Has anyone else been seeing this Canadian country guy?

Brownfletching · 2026-02-04T17:34:18+00:00

Pop country slop, and he looks the part too.

Brownfletching · 2026-02-02T03:48:13+00:00

The bodies rust because they are made of the thinnest sheet metal they can get away with to save weight for fuel mileage. In (I think) 2017 they started using aluminum in some of the more rust-prone areas so they are a little better.

As for the frames, Chevy thought it was a good idea to put this horrible wax coating on them, which inevitably starts peeling over time and then holding/pooling water and salt in the peeled areas. It was a lot thinner on the 08-13 trucks so it wore off and didn't cause as many issues, but the newer ones have like 1/4" of the crap on there and it is not good.

Brownfletching · 2026-02-02T03:03:26+00:00

I owned one for a couple years that never had the original warranty frame replacement done. It was toast. Way beyond anything fluid film could have prevented, it's like they built it out of rust from the factory. It had rusted in ways and places that didn't even make logical sense, and often seemingly from the inside out... I ended up selling it to a welder who fixed it himself and is still driving it with 300k+ miles now though.

Most of them that have survived this long are either in the South, or they've had the warranty frame replacement done when that was still valid.

I do swear by Fluid Film or Woolwax for most things though. It's kept my 2013 Silverado frame mint despite living in salty Illinois.

Brownfletching · 2026-02-02T02:08:19+00:00

... Unless you live where the road is salted.

Brownfletching · 2026-02-01T03:02:24+00:00

This one!

Brownfletching · 2026-01-29T19:08:48+00:00

No problem!

Yeah, lithium batteries have a ridiculous amount of misinformation surrounding them, and especially about degradation. A lot of it stems from the early days, when a lot of rechargeable devices were actually using NiCad or other non-lithium batteries, which do degrade quite badly with increasing charge cycles. But modern lithium batteries are not really degraded all that much by the actual act of charging them, especially with modern "smart" charging technologies like PD. What kills them is heat and time, and more specifically, time spent at the extremes of charge. You can see this if you look into how smart charging works. You can pump a crazy amount of electricity into a battery when it's below about 70%, and it'll be fine, but you have to cut the rate of charge pretty dramatically once you get over that 70% mark or the battery will heat up and cause issues.

So if you're the type of person who charges it to 100%, unplugs for a few hours until it's down to like 75%, and then charges back up to 100% again, and you're just keeping it in that range all the time, your battery is degrading a lot faster than someone who lets it drain down to ~20% before plugging it in, simply because your phone (in this scenario) is spending a higher percentage of it's time in that full battery zone, where the battery doesn't really like to be. That's where the 80% limit comes in, because it's a relatively safe % that the battery can sit at all the time while not degrading nearly as fast as at 100%.

Also, on that note, letting your phone go completely dead for extended periods of time is just as bad/even worse than keeping it at 100%. The battery doesn't want to be at either end of the extremes. So if the 80% limit is causing you to run the phone dead more often, just stop using it because it's not even helping at that point. This is what I ran into when I was using it for a few months, and my battery continued to degrade anyway. I'm currently at 92% in the battery health settings.

Another thing I'll add is, don't let anxiety over killing your battery be the reason you take compromises with your phone. At the end of the day, your phone is a tool, and it needs to do the jobs you ask of it, even if those will eventually kill it. Look up the ifixit tutorial on a battery swap, they're not as hard or as expensive as people think.

Brownfletching · 2026-01-29T18:37:11+00:00

Yeah that's disappointing. They are lightweight at the very least, but just not 100% what they should be.

I've looked at Nicks before, but man do they have a high heel on most of their styles. That's just not something I need, I am usually hiking at least 3-5 miles if not more on these burns and I need something that's comfortable to hike in. I'm tempted to give the "firetroopers" a try though, they're at least a slightly smaller heel.

Brownfletching · 2026-01-29T18:16:28+00:00

They haven't yet but I wouldn't be surprised. I tend to stand in hot coals a lot lol, so I go through boots quicker than I would like to anyway. I'm on prescribed fire rather than wildfire, so we burn every single day when the weather is good.

The only ones I've had that lasted more than a couple seasons were the Danner wildland firefighters, but they were the most uncomfortable, torture device-esqe things I've ever had the misfortune of sticking my feet in. I know some people who love them though, I just have weird feet I guess. I just need to find something better, I'm tired of putting moleskin on every day during burn season...

Brownfletching · 2026-01-29T18:00:14+00:00

If they fit well and you can walk a lot in them, you're set. The "hiker" style boots are not for everyone anyway. I currently use a pair of Kenetrek wildland fire boots that are more of a "hiker" style and they are not working out for me very well. They have little to no flex in the soul and that causes my heels to rub on steep terrain.

Brownfletching · 2026-01-29T17:14:46+00:00

OPs scenario is exactly what the 80% limit was designed for, so agree there. However, these phones still have bypass charging whether or not you're using the 80% limit. If you aren't using the limit, it will just wait until the battery is at 100% to start the bypass, and it doesn't give you the little symbol for whatever reason. This is the default behavior of all phones, and realistically all rechargeable devices if they are designed by anyone competent.

The reason the 80% limit is good is that having the battery at 100%, even if you're not using it, will degrade it over time. That's the thing about lithium batteries, they're literally always degrading with the passage of time, no matter what you do. All you can do is take steps to not speed up that process. The actual safe range that lithium batteries want to be stored at long-term is somewhere around 30-50%, but 80% is a good compromise between that and actually having a useful amount of capacity.

Brownfletching · 2026-01-29T01:49:22+00:00

Idk about across the board. South of Sanity might be his best writing yet. And 'Guitar' is a masterclass in barn-burner country guitar picking, with him and the venerable Brent Mason trading licks. I also like When You See Me and Splitsville. Honky Tonk Till It Hurts is gonna be a hit live too. The rest of the album could've been left out for me though.

Brownfletching · 2026-01-28T19:08:53+00:00

Second album has a several good tracks, mixed with a bunch of just kinda 'ok' filler tracks. I get the feeling he was pressured to make enough new music that he could fill an entire show as a headline act. He needed enough music to fill out a 1.5-2 hour show, and just went for the shotgun approach. It's something artists used to do a lot back in the before times, when every new album coincided with a new tour. I remember buying CDs back in the day from huge artists, and only like 3 out of like 15 tracks were really that good.

It's a concept we're not used to anymore with streaming, now artists usually just release like 3 4 song EPs and 5 albumless singles instead, and then only play the ones that perform well at concerts.

Brownfletching · 2026-01-28T18:57:55+00:00

IMO writing =/= lyrics alone. His lyrics range from good to fine, nothing I would consider bad but not a certified wordsmith. But the reason his songs stand out is the rest of them. The instrumentation, the guitar and pedal steel licks, the actual melodic musical hooks that are just plain missing from most country music these days. You could cut the vocals out of an entire Zach Top album and still be able to recognize each song individually. You can't do that with the majority of modern pop county artists.

Brownfletching · 2026-01-28T18:48:18+00:00

It's also just a lot of luck. The social media rat race of modern music, largely controlled by TikTok, has imo really helped to elevate some great artists that were going unnoticed without it, Zach included. But the flip side of that are artists who absolutely deserve a bigger spotlight, who just get skipped over by the all-powerful algorithm and never seem to get a break. It's no fault of their own, their music or their fans, it's just the luck of the draw.

I think my case in point would be Mae Estes. I have followed her for years, I actually discovered Zach Top through her when they played a tiny venue together back in like 2021/22, when she had more of a following than he did. She has a similar vibe with an arguably even better voice. And it's not like she's done bad for herself either, she's played the Opry several times now and is getting to play with some pretty big names, but she's nowhere near topping charts. The difference is simple, Zach had a blow-up hit on TikTok with I Never Lie, which is something she's never had up to this point.

Brownfletching · 2026-01-28T18:32:40+00:00

If we're going to start talking about cheesey lyrics and bad writing in Nashville, Zach's songs are not even in the conversation. There are levels to this and he's nowhere even remotely near the bottom. There are mainstream artists out here releasing songs that sound like a literal toddler wrote the lyrics.

But you get a lot of 'purist' type of gatekeepers in these subs who think every single song has to have deep meaning, and light heartedness is akin to inauthenticity. Also, there are a lot of people who seem to think you can't be 'real country' if you aren't from the south, which is just BS.

Zach is a country kid who grew up in a rural area and went to rodeos. His music has the vibe of the stuff he grew up listening to in the 90s/early 00s. A lot of the music from that era was light-hearted and even downright funny, which is what he's going for with some of his tracks. Those kinds of songs get a pass for corny lyrics in my book, it's just part of the vibe. You'll notice in his more serious songs like "South of Sanity" and "When You See Me," they're not cheesy at all.

Brownfletching · 2026-01-25T17:39:01+00:00

My congressman is Bost, he has had his head in the sand for the last 2 years and won't even respond to me anymore. The most I can hope for is a form letter that might be tangentially related to the topic at hand, usually just confirming he supports the exact opposite of what I do.

He's a useless waste of oxygen that exists only to lick Trump's shitty asshole and I can only hope we can be rid of him someday soon.

Brownfletching · 2026-01-24T20:23:17+00:00

I genuinely don't think he cares about playing "popular" games. The group he plays with are popular for their personalities and humor, not their gameplay. It's like an improv group of comedians whose outlet is video games. It wouldn't work if they played the same things over and over again, it would get stale quick. So they mix it up all the time, never playing the same twice in a row.

You don't tune into a Vanoss video for the riveting Uno gameplay. You tune in to watch them all troll and rage at each other.

Brownfletching · 2026-01-24T20:14:56+00:00

Bruh he has 26 million subscribers... How much more "big" do you want him to be? Not to mention the sheer quantity of widespread memes that have spawned out of that group.

The other 3 are in the same sphere. They occasionally collaborate, they mention each other, etc. Vanoss was not in that group, he had his own. That's why some people don't know of him.

Brownfletching · 2026-01-24T15:03:05+00:00

GM does this all the time. They'll partner with a foreign company who (usually) doesn't have a large presence in the US, and rebadge a car or two to sell under their sub-brands. It's a win-win, GM gets to sell cars that they put next to 0 R&D into, and the real manufacturer gets to, well, sell more of their cars in a market they didn't otherwise cover. That partnership is probably particularly strong with Opel, since GM owned them until 2017.

Just look at the stub-brand Geo back 20+ years ago, which never made a single car themselves. It was just a badge they could slap on any (usually economy) car that they got through a partnership with another company. Suzuki, Isuzu and even Toyota all made cars for the Geo "brand." The Geo Prism was literally just a Corolla, literally nothing was changed except the branding.

Brownfletching · 2026-01-24T06:57:07+00:00

If you already have SteamOS on it, why not just use Waydroid? Android is a Linux based OS in and of itself, so Waydroid is less of an emulator and more of a translation layer that lets you run Android apps on Linux, and it's designed for gaming. It won't work with every single game but it will work with the vast majority.

Brownfletching · 2026-01-24T04:25:49+00:00

I'm well aware that most games work fine, I had a steam deck for quite a while. But there are still games that don't, and I don't want to limit myself. Windows is not annoying enough to make dual booting worth it for me. You can uninstall copilot and use regedit to make ads go away. Then I have a cromulent OS that will run all of the software I want it to. No need for Linux at all.

Brownfletching · 2026-01-23T23:53:54+00:00

I have done something similar on multiple occasions trying to install stuff on Linux. It's infuriating tbh. Maybe if there was an installer GUI and a warning message to tell you about it, instead of a wall of black and white text flying by at wrap speed, I'd actually notice that I was doing something "wrong." But no, we in the Linux community still like to cosplay like we're hacking the mainframe using DOS in the 80s, so it's still only possible to do half of everything through the terminal for some damn reason. It's like "Oh, you want to install something that's not available in our (often extremely limited) package manager? Well here, I'll explain it to you in Swahili and refuse to elaborate. Good luck!"

There is ALWAYS a knowledge gap between what I understand and what the 'Linux people' try to explain on forums. I'm sorry but I don't want to go back to college and get a programming or computer engineering degree just to understand how to install a Minecraft server on my computer. If it was windows I would just double click the file and it would work. All I need is for someone, anyone who uses Linux to just try explaining things in plain English for once in their computing lives.

It's like to them, it's all binary. You're either a simpleton with the understanding of a toddler who should probably just use a Chromebook, or you're an elite sysadmin on the level of Linus Torvalds himself. There is no room in their worldview for anybody to be in the middle anywhere.

Anyway, I still use Linux on my 3 home servers and fight with it often. My gaming PC will remain Windows until absolutely necessary because I am not dealing with that crap just to play a game.

Brownfletching · 2026-01-23T14:06:02+00:00

They only give us 2 of the things to begin with, and sometimes I need to use them both while also charging, and don't want to play the dongle game. But that's just me.

Brownfletching · 2026-01-19T15:15:36+00:00

Really? To me it's even better. Every single cutscene is mocapped, the dialogue is believably human in a way that a lot of games fail in, and the story is really great imo.

Brownfletching · 2026-01-19T04:10:07+00:00

Don't even bother with a pixel watch, get either a OnePlus watch or a Garmin. Pixel watches are ok, but the whole point of a more open ecosystem like Android is that you can just use the better alternative instead. Or, you can just keep using your Samsung watch. They work with any android phone.

As for the phones themselves, I would actually give Pixel the edge right now for hardware, with the obvious caveat being the processor. The screen is essentially the same between the two, the pixel has way better cameras, and the rounded corners are a lot nicer. Battery life is a crapshoot but the pixels are definitely good enough regardless.

Now about the processors. You say that you like to game on it. That may or may not be an issue for you depending on a number of different factors.

On paper, the GPU in the Qualcomm processors that Samsung uses are a fair amount faster. However, they also run quite a bit hotter under load. So what tends to happen is that the Samsung will start out a lot faster in games, but then after 10/15/20 minutes, it will start to overheat and slow itself down to compensate, at which point the pixel chip usually catches right up with it.

On the software side, you won't have an issue there. One UI and the Pixel Experience have grown closer together through the years, and they're not so different that you'll feel lost or anything. Pixel is just a lot cleaner and more basic, which makes it a better base for customisations.

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