Oh wow, that’s a huge monthly increase. Thanks for explaining the pricing system.

Not a big surprise on the Huffman Shitshow. A lot of subs over there are insanely toxic. But yeah, a ban for that? That’s crazy.

I didn’t even know RuneScape had a subscription! I think I briefly played it about 15 years ago. Good game, I just don’t have the time to play it, unfortunately. I assume you play? What’s the community like over there?

I just looked up their pricing and it makes sense for them to have an optional subscription. $14 a month is in line with other similar games (e.g. wow). Would be nice if they had a couple of tiers of subscription. Maybe a $7 and a $14. But that might complicate things. How much can you do on the free mode?

I was looking into something similar recently, and asked around on Lemmy. The general consensus I heard was that a Mini PC weren’t ideal, mostly I think due to the fact that they aren’t designed purely for streaming.

One think someone said piqued my interest, and I might try this. They recommended buying a cheap, Android TV compatible streaming box (like an Onn brand one), and side-loading an open source (and ad-free) launcher onto it.

I found this thread over on the Huffman Shitshow that had some good instructions.

upliftingnews

…Not if you’re a Pakistani cricket fan! 😆

I don’t have a direct answer to your question. But I advise caution in putting your creative works online in the way you are planning. Between people plagiarizing it (either word for word or just the broader concepts) and AIs doing similar things, you could find that your work gets stolen.

Self-publishing might at least give you a bit of inherent copyright protection. Then at least you will have an ISBN associated to it, and you can always host your stories somewhere (WordPress, Medium, etc.).

If you want to self-publish your stories a free service like Smash Words would work.

You are correct. But that doesn’t change the fact that if he wins environmental regulations will go out the window.

Hail Fludra!

This sounds like my old place, but much worse.

We used to have laptops we had to lock in a cabinet (yeah, one of those cabinets with a really puny lock that’s easy to pick). And we had to log into n old mainframe system that had numerous environment instances which each required a unique password that had to be changed every 90 days.

We (the software devs) basically rebelled on the laptop situation and insisted they find a better solution. Thankfully they changed policy and of allowed the laptops to be locked into our docking stations, which in turn were locked to our desks.

As for the mainframe system credential management, I tried using a standard third party password manager, but a) it wasn’t a good fit for the credentials, and b) the sys admins or security team forcibly uninstalled it because it wasn’t sanctioned software (even though it was a well-respected and actively maintained one). And our security group refused to go out and find one.

So being a dev, I wrote my own desktop password manager for the mainframe credentials. It was decently secure, but nowhere near as secure as a retail password manager. But it fit the quirks of the mainframe credentials requirements. And after my colleagues and manager did a code review of it, it was considered internal software, and thus fit for use.

As I was leaving they were in the process of removing all our local admin rights (without a clear path on how to accommodate for us developers debugging code - fun times ahead!).

But all of those annoyances pale in comparison to the shit you are having to deal with! Holy hell, that sounds like pure misery! I’m sorry.

It’s wild to think that a few hundred thousand years from now (probably sooner than that) everything about humanity will be totally gone. Even the most famous humans to have ever lived will have been lost im the mists of time.

All our history, everything we’ve ever done as a species, even our most fundamental presence in they universe will almost certainly be gone.

And within half a billion years we probably won’t even be seen as fossils.

But even then, a few pieces of our burned-out technology that we pushed out of the a Solar system will still exist.

I’m getting a very familiar vibe from those cats…

What a good dude.

Or the entire timer industry.

Or as some call it: Big Wood.

I posted a transcription of it to another comment here. But I’m not seeing it on refresh. So here’s a link to my comment. Hope it helps.

https://lemmy.world/comment/7068731

I got it to come up on the third or fourth attempt (after the same rate limit errors your were seeing). Even then it was not the easiest to read because that social network is a horrible choice to use for a longer story/article.

But it is an interesting read.

Below is my transcription of the dozen+ posts by the guy (who I’ve also credited), minus all the meme gifs he included.

Latif Nasser @latifnasser

Last January, I noticed something peculiar in my 2yo’s bedroom that - after a year of obsessive reporting - led me to a profound cosmic revelation about what’s even possible in our universe.

So about a year ago, I was putting my little guy to bed in his crib and I noticed a strange detail on the solar system poster up on his wall

[Photo of a kid-friendly infographic poster of the solar system]

Venus had a moon called Zoozve. Huh, I thought. Never heard of that.

Put the kid to bed, went back to my room and googled “Does Venus have a moon?” First hit was from NASA: “Venus has no moons.” Weird

Then I googled “Zoozve” and got no results, literally zero results in English. Only results were in Czech and they were about zoos. Not what I was looking for.

I called a friend (@lizlandau) who has worked with NASA for a decade and she confirmed: Venus is completely moonless. And she had definitely never heard of Zoozve.

This started to bug me: why make up a moon on a kids’ poster? And why call it Zoozve?! (Best guess: it was a prank and Zoozve was the illustrator’s dog’s name.)

So I called the illustrator, a Brit named Alex Foster. (He does have a dog, but it’s named Winnie.) He didn’t know much about astronomy but he swore he didn’t make it up. He said he found it on a big list of all the moons online. I believed him, but couldn’t find the list.

Around that time, I got a text from Liz at NASA: “Wait Latif I think I figured it out!!!”

It wasn’t ZOOZVE, it was 2002-VE, which is an actual object near Venus. The illustrator Alex confirmed that he probably misread his own writing. Aha! 2002VE! Okay so what IS 2002VE??

2002-VE68 (its technical designation) is a giant rock. Imagine a gray pockmarked potato the size of the Eiffel Tower. (We don’t have pics of it, but this one is similar.)

But the weirder and harder question: is Zoozve (gonna just keep calling it Zoozve) a moon of Venus or not?

So I tracked down the person who discovered it: Brian Skiff at Lowell Observatory in Arizona.

He has actually discovered so many asteroids that when I talked to him, he had no idea what I was talking about, genuinely didn’t remember this one.

He said that he found it as part of the LONEOS project, an industrial-scale asteroid scavenger hunt that Congress funded during the 90s/00s when everyone was obsessed with what would happen if one hit earth. Sometimes they discovered hundreds of asteroids in a single night.

Once Skiff realized Zoozve wasn’t a threat, he stopped tracking it. BUT I found 2 astronomers who kept looking: Seppo Mikkola in Finland & Paul Wiegert in Canada.

They told me that Zoozve is NOT a moon of Venus. But it’s also NOT NOT a moon of Venus. It’s both and neither. WTH?

Turns out basically everything in our solar system orbits ONE thing. Earth orbits the Sun. The Moon orbits the Earth. Etc. If you are a body in the solar system, you hula hoop one bigger thing. That’s what you do … Except for Zoozve.

Zoozve orbits one thing: the sun. It spends all day every day doing that. BUT Venus also has a teeny gravitational toehold on it such that it ALSO ORBITS VENUS AT THE SAME TIME.

It’s a whole new category of thing. Something that orbits a star and a planet at once. Something that is not a moon, but also not not a moon.

They call it … a quasi-moon.

Astronomers had been speculating that such an object could exist for 100+ years, but this was the first time anyone saw one … not only in our solar system but in the entire universe!

But since they found Zoozve they’ve been finding all sorts of other quasi-moons (aka co-orbital objects) all over the solar system. They ring around the sun, but then seem to do weird patterns around their closest planet

Some (called Trojans) stay in one spot ahead of or behind the planet, like a secret service agent. Some do horseshoes: go mostly around a planet but then turn around and go back the other way. My favorites do a comma shape, just wiggling back&forth. Those are called tadpoles.

And by the way, Earth even has at least seven different quasi moons dancing around us right now!!! The most recent one was discovered in 2023!!

Also, quasi-moons can switch planets! We (Earth) were probably the ones who - 7,000 yrs ago - flung Zoozve over to Venus in the first place. Zoozve is going to leave Venus a few millennia from now, but no one knows where it will go next.

Anyway, I think this is so cool because everything else on the solar system map is so regular and orderly, but not quasi-moons! It’s like we discovered a bunch of new weirdos who seem to be dancing to the beat of their own drum.

Contrary to the posters, we don’t live in a big clockwork, we live in a dance club, and while some of us are doing the same old waltz with our same old moon, there are bodies out there do-si-do-ing their way all over the solar system.

How inspiring is it that we are alive at a time when we are just discovering this new class of paradoxical and promiscuous rock stars like Zoozve that remind us how weird and temporary and connected everything in the universe is. And how much we still don’t know.

One last thing. If you want to hear more about this strange object, check out the latest episode of Radiolab. Tons more there I haven’t mentioned here. radiolab.org/podcast/zoozve

Including my detailed plan to officially rename 2002-VE68 to “ZOOZVE” to immortalize the typo and thus retroactively make the poster in my kid’s room correct! This plan falls into the category of so-crazy-it-just-might-work. And we will know the answer VERY soon. END OF THREAD.

Great article about a very sad situation. But glad steps are being taken to try to fix it for those affected.

Maybe it’s just me, but these two gals don’t look like identical twins. Sisters? Definitely. But some of their facial features are different enough that you can easily tell them assist from each other. And I don’t think it’s just down to lighting or makeup.

I have a love-hate relationship with David Lynch’s adaptation.

I first saw it when I was about 13 on TV, dubbed in French with no English subtitles. So I barely understood a word of the dialogue. But the pure epicness shone through those challenges and I vowed to see the original English version.

When I saw the original English version a couple of years later it was everything I hoped it would be, and then some. It was amazing.

Then a few years after that I read Herbert’s novel, and that movie was forever tarnished. Reading the meticulous way he forged the plot really shone a light on the movie’s plot shortcomings that I had been ignoring.

So now I see a deeply flawed movie, but also one that is still epic and beautiful and revolutionary to the industry. They really should have made it as a real miniseries from the beginning, so they could give it space to breathe. Trying to cram that incredibly dense novel into just two or three hours on the silver screen was doomed to fail.

Mouse: “Damn it, this messy human is driving me crazy! It’s bad enough he keeps pulling out my giant metal ornaments. But why can’t he at least tidy up after himself?!”

Yeah I agree with you. A second reboot of BSG is just unnecessary. The first reboot was almost perfect (except for some of the subplot conclusions, which they botched).

And yes, there are so many other good intellectual properties out there. But not just ones they already own, but many other ones where a screen adaptation hasn’t yet been attempted. For example Gateway, and Hyperion. Both of those were planned by someone but they’ve never materialized. And there’s also William Gibson’s entire Sprawl series, which would be very cool to see on a screen.

BSG (the 2003 remake) was amazing. So much better than the original version. And it really ushered in a new era of more gritty, darker science fiction on television. My only complaint with it was that they largely botched the ending (especially the whole Starbuck thing. But I won’t elaborate on that as it is spoiler-heavy).

^ This person right here knows their sci-fi. A lot of good recommendations here.

Special shout-out on Dark Matter. I found the first episode almost unwatchable, but that was because I went into it with the wrong attitude. If you don’t take it to seriously it’s a really fun show (as I discovered when I gave it a second chance). And it just gets better and better. Such a shame it was cancelled too soon (though that seems to go for about 95% of science-fiction TV shows!).

Lexx is fun too, just in a really weird and raunchy way.