A note about surge protectors: Make sure they are actually surge protectors and not just “power strips” that Amazon has mixed into the search results. Power strips are easy to find in many varieties, made by any number of fly-by-night companies; they’ll do nothing to help protect your stuff from power surges. Legitimate surge protectors from reputable companies are much less common. Also, they don’t last forever. An older surge protector may still work as a power strip, but over time they may become much less effective as surge protectors.

Wait till they hear about the people farming, harvesting, and shipping the vegetables.

Have you never actually seen a crosswalk before? Because I’m having trouble figuring out which part of these rainbow flag colored crosswalks makes them look any less like a crosswalk or makes them less visible or recognizable in any way. Literally the only other pavement marking that comes anywhere near looking like or being placed in the same way on a road is a stop bar. And guess what, car drivers routinely mistake the plain crosswalks for stop bars, thereby blocking the crosswalk. Making the claim that painting a pedestrian crosswalk in bright colors somehow makes them less visible or recognizable has got to be the dumbest argument I’ve heard this week.

I’m in awe of a stomach so delicate it can be turned by an animated stick figure physics diagram.

A fucking Members Only pizza.

It’ll destroy all your painstakingly crafted and curated ID3 tags much faster than Picard. I’m not salty or anything. Anyway, the lesson for me was that music is simply too complicated from a library perspective to trust to highly-automated tools like beets. Picard kind of encourages you to go directory by directory and release by release, and that is a good thing. These days so are does most of the library stuff for newly added things, but I usually end up fixing it all basic to my standard with Picard later.

There was a scene in Braveheart we had to skip when we watched it in middle school. I’m sure many convinced their families to rent Braveheart from Blockbuster for “homework” later. At this point, I don’t even remember what the scene was. Maybe there was a penis? Probably it was just butts or boobs. The corpses and violence were of little concern.

There was that one time we watched a particular version of Romeo and Juliet and the teacher was delightfully inept at skipping scenes. That girl was barely older than most of us.

I have cable. It doesn’t really work like that anymore. I used to be able to click through ALL the basic cable channels, catching a frame or two of every single channel, with zero delay between channels, all within like under a minute. These days every channel change or menu selection has a built-in delay of at least a second or two. Channel surfing just doesn’t vibe the same anymore. That form of TV is mostly if not entirely dead.

Plexamp has gotten better lately. It can save your progress on audiobooks now. It’s a per library feature, so I have one library of music (that does not save progress) and one for audiobooks (that does save progress). I used to have trouble with some audiobook formats (M4Bs needed to be converted (really just renamed) to mp4s, but that wasn’t necessary for the last few I loaded. Plex still has a little trouble with standards around multiple authors and different productions (and different readers) of a single book, but that’s more of an ID3 tag problem and is resolved if you’re consistent in normalizing the tags on your library. I’ve also used the syncing features a bunch for offline time (like on a plane or on long trips). For a large library, I see syncing offline files as a necessary feature.

And before the Jellyfin fanboys chime in, if Jellyfin could match these audio and syncing features (and be easier to setup for access outside my LAN and sharing with family), I jump ship in a heartbeat.

Obviously Miles Davis is the only answer, but only while watching Elevator to the Gallows because he composed and performed the soundtrack. Otherwise I just listen to the thing I’m watching.

“pretty easy” is a bit of a stretch

Why not keep it simpler with one commandment:

Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.

I was just pointing to the simplest answer I had, which didn’t rely on a bunch of circumstantial and vague hunches. Since you take issue with that, I guess I’ll rant a bit.

Fake photos have been a thing as long a photos have been. Very little has changed in that regard. The various tips and tricks to spot AI fakes will become obsolete a lot faster than the other critical thinking skills needed to decipher fact from fiction in any other medium: news articles, YouTube videos, social media, etc. This will be especially true as the tools used to make these images will evolve. One of those critical thinking skills is tracing a claim, especially a repeated claim, back to it’s source. Another is looking at the timeline of the spread of the meme. These both involve gathering actual evidence and work for a variety of mediums. This is why so many lamented the death of rigorous independent journalism. Suddenly the news becomes so much more trouble to trust and to verify. AI is here just a fungus feeding off the corpse of journalism in the dense jungle of the death of critical thinking in the news consuming public.

Also, I’m pretty sure I saw this pic being meme long before AI images were a thing.

He wasn’t “walking around in public”. He was a gardener, walking around with gardening tools, gardening. I have one of those tools. It’s fucking amazing at digging small precise holes under difficult conditions, but as a weapon it wouldn’t be any more dangerous than any of my other tools. It’s absolutely not a knife. It’s just a narrow trowel with edges necessary to cut through roots. Most gardening tools have a sharp edge somewhere. Context fucking matters. And the fantasy your spinning about this scenario is just more pathetic nanny state authoritarian nonsense.

“Boring straight lines” as you put it are also a way for the poorest land owners to describe, subdivide, buy, and sell property using simple easy to understand language, often without even the need for a surveyor or a lawyer to get involved. Curved boundary lines are a clear indicator of commercial development at the higher end of that spectrum. Ordinary folks are not going to have the necessary training to do anything to directly subdivide property described in that way without involving lawyers and surveyors.

Moreover, you often can’t sell a property without ingress and egress access to some public right of way. The same rules for simplicity of geometry apply to those right of ways too. Curves are vague and require complex legalese to describe in words. It also wasn’t too long ago that the precision of survey tools just did not exist to accurately describe parcels as anything but straight line distances with sometimes VERY vague information about orientation. Only more recent subdivisions (often much less than about 100 years old) include curves described with any decent level of precision. When they do describe curves on older documents it’s almost always in reference to large curves along existing structures (like railroads) and the actual geometry of that curve is not fully defined.

What we see here is only tangentially related to tourism in that it is directly related to the entire business of land development, which includes everything else.

Ask a surveyor with experience in Mexico.

It looks like most of the minor streets are mostly parallel with or perpendicular to the major road to the north and the rest are aligned along the cardinal directions: north & south, east & west. Lots of the properties and their respective drainage and road right of ways were probably apportioned to align with whatever the most significant roadway or canal was in place at the time. I can see the being portioned off using simple legal language like you can buy the north 50 meters of the south 300 meters relative to “this road” and the east 50 meters of the west 200 meters relative to “this canal”. You can accurately divide an area this way without any need to define a grid north, a proper grid coordinate system, and very basic survey tools.

I’d guess that the other streets oriented to the cardinal directions came later as survey tools and practices advanced or some other change in the way municipalities regulate. For example, in the U.S. you see most gridded streets and lots in older areas, relative to sections townships and ranges, but in new platted developments constantly curving streets are all the rage.

Whatever the cause, you are seeing the history of land development as the area develops it’s customs around land development.

Landru?

DO NOT OBEY LANDRU.

Why not both?

I suggested Plex because it syncs local copies on a per device setting so you can stream and sync pretty seamlessly. I haven’t copied a file around except for making backups for nearly a decade now. It does audiobooks with saved progress inside the files too.