At any point that I’m about to make a post online and I realize that the emotional energy required to continue engaging is more than I’m willing to commit to this particular discussion, I just bail. No reply, no downvote, just peace out. It’s really not worth it.

Here’s an episode of the podcast Citations Needed all about how much Mike Rowe sucks.

No problem. I was concerned I went way overboard so I’m glad it’s helpful. Just be aware that if you also use Freestyle Dash, basically anyone who’s familiar with 360 modding will be like “…why are you using that?” It’s over a decade out of support. Aurora is much lighter and up to date, but I’m old school and I’m nostalgic for Dream Theme. The good news is if you want, you can configure Dashlaunch to have both. You just hold some button you choose on the controller while booting and it will boot into FSD, Aurora, or straight into xexmenu if you want. Before I settled into a preference, I put both FSD and Aurora on all the consoles I modded.

RGH was the first mod I learned. Back then, you needed to use an ace v3 mod chip. Now with RGH 3, you only need a resistor and a diode for most models. I still prefer RGH because it persists between boots. Mod once and have a cracked console forever.

Honestly I mostly forgot that bad update was a thing while typing that comment. Back when I was still paying attention, you needed a specific game to make it work. Naturally, that game instantly became way more expensive on the resell market. Also the exploit used to take a few minutes to run, but I’m pretty sure that’s much shorter now.

If you have the game you need or it no longer requires a specific game, then I guess there’s no major reason to hard mod as long as you don’t mind running the exploit each time you power up the console. I haven’t done a mod in a few years now, but was planning to do another soon. I’ll probably look into bad update just to familiarize myself, but I imagine I’ll still do RGH 3 because it lets me set everything up, install all the games I want, customize the dashboard, make the menus pretty by getting all the full box art for every game, and then the console just stays that way forever and cleanly boots directly into the custom dashboard with virtually 100% success. I also prefer Freestyle Dash over Aurora which makes makes me somewhat unusual, but I very much prefer having separate categories for 360 games, original xbox games, xbla games, homebrew apps, and emulators (I could only ever find SNES so that’s all I have). Also I just really like customizing the look and feel with the Dream Theme installed on Freestyle. Scrub through that video to get an idea how crazy customizable Dream Theme is. Aurora has one look and one category with all games as far as I know, but most people go with it over Freestyle Dash.

All that to say, I mostly just enjoy doing an RGH mod because it’s fun. I mentioned how the whole process makes me feel like an actual hacker, and that first time you see the xell screen pop up (meaning the hack was a success), it’s worth it for the dopamine hit alone. Also these days if I’m modding a 360, I’m probably doing it for a friend and it’s much easier to give them something that requires no special knowledge to use.

I mean, it’s a perfectly functional free public tracker that can be thrown in with a handful of other free public trackers in prowlarr which when added together, cover about 98% of all my media needs. I don’t go to the pirate bay, but I would imagine my arr stack probably uses it from time to time.

When people are difficult about accepting cash as thanks, I’m a fan of hiding some money at their place or in their stuff. Depending on the person though, they might figure it out and thus begins a pretty silly back-and-forth battle.

I’d highly recommend modding an xbox 360 if you’ve never done so. Very achievable if you’re somewhat technical, and you get to feel all the hackerman vibes because it requires soldering some wire leads to the motherboard and using a raspberry pi pico to read and write the nand. Most original xbox games also work if you install the compatibility files. So many incredible games from the 360 generation, and the consoles can still be found for around $50. Just make sure you get a “slim” model console because the phats don’t live as long. This site has basically everything you need to know. It’s an extremely good resource.

YouTube started doing a thing for me a few days back where every video that I moused over for a few seconds counted as a view and went into my watch history. Only took me about 30 min to notice because my algorithm suddenly turned to shit and I was getting the most content-slop recommendations. I could actually tell something was off with my account they were so bad. Looked at my watch history and noticed like 15 videos I never watched. Removed all of them and it went back to normal, then I had to Google how to turn off mouseover autoplay to make it stop.

There was a brief period of time where they were actually on the “right” track IMO. You’d pop the headset on, call your friend(s), and when they answered, immediately your VR avatars would be standing in the same virtual space or in your room if you’re using passthrough mode, and you could “look at” and speak to each other in a way that felt extremely natural. You’d start gesturing and naturally moving your body as you speak in the same way you would in a face-to-face chat. The same way you can be at a Halloween party and after a few minutes, you’re having a completely normal conversation with Abe Lincoln or a frog or whatever. Even though the avatars weren’t perfect, there were times that three of us just stood around for 30-45 minutes just chatting and catching up before anyone suggested playing an actual game.

To me, the main selling point of VR is that it’s the best way to feel present with someone who isn’t physically there. It’s better than a video call or a traditional online game. It’s really the closest thing to just “hanging out” with someone who’s somewhere else.

Of course, it only worked that way for a month or two before they made it so that you couldn’t gather like that unless you were inside the horizon worlds app, which everyone always hated. Typical dark pattern enshittification as usual.

This is all beside the fact that it’s Zuck, Facebook, and all the other things everyone hates, but much like the perv glasses seem to be catching on, I think Zuck’s metaverse could have been somewhat popular if they hadn’t done… basically everything they’ve done to it.

As I gain a better understanding of how federated social media works, I just find it even more confusing. This dude appointed himself batman of lemmy, but he’s just a single dev of a single frontend. Don’t most instances have multiple frontends? Even if a secret block list was the key to getting lemmy to finally go mainstream (it’s not), implementing it at a frontend level is simultaneously both way too wide and way too small of a net. If tesseract was the only way anyone could access lemmy, maybe a secret block list could actually change the winds, but it’s such a small slice of the fediverse. It’s like if batman was only beating up jaywalkers and was like “You’re welcome, Gotham. The city is saved.”

What was the point of any of it? Someone was inevitably going to discover it was happening. There were so many people on the block list. Was he just going to personally defend against the ranks of people he found annoying forever? Keep adding more and more regex as the list grows to multiple thousands of users?They’re still on the platform, dude. It’s just one filter on one frontend. What the hell are you trying to accomplish?

I’ve said for a long time that the primary means of American education is advertising. He was advertised as a competent businessman on TV, and so that’s what a lot of Americans believe. The guy’s a walking advertisement. A flim-flam man.

He wins because he’s the best at lying in a country that prizes lying for money as the best skill set one can possess.

It’s weird how much effort you have to put into convincing people that the team who lost had a bad strategy…

One detail I’m still not fully clear on is how widespread the effects are. Say an instance uses the tesseract frontend. Does that mean that everyone who accesses lemmy via that instance was having all of this filtering applied? Does it only apply if they were accessing it via the web? If they logged into the same instance via a smartphone app, would it still be applying all of the hidden tesseract filters?

The superiority of homegrown tomatoes is like THE universally agreed upon gardening fact that everyone who’s ever had a garden knows. People go their whole lives thinking they don’t like tomatoes or that they taste bland and then they try a homegrown one and they’re like “Wow, that’s what this is supposed to taste like?”

“No CGI” is primarily dishonest marketing hype that actively minimizes the work of talented artists. Yes, they had a puppeteer steering a plastic ball around for Project Hail Mary, but they also replaced 100% of the practical ball with CG. Especially at a time when people are so opposed to AI because it devalues human art, I think it’s important to be aware of the other ways we devalue art that have nothing to do with AI.

This fantastic YouTube series done by a career FX artist does an excellent job of dispelling the marketing hype and recalibrating the conversation around CGI in movies.

I kept thinking of Wishbone when watching the Odyssey, and I didn’t realize until the next day that the reason why is that Wishbone was the first time I’d ever heard the story. My original Odysseus was a dog.

Idk, I could probably bear to hear about him exactly one more time after he gets sent to prison.

I saw a movie last weekend and there was an ad before the film for tiktok. The ad was super “wholesome” and about this dude who I’m sure is legitimately a great guy. He uploads “Dad” lessons on things like tying a tie and whatnot.

I couldn’t help but think that both US political parties were in lock-step just a few years ago that tiktok was a national security threat because it was a vector for foreign propaganda. Now that the American side of tiktok is owned by Larry Ellison, it’s not only no longer a “national security threat,” it’s a wholesome place where you can find trusted information from real people who are doing it just because they care.

It made me wanna puke.

I enjoyed it quite a bit. At nearly 3hrs runtime, I went in thinking “as long as I don’t hit a point where I’m wondering how much time is left, I’ll be satisfied with this movie.” I was pretty gripped the entire time. Never once felt like it was dragging.