After I graduated college and got my first place on my own, I had my desk set up in the corner of the living room with a long HDMI cable strung around along the baseboards and into the TV. It was clean. It was a Vizio 37" panel from 2011 so it had no smart features. I kept a Logitech keyboard/trackpad combo on the coffee table and that’s essentially how I had a smart TV running full blown Windows 8 Pro in 2013. Tired of desk gaming? I got a DualShock 4 and a Bluetooth adapter so all I had to do was turn the controller on and walk to the couch. Sometimes, switching my sound device did mean saving and restarting my game. Some games handled the Alt + Tab to the Control Panel just fine. I put a Blu Ray drive in my computer too so with some software, I used it as a Blu Ray player.

These days, I have 10 TB on board so I keep my movies stored on my disk, and I stream them over my local network. I’d like to build a proper always on NAS one day, but for now, my gaming PC is also my network share.

If we’re sharing our dogs, here’s mine.

It wasn’t a successful day at the park if he doesn’t sprinkle 15 molecules of pee on every tree at least a few times. He also marks the benches, despite my efforts to stop him. He’s very rude like that.

He just turned 2 years old a few weeks ago.

The anti-natalists have a point.

I’ve been playing a lot of Minetest. I have Minecraft, but I really love the old school vibes of Minetest. Plus, there are way too many materials in Minecraft. Minetest is super simple. Love it for that.

I’ve been pining for Stardew Valley again after putting it down for a while. I also started a Thousand Year Door run in August so I might actually finish that. Or maybe some old school Animal Crossing if I’m gonna be couch gaming on the Wii.

I started Earthbound last year, and I’ve really been wanting to sink the time into it, but I really think some kind of handheld emulator would be the best way to experience it. I’ve got an old PSP I think would make a great handheld NES/SNES emulator.

I’ve also been wanting to revisit the original PS1 Resident Evil trilogy, which I have on my PS3.

tbh I’m spoiled for choice and I don’t know where to start lmao

Amtrak currently runs trains on the freight tracks, but as Amtrak essentially leases the privilege of using the tracks at all from CSX and BNSF and Union Pacific and the like, their traffic gets heavily deprioritized to freight trains. You can totally catch a train from Fort Worth to Los Angeles, but it will take a few days longer than driving, will be almost as expensive as flying, and the train will be delayed many times for freight traffic.

If the federal government nationalized the rails, put them under the care of the FRA, properly funded Amtrak, and gave it a healthy advertising budget to let people know rail is the clear choice for medium length trips (like Chicago to St. Louis), there’s no reason we couldn’t send passengers on the same rails and with the same priority as freight trains. They’re perfectly safe, and the reason we’ve been hearing about so many train wrecks lately is the degradation of work conditions for rail workers. Longer trains and longer hours make for more dangerous operating conditions and more frequent wrecks.

And while the trains wouldn’t run 190 miles an hour, many long, straight stretches do exist, and it’s not unheard of for a train to be running 80-100 miles an hour on those stretches. That kind of speed is very doable for passenger rail. Hell, some Amtrak trains are capable of 150 miles an hour.

My point wasn’t to use 150 year old rails. It’s that the rails already exist so it doesn’t need to be a decades-long multi-trillion dollar project. It’s highly unlikely that any of the rails in use today are from the 19th century.

Don’t even need to lay down rails. The rails are already there. Built by Chinese slave labor 150 years ago. We need merely to seize them.

Or just cut a check to the freight companies.

Auto parts, YOW!

wait wrong song-

I, for one, support a trans person’s right to burn it all to the fucking ground.

Worth it. I’ve never even seen the falls, but I’ve seen lots of Jim Carrey movies. The man deserves it, and I’m sure he’d love to be honored in this ecologically non-invasive way.

And here’s the /s for those who need it.

And then there are the teachers using memes specifically because they know it will make those memes uncool. And I salute them.

I gave my brother my Sandy Bridge laptop that got me through college. New battery and charger and it’s all set. The 1366x768 resolution doesn’t render pages very nicely anymore, though.

My wife’s 2019 16" MPB is running pretty great. Probably got another 5 years of life left in it. She uses it to watch YouTube and play Sims 4.

My 2016 Acer Aspire V3-372T is hanging in there running Debian. 60 FPS YouTube videos are getting to be too much for it anymore. I may have to put the old girl to rest one of these days.

But hey, it does play Minetest pretty flawlessly.

Heat cycling is a huge stressor on any material. That’s part of why diesel freight trucks tend to last well past a million miles while it’s newsworthy if a passenger car makes it that long. How many times a week is your Toyota Corolla driving 10+ hours at a time? Most commonly, when you hear of a million mile vehicle, it was making long haul deliveries daily and was maintained at the correct intervals.

My kitchen sink is next to the water heater. It’s hot in 5 seconds. My shower is on the opposite end of the house. I’d reckon it’s a 2 minute wait. Sometimes, I turn the bathroom sink on and get undressed.

It’s the State tree of Oklahoma. When my neighbors’ redbud starts making pods, I’m gonna snag a bunch, refrigerate them over winter, then scarify and try to get a few to germinate the following spring. It takes probably 5 or so years to start getting flowers, but I really love everything about these trees, not just their awesome flowers. The heart shaped leaves they develop in summer are so cute.

Just gonna leave Brainrot Girlfriend here for you to read.

Can’t say I’ve ever been to Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.

Huh. I just Ctrl+P before the paywall comes up. Then I can print to a PDF and view it the way it was meant to be.

At least it was a sock and not a coconut.

I wouldn’t even mind ads if they weren’t so obtrusive. The ones that take up 70% of your screen between one liners are the worst.