Lorindól

During my military service I constantly fought against idiotic traditions and doing things the stupid and inefficient way. I had read the regulations manual carefully to back me up and presented my cases respectfully with proper conduct.

I always started by quoting the relevant regulations, so they had to hear me out and could not officially punish me for my “disobedient queries”. This got many of the regular staff royally pissed off at me, some just found my resilience amusing and a few younger offiicers even showed occasional support for me. I knew very well that nothing big would change, but I actually did manage to get rid of a few small things that were just hassling disguised as training.

My service friends thought I was crazy for stirring things up in vain, but I took good care that I never got them in any trouble. The only “punishment” they could give me was that I was always given the assignments that were considered most unpleasant and I was regularly sent on long range recon excersizes with my men, so I would be out of sight for most of the time. I loved those long trips in the woods.

I also quit my first real and well paying job out of principle a week after we got a new manager. I had been there for 5 years and really liked the work, but after the new manager gave us a list of changes he wanted, it became clear to me that it was time to leave. It would have been entirely impossible to fulfill my duties properly with the allocated resources and time. I could have done the work badly, sure, but this would have led to the customer leaving us for other services. I did point this out to the new manager when I was cleaning my desk. “Just because you cannot do doesn’t mean that someone better couldn’t” was the only response. They promptly lost the customer and 3-4 others also quit the team in the same year.

With the help of an old friend I landed a new, little less paying job but with vastly better benefits. Been there since.

I care, a lot. But this wasn’t always the case.

Before I was 13, I didn’t care much about music at all. Sure, I liked some songs I heard on the radio but I didn’t own any albums in any format. I considered music to be a harmless but mostly pretty meaningless.

Then my 7th grade music teacher gave me a really low grade, on the sole basis that I couldn’t sing in tune or play an instrument. I got good grades on the written tests, but this apparently meant nothing to her.

So purely out of spite I decided to learn how to play an instrument and sing. Getting music classes wasn’t an option due to my parent’s economic situation at the time, so I used my savings and bought my friend’s old acoustic guitar. I found good intro books from the library and started practicing.

I listened to the radio and recorded a few acoustic guitar songs on tape, so I could practice playing and singing along with them. This must have been a terrible few years for my family, but slowly I started to get the hang of it.

During this time I discovered some bands I really liked and copied their albums from LP’s from the library. My dad brought me an old discarded boombox from his work, it was big but had an excellent sound. I also scrounged enough money to buy a secondhand Walkman, so I could carry the music with me.

In high school I formed a few bands with my friends, I played rhythm guitar or bass, depending on the genre. We weren’t good, but I loved it. In university I had a chance to minor in music, which opened up whole new worlds for me. I learned to sing properly and had piano lessons.

By this time music had become a big part of my identity. I almost always had something playing on the background, if I wasn’t listening actively.

Nowadays I don’t have as much time for music as I’d like, but I’ve got myself a really good vintage Hi-Fi setup. It’s amazing to discover small things in songs I never noticed before in songs I have listened for decades. My gear may not look like much, but it’s got what counts.

When I was younger, I couldn’t afford good gear but now that I have some musical education and have learned to listen", I can’t really enjoy the music if the sound system is crappy. If it’s in the background it’s fine, but I just can’t use bad headphones anymore.

I listen to music from a large variety of genres, but hiphop/rap is something I just can’t get into. I’ve tried several times to approach it with an open mind, but there’s something in that genre that just rubs me the wrong way.

I don’t care if the music is a jokey meme thing or considered a masterpiece of it’s genre, if it clicks with you it’s good. I love symphonies as much as I love old simple folk tunes.

You are correct. It’s scary how things like these used to be just dystopic fiction. Now it is a completely plausible scenario in the very near future.

TOS had the “Eugenics Wars” / WW III start in the 1990’s, but the later series made alterations to the original timeline due to several time travel shenannigans. An easy way for the writers to explain why we aren’t currently living in a post-apocalyptic hell. All the major events will happen, just delayed accordingly.

Star Trek is supposed to happen in our future, so it’s hard to address our modern problems if they had to skip everything that happened after mid 90’s. Especially when the last 25 years have had a lot of mental stuff happening almost non-stop.

Back in the day my not-so-tech-savvy colleague bought a Windows 8.1 laptop that had a touchscreen. After two days she brought it to me and asked me if I could “rip this hellspawn out of this computer”.

Before wiping it we checked if there was anything to backup and the ~30 minutes I spent using Win 8.1 were hideous. It was the only time I ever had to use it, of which I am very grateful.

If it’s wakeup alarm, it takes about 5-10 minutes for my higher cognitive functions to get back online. If someone tells me something during this time, I most likely wil not remember it at all. And it doesn’t matter if I have slept 20 minutes or 10 hours, I’ll still be as groggy.

If there’s a loud sound in the middle of the night, it’s almost instantaneous.

Yep.

In one of the books he is on Earth without his shipmates and pretty quickly regresses back to sociopathic behaviour.

But he recognizes this and does not welcome it. After killing a stranger just to get access to gear he needs, Amos realizes that he is making the wrong choices and states: “I need to get back to my crew.”

He has an understanding of what is good and what is bad. He cannot understand why there are limitations to by which means “good” can be achieved. But he knows these limits do exist and should be respected, therefore he needs Naomi and Holden to lead him.

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Russian doctrine of advancement on tactical level engagements seems like madness, but there is an effective method behind it.

First they send small groups of decently equipped fighters to seize a new patch of land. If/when these succeed, they instantly send in the diggers. These may not even have weapons, their only purpose is to dig foxholes and entrechments while the first wave holds the ground. Once the diggers have the first holes ready, they send second rate troops to hold the new positions and relieve the first wave to prepare for the next attack

And since they do not seem to care about casualties, this method works like a very slow meat grinder. Simply and effectively.

Yes, I mean to try running them with VM. The software I need are old and light, so there’s a good chance that my laptop can run them.

I installed Fedora last Friday and I have no regrets. Win11 was never an option for me, my laptop is “too old” and I have no desire to touch that horror in any

~10 years ago I had a Win7/Ubuntu dual boot laptop, but I dropped Ubuntu when I upgraded to SSD and needed all the space I could get. Ubuntu was OK, but there was something with the UI that just didn’t click with me. I meant to try other distros but never found the time, so I just stuck with Win10 until now.

I have several legacy software that I need, so I went with dual boot again. If I can get them to run smoothly on Fedora, I’ll do a complete clean install.

The only challenge in installing Fedora was Windows’ crappy partition manager, which would not let me minimize C: for more than 54MB. I did every trick I knew and learned a few new ones, nothing helped. Then I just flashed Gparted to a USB stick and it worked instantly.

After that everything went smoothly, with the exception that Fedora didn’t recognize my Bluetooth device at all. I’ll dig into that single issue tomorrow, I’m fairly certain that a fix can be found easily.

My right pinky is severely bent at the topmost joint. It made learning the piano somewhat challenging, since the pinky sometimes “locks” itself if I try to extend my fingers too much. And if it does, I have to do a little wiggle movement to release it painlessly. If I try to force it, it makes a very loud snap and it hurts for a second.

Otherwise it has not affected my life in any way.

And I can make goose bumps / make my body hair rise up at will. It only lasts a few seconds every time, but it did make for a fun party trick when I was younger and a very hairy guy.

Now this is a good list.

I’ve had my Amazfit Bip (the original) for 6 or 7 years and the only complaint I have is the shitty original non-breathing silicon strap. After I replaced it with nylon strap, it was pretty much perfect.

The battery still lasts over three weeks. The display glass only has a few tiny scratches on it, despite that I’ve worn the watch basically 24/7 all these years.

It has all the basic functionalities I need built in and the not-so-important-but-nice ones I can get via Tasker.

And it was really cheap, I originally bought it just to see what the fuss about smartwatches was all about. But it’s been so damn useful and trustworthy that I won’t even consider upgrading until it fails someday.

IMHO, J.J. Abrams should not be allowed to touch any scriptwriting duties ever. He is not a bad director, but he doesn’t seem to give a shit about the internal logic of the script if it comes in conflict with the “cool ideas” he has.

His two Star Trek films were perfect examples of this fallacy, as was the last and worst Star Wars film. With Star Trek he kinda butchered the heart of the franchise - the point of using starships to explore - with “Oh, the transporter can now beam stuff over interplanetary and interstellar distances, because it will be so awesome and less time consuming!”

Yes, it’s science fiction and suspension of disbelief is required to fully enjoy it, but it is possible to obey the decades old in-universe rules and still write an enticing storyline if you put a little effort in it. Sad model example of lazy writing.

Of course the fault is not all his, the other producers should have stopped his stupid ideas but chose not to. Still, ROS was so bad that the guy should have been blacklisted for life.

Many of my friends really love Coldplay, so I’ve heard several of their albums played at parties. Many times. But I cannot remember a single song from Coldplay and most likely wouldn’t recognize them if one was playing on the radio.

And I have a decent ear for music, I can play a few instruments and can even find the right chords for a song after hearing it once or twice. But not Coldplay. There is nothing wrong with their music, but it doesn’t make me feel anything. It’s just so generic to my taste, I guess.

My eyes are very sensitive to light, so I’ve been using “Men in Black” - style wraparound sunglasses since the late 90’s.

I am a dad, but pretty much as far from conservative one can be. Where I live conservative dads do not tend to use these at all.

My old Xperia Z5 Compact was the only phone I’ve ever owned that had decent speakers. You could actually listen music with them without getting pissed off. It was small and had amazing audio capabilities and great camera, easily the best phone I’ve ever owned.

But listening music / watching videos in public with your phone speakers on is an abomination. It should be made illegal everywhere.

Yes. I was almost three years old. I don’t remember much, but I do remember that I started to sing during the wedding ceremony when my parents knelt at the altar. Of course no one else sung.

I also remember that the priest scared the shit out of me and that my godfather “fell asleep” in the toilet and had to be carried to a car. I learned years later that he had severe social anxiety which he treated with liquor.

I did this with my friends when we went to Thailand. We were enjoying the delicious taste on a beach, two Australian guys were wanted to try it. They both spat it out instantly and the other one got so mad we thought he’s actually going to attack us.

After he calmed down a bit he demanded to see us drink it to be sure we hadn’t tricked him to drink poison. So we downed the entire 1 litre bottle to appease him. It was the start of a great day that lasted for few days.