I’m surprised at how little Connect love I see here.

I started with Jerboa and it just didn’t feel right. I tried Blorp and a couple of otherez but Connect just has the feel.and features.

I ended up using duckdns for a free domain. It sucks that I had to tie it to a google account, and maybe one day this might be an area where I buy a proper domain instead.

I have a glinet Flint3 router that makes it easy to spin up Wireguard servers on it. It was a bit more finnicky, but eventually I was able to get into the advanced settings and configure the router to sync the dynamic IP with DuckDNS too.

So I have Wireguard on my phone and my wife’s phone. We have one pair of close friends who have a connection on their router too (and vice-versa) and their own Jellyfin server.

My router (GLI.net Flint 3) makes it really easy to set up Wireguard servers on it, and from there all I needed to do was get a domain name to use. Set up Wireguard on my phone, and I can access my local network remotely without needing to pay for a VPN subscription. I still use Mullvad, but that’s for privacy not remote access.

I think a LOT of people require external validation to feel good about themselves. Its why we see places like Facebook and Reddit fracture into echo chambers, and why humans separate themselves into social groups based on similarities. Groups then can outcast the “others” which creates a social floor. As long as you’re within Group, you know you aren’t as bad as those Others over there. At the same time, the people within Group build each other uo and reinforce their common behaviors. Dissimilar behaviors within the group leads to either note fracturing within the group, or leads to people changing their behaviors and homogenizing.

When I was last in a band, I noticed the pattern. The 3 of us would each write things on our own that sounded unique, like our individual selves. When we brought the pieces together, or wrote songs together, the result was bland and generic stuff. All of our respective rough edges that made us interesting were rubbed smooth to make room for each other. And the songs that seemed to do the best with crowds were the smoothest ones (not that we had a ton of success- we played a handful of gigs before the pandemic hit and they ended up moving away).

I’ve noticed a lot lately that introverts in media are often portrayed as broken. Evangelion is one of my favorite anime, but its guilty of this. Shinji is often used in memes and internet culture to represent an introvert, but pretty much every scene where we see him alone he is miserable and craving some external validation. When I’m alone I usually just feel at peace.

I think a lot of people fear themselves, their own thoughts. They consider “being in your own head” a bad thing, like your own thoughts are scary.

My older sister is autistic and we were recently talking about traveling. She said that she prefers to travel alone so she can just wander around a new city at her own pace without having to consider the needs of her husband or children or friends kr anyone else, and I related to that a lot. I may also be autistic- I’m waiting for my assessment results lol.

I remember when I was a child and I first got experience with computers. I saw how file systems worked and thought to myself “wow I should structure my own mind this way so I can try to think as well as a computer can!”. I may have autism.

AI is the exact opposite. Taking something beautiful, clear, clean, organized, efficient, definitive. And inserting all the messy, sloppy, uncertain, unreproducible aspect of our bloody electric meat brains. It’s a move in the opposite direction of where I think humanity should be going.

Do I believe China is engaging in a campaign of global intimidation? Heck, I’d be more surprised if they weren’t.

Do I believe they were using ChatGPT, product of an American company, as a “diary” to document the process? Absolutely not.

Well, it might help to identify some criteria first:

1. Economics. When was it easy to just… Buy and play games? No microtransactions or season passes or subscriptions. Games were mostly physical purchases that you could buy used or re-sell.

You could make an argument that anti-consumer games have always existed in some form. Arcade games designed to sucm quarters out of pockets, games with special codes or info in the box/manual needed to progress that would deter people from buying used. Pokemon selling 2 versions of the same game and locking content behind promotional events. But all that was less common and less egregious. For some games, DLC used to be a great value because it added a lot of content cheaper than the base game- Roller Coaster Tycoon was a great example.

I think everything through PS2/GameCube/Xbox is pretty safely within this range. PS3/Wii/360 is arguable.

2. Technology. This may be controversial, but I think there is a minimum level of fidelity and performance that needs to be considered here. There are definitely some great 8-bit and 16-bit games, but there’s also a lot of duds from those days. There’s also plenty of great 2D games that came later on systems that are ALSO capable of great 3D games. So I’m eliminating anything prior to the PS1/N64/Saturn.

Except… Even just comparing that generation to the next is still a huge difference. Storage space was quite restrictive. N64 games look like garbage, and particularly with multiplatform games you can really feel how limiting the cartridge was. The Saturn was a joke. PS1 games… The aren’t bad, but there’s still a wide gulf between them and the next generation. Compare Metal Gear Solid to Twin Snakes for example, or any of the multiplats that crossed generations.

I know a lot of answers here are “what you grew up with”, but this is the point where I have to admit that what I grew up with was immediately objectively surpassed by the next generation. PS1->PS2, N64->GameCube, and Saturn->Dreamcast/Xbox were all strictly better upgrades, and the only real downside was that Xbox started charging for online multiplayer.

3. Scope. AAA games got too big. They take too long to make and cost too much money. A lot of developers saw GTA and became obsessed with open-worlds with tons of silly collectibles. Assassin’s Creed is an example, and I think the PS3/360/Wii generation is where this started, though it certainly got worse afterwards. I remember Skyrim taking hours to install, and even then the load times were so bad that my wife and I would usually be playing Pokemon on our DS’s during the load screens.

The increased fidelity also seems to correlate with a decrease in creativity. This has gotten a lot better since, but the PS3 and 360 are remembered for mostly brown/green/grey games. Everything was “gritty” and realistic. I like realism, but it was overdone here. The Wii, on the other hand, mostly just looked like GameCube games. I could be misremembering, but I think this is when a lot of games moved to target 30FPS instead of 60FPS. Trying to be more “cinematic” and reducing the importance of gameplay, and thus reducing the importance of responsiveness.

4. Tutorialization. I’m not exactly sure when this started, but it seems like almost all modern games lie on opposite ends of the spectrum. Either they hold your hand and force you to read through tons of dumb text prompts poorly explaining every element of the game all at once, or they copy the FromSoft formula and give you nothing and make you look everything up online from a fan community. I suppose older games like the OG Zelda are also known for being hard to figure out, or other games made you look stuff up in the manual. I look at Portal as one of the best at this: the whole game is basically a tutorial that slowly, constantly introduced new wrinkles for you to learn without holding your hand about it.

So I would say the GameCube/PS2/Xbox era was the peak. That being said, there was plenty of garbage released during that era, and plenty of great games released before and after.

I have had issues in the past with bad SD cards on my pi-hole that cause it to stop working after a few minutes. I know you said it works fine without Mullvad, but was that just a quick verification or an extended long-term test with traffic?

You forgot divide 4-panel comics. Bonus points if Loss is hidden inside somewhere!

Bigotry is bad. Segregation is bad.

In progressive spaces this is USUALLY met with agreement. That’s easy whenever we are talking about equal rights for people who have been historically been oppressed. However, a dark corner of progressive spaces likes to hate. Hate on men, cis people, white people. It’s usually just one or two people, who have probably been personally hurt by people who happen to fall into those groups, and the rest don’t feel like they can say anything.

I strongly believe that things like segregation are fundamentally wrong and make the world a worse place. Not that they were tools that were used for evil and can now be used for good in the right hands. Not just temporarily as balancing measures for society. Equality isn’t just something you can pick and choose when to believe in, when it’s pretty and convenient and makes you feel good.

I know the general idea is to make it easier for your body to enter fat burning mode “ketosis” which iirc means that if you hit a calorie deficit

That is not the goal of keto at all. People can choose to add calorie counting, but that’s an additional step. Calories are a unit of thermal energy. It’s how much energy is released when the food is burned (more technically, oxidized). The most basic way to measure this is to burn it in a way that directs the thermal energy to a container of water, where it’s then pretty straightforward to measure the temperature change and do the math.

As a vague heuristic to measure the energy in food this is… Sometimes useful, sometimes not. What your body actually does is break down carbs into glucose, and things like protein, fat, and alcohol to ketones. Those eventually get broken down further into Adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, which is the basic fuel source your cells mostly use to do things. This is not the same as an oxidation reaction.

More importantly though, when you reduce caloric intake you risk some negative outcomes, which is where we start to mix between physiological and psychological. A lot is based on genetics: if you are lucky enough to have the right genes, you can reduce caloric input or increase caloric output and see weight loss results. Unfortunately, a lot of people like myself don’t have such genes. Instead, when we reduce calories are bodies starts to use processed designed to survive famines- slowing the metabolism, reducing the amount of energy expended, storing as much energy as possible (as fat). If you stick to it long enough, you will lose weight eventually. The problem is that your body makes it harder to stick to it.

Hunger is one of the most basic, primal driving factors baked into the relationship between our body and mind. Caloric restriction can make people hungrier. It causes a lot of diets to fail. It also makes it hard to keep the weight off.

What keto does is gets your body used to treating fat as a source of energy to be used rather than stored for later. So I don’t have to count my calories, I just make sure that what I’m eating has relatively few carbs. Personally, I prefer protein-heavy foods over fat-heavy, although some keto people would argue that doesn’t count as strictly “keto” anymore. It’s not because I’m a gymbro who needs protein, but because protein makes me feel full and satisfied. I don’t have to count calories. I don’t have to be hungry. I don’t have to keep track of every little thing that I eat and think about whether I can afford to have a drink at the end of the night. Compared to caloric restriction (weight watchers), the minute-to-minute decisions are way easier and the day-to-day decisions go away.

It’s not for everyone of course. The academic research, like with every other diet, is mixed. When you get off keto you’ll probably gain some weight back. I’m sure there are some medical conditions that it makes worse. My wife happens to have a lot of issues that are improved by keto (epilepsy and PCOS. Kidney stones too, though the research on that is more mixed).

This is not a problem unique to keto. Plenty of diets have enough loopholes for you to technically follow them while being incredibly unhealthy. There’s a reason the term “junk food vegan” exists.

“Keto” itself has a ton of different forms, but the main goal is to move away from processing food into glucose and towards processing food into ketones. That effectively means cutting carbohydrates. A lot of these pretty much everyone agrees are bad for you: sugar, corn syrup, starches. That isn’t unique to keto. What is unique is cutting out other carbs. Fruits, and some vegetables (I’m using casual categories here), have been bred over thousands of years to have a ton of sugar in them. Grains like wheat, oats, and rice are probably the most significant and weird things that keto cuts: these have been efficient sources of calories for humans for thousands of years, the foundations of civilization, yet are not compatible with ketosis.

In order to maintain the same caloric intake, that means increasing fat and protein (technically alcohol too lol). If you increase saturated fats (dairy, red meat, coconut and palm oils) that’s unhealthy. The healthy way to do it is to go for unsaturated fats: fish, poultry, seeds, nuts, most other vegetable oils. It also happens that red meats are the ones that are significantly worse for the environment and economy. Seafood and poultry certainly have their own environmental impacts of course, and are more expensive per calorie than grains. If you can stand to get away from Western cuisine, there are plenty of insect options that are great sources of protein (shrimps is bugs after all). But articles like this (I can’t confirm because it’s behind a paywall) almost always project out the worst-case scenario that all of this increased protein intake is coming from beef, the worst source. Beef and pork should absolutely be reduced to luxury items people eat on rare occasions, or perhaps not at all. Fish and poultry can definitely be part of a sustainable future: there are a lot of conditions like epilepsy that BENEFIT from getting more protein from animal sources.

That’s all just talking about macronutrients. The other components are micronutrients and fiber. Leafy green low-carb veggies like lettuce, kale, spinach, broccoli, brussel sprouts. Dietary fiber is listed under carbohydrates on US Nutrition Facts but does not count towards the “Net Carbs” that someone on keto should be looking at. Mushrooms are good too.

Someone can eat nothing but Oreos and still be vegan, and someone can eat nothing but beef jerky and cheese and still be keto.

It’s also worth pointing out that the sugar industry spent decades and billions of dollars convincing Americans that fats were much worse than they actually are, which led to its own terrible consequences. There are healthy amounts of fat that a lot of boomers are still terrified of.

These food guidelines have always been more about economics than health anyways. It changes with the political influence of the various agricultural industries in America.

It’s been a while, but I thought the theory that MaxwellHill was Ghislaine had been debunked, And it turned out the user was some guy in Malaysia who lived near a place known as Maxwell Hill?

It’s entirely possible I’ve fallen for a smokescreen, but also there never seemed to be a whole lot of evidence that account was Ghislaine’s other than the name “Maxwell”, which is pretty common.

Ok

Taxing the rich is not just “oh we as a society want money to do things, so let’s take that money from the people who have it”.

Taxing the rich is about removing the incentives that wealthy people have to seek out and hoard more wealth. Get them to stop trying to control everything and seek rents. Convince them to just be satisfied with being, in 2025, a USD hundred-millionaire. Force them to enjoy an early retirement.

The Dual shock 3 batteries are also really easy to replace. Maybe pushing the boundaries of what you’d reasonably call “user replaceable” but certainly something that I think anyone capable of usin g the controller and a PS3 would be capable of.

As an American I can confirm it goes back way further than 1950.

First of all, stretching. The same stuff I learned back in gym class. The same stuff my soccer coaches made me do in elementary and middle school. Having a morning routine is good, but also taking a moment to stretch before physical activity helps. Whether that’s working out, mowing the lawn, moving the Christmas decorations down from the attic, having sex, or whatever else.

Then there is exercise. I have had a basic structure for years that I landed on in high school, and I keep changing it as my needs change. I’ve also gone through years of my life where I have stopped exercising and faced the consequences.

The core structure is a super set of arm workouts with free weights. Curls, front raises, overhead extension, hammer curls, lateral raises, overhead press. The amount of weight, number of reps, and number of sets varies. If I haven’t worked out in a while and just want to get my joints used to moving again, I might not use any weight and just do 20 reps of each for 2 or 3 sets. If I’m strength training that might be something like 5-10 reps at 25lbs each hand (honestly higher weight/lower reps would be better, but those are my biggest weights and I don’t want to spend the money or dedicate more space in my house for bigger ones right now).

Of course, arms alone is a terrible workout. If I am in a hurry, I’ll do what I consider a “focused” set. I start with pushups (using my 25lb weights as hand holds), then upright rows (with the 25lb weights I still have), then situps (using the 25lb weights as footholds, often grabbing extra weights to hold in my hands). Then I stand up and do the 6 exercises I mentioned earlier, and end with a handful of squats. Then repeat one or two more times. This is usually between 15-45 minutes depending on how long I take to rest, how many reps, and whether I’m doing 2-4 sets. My biggest complaint is that I get bored. I can put in music but that only does so much.

If I want a longer workout with more cardio, I have other options. Until a year ago I had a treadmill and a 10" Fire tablet I got real cheap and hacked to allow regular android apps. I installed Steam Link and used a MayFlash USB adapter to connect joy cons, and this let me play games from my gaming PC while on the treadmill. Not all games work- I found a lot of 3D games disprorienting, and fast-past games were hard because I wanted to time my inputs with my walking pace. But stuff like emulating Pokemon games, visual novels like Ace Attorney, and other turn-based games like Wargroove were great. Playing games and working out made me really enjoy working out, it was great to make progress on my backlog, and it was overall blorerty great. Did that for years and went through a couple of treadmills that broke.

Last year when the treadmill broke my wife and I discussed other options. I have a bad knee and so I wanted to try something lower-impact. The treadmill was also really loud- headphones were required. So instead we got an exercise bike. It’s been even better than the treadmill was, but being more stable means I’m more comfortable with lifting weights while I use it than I was while walking on the treadmill. Which is great multitasking, but instead of playing videogames I just watch videos on the tablet. Still good, but I do miss the gaming time sometimes. But it’s also really nice to get arms and cardio in at the same time.

Ultimately it’s a balance in constantly tinkering with. The beauty is that once you have the core movements down it’s very easy to customize. Strength, cardio, endurance, muscle mass, time, entertainment value, whatever it is I need. It’s good to alternate throughout the week. At my peak I workout every day, but that’s rare to sustain because life gets in the way.

Nutrition… I’m sure some vegans and vegetarians are going to hate on myself for this, but I’ve found the best results come from a nearly-carnivorous keto diet. Eggs for breakfast. Zero-carb protein powder smoothie for lunch (with a bit or orange juice, peanut butter and ice. Some banana if you can spare the carbs). Chicken or pork with leafy green veggies for dinner. Cheese and nuts for snacks. I don’t do it all the time, but every time I’ve done it i usually lose about 30lbs in 2 months. I’ve tried other diets and general CICO and it just doesn’t work the same- I can actively feel my metabolism change as I enter ketosis. And once I’m there, I can shove as much protein into my face as I want and still lose weight.

Which brings me to my final tip: marijuana. Other people my age swear by Tylenol or ibuprofen, but THC is my drug of choice, especially for my bad knee. I can still feel the discomfort in my knee and know that something is not quite right, it just stops bothering me. I feel less likely to accidentally do something that damages my knee further, plus it’s better for the kidneys and liver and stomach than those other drugs. Plus it’s fun to get high… On the exercise bike… And then snack on a bunch of cheese and nuts with no consequences. It really feels like what my body wants to do.

Final tip: Pedialyte makes freezer pops. It’s basically Gatorade as a freeze pop form, and they’re only 4 carbs each! Great frozen treat in the summer when you’re doing something that involves sweating.