This is the answer.

Fan-made trailers of existing media can be really interesting, especially when they put a very different take on the presentation.

Example: Star Trek the Motion Picture in a more modern style makes that movie seem amazing.

Or Alien as a comedy movie

Games getting bigger and bigger in gigabytes, but still hampered by slow optical disks and slow hard drives. It was good tat the time, but I have more fondness for the cartridges which came before, whose immediacy felt like magic.

Burning DVDs was really a thing there for a hot minute. I remember buying them in big spindles of 50 at a time, and burning at least two or three a week.

Back then I already had my first ever USB flash drive, but they were still very expensive and small - 128MB was great for some documents, but no good for large files. And my PC’s hard drive was still only about 120GB or something.

DVDs were in their element. 4.7GBs of storage, and super cheap. I was using them to back up data and clear apace on my hard drive, and I was loading them up with content for friends, where I could just take a disc over their house and leave it there for them.

Then flash drives got bigger, and hard drives got bigger too, and that sweet spot the DVD occupied got squashed from both sides until poof, in just a few short years the age of the DVD was over.

VCRs.

Spent my childhood merrily taping things off the TV, and thought it was the best thing ever. i love those nostalgic whirring and clicking sounds as the tape loads.

But digital media is just the best, and tapes can stay in the past where they belong.

This can sometimes be because the lyrics of a song have different licencing considerations to the song itself, and they are legally not entitled to put the lyrics as subtitles.

No such problems for fansub groups! :)

Japan is like this too, and I loved to see that when I was living there.

The bus drivers often wear nice uniforms and white gloves, and clearly take a lot of care in their appearance and work. And people give them respect.

I wish it was like that everywhere, because being able to have pride in what you do and be respected for it is such an important thing that everyone deserves to have - regardless of what your job is.

I feel trypophobia quite strongly with some triggers, even things like budding plants pushing through the ground can make my akin crawl. But for some reason crumpets are okay.

I guess my brain just sees the crumpet texture as being like a macro bread texture, which is okay because it’s kinda bready.

There are some ways in which the newer shows like Discovery are realistic, but there are also ways in which they are stupid.

For example, two federation officers in a life or death situation where they have two minutes to solve an urgent crisis, and they decide to spend 60 seconds of that having an emotional heart-to-heart.

If that was in TNG, they’d have got the job done like professionals, and then had the friends chat later in ten forward. Because that’s how people with jobs get their jobs done.

TNG era was quite cheesy in some ways, but it kept characters real in that they always acted appropriately for their role and position, not just like a bunch of emotional oddballs who get to be in charge of a spaceship for some reason.

One thing that works is finding ways to make achieving small tasks part of your routine. I have a to-do list and in my lunch break at work I often pick off one or two things and decide okay, that’s what I’ll do when I get home. And so that way the selecting of the tasks and the doing of the tasks are things that have their own specific times and the decision is already made.

What also works is to create some external motivation.

I might not feel like cleaning the house, for example, but if I have friends coming over then I’ll enthusiastically clean everything because I want it to be nice for them.

And so sometimes I intentionally weaponise that by inviting a friend over just to give myself that extrinsic motivation.

Not what you had in mind when you said ‘fake’, but how about an AI-generated mushroom identification book that landed people in hospital for eating poisonous stuff the book said was safe

This is it for me too. I’m not going to allow companies to monetise me or my data any more than the absolute minimum I have to.

One thing I try hard at is making sure that I never have to see a single advert in my own home. I don’t have TV, I don’t watch any streaming services if they have ads, and I adblock everything. I don’t care how good a product is, how cheap or free, if it has advertisements I’m out.

To me it’s about having sufficient self-respect to not let companies live in my head rent-free.

Yeah but there’s clunky in the way where its big but still a single unit as designed and intended, and clunky when its got some extra growth hanging off the back of it like some technological parasite.

Of course, my advice is only that, and you should choose the approach that works best for you. But advice is why you came here right :)

I have a portable monitor that I’m pretty pleased with.

It has a magnetic cover that goes over the screen to keep it safe, and that same cover folds and goes on the back to act as a stand when it’s in use. Power and video are via the same USB-C cable.

Nice and slim and stays in my bag most of the time but when I want a second screen I can whip it out in two secs.

A screen that attaches to the laptop sounds convenient initially, but I feel like in practice it would be a hindrance and make your laptop clunky and bulky.

I had similar thoughts when I first discovered Pop!_OS. Just the name alone gave me vibes of some Fisher-Price toy operating system like it was meant for children, all cringe happy-smiley.

But I honestly suggest you get over your aversion to the name, and give it a try. It’s actually one of the most pleasant desktop experiences I’ve had with Linux, and it’s especially a treat on bare metal. Looks great, runs great and everything just works, including steam gaming.

Haha yeah.

Honestly though, while I’d certainly look through my photos when I was bored on the train (having no Internet on phones then of course) that was never the intent of how I expected those photos to be viewed.

I’d regularly transfer all the photos to my PC and that’s what I considered the “real” way to look at them, and email them from there to other people.

Cared about:

• Camera quality
• Audio playback (Can it do MP3 ringtones?)
• Looks and size (more important than anything else!)

Didn’t care about:

• Screen resolution
• Processor specs
• Onboard memory (because the assumption was all those photos and videos were going on an SD card)

His content is really good. A lot of his audience is still people from the old days who basically grew up watching ethoslab, and his style as a creator has changed a little too as he’s grown up with them.

He’s definitely still a youtuber whose uploads I look out for. Very comfortable content that makes me feel super chill.

Yes - by most definitions. It’s powered by user-generated content and is based on interaction between users through engagement with that content, which is voted and scored.

There is a difference which I personally feel makes reddit less harmful than other social media, however, which is the algorithm - or lack of it.

In most social media, the algorithm exists to continually serve people the exact content they engage with in a constant feed, which is IMO the most socially damaging part of social media because it creates endless doomscrolling, toxic echo chambers, promotion of sponsored content, and a whole raft of psychological problems in users.

The Lemmy homefeed is more organic, and scrolling through ‘all’ you see content genuinely from everywhere, in a less curated way based on upvotes, not individual algorithmic tailoring. And that’s maybe not as “engaging” but it’s far less damaging.

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Sure, I was there then. I was on Facebook right in the beginning, when you needed a university email address to even sign up.

So that’s true, but it’s also true to say that early Facebook wasn’t the same as modern Facebook. Early Facebook was - as the name suggested, a place to connect with friends, share pictures and plan events. You’d probably check it once a day to see what was happening, but that was it. And your home feed would be a direct and unfiltered view of what all your friends posted, in the order they posted it, without bias. And you could easily catch up on everything that had happened and then you were finished.

It’s the birth of the algorithm and infinitely scrollable tailored content feeds that really defines what social media has become.

This and mobile Internet have really gone hand-in-hand. The algorithm has made us want to be scrolling all the time, and mobile Internet has made it possible .