You may want to look up the study “Speaker sex and perceived apportionment of talk” for a potential explanation of why this could be happening.

Basically, psychologists did a study where they asked participants to rate excerpts from a play. They started by attempting to control for male and female “role” bias from the script itself; They had university students read the scripts (with “A” and “B” listed as the speakers’ names, gendered pronouns swapped for neutral pronouns, etc) and try to intuit the sex of the characters in the play. So this gave them a baseline on the socially perceived gender of the roles in the script. So if one role was filling a more traditionally feminine or masculine role, had more fem/masc speech patterns, etc, this part of the study was designed to check for that.

Next, they had actors perform the script, and took some recorded excerpts to play for participants. The excerpts had a male and female actor, and the participants needed to rate how long they believed the excerpt was, and how much they believed each actor spoke, from 0-100% of the conversation. So for instance, if they believed the female actor spoke 40% of the time, they would list 40 for her and 60 for the male actor.

Virtually every single participant (both male and female) over-estimated the female actor’s participation to some degree. Female participants were closer to reality, but male participants were pretty far off. Some of the male participants began saying the woman was an equal contributor when she was only speaking 25-30% of the time. Interestingly, these numbers were closer to reality (not totally accurate, but closer) when they flipped the script (literally) and had the actors play the opposite roles. So the female actor was now playing the “male” (determined by the earlier script reads) part of the script. So societal role expectation does play some part in the determination… But it’s not the entire reason.

It could be a large part of why so many terminally online men pipe up about “feminism is ruining my hobbies” whenever more than a token woman is added to media. Because many men genuinely feel like women are an equal contributor when they’re only a small fraction. Does it excuse the behavior? Absolutely not. But it could at least begin to explain it.

Quite the opposite. I read best in the corner of a busy bar, or with music in the background. I guess that’s just the AuDHD talking though.

Similarly with audiobooks, I prefer them when doing menial tasks like driving. Something that I don’t need to actively think about, but which keeps my hands busy. If I’m just listening to the audiobook without doing anything else, I’ll find myself understimulated, and I’ll inevitably reach for my phone. And then at that point I’ll stop paying attention to the audiobook entirely, which defeats the purpose. I need tasks which hit that “Minecraft parkour brain rot” sweet spot to keep me busy but not distracted.

From what I understood, it’s an unintended consequence of accessibility rules coming into place.

It’s a fully intended consequence of DRM refusing to adapt to said accessibility rules. Closed ecosystems make DRM easier, which was always the goal for publishers.

Welcome to Readarr and Calibre, my friend.

They likely only block some of the more popular ports that VPNs use for the encryption handshake. You may want to consider fiddling with the VPN connection settings to see if you can bypass the block. My work WiFi blocks WireGuard connections, but IPSec/IKEv2 protocol is unblocked.

Http: Your employer can see every webpage you visit on the work WiFi. If you visit PornHub, they can see which specific videos you watched. If you were logged into your account, they can (depending on how the site is set up) likely even see account details if you visited your account page.

Https: Your employer can see the base URLs you visited, but not specific content. They can see you visited PornHub, but can’t see which specific videos.

VPN: You create an encrypted connection with a VPN server, so all of your traffic passes through that. Now your employer only sees the encrypted traffic to and from the VPN. If you visited PornHub, all the employer would see is the encrypted VPN traffic. The same rules about http and https still apply to the VPN server, (for instance, on https the VPN provider can see you visited PornHub, but can’t see which specific videos,) but your employer basically only sees encrypted white noise.

Tor: VPN servers connected together in a chain, with an entry node, secondary node, and exit node. Since the VPN server can still follow the same rules about http and https, Tor takes it a step farther by obfuscating which user is connecting to which site. You connect to the entry node and establish an encrypted connection. It sees your traffic to/from an encrypted connection, and passes it to the secondary node. The secondary node only sees the encrypted traffic, which it passes to the exit node. The exit node establishes an encrypted connection with the site, which it uses to pass the site data to/from you. So no single node sees you, the unencrypted traffic, and the site. So (without owning at least the entry and exit nodes and performing a rather technically complicated timing attack) nobody has any way of figuring out which site you’re visiting. If you visited PornHub, the entry node would only see you, the secondary node would only see encrypted traffic, and the exit node would only see PornHub.

MS Word when you try to move an in-document image three pixels to the left.

I give people hearing damage.
(I run audio for live events.)

In doing so, they needed to reduce inventory, so they gave away the old laptops (sans drives) to their employees. I now own the same laptop (or a very similar one)!

Yeah, IT fleet upgrades are a great way to snag some decent hardware for dirt cheap. My Plex server is running on an old HP EliteDesk that came from a cubicle. The hardware itself is often practically new, because corporate drones rarely do anything intensive enough to actually push the hardware. Just give it a quick spray with some canned air, and pop a new drive in.

The idea was that I do not need an extra light because, well, there are plenty all around

The biggest counterpoint I have is simply that I enjoy camping. Good luck finding a desk lamp when you’re 5 miles into the woods. And I’m not wasting my flashlight’s precious battery life on reading.

RetroArch is the go-to for most people, because it can emulate just about anything. But first time setup can be kind of a pain if you’ve never done it before; The UI for settings can be unintuitive, you need to dig for what you want, and it’s easy to forget to save your settings because the save option is in an entirely separate page. It also suffers from some software bloat, because it has so many features that it can get bogged down when emulating more intensive systems.

For Nintendo I tend to use Delta. It’s simple, has cloud saves via Google Drive, and runs everything flawlessly. For PSX, I tend to use Gamma. Again, it has a simple interface and syncs via Google Drive.

RetroArch is a good one, and is the go-to for most people. It covers just about every console you could want. But it also suffers from some bloat due to having so many features, and config can be kind of a pain if you’ve never done it before. If you’re just looking for a more basic “just fucking boot it up and play” emulator, maybe an app like Delta (Nintendo consoles) or Gamma (PSX) would be less bloated (and potentially run smoother.)

Be careful with Xbox controllers if you’re using Bluetooth. Microsoft only started including Bluetooth in their controllers in the last few years. The Xbox consoles all the way from the 360 actually use 2.4GHz (same band as WiFi) instead.

That’s part of why Xbox controllers are so much bigger and heavier than things like the PlayStation controllers; The 2.4GHz circuitry and antenna takes a lot more space than Bluetooth does.

If you’re going to get an Xbox controller for Bluetooth, at least look up how to identify which models have Bluetooth built in.

plus theres those sd card cartdridges for it

If you’re willing to get a flashcart for your NDS, you might as well just get a 3DS and load up some custom firmware instead. It’s stupid easy to hack with the SD card slot, and you can play whatever games you want for free. No need to fiddle with flashcarts when you can just use the 3DS’ built in SD card slot instead.

I just emulate things nowadays. I have pretty much the entire NES, SNES, GBC, GBA, N64, NDS, and PSX libraries on my phone ready to go. And it works perfectly fine with any Bluetooth controller, because touchscreen controls are… Well… Complete fucking garbage.

I’m currently playing through the NDS version of Chrono Trigger in my free time. And since all of the games are stored locally, it doesn’t use any data at all. I recently went camping for a week, and my iPad lasted like 7 or 8 hours of playtime (on low brightness because I was in a tent at night) off of a single charge.

Soft bristles are pretty much the only thing anyone should use, regardless of whether or not it’s electric. Hard bristles are too harsh on your gums.

Yeah, the issue with multi tools is the same issue with phones; They’re mediocre at a lot of different things. A dedicated multi-bit screwdriver will almost always be better than a multitool. A solid pair of pliers will almost always be better than a multitool. Et cetera, et cetera…

But in a pinch, a multitool is better than nothing. And a multitool is a hell of a lot easier to carry as a “just in case” thing than an entire toolbox of individual tools. As a freelancer I habitually keep a lot of tools in my trunk, but I don’t want to walk all the way out to my car just to tighten one screw. So I also keep a multitool around as a “good enough” solution.

To be clear: Hospitals use pagers because they use a longer (and much lower bandwidth) wavelength, which is affected less by things like thick fire-resistant walls. Hospitals are built like bunkers so that things like fires don’t require the entire building to be evacuated. Pagers can still reliably get signal even in the basement of a hospital, when behind multiple fire-resistant walls and solid concrete floors. Texting has effectively replaced pagers for 99% of the population. But hospitals still use them because reliability is prioritized in the medical world; No hospital wants to lose a patient because a doctor was in the basement and didn’t get a text.

There’s also the financial aspect; Does supporting the art also support an artist you don’t agree with? JK Rowling is a good example; She’s a horrible bigot, who penned the single most wildly popular book series in living memory. She made over a billion dollars on Harry Potter, all while being a bigot. So it’s worth asking whether supporting the art is a moral choice, even if we’re using Death of the Artist.

My favorite bit about fridging is that the term initially got coined due to Alexandra DeWitt being killed to get at the Green Lantern. She was later resurrected as a zombie during part of the Black Lantern story arc, and was always shown inside of a fridge even as a zombie. She was only shown a few times, so it was a subtle nod to the criticism the writers had received for fridging her in the first place.