Pickles. They were too strong and sour for me. Now I love 'em.

That’s so neat; I’d never noticed that before. And the walls closing in on the stage adaptation is really clever

“12 Angry Men” (1957) is a personal favorite that I recommend to pretty much everyone. Great messages about questioning assumptions, challenging biases, understanding the limitations of evidence, acknowledging imperfections in the justice system, and the consequences thereof.

The movie is also cinematically interesting to me because it feels “small”. The entire movie just about takes place in one room, and the events of the film transpire over the course of one afternoon.

I found almond milk to be a great substitute a couple of years ago when I was dieting. Particularly the ‘unsweetened, vanilla’ variety from Almond Breeze.

As an added bonus, it also has a much longer shelf life than regular milk.

As others have pointed out, there’s a lot to hate about ads since the industry is routinely dishonest, insulting, obnoxious, deceptive, intrusive, and all manner of unpleasant. I’ve been adblocking religiously for most of my life for these reasons.

So I think a more interesting question might be the other way around: “What do you like about commercials?”

The only commercials I’ve ever liked are the ones for local small businesses. The ones with a nonexistent production budget that aren’t beating the viewer over the head with blatant lies or dishonest sales tactics.

Adult Swim used to have faux-ad bumpers for the fictional business “Strickland Propane” from King of the Hill, featuring the honest-to-a-fault character Hank Hill as the spokesman, which I felt captured that vibe well.

Rhett and Link also made a funny homage to these kinds of commercials in this classic skit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnOyMSEWNTs

I don’t watch a lot of creepy/spooky stuff, so my recommendations come from a fairly limited breadth. That said, I recommend a few things that many might lump under “kid movies” (I prefer the more accurate label “family entertainment”) since they tend to be perilous and unsettling without being outright violent, gory, or generally miserable.

Coraline (2009) - A young girl, dissatisfied with her home life after moving to a new town, stumbles upon a dark, parallel world. Therein, she finds solace in a parallel version of her mother who is not what she seems.

Paranorman (2012) - A young boy who can speak with the dead learns that a witch who was executed by the townspeople hundreds of years ago will soon return to seek vengeance upon them.

Over the Garden Wall (2014) - A mini-series focusing on two brothers who find themselves inexplicably lost in a forest teeming with fell beasts, witches, undead, and unlikely allies. I watch this one every year around this time. Cozy yet spooky at the same time.

“Sons of Texas” reminded me of this tune I enjoyed a while back from Maylene and the Sons of Disaster:

“Step Up (I’m On It)”

AAA’s seem really common in my neck of the woods.

I got a Coast headlamp a couple years back that has a rechargeable battery pack, but can also take regular AAA’s, which is a handy feature if I happen to need an immediate recharge.

Ah, darn. Unfortunately I have no additional help to offer since that particular issue was fixed for me after changing those options in Flatseal.

I’d try running Firefox from the terminal to see what error message you’re receiving when the crashes occur; the unique error message was what led me to this workaround when I was originally troubleshooting.

In Bazzite, you should just need to open the Discover package manager and click “Refresh” and then “Update All” in the top right. Although these drivers don’t appear to be available through the package manager yet; mine is still on version 560.31.02.

If your Firefox crashes are anything like mine were, it should be solved by opening up Flatseal and disabling Wayland rendering for Firefox. See the screenshot shown here: https://universal-blue.discourse.group/t/nvidia-555-drivers-incoming-important-information/2554

When I first installed Bazzite on my Intel+Nvidia laptop, the Firefox crashes were constant. The workaround here fixed the issue for me.

I’ve had this same experience on Linux Mint. I’ll run apt update & apt upgrade and, occasionally, if Firefox is one of the things being updated, new tabs and new pages won’t load and will tell me I need to do a system restart to continue browsing.

I always update manually, so it never happens without me initiating the update first. But sometimes I’m like, “Dangit, didn’t realize this update would require a restart to keep using Firefox.”

I happened across a thread on Lemmy recently that discussed the usefulness of certain extensions, and this “Don’t Bother” section of the Arkenfox wiki was linked:

https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/wiki/4.1-Extensions#-dont-bother

A lot of conventionally useful extensions like Privacy Badger, HTTPS Everywhere, Decentraleyes/LocalCDN, etc are apparently not necessary (at least in Firefox) if you have certain browser preferences selected, like Strict Mode/Total Cookie Protection.

I felt outdated cause I still run Privacy Badger and Decentraleyes in my Firefox environments, but it was nice to see that a lot of these “extra” features that used to require extensions are now options built into the browser (or Firefox, at least).

let’s be real, youtube is a big waste of time

I see people say this a lot, especially on the fediverse, and it makes me wonder why people think youtube is a “waste of time” when youtube’s uses are what the user makes of it.

I primarily use youtube for learning things. There are so many thousands of hours of useful, educational content on youtube that I find the suggestion that the entire platform is useless clickbait to be reductive and disingenuous.

Sure, there are channels I watch for typical mind-numbing content like Let’s Plays and such, but I wouldn’t suggest that youtube is wholly a waste of time just because there’s plenty of mindless content on it.

Just like Reddit or Lemmy, I can create an account and subscribe to a bunch of dumb shitposting communities, but I can also subscribe to a bunch of interesting hobbyist/intrigue communities.

Lots of people work on weekends.

Yep! These guys are booked solid around the clock. I have to schedule well in advance any time I want to take my car to them, unless I want to camp out and be the first customer when they open at 5am. Worth it, though. They’re good people.

Nah, I just live in a rural area. There’s closer shops to me, but a very honest local business I’ve been going to for years is a bit further away and it’s worth the extra distance for their service. They’re a fantastic shop and they’ve always done great by me.

Adding on to this: the repair shop I take my car to is too far from my house for me to walk or bike back, so I just walk the shops in town while they work on my car (unless they tell me ahead of time it might take more than one day to diagnose+repair, in which case I ask a friend to drive me back home after dropping off the car).

It’s less that they “assume you can leave”, but rather that it isn’t really their problem. They need an uncertain amount of time to work on your car, depending on the issue being repaired, and you can leave if you want to during that window.

If there’s nowhere for you to walk/bike to nearby, you just gotta sit and wait, which I’ve done on a handful of occasions. Just sitting in the lobby and reading some outdated magazines for an hour or two. It’s boring, but what can you do?

I really enjoyed watching this series a while back by Ben Eater:

“Building an 8-bit Breadboard Computer”

It explains a lot of the steps in the rocks-to-computer pipeline in detail. It assumes decent familiarity with electronics fundamentals, though. So maybe not the best starting point.

A $1 backscratcher from a local pharmacy. Makes scratching my own back effortless. 10/10 investment. And way more affordable than the full-time backscratching assistant I was paying all those years.