i wish i had close friends. a romantic partner would be nice too, but friendships are better.

100% complete playthroughs of all three of Xenoblade Chronicles 1, 2, and 3.  including the expansion packs.

I’m a single dad and only played in my own time, and started in February; finishing all three felt like a major personal achievement.  Overall roughly 800 hours total (but again, went for 100% completion, only missed a couple of the superbosses), and finished the whole run in Dec 25th.

according to wikipedia, it’s in Alberta Canada.

put the first one on my work tool cart. i gotta mess with the svg file cause i can’t get it to work with my circular stickers (yet).

anyone have this in a b&w format i can use with my label printer?

threatening unwanted physical harm against friends/acquaintences for any reason is morally bankrupt.

the website is clear as mud, for sure. maybe it’s like lemmy? or mastodon? can’t be sure, and the public demo doesn’t make it any clearer.

we all need to agree on a standard for ‘about’ pages so we can collectively reject those that look like that.

i feel like it’s important to note that this is against the ebay seller agreement, and though ebay does nothing about it if you report it after the fact, leaving feedback with a statement like “this seller drop shipped the item via amazon” helps other shoppers.

generally, though, it’s getting easier to tell: higher volume (we’re talking 1k or higher, usually) of feedback with less than ~97% positive feedback, is a good first indication of some kind of reseller/dropshipper.

personally, i started shopping on ebay to avoid amazon, so it’s a supreme annoyance to have something drop-shipped or gift-shipped through them. I get why some sellers do it, but that doesn’t make it right.

that’s some typeface, i’m sure of it because each letter is identical.

i use jmp.chat and love it but be aware that they have a list of banned words, and any outgoing sms (meaning that you send out, incoming messages aren’t blocked) containing the banned words will be blocked.

https://blog.jmp.chat/b/sms-censorship

the children STILL AWAKE running around upstairs

there are a few cycling helmets that have magnetic visors. Mine is a Rock Bros, and I have a darkened visor for daytime use, and a yellow visor for nighttime (the helmet came with a clear visor). It’s done just fine in snow and medium-heavy rain, but I have worried about it in very heavy rain.

I also have a pair of goggles made for motorcycling that are made specifically for wet conditions - there’s a foam gasket around the visor and air vents on the bottom. They’re also large enough to wear sunglasses or prescription glasses underneath. I think they were about $30 on ebay a few years back, and looking now, similar items are pretty common.

geet a couple of dry sacks too. Those are the waterproof bags that the open end rolls up and clips shut. I keep spare clothes in a smallish 2L dry sack on my bike.

as an ex-IT currently working at Lowes, they don’t really give a shit about your qualifications, and probably won’t even ask. passing the drug test and background check is about the only qualifications that matter to them.

funded quick because of an absurdly low funding goal coupled with a high entry price point, and somewhat deceptive marketing.

blitzkrieg bop by the ramones

we can leave your friends behind!

it’s plenty fast. i have a usb-attached nvme for the stuff i download to watch that I don’t intend to keep, and my main collection on a separate NAS. the microsd I run coreelec from is a samsung evo, i think it’s an A2 and it’s plenty fast. I haven’t installed coreelec to the emmc because i’m running nightly so it’s a decent fallback when CE breaks which does happen once every few months - and allows me to easily make a backup using dd.

there was an issue with x265 playback being out of sync slightly (which could be remedied by seeking back or forwards one step, i used to just do it at the beginning of playback), which persisted for more than a year, but that was resolved about two weeks back, so aside from the occasional av1 issues, I’d consider the X4Q+ the best CE device i’ve ever tested. i had also used one of the homatics boxes that CE supports, but gave it to a friend.

One more note, I have this connected through an hdmi switch (that’s shared with a steam deck and a ps5) to a usb-powered 4k hdr display. CEC works fine, passthrough audio works fine, color depth displays exactly, it’s just a butter smooth experience.

i’m no ugoos evangelist, but the hardware is really solid and fairly cheap and hasn’t failed me yet. i’ve been running this setup for about 2 years (iirc) and probably won’t be needing to upgrade for a while.

edit: for clarification on speed and image caching, my library has roughly 1600 movies, 140 shows with about 5200 episodes, and everything is scraped. there’s never any image loading issues like there is on slower hardware like the rpi and odroid.

+1 for Ugoos. I use an X4Q Plus, which has av1 support, but other than that I did the same setup: coreelec nightly (I like living on the edge). I have a complicated setup due to my networking paranoia and coreelec handles that without issue. I loaded coreelec onto a micro-sd but haven’t used the default android that it came with since day one.

My only real complaint is that SOME av1 files have playback issues, and some play flawlessly. I’m no expert so I haven’t any way to figure it out, and I’ve been too intimidated by the community to try to seek help or report a bug.

That being said, av1 isn’t meant to be an archival format and realistically only excels at network streaming, so it’s better to look for x265/hevc content rather than av1 if all you’re doing is playing locally (or even playing from a NAS on your local network). and, of course, x264 is still pretty much the standard, with the downside being higher filesizes for the same level of quality.

someone the other day posted a link to CT Fletcher talking about willpower and in that video he says something that resonates with me here (and I’m paraphrasing): when you do your best, it’s never a failure, it’s a victory. because you did your best. that you didn’t achieve some (possibly unattainable) goal is irrelevant, because the success is determined by the efforts you made. (and there are MANY ways to interpret those wise words and make them applicable to yourself).

as a single father, i’m constantly struggling with similar thoughts you describe. I often feel like i’m struggling to just survive. but when I see that my kid is happy, and that he’s following my advice (like: ‘never be afraid to speak your mind’ and ‘cleaning your room makes your life better’, etc) and I realize that yeah I’m absolutely doing the best for him that I can, then the whole rest of this shit sandwich doesn’t suck so bad.

there are many measures of wealth, and only ONE of them is by how many dollars are in your pocket. collect those smiles and those ‘i love you, dad’ and they’ll keep you going when money won’t.

here’s me, a grown ass adult with a car i paid off like 4 years ago - nothing special, a smallish commuter POS that gets 40mpg that i literally use to drive 4 miles to work and back.

i was paying about $630/year because i pay for a year at a time, and it’d be almost double that to pay monthly, like what the actual fuck? anyways, a few months ago i get this email from the insurance company telling me “hey get ready your policy will renew in 3 months, be sure to double check your payment method” so i log into my account and they were gonna raise my premium to $970/yr and there was literally no obvious way to see that they were gonna do that. it was a case of logging in, going through multiple levels of menus to get to the future policy, download a pdf of that policy, then view it offline.

well, i’m pissed, so i call them to find out what the hell they’re doing and why and they claimed it’s because i had gotten a speeding ticket. of course, they had zero information to share with me about that speeding ticket - no ticket number, no date/time, no address, nothing. i sure as hell don’t recall getting a speeding ticket, and in any case, with a spotless driving record, you’d think there’d be some kind of interfacing with me about it, but no. they claimed the ticket was real and i’d need to contact my DMV to find out more.

so i call them, the DMV, and after some hassle, find out they have ZERO record of any speeding ticket. so… back on the phone with the insurance company and they just wanna give me the shaft and the runaround no exceptions. i mean, i’m pissed now because it’s OBVIOUS fraud, right? Anyways, i get absolutely nowhere. so i tell them to cancel my policy and i woulda thought about contacting a lawyer about a possible case or something but, naw…

i still have the car, and it’s parked being unused. I swapped to riding bikes to and from work, sometimes an ebike, sometimes a fixie, and i’m the only cyclist on the road around here that I’ve ever seen and it’s sometimes really sketchy. but i plan to ride through the winter, dry or snowy, i don’t care.

it can get complicated, because i’m a single father, but honestly, fuck auto insurance, fuck cars, fuck car brain. we gotta make a stand at some point and I lament that we can’t really do it collectively.