Yeah, it’s amazing how quickly the “don’t trust anyone on the internet” mindset changed. The same boomers who were cautioning us against playing online games with friends are now the same ones sharing blatantly AI generated slop from strangers on Facebook as if it were gospel.
One of the most difficult parts of veterinary medicine is the fact that your patients can’t directly communicate. Oftentimes, issues go unnoticed simply because the animal masks things like pain. Luckily, the vet immediately knew this hedgehog had something wrong, because it kept exploding into a bunch of golden rings.
Marketing wasn’t really a thing until sometime around the Industrial Revolution and post-WW1. Before then, we didn’t really have the capacity to produce more than what people needed. Marketing basically just consisted of “here’s my product, here’s why it’s superior to others.” But with the post-war boom and the rise in manufacturing, producers were suddenly able to out-produce the demand. So they invented marketing, to get people to buy things that they didn’t actually need. The idea of “create a problem so you can sell the solution” was born.
I think the point is that if it was important for the character to be Hispanic, they could have hired a Hispanic actor for it. Her being Hispanic didn’t have any meaningful impact to the story, so why not just let her character be white? If they did it to make the film more appealing to Hispanic viewers, then surely an actually Hispanic actor would have been a better fit. White actors have historically been given distinctly non-white roles just because Hollywood is afraid of melanin.
The history of it goes all the way back to old black and white films, with movies like Dragon Seed or The Teahouse of August Moon, which both had major asian roles filled by popular white actors. The unfortunate part is that they often aren’t respectful when they do it; It often ends up being a caricature of the race instead. Anyone who has seen Breakfast at Tiffany’s will know what I’m talking about. Or hell, there are even cases of outright blackface, like a white actor playing Othello in the 1965 movie. Many people have criticized Al Pacino’s accent in The Godfather as offensive, bordering on caricature.
If you want more recent examples, we could point at Jake Gyllenhaal playing a middle-eastern prince in Prince of Persia. Or Johnny Depp playing a Comanche caricature in The Lone Ranger. Another good example is Scarlett Johansson being given the role of Matoko Kusanagi, in Ghost in the Shell. The movie is based on a Japanese anime, and is based in Japan. But Hollywood refused to hire a Japanese actor to play the role, and instead gave it to the whitest white woman who has ever whited.
Yeah, Calibre is ubiquitous at this point. You really can’t discuss ebooks without it inevitably coming up. Syncing with calibre would be huge, because it would open the door to the single largest library management program in use.
Not off the top of my head.
You can think of Usenet as a sort of second internet. Usenet providers sell subscriptions to access their servers, just like ISPs sell subscriptions to access the internet. Each Usenet provider has their own servers, and multiple providers will group together and share data. These clusters of shared servers are called News Groups. Each news group occasionally has different stuff on them, but most have started cooperating to try and establish parity. So in most cases, you only need one news group subscription.
There are occasionally updated news group maps that get posted, and they usually look something like this:
The important point is that the providers in the same news groups will all essentially have the same content.
Subscriptions come in two different forms. The first is a pretty standard monthly subscription. You pay for a month, you get unlimited access for a month. The other form is a pre-paid plan, sort of like pre-paid cell phones. You buy a certain amount of data, and then can download that much data. So maybe you buy 500GB, and then when you hit your 500GB cap it either charges you again for another block of data, or it cuts you off if you don’t have it set to auto-renew.
Most Usenet users will have both types of sub; They’ll use a monthly unlimited subscription for their primary news group, and then have a prepaid plan for a second news group (or just fall back to torrents). The idea is that the vast majority of your downloads happen via your primary news group, and you only fall back to your prepaid plan (or torrents) if something isn’t available on the primary news group. So you’re not constantly burning through a prepaid data cap.
Browsing Usenet is done with a news reader. This is a program that acts sort of like a torrent program does for torrents. It connects to the usenet servers, and you can browse what they have. Most usenet subscriptions will also come with a free news reader download, or there are a few FOSS ones you can use instead. Or if you’re using the *arr suite, you configure it to search for files automatically based off of certain criteria, and it handles the searching for you.
The important point of Usenet is that it’s not peer-to-peer. It’s more like a dead drop, where an uploader drops the file onto the news server, and then other users can download that file for a certain amount of time. Each provider has their own retention period (how long they’ll hold onto files, that got uploaded) so that’s something worth looking at when you’re shopping for a provider; Longer retention periods will mean finding older content is easier. So you’re not going to be stuck waiting on seeds or buried in leeches, because the server already has the entire file ready to go. In my regular use, Usenet downloads regularly max out my gigabit connection.
Worth noting that copyright takedowns are the primary reason for failed downloads. DMCA takedown requests will still affect Usenet, but only if their servers are in the US. Try to search for NTD providers instead. NTD is the Dutch implementation of DMCA. It still results in takedowns, but it doesn’t happen nearly as often.
Yeah, private trackers really think they’re the best thing in the world, but Usenet is 10x better for half the effort. My current ratio is ~30:1 for public torrents, but I pretty much only use them on the rare occasion that Usenet is missing something. I honestly couldn’t give a fuck about private trackers when Usenet exists.
That only works if they’re on the same drive or petition.
My very first experience with weed was at a party, hitting a gravity bong made out of a 2L bottle of Coke, a big jug of Hawaiian Punch, and the fattest bowl I’ve ever fucking seen:
I hit the entire 2L, (essentially 1-hitting the entire bowl), accidentally sucked too hard at the end of the hit and got a mouthful of dirty bong water, immediately coughed up a lung while trying not to puke my guts out, and had the most wicked high of my life… The way God intended.
That shit teaches respect. If my first experience with weed was hitting a pen, I wouldn’t have learned that a plant can rip your soul out for like 15 minutes. The same way a newbie beachgoer doesn’t respect the sea until they almost drown, I would have been full of hubris if I had a fucking vape pen as my first experience.