I considered that, but I apparently have a really lumpy, scrotum-looking scalp. I do NOT look good bald. So… I gotta put up with what’s left of my hair as long as I can.

The only reason my hairstyle has changed over the years is because of thinning hair.

I used to have such thick, soft hair, people would joke that I was actually growing fur. Everyone loved to scruff my hair and I got compliments all the time.

But now I’m in my 40s and the family balding curse has caught up with me. My hairline is receding, a bald spot is starting to show, and I needed to change up my style to avoid looking 20+ years older than I actually am. Eventually, I’ll just give up and let it do its own thing, but I need to experience my midlife crisis first. 😉

My introduction to Tim Curry was when he played Rooster in Annie waaay back in 1982.

It’s always been wonderful to see him pop up in movies and shows (and video games) over the years, even if he’s just doing voice acting. I know it took him a while after his stroke to be able to talk normally again (he was slow and slurred in his speech for a while), but I’m surprised he hasn’t done more voice work since 2012.

I always attempt to play a game the way the developers intended the first time through. If I decide to give it another playthrough and I don’t want to put up with the extra grindy parts of the game, I’ll look for legitimate cheats to help me fast-forward through the rough parts.

I mean “legitimate” as in, cheats the developers put in the game, not outside hacks or mods that alter the game itself. I’m not big on mods in general, and I don’t usually use cheats, but I will in rare situations.

Back in the day, Warcraft III had cheats that let you power through each level with stuff like infinite resources, invulnerability, or just letting you automatically complete a level. I used those on recurring playthroughs because each level could easily take 30 mins to an hour to beat, and it was very grindy.

In Satisfactory, there’s a cheat where you can add a single stack of a resource into the back of a factory cart, then deconstruct the cart. You’ll get all the resources of the factory cart in your inventory, plus double the resource you put into the cart.

Do this dozens of times and you can exponentially grow resources without having to wait on factories to make them. I’m pretty sure the developers are aware of this “glitch” because it’s never been patched out, even after a bunch of people started pointing it out on official Satisfactory forums.

I played hundreds of hours of the game and made some pretty massive continent-stretching factories. Upon building a new world, I started to implement this “strategy” to hurry up and acquire rare resources so I could get factories off the ground. Saved me from hundreds of hours of gameplay, waiting on production lines to make basic resources into more advanced resources so I could get to the next step.

A buddy of mine asked to be part of my Steam Family so he could have access to my 4,000+ game library. He regularly streams games online and figured it’d save him tons of money buying games to play.

But he’s also completed all achievements on almost every game he’s played on console and uses some website to automatically complete all the achievements for his Steam games, so he doesn’t need to redo them on PC.

The thing about Steam Family is… if someone’s caught cheating and earns a vac ban, the owner of the family account receives the ban, not the individual player. I told him I was worried that cheating of any kind might affect my immaculate record and/or library of games and he decided to just buy his own games instead of risking my account. Good friend; he didn’t even argue. I was still willing to let him have access as long as he was careful, but he chose another route.

[…] we have so many things wrong PlanetSide that it makes the stars almost irrelevant.

Yeah, this has been my fear lately. As a kid in the '80s/'90s, I had high hopes for humanity. I loved space travel stories; read so many science fiction books, watched Star Trek/Star Wars, loved space films of all genres…

But lately, I’ll be happy if we ever make it to Mars. The one person who had a dedicated mission to get a man on Mars turned out to be a self-destructing billionaire sociopath who seems to have abandoned that dream for political meddling aspirations instead.

If we can get capitalism out of the way, humanity might have a chance at bouncing back. But as long as a few powerful elites maintain control over society, our hopes and dreams will forever be redirected toward financial gains until the collapse of society.

On the plus side, even Rome, the most stable and advanced civilization outside of our own, eventually collapsed. Humanity survived and eventually went on to thrive once again, doing even better this time. By the historical timeline of the birth and death of civilizations, America is long overdue for a collapse. Maybe we’re about to see a global change that will reset our predicament and give us another chance to succeed. If we can learn from our past.

I can’t vouch for all East Asian countries, but in Japan, it’s a matter of formality. When you meet someone, you always refer to them by their family name and an honorific. (Like we would say, “Mr. Smith.”)

Once you start to get more friendly and familiar with an individual, you’ll move on to more intimate honorifics, until you’re allowed to call them by their direct first name, no honorifics. That’s a sign that you’re very close with someone.

It allows people to refer to you without being too direct and familiar until you’ve gotten to know them well. And you can tell what relationship two people have by what names they use to call each other. Heck, really close friends will probably make up nicknames for each other too.

When I was in the US military, it was kind of the same mentality. Everyone was referred to by rank and last name only. As you got to know someone of the same rank or lower than yours, you could refer to them by last name alone, no rank required. But only the closest of friends would refer to each other by first name.

I just wish I could see how life goes on without me. How our world changes in the future beyond my limited time on this planet.

I think about people who lived hundreds of years ago. How they couldn’t even imagine the scientific and technological advancements that we have. And then I think about hundreds of years into the future. What changes will be so extreme and advanced that I can’t even imagine it today?

I wish there was some way for me to glimpse into that future and see where society is heading. Will we expand out to the stars? Will we be extinct long before we leave this planet? What’s the ultimate future for humanity? These are questions I want to know, but will never get a chance to find out, unless everyone but me dies out in the next 30-40 years. And I highly doubt that’s gonna happen.

Depends on how much milk you add to it. Personally, I see it as more of a breakfast stew; more solid food in the bowl than liquid.

Meh, it’s a deal to get more subscribers. I’m not mad at them for not extending it to all users. It is a little shady that they didn’t make it clear it’s for new subscribers, though. If that’s their target audience, they should make it a little more apparent.

I have a Google phone, which has YouTube embedded on it. I can’t remove it. I had to disable it, then tell my phone to redirect all YouTube links to my browser. Now I can block ads again!

deleted by creator

Hmm, this looks interesting. And you can’t beat the free price tag. I’ll check it out.

Are you retired or young?

I’m retired AND young… well, relatively speaking. I retired 3 years ago, at 38 years old. I’m 41 now.

I was in the US military for 20 years, earned a pension, plus 100% disability through the VA. With the passive income and benefits (free medical/dental for life), I can afford to be fully retired now. I’m not filthy rich by any stretch of the imagination, but I make enough to live a quiet, relaxed life and have my basic needs met. And that’s good enough for me. Plenty of time to indulge in my many hobbies. And I have ADHD, so I’m always finding new and interesting things to deep-dive into.

I actually started a movie review blog about 6 years before I retired. I ended up taking a hiatus from it shortly after retirement and just haven’t been motivated to get back into it lately, despite all the movies and TV shows I watch regularly.

I switched to reviewing video games sometime last year and have been mostly keeping up with that; although it’s been over 2 months since my last review. I should probably make a new post soon, or declare another hiatus. 😬

I’ve been playing it this morning. Virus scan came back clean, and the game has been interesting so far.

That’s cool, no reviews yet then. Not a problem!

I play a lot of games (over 4,000 games in my Steam library) and I’ve made a hobby of reviewing them here on Lemmy over the past year. I especially love horror games. I would love to give it a playtest and provide constructive feedback.

It’s up to you if you’d like me to also post a review of it here on Lemmy or wait until a finished product is available. You can see my post history to see the kind of reviews I write, or you can check out my blog where I’m archiving my reviews here. Easier to browse the history of posts on the sidebar at that website.

If you were a member of ISIS, you would be considered a member of ISIS regardless of whether you were a janitor or secretary or worked in the cafeteria or you were a combatant.

By this logic, all Americans are terrorists, since they exist under the rule of the US government and haven’t risen up to overthrow it. Therefore, complicit in its actions.

Which, by the way, is the mentality I was regularly exposed to while living abroad. There are some countries that judge our entire nation based on the actions of our government and persecute any citizens of that country because of it.

The world isn’t black and white. Real life is complicated. You can’t make blanket statements against an entire group of people based on the actions of an organization. That’s just encouraging hateful and biased rhetoric toward people you don’t know anything about.

That’s a life lesson I learned while traveling the globe. Some people treated me like a hero when I arrived; some treated me like a terrorist. None of them actually took the time to know me. I was judged based on the actions of the organization I associated with instead of taking the time to witness how I was trying to influence that organization.

And the same could be said of other countries. We’d receive reports of terrorist cells embedded in the populations of third-world nations and be told not to trust the citizens. Yet most people I encountered in that nation were grateful for our presence and glad that we kept the local crime and violence at all-time lows, simply by being there.

I worked with Iraqi citizens who begged us not to leave their country because they hadn’t known peace until we arrived; there was so much violent and murderous infighting between the Shia, Sunni, and Kurds. And having a foreign military power in the area, especially one with our reputation, prevented a lot of deaths and gave local citizens a chance to rebuild and get back on their feet.

I don’t believe in violence. I don’t believe in supporting rich powerful elites. I joined the military to help empower the working class; to give them the tools and resources to rise up against dictators and take back their rights as human beings.

And during my 20 years of service, I had a net positive result in that regard. I never had to raise a weapon against anyone. Never had to violate anyone’s rights while supporting their oppressive government. Never had to compromise my own morals for my job. I accomplished my personal goal of being a positive influence on this world.

You talk about Iraq as if it was a one-off, an outlier.

This was the largest conflict during my time in the military, so it was the first example I defaulted to. Yes, I’m aware that the US has involved themselves in foreign conflicts that it doesn’t have any right to be associated with. Heck, I’ve been protesting our direct involvement in Israel’s genocide of Palestinians and the poor way we’ve handled the Russo-Ukraine War so far.

I am but one man. I can’t stop the US government from making bad decisions. But sitting on the sidelines and protesting something I don’t have any experience with hardly made a difference. I chose to be directly involved so that I can influence positive change from the inside.

While serving, I made sure my subordinates were educated on our military’s current actions. I made sure they made informed decisions when ordered to do something, so they would use critical thinking skills when given orders and not just be “yes men.” This was not only to protect them, but to ensure they made choices that helped people instead of pushing ruling party objectives.

The military is a propaganda machine, I won’t deny that. But by being directly involved, I could use that propaganda to push its members toward wholesome choices. The military claims they’re a humanitarian service? Fine, let’s do some solid humanitarian work! Let’s get outside and actually help struggling citizens.

Community volunteer service was a requirement in military life, and I made sure myself and my subordinates were actually affecting positive changes in communities instead of just going through the motions for the publicity. We rebuilt low income neighborhoods, set up organizations to house and feed homeless and/or abused people, created safe spaces for people to receive free mental health services, etc. I did my best to ensure we weren’t just showing up to a single public event to “help out” and then abandoning it the next day.

Change comes from within. You can shout and protest the government’s actions from the sidelines all day, but what are you doing to actually change them? Until you’re directly involved and have hands-on experience with that organization, you can’t really claim to be doing something positive. This is why I joined the military, despite my friends and family thinking I wasn’t the kind of person to do well there. I didn’t join to shoot people or spread hate and fear. I joined to use their power and influence to help out citizens. And I’d like to think I succeeded in that regard, while also positively influencing other military members to do the right thing.

My hope is that the “butterfly effect” of my actions permeates through the organization and continues to positively influence members. Heck, I’m still mentoring some of my old subordinates, several years after my retirement.

One of my friends is currently working for a unit stationed in Germany that is filled with pro-Trump members, and he claims it’s getting hard to see any opinions besides their view. We’ve had lengthy discussions on the destruction and harm Trump has been up to here in America. I’m hoping he can turn around and be a voice of logic and reason in his unit and spread some reality instead of the fascist propaganda that’s already settling in. If I hadn’t served, there would be at least one unit in Germany who is falling for that fascist propaganda. Every little bit helps.

If you’re a US citizen, I’d recommend getting involved yourself. You don’t need to join the military, but we need positive voices in local and federal government positions to fight against tyranny and oppression in our own nation. Our human rights are already on the chopping block and we need everyone we can to speak up against it from positions of authority. Even being on the board of your local town hall is better than nothing.

Yes, this was one of the common stereotypes I heard a lot, mostly from anti-war people who only view the military as a war vehicle. Fortunately, I had no direct involvement in terrorism during my service. We mostly engaged in humanitarian aid. Publicly, we promote ourselves as a humanitarian service, and in my experience, that was the majority of what we focused on. But some people (like myself, initially) only know the military through war films and assume we’re just there to kill people.

That’s not to say the US is completely exempt from bad deeds. For instance, the Iraq War should never have happened and there was literally no reason for us to be there. That was a very bad call by Bush Jr., who expected we’d find something to justify our campaign into the country. (Note: we did not.)

We have regulations about what type of orders we have to obey and what orders we’re required to disobey. Thanks to the Nuremburg Trials, we know that “just following orders” is not an excuse to carry out horrific actions. So if we’re given an order that violates the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC), we’re expected to ignore those orders, and depending on the situation, we may even remove the person who gave those orders from command.

Honestly, I’m glad I retired when I did. I served during Trump’s first term in office and it was a dark time for us. But he was mostly restrained by a majority Democrat government that time, so most of the fascist ideals he demanded got shut down.

This time around though, he’s running with a majority Republican government and they’ve given him a green light to do as he pleases. He even replaced the Secretary of Defense with an unqualified alcoholic National Guard captain. Completely circumventing the promotion programs we have in place to ensure only the best and brightest are allowed to hold those positions. You’d better believe I’d be abusing the hell out of that regulation to disobey unlawful orders if I was still serving.

what OS do they use in the military?

It depended on the function, but most computers were Windows. Historically, Windows has had the most versatility with other common file systems that we and our allies/enemies used, plus it was easy enough for any service member to pick up and use with minimal training.

However, we always had custom-configured Windows images; we didn’t just install a blank copy. Like I mentioned, our systems were severely locked down, so there were plenty of registry configurations and custom software suites that would take us a few days per computer to install manually. So we would build one that met our requirements, then create an image of it and copy that to every other computer in our unit.

Depending on the unit, there might be custom software builds to meet a particular mission requirement, so there were always several images ready to be pushed to specific computers.

they believed that the best security was older systems that had been thoroughly tested for vulnerabilities

Oh no 😅 I am not a cyber security expert but that seems to me like a recipe for a disaster

It worked well enough for a while, but computer technology kept evolving, so we were constantly playing catch-up.

For the first half of my career, we were always at least one OS behind the civilian sector. When I joined in 2002, we were just phasing out Windows 95/98 and replacing it with Windows 2000.

Then in 2008, we were on Windows XP and Microsoft was trying to get us to upgrade to Windows Vista. Vista was a terrible OS, so we decided to just skip it and go for the new Windows 7 that was supposed to be coming out a year later.

Then Microsoft announced an end to support for Windows XP in a few months. We can’t have an OS without any support, so we quickly signed a contract to upgrade to Windows Vista. Before the ink dried on the new contract, Microsoft announced that they would be extending support on XP for 4 more years.

So we got suckered into a Vista contract, and as soon as Windows 7 dropped, we switched to that. We stayed mostly caught up ever since, although it could take up to a year before we switched to the latest OS. Our own cyber security teams did their own vulnerability assessments before pushing out a new OS across the Air Force, and that could easily take them months of testing and research.

In the last few years before I retired, the Air Force started testing the concept of handing computer support functions over to civilian companies. This was something they had been talking about long before I joined the military, but they were finally pushing forward with it. My last base was one of the test beds in the US, and AT&T took on the contract at that particular site.

Our base-wide IT unit had to hand over administrative access to our unclassified network to them, and as the civilian company took charge of more functions (and had security clearance investigations completed), we started handing over classified networks too. Which seemed wrong to me; we had always kept our classified networks secure by managing them ourselves, so handing it over to a civilian company felt like trouble.

It was even worse when Trump became president the first time and started discussing classified operations on Twitter. Dude had no concept of security protocols and messed up a lot of missions we had overseas, putting our members’ lives at risk so he could brag about secrets he knew.

He ordered us to give security clearances to a bunch of civilians whom we had already refused in the past for being a threat to national security. But you don’t say no to the president, so we started handing over classified access and before long, a bunch of our foreign operations started getting compromised. It was an absolute clusterfuck.

Things mostly went back to normal under Biden and I soon retired. I can’t imagine how messed up my old career field must be now, since Trump got back in office. All I can say is I’m glad it’s not my problem anymore.

Being in the Air Force, the job was mostly like any civilian IT job. We worked off a ticket system to resolve computer issues, dealt with “customers” (other military members), managed servers, satellites, networks, etc. The specifics depended on the exact job; it seemed like every base I was assigned to had different equipment or mission requirements, so I was always learning some new system to manage.

Probably the biggest difference from the civilian sector was that military networks were severely locked down. There were approved software lists that were managed from much higher levels in the Air Force and only that software was allowed to be installed on computers. Half the time, even us administrators at the base level couldn’t mess with installed software.

There were software scans that would detect unauthorized software and boot computers off the network until it was resolved. Most places I worked, you couldn’t bring CDs or flash drives with your own programs on them. USB devices would be flagged instantly and get your account kicked off the network until you completed remedial training through your local IT office.

Our web browsing was severely limited too. Some bases only allowed official military website access; others would allow access to the web but only from an approved white list of sites. It depended on the job and the classification of the network.

Also, they believed that the best security was older systems that had been thoroughly tested for vulnerabilities, so we were usually a step or two behind the civilian sector in terms of operating systems and software/hardware. They preferred that new systems were thoroughly tested in the civilian sector first, most vulnerabilities identified and remedied, and then we would trust it. So I rarely got to learn about modern IT technologies unless I researched it myself in my own free time.

EDIT: In terms of harassment, there was sometimes a lack of respect for the IT guys. Lots of higher-ranking officers made unreasonable demands, expecting us to make some impossible network requirement magically work because “that’s your job.” Or just getting mad when things were broken, because “Why do we have IT guys if things are always broken?” Or the same if things work: “Why do we have so many IT guys when nothing ever breaks?” We had our own leadership in the IT field whose job was to explain to other leaders exactly what we did and how it benefits them, so the rest of us could focus on the job.