparing an Italian food in a French style, with chicken in an African/Portuguese inspired marinade, and a Jamaican Ginger beer. Each worked really well. The combination, not so much, but I’m happy I did it because I had so many meal parts I wanted to try even if I couldn’t put together a coherent combination.
I haven’t slept in a long while so I don’t have the energy or memory to infodump too extensively but please for the love of all that is holy listen to the Magnus archives. I am begging everyone who sees this comment and has even marginally enjoyed horror atleast once to immerse themselves in this masterpiece.
To give an incredibly brief description it is a 200 episode long horror audio drama that follows an archivist at the Magnus institute; an academic establishment focused on archiving paranormal events in the form of experience statements from the general public. Jonathan sims, the archivist, is tasked with transforming some of these statements into an audio format (along with every other aspect of an archivist job but he kinda sucks at it) and he starts to notice some connections.
That’s as much as I can say without spoilers. I think with this amount of information it can be enjoyed to the fullest with the maximum feeling of wonderment, fear, and curiosity. However for those of you who need more convincing and don’t mind knowing a bit more I’m gonna add a little under this spoiler tag. Nothing too major but I think knowledge of it takes a bit away from the experience.
spoilers
You ever heard of checkhovs gun? The Magnus archives is checkhovs firing squad. Everything is connected, every detail is important. Every single moment builds to its finale.
This audio drama focuses on the nature and catagorization of fear itself. Being controlled, contagion, filth, destruction, being watched, having your secrets known, darkness, being prey, your own flesh, suffocation, isolation, how tiny you actually are, war, random violence, fire, strangers, madness, death; these are all things to be feared and they all manifest supernaturally. Sometimes the blend together sometimes they are incredibly distinct but they are all just manifestations of fear. Jonathan Sims is forced to face the reality that the world isn’t as he thought he knew it and he must piece together what it all means. Between cults, books of power, people who channel the power of these fears, rituals, and names that just won’t stop showing up it becomes obvious to Sims that these events are in no way random. Should he do something about it or just continue to observe? What will he do when these powers inevitably confront him personally?
It’s fucking riveting
I hope someone here sees this and becomes as obsessed as I was. I shit you not I listened to 200 20min episodes in the matter of 2 weeks and that was my second time listening. It’s sequel, the Magnus protocol is currently releasing every Thursday and I just don’t know If I can handle e listening at that pace
I LIED I ABSOLUTELY DO HAVE THE ENERGY TO INFO DUMP
Next up on the roster is sweet home by by Kim Carnby and Hwang Young-chan. I’ll make this as quick as I can
You like depression, monsters, tense group dynamics, apocalypse, and the constant nagging fear that you will never make it out of this shit hole of a situation? Yeah me too, sweet home has it all. Star of the show hyun is a shut in who just moved into a new apartment building after the death of his sister and father iirc. Not long after being there shit starts to get a lil weird but he doesn’t notice all that much because he’s a shut in. Eventually even he has to notice the world’s gone to shit when he starts seeing posts on the intenret about it before the Internet stops working. One look outside is all it took really. Will hyun ever get to see the finale of maria from the sky? Probably not but a man can dream.
I’ll be back to info dump some more if I still can’t sleep. You better pray I don’t turn this comment into an 8 page rant. I don’t know the character limit for Lemmy comments but I’ll fucking find it.
Ok fuck. I’ve had it in my podcast Playlist for a while now. I’ll start it this week once I finish my current audio book. You sold me by the first paragraph so to avoid spoilers I stopped reading. Thanks for the push, here I go.
Also this reminds me, for anyone that enjoys this sort of archival paranormal story type check out Out of Place on Spotify as well. It’s similar but with historical artifacts it gets pretty intimate as the story progresses.
You are the 6th person I’ve convinced to listen to tma. My sphere of influence grows further.
+1 more
Fuck yeah
Me too!
Qwerty fucking sucks. This guy Sholes who invented the typewriter put no thought into the actual letter arrangement and doomed us to this disaster.
Dvorak exists and there’s a new one called Colemak (now on windows) but they both have fundamental mistakes too. There are dozens of us on the other site debating keyboard layout design.
And for some education qwerty was originally alphabetical with the vowels on top. https://youtu.be/blRn9U9Fapg?t=625s Pause the video. *Jamming was not an issue and was not a design point. That’s common myth.
sunsets not lasting long enough. fuck. I need more time for my brain to enjoy my favorite cosmic thing before going back to “screen and need more food” mode.
I recently had an acid trip where a good friend and I wanted to watch the sunset and found out near the very end that we were facing the wrong direction. I’ve never been so disappointed
That is such an acid story.
You should move to a higher latitude, the sun crosses the horizon at a shallower angle. Near the arctic circle, sunset can last for hours.
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