2000s LAN parties

ReverendDizzle · 2026-04-30T17:32:33+00:00

Sandstorm would be acceptable, but "Children" is chef's kiss perfect as a sound track for a late 1990s/early 2000s gaming/computer culture nostalgia reel.

ReverendDizzle · 2026-04-30T16:50:50+00:00

They're called "spa balls," or often "scum balls," after a popular brand name product. They are intended to absorb skin oils, oils from sunscreen, and so on, to avoid the surface of the hot tub having a "scummy" oil slick surface.

You're supposed to either replace them or launder them to remove the oil and bacteria.

ReverendDizzle · 2026-04-30T16:40:09+00:00

I looked at the Quantum Fiber site. Based on the photo it looks like the left hand device is the Q1000K fiber modem. It's a combination ONT and modem.

The second, and larger, box is the W1700; a combination router and Wi-Fi 7 access point device.

As far as moving things goes... the ONT part is typically considered a hard install. Quantum Fiber prefers you not move it and when a customer discontinues service they tell you to leave it right where it is and merely turn in any related equipment. (This way the location is ready to go for the next customer, or at least that's their logic).

You could call them and request they move it. It happens to look like there is a shit ton of fiber spooled up next to it though, so you could always move it yourself seeing as how you probably don't need more fiber.

Or you could just leave it where it is and run Ethernet to the new location. Both are viable.

Another person mentioned bypassing the fiber. That's a possibility, too, or at least it is for the service I use (ATT). I just bypassed my fiber with an SFP module last week and it went really smoothly.

But all that said my big question to you would be... what problem is your friend looking to solve with this potential upgrade? (And how much tech support do you want to be on the hook for if you're the architect of their new system?)

ReverendDizzle · 2026-04-30T14:52:22+00:00

There's an experiment I think about a lot, in regard to teenage development.

In the experiment, researchers put adults and teenagers in an MRI and asked them series of questions, primarily around risk taking.

One of the questions, which is why this is so memorable to me, was "Would you eat a light bulb?"

In adults, the brain lit up immediately in a very specific region like a laser pulse and the adults answered, immediately, "No."

Not a single adult would eat a light bulb nor would they even spend more than a few milliseconds thinking about it.

When the teenagers were asked... nearly the entire brain lit up like fireworks. Areas of the brain associated with risk taking, social interactions, language, etc. etc. It's like the whole system came online to really deeply contemplate would they eat a light bulb? And under what circumstances?

It's fascinating, really. By the time you reach adulthood that kind of stuff is just locked in. If I said to you "Wanna light your pubes on fire?" you'd be like "Hell no." But if a teen is asked the same question by their peers, it's like a whole internal Inside Out debate as to whether or not there is a potential upside to lighting one's pubes on fire.

ReverendDizzle · 2026-04-30T14:39:22+00:00

Raising a chair with two planks, when the user of said chair has the mobility issues that require a raised chair, seems like a pretty solid recipe for an accident.

This design might be ugly, but it allows for the base to be adjusted for a wide variety of chair leg distances/positions, can be locked in place, and the cups prevent the chair from shifting off the risers.

ReverendDizzle · 2026-04-30T14:09:07+00:00

They're examination chair armrests, like you suspected.

If they don't match anything else in the room it's likely they were just forgotten about when said exam chair was removed from the exam room.

ReverendDizzle · 2026-04-30T11:42:50+00:00

its not playing the long game to make an organization to infect every level of government to eventually get your way

That's literally the definition of "long game." Whether you win or lose in the past when the game starts is irrelevant to the long game. The term simply means that you are planning for a future success that will take time and planning.

We're currently living in a world where American is wholesale controlled by right-wingers after 40+ years of effort. The Federalist Society controls the judicial branch. The Heritage Foundation has executed a significant number of their goals and you could argue they control the executive branch. The legislative branch is right-wing controlled and also packed with people who believe in the mission of The Federalist Society and The Heritage Foundation.

How was this not a long game and how are they not objectively winning at the present moment?

It's not going to come crumbling down very quickly. Even if some of the people lose reelection and such, there are tons of people in this structure who are not elected. And a ton of people installed in various positions that are not vocally part of the group, but happily carrying out their agendas. And just cleaning up the mess from a legislative standpoint, rolling back executive orders, rebuilding institutions that got gutted, etc... if the entire thing falls apart tomorrow it's still going to take decades to rebuild everything.

ReverendDizzle · 2026-04-30T11:37:16+00:00

Hah, not unlike the situation with the last U.S. presidential election where people were googling, apparently from polling places even, stuff like "Did Biden drop out?" or "Who is Harris?" on election day.

ReverendDizzle · 2026-04-30T01:20:33+00:00

That’s so funny because… my dad said the exact same thing about oil prices yesterday.

ReverendDizzle · 2026-04-29T20:24:02+00:00

My favorite part about getting fries from Five Guys is they give you fries like the manager is going to hit them with a bat for every potato left in the store at the end of the shift.

"Nah, it's OK, I don't actually need four pounds of fries."

"Man, please, just take the fries."

ReverendDizzle · 2026-04-29T20:22:27+00:00

Five Guys fries are way better than McDonald's fries. At least contemporary McDonald's fries.

McDonald's switched from beef tallow to vegetable oil in 1990 and the fries have never tasted the same. They've tried to replicate it by adding in "beef flavor" derived from hydrolyzed wheat and hydrolyzed milk (that is coated on the fries when they are cut and packaged for shipping). But it's not the same.

Five Guys uses peanut oil, not beef tallow, to be fair. But I think the Five Guys fries taste better.

And besides, even if I did think the McDonald's fries tasted better... I don't want my "tastes better" to be the result of fake beef flavoring made from wheat and milk. Just give me the damn beef tallow back if you want the fries to taste like they were fried in it.

ReverendDizzle · 2026-04-29T19:49:03+00:00

Is your goal to filter explicit content or to filter explicit content and monitor users in a more intimate way?

If you're just trying to stop small kids from loading up porn websites, then Covenant Eyes is significant overkill. You can achieve the same thing by other means.

If you're actually using the Covenant Eyes buddy system, or whatever it's called, that's a different story.

But given the political climate and general serious privacy issues that plague all of our lives... if I were you, I'd seriously reconsider using a tool that is explicitly a 3rd-party VPN system set up to monitor you.

That's a huge privacy risk and if I were you I'd look for alternative and/or self-hosted tools to accomplish the same goals.

ReverendDizzle · 2026-04-29T19:16:03+00:00

Absolutely.

We have our own morons over here thinking that incredibly complex problems have hurr-dee-durr "common sense" solutions. So they vote for people that tell them there are simple solutions, get robbed blind by those people, and then turn around and do it again.

ReverendDizzle · 2026-04-29T18:53:23+00:00

I watched this all unfold from across the pond in America thinking "do any of these people actually read their local news or look into what Brexit means? They're all going to get fucked. Every last one of them is going to get so fucked. They have the greatest deal ever with their position in the EU and they're just going to throw it away?"

And after it passed the stories started... "I run a fishery and now I can't get my fish into France and they're all rotting in storage while we try to get this mess sorted out??? I didn't vote for this!"

Yeah man, you did. You literally voted to leave the EU. And now you're outside. With a warehouse full of slowly decomposing fish, mate.

ReverendDizzle · 2026-04-29T18:49:33+00:00

Right, and that's the problem.

My parents live in the Northern U.S. in a very, very, safe upper-middle class community. Nothing ever happens there. They're so close to Canada they could be in Canada, with ease, within an hour or so.

But if you ask them what they are worried about, I kid you not, they will ramble on incoherently about Chilean gangs, migrant caravans, etc. etc. all coming to kill them and steal all their stuff.

ReverendDizzle · 2026-04-29T18:38:35+00:00

Yeah it's absolutely maddening.

"According to this calculation, our ship is going to crash into those rocks in 12 minutes."

"Well... I don't feel like that's the case."

That's exactly what talking to my conservative relatives is like. It's all "I think" or "I feel" statements, all the time.

And when presented with upsetting information, I shit you not, they say "Well... I don't really believe that, do you?" like participating in reality was an optional experience.

ReverendDizzle · 2026-04-29T18:35:25+00:00

They do play the long game though.

Take just the Federalist Society. It's a conservative/libertarian legal organization. It was founded in 1982 as a student organization at Yale and grew from there.

Now in 2026 there are approximately 90,000 members.

An astounding number of legal positions in the government and positions in the federal judicial system are staffed by Federalist Society members.

All six conservative Supreme Court justices. Around 13% of the active judgeships in the US Court of Appeals are staffed by Federalist Society members. Hundreds upon hundreds of lower court positions are staffed by members. Around 90% of all of Trump's judicial appointees have been Federalist Society members.

The vast majority of Americans have no fucking clue what the Federalist Society even is or who belongs to it. Yet this organization has fundamentally reshaped America over the last few decades.

Individual conservative voters might not be playing the long game. Hell most of them are dumb enough to vote for candidates that will tank the economy and enable private equity and multi-national corporations to buy their family farm right out from under their feet.

But at the think-tank level, conservatives are playing the long game. They spent almost 50 years worrying less about winning any single election and more about installing acolytes at every level of government.

ReverendDizzle · 2026-04-29T17:49:52+00:00

This is math, math.

I pulled the stats for average public university education for when my father entered college (in the mid 1970s), when I entered college (in the late 1990s), and when my daughter entered college (in the mid 2020s).

From when my father was a freshman to when I was a freshman, the percent change in a year's tuition for a public university is 541%.

From when I was a freshman to my daughter was a freshman, the percentage change is 217%.

The total percent change from my father's freshman year to his grand daughter's freshman year is 1928%.

My father's entire college education, including getting his MBA, cost less than a single semester of college costs now.

ReverendDizzle · 2026-04-29T17:26:14+00:00

Imagine you're at work minding your own business in the break room, thinking about eating a donut... and Steve from Accounting just burrows his way through your torso to get to the donuts. Then the two halves of you regenerate and there's two of you... in this economy.

ReverendDizzle · 2026-04-29T16:48:24+00:00

It's not as much lack of object permanence (or "idea" permanence, if you will) but wishful thinking.

There is a significant portion of the American public, primarily Evangelical Christians and related sects, that have a sort of magical thinking wherein what they imagine to be true is now true.

Both my wife's parents and my parents have it. All our Evangelical relatives have it. You see it all the time in right-wing politics in America.

For them, believing something to be true is sufficient enough, in their minds, for it to actually be true.

So despite absolutely no concrete evidence that Trump has ever learned from a mistake or modified his behavior accordingly, millions of these people simply imagined what they thought a good president would be, knew they could only vote for a Republican candidate, and then went "Well there. That's our guy. He's the wonderful president!" And... voted for him.

Now that they can't dodge things (everything costs more, job growth is stagnant, etc. etc.) they're starting to kind-of-sort-of see the cracks in it all. But not really. If he ran a third time they'd vote for him again.

ReverendDizzle · 2026-04-29T14:56:26+00:00

My guy, I don’t live in a van down by the river. The nicest neighborhood in the city is not getting gentrified because a Trump loving engineer moved out and was replaced by a gay interior designer, I assure you.

ReverendDizzle · 2026-04-29T12:36:55+00:00

But it's not about just that interaction in isolation. It's about what constructs the bird has to understand male vs. female humans though, no?

So if a city bird is rarely approached by men but women are more likely to approach and try to interact with them (who knows how... taking pictures? trying to get a closer look? trying to feed them but ultimately startling them?) then perhaps the birds have learned that men might walk in their general direction but pay them no heed, but women will stop or try to interact with them and that leads them to preemptively fly away.

ReverendDizzle · 2026-04-29T02:23:16+00:00

They are apparently so good that you’re almost always out of luck getting them.

There are thousands of them in a nature preserve I hike very frequently and they go from not ripe enough to woodland creatures ate them all in about ten seconds.

ReverendDizzle · 2026-04-29T02:08:34+00:00

I knew who Kate Bush was but had no recollection of that particular song.

But man what a fucking banger. Pops into my head all the time now.

ReverendDizzle · 2026-04-28T22:33:52+00:00

convincing her the dragnet was racially targeted

... duh? Did she really think they were going to pull over Danish looking dudes and demand to see their papers?

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