Prophet Zarquon

So real; I have just years of old '90s SciFi etched into my brain. SciFi novels, too, but it might be nice if some percentage were nonfiction? I dunno, honestly at this point I’m just glad when I see media with a plot that I don’t immediately foresee the denouement of.

Weirdly, I watch less TV now than when I had more monthly bills to work off.

I was even doing pretty well about steering clear of social-marketing sites, until SMBC-comics added a comments section directly below the first of four stops on my (semi-)daily funny pages.

Steam is even helping to push more people to Linux, by ending Steam support on WIn7, this January 2024.

I would probably have left Win7 running on several older machines, but like XP it’s become so widely unsupported that I can’t really condone using it online anymore even if the app-services allowed it. Unlike XP, there’s a lot of apps that would run fine on Win7 if supported; but like XP there’s just not much incentive for a dev to support such an old OS except as a pet project.

Win ≥8 is awful; I’ve helped Win10 users recover from the most insanely unacceptable issues I’ve ever seen in ≥35 years of using computers, with absolutely useless official responses made in each case. I will never poison one of my own machines with something so heinous as Win10, just for the sake of a game. And other than games, I don’t see a compelling use case for Windows anymore.

So, Linux, & holding out hopes for decent Steam action on Linux, I guess!?

I can’t speak for anyone else, but yes, mine is.

I’ve never had Prime though. The reason my life is boring and empty, is (I think) because I avoid participating in things I don’t wholeheartedly approve of.

Viewing media, is an insidiously passive form of participation, so I do intently watch plenty of TV\movies (recently figured out it’s about 6-8 things a week).

The rest of my life is just household chores, bicycling, & traveling when I get the chance.
Doing Things makes me feel like Ged.

Yeah, where my Mom lives, the food options are:

• Walmart
• An erratically pricey local grocery, that rents its building (which has a leaky roof, requiring them to move product when it rains)
• Dollar General
• A farmer’s market that’s open once a week for a few hours before the afternoon heat, a few months a year, if no events have pre-empted it, having an inventory of which about 30% is bulk-bought supermarket produce with the labels (sometimes) removed
• A 90 minute drive; no trains, no buses (literally, no buses) to the next largest town

And she lives in a town people drive to, to get food, clothes, medicine, etc.

She gets as much as she can from the local grocer, for whatever that’s worth; the inventory is frequently poor, & about on-par with Dollar General so far as brand-representation, goes. When tourists ask if the store has something, they get pointed to Walmart.

Cable internet? I agree. Nowhere near using all its last-mile capacity, yet.

Well, not just because a company, did…

The Kademlia network (eMule, Kazaalite, etc), did indeed use a global P2P Distributed Hash Table, to resolve which IPs hosted which content, which the torrent protocol also does … some of:

Unlike the mainline torrent protocol, Kademlia’s DHT (like the modern-day Tribler DHT), also resolved filenames to content, allowing in-app search.

With torrents, one needs to consult a DHT crawler, or an index site (which sucks; centrally operated sites are fragile, compared to DHTs), whereas eMule & more contemporarily Tribler, have two layers of DHT, enabling decentralized search without relyiance on someone having created a listing at some particular site & that site being online to search its index.

They’re still happy to accept food-stamp revenue though, if you get Amazon Prime, of course…

Indeed.

• Ad-blocking (before anything online)
• DHT crawler, or index sites if DHT has too many results
• right-click/long-press on magnet URL
• copy link
• paste magnet link
• remove tracker URLs (not needed)
• go
• enjoy

Hm, 8 steps, is one more than the 7 stages of grief; but I’ll take this over yet-another subscription service that continually degrades in quality for the dollar.

The number of people who think they’ve ordered food delivery “from” a local restaurant, not realizing it was actually made in an UberEats\DoorDash all-in-one “ghost kitchen” located in a nondescript building nearby, vastly exceeds the number of people who’ve heard the term “ghost kitchen”. One of the most well-known local pizza shop’s deliveries, actually come from ghost kitchens, here.

^ This. 💯