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Cake day: July 12th, 2023

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  • All the men on my mom’s side of the family have been bald for as long as I can remember so I knew I was doomed when my hair started thinning in my early twenties. Now that I’ve been shaving it for years, I don’t miss it one bit. It’s so much less of a hassle than keeping it clean and straight and cut neatly.

    It’s just hair. You can either own it or wear a hat while you wait a few months until it grows back – and then be grateful that it still does.



  • I have two servers, a >100TB rack-mounted Supermicro archive that doesn’t get fired up often, and an Intel NUC that runs 24/7 but only draws 5W at idle. The NUC with its mere 4TB SSD is only for content I’m actively watching which gets deleted immediately afterwards. Running just the Supermicro made more sense when I had a terrible internet connection and had to wait for everything but I moved to an area with 1Gb+ connectivity a few years ago and subsequently needed to save on energy costs.

    I feel like the real question you want to ask yourself is, “how likely is it that this particular content will still be available on Usenet/torrents in a few years?” Some stuff is much more niche and rare while other movies/shows each have over a dozen redundant releases, at least a few of which will more or less always be available somewhere. To put things in perspective, it also helps to do an analysis of how much you’re spending each month in order to avoid what you would be paying in streaming and licensing costs, including hardware, power, and connectivity. If that ratio gets too high then it’s time to scale back.


  • While I fully support the spirit of this idea, the problem here has little to do with a lack of storage redundancy and everything to do with the bandwidth limitations of a nonprofit company vs a malicious nation state that would seek to deny access to this sort of resource. Basically, given enough bandwidth, you either become resilient to most of these attacks or you become capable of performing them yourself on anyone with a slower connection than you.

    I think the Internet Archive would be better served by direct donations, although I’d also love to see a complete torrent posted that gets updated regularly for anyone with the storage and bandwidth necessary to grab and then re-seed it. The web content alone is nearly a trillion pages, though, so that’s not going to be a long list of volunteers.






  • I took LSD, DMT, and weed one night several years ago. This was near the end of my experimentation phase with psychedelics before I finally came to my senses and chilled out so we’re talking heroic-level dosing, too. While peaking on something like 880μg, I smoked some weed to intentionally send the acid into overdrive and then took a couple big hits off a DMT vape.

    Instant ego death.

    At first I was just in awe of what I was seeing and experiencing, but soon I realized that I could no longer talk or even think linguistically. Language completely fails at some point when you’re that far gone but I was too far gone to remember that fact, let alone comprehend it enough for it to calm me down. I didn’t even know what I was, let alone who. I had a sense that I was a being of some sort who had once been able to communicate but I didn’t understand why I couldn’t anymore. Panic set in. Part of me was still dimly aware that I had taken something or at least done something to myself, even if I didn’t understand it was the cause of what was basically a temporary psychotic break, so I came to the conclusion that I had erased my brain like a hard drive that doesn’t even have an operating system anymore and that I would have to re-learn everything from scratch.

    When I came down enough to find (and be able to use) my phone, I called a friend to come meet me at 3am (true bro) so that the re-education could begin immediately. By the time he got there, though, I realized that I couldn’t have wiped my memory since I remembered my friend and that I was, in fact, a fucking idiot. We had a good laugh and I decided to take it easy with the drugs after that.



  • Second the NUC suggestion. I’ve got a 10th gen i7 model that I use primarily as a media server. It draws <6W at idle so it runs 24/7 and barely makes a blip on my electricity bill. It’s been rebooted exactly twice so far this year after switching from Windows 10 to Arch (BTW), once after a planned upgrade and a second time unexpectedly when my cheap UPS’s battery died. It works fine with the two docking stations I’ve tried and two different USB-C displays. I think my model might need a small adapter to support a third monitor but I’m not sure that’s the case with newer generations, though you may have to look beyond the Intel-branded hardware if you do want a more recent edition since they sold the brand to ASUS.