Today I’m donating my streaming sticks. I got a ONN brand 2k one I bought for 15 and I got an Amazon Firestick 4K I got for $3 from a thrift store because they didn’t know what it was.
And I love the concept of stream sticks, I really do. Too fucking bad that corporate interests got in the way and now everything has to have a bundle of ads at every damn turn. Not even some of the things I’m subscribed to is free from ads because this is the future apparently, we’re here.
Shame because I don’t want to let these go and even if I were to subscribe to Netflix’s ad-free subscription, that’s only one source. Why do that when I can just grab a long HDMI cable, plug it into my desktop and to my TV and I can watch everything that’s there, without ads because of the extensions I use to block ads.
Trying to draw using vector programs such as Illustrator. Prior to settling on my beloved (Paint Tool SAI) I tried to use Illustrator, and despite the benefit of being able to blow up a drawing without losing quality, it just never sat right with me and always felt awkward.
Depends on the style, I think. If it requires any kind of gradient shading or texture, pixel editing software. If you can get away with just lines, colors, and solid shading, vector is good enough but it’ll be easier on pixel editing software.
Nowadays I just work on massive files so that I can shrink them to size.
Biological ‘family’.
My therapist told me that family members can’t be replaced. I disagree. They can be replaced. They only become titles but titles also can be ignored.
You don’t have to associate with, acknowledge or interact with the biological family members if they’ve proven to have been a contractual mess of toxicity in your life.
I’ve replaced members of my ‘real’ family and I got better people. People who care and support. I recommend it, to anyone.
Yes, thankfully my therapist doesn’t say that but she does seem to say it’s all on me to deal with and change since I can’t change them, which is fair.
Thankfully I have a few folks helping me escape them, but it’s a slow process.
My willingness to creat things for other people.
Less depressingly: the local pizza shop fucked up my order 1 too many times. Faith in them has been destroyed, which sucks cuz they’re a decently priced mom and pop kind of place, but I can only accept a wrong/missing item if I get a refund if it’s not literally half or more of the time I go to your place of business!
Electronics with bad interfaces.
Either make your shit user friendly, or I’m returning it. If I have Google how to do basic things F U. You and your product isn’t worth my time.
Same with subscription fees.
Those bosses in my game that I keep dying on
You just gotta clear the biter spawners around your factory so pollution doest trigger a ton of waves over and over.
Once you get a car drive really far in each direction because nest you have discovered don’t evolve from time passing/pollution/killing spawners. Bring walls if you can and seal up choke points so you get peace of mind and can work on what’s important.
Goddam traffic in cities skylines
Corporate media
Try appletv, a pirate ship and plex
It worked well for me until at some point the audio in Plex was slightly off and there was no way to adjust anything in this damn app. I was not alone with this issue but they never did anything about it.
What is ONN brand?
It’s Walmart’s generic brand for electronics.
Onion News Network
My parents and their endless bigotry.
I think I’m at my wit’s end with “smart” things.
Roomba? It takes less time to just vacuum the place than it does for the fucking vacuum to realize it’s been humping the same chair leg for most of its battery charge.
Assistants?
“Hey Google, open the bedroom blinds”
“Sorry, that device hasn’t been configured yet”
“Hey Google, open the bedroom blinds”
“Sure, turning 2 lights on”
“Hey Google, open the bedroom blinds”
“Sure, opening the blinds”
I gave up on “smart” devices after giving them zero chances. I’ve never bought one.
I consciously avoid having to control any of my smart home devices using voice or other weird methods. Everything is toggled with buttons or fully automatic. This works pretty well for me and voice control is still available but it’s only optional. Sure you might ask why even make it smart then? Because I’m a nerd and because I keep forgetting to turn lights off when I leave. Also smart thermostats are great.
Though I also gave up on my vacuum robot. Due to rearranging some furniture I had to move the vacuum base and let it rescan my apartment. But now for some reason it never gets past the dining room and aimlessly swirls around the table until the battery is dead, never finishing the room scan. On top of that it picked up a small pebble or something and scratched the floor. I had enough of it.
I feel the same, but my anger is scoped to cloud-connected “smart” things.
Like you, I can’t stand my iRobot gear. My Roomba hasn’t updated its map in over a year because it always has “some problems” (probably due to pushing everything to the jank
us-east-1data center).On the other hand my recent Aqara gear is very nice but it took me time to finally call it quits on Z-Wave beforehand.
Z-Wave. I could never get it working quite right despite purchasing highly recommended Aeotec stuff.
The MultiSensor 7s and door sensors would always report a battery level of 100%, fall off the network, and do other crazy stuff. I spent a year with a Z-Stick 7 before finally bailing a buying a fifth generation stick.
Firmware updates would take weeks because they just wouldn’t install. Constantly factory resetting them never fixed anything either.
I really hate to say it, but Zigbee ended up working much better despite living in a 2.4GHz interference hell hole.
My gripe is with the androidTV/roku/etc being built into the TV. Just give me a big monitor that can switch inputs, that’s it. I install TVs for work and I can’t count the amount of times the TV is just trashed because the software is screwed up and you aren’t even able to switch it to HDMI1 and carry on like it doesn’t exist. It’s hot garbage, keep that shit on little HDMI sticks that you can throw away without throwing away the whole TV. Seriously, your TVs life gets cut in half if you have a whole OS on it. Bring back dumb firmware.
Oops All Planned Obsolescence
Dumb TVs exist, and they’re 5x the price of smart TVs.
Ads and data mining subsidizes the hardware cost. If you want cheap TVs you get spyware and ads.
My job. I resigned earlier this week after 8 1/2 years.
i’m about to do something similar and for a job that is a 56% percent pay cut for me; but it’s as far away as i can find from the profit seeking evil that has characterized my most recent jobs while still employing my skillset.
Congrats!
Google. It’s been a long process but I’ve been degoogling little by little for a multitude of reasons.
Burger King. They’ve messed up orders, burned food, and drowned stuff in mayonnaise too many times to tolerate.
Now I just cook frozen burger patties on the stove, and tell myself that their sides were never all that great anyway.
