For me it’s chaotic good vs lawful good.

D&D divides character alignment along two moral axes, good vs evil, and lawful vs chaotic. Both can be neutral, and if you’re neutral in both you’re True Neutral. Heroes are good, but most are lawful good, like Superman in American comics and All Might (My Hero Academia) in Japanese ones. For chaotic good, that’s someone like Batman. I think that’s an anti hero.

Whereas villains can be lawful evil or chaotic evil, that doesn’t seem to matter as much. Darth Vader is lawful evil — he is evil, but he follows a set of laws. The Sith code or whatever. Trump is more chaotic evil, he makes his own rules and just wants to see the world burn.

I think most of us are close to true neutral. We might lean towards good but I don’t think most are pure good like a hero would be. Some of us lean toward lawful but aren’t pushing it like lawyers, judges, good cops I suppose… and some lean toward chaos (like say movie pirates) but they’re not trying to make the world burn, they just wanna watch stuff for free. The four extreme alignments are really reserved for heroes, villains — the movers and shakers.

Thank you! Subscribed to both and found a few things to sub to in the second one.

Thank you! I’m mostly treating it like “Reddit but for left leaning people” and enjoying learning the differences.

Here’s what’s wild though. At first with music streaming it was largely just American, Western, popular music. I left Spotify for Apple Music because the latter had Japanese music and I was tired of sideloading it into Spotify. Now Spotify has Japanese music too.

The Japanese music market is super weird. Anime is to Japanese music in the 2010s and 2020s what MTV was to western music in the ‘80s and ‘90s. It’s the international hit maker. So anime is bringing western eyes to all this music, not you go in YouTube and a lot of them have “YouTube edition” videos that are like half the video. Because they don’t fully trust us I guess? Sometimes the video is on Apple Music though.

I know Japanese music is more expensive than ours. I mean like the cost of a CD. So when bands would release a Japanese album, they’d add bonus tracks to help increase the value. Western bands do it too. Look up an album you know on Wikipedia and see if there’s a Japanese version with some bonus tracks.

I’m wondering how Apple Music and later Spotify more or less tamed the Japanese music market but TV and movies are so much harder.

I’m doing my part! Just joined a couple days ago. Thought I could stick with Reddit but it got too far to the right for me. They crossed a line I can’t ignore, but I like the format, so I’m here. I knew Reddit was going to be winding down soon so I didn’t put as much effort in. I’d like to start a couple communities here, whereas I wouldn’t have tried over there. I just hope the toxic people who run the communities there don’t see what I’m doing and try to invade. I mean we could use the numbers but not the toxicity — though I feel that that comes with any influx of new users.

When the kid can stand on their own. Some never learn. Sometimes it’s the parents’ fault, sometimes the kid is missing something (some mental or physical or maybe psychological deficit).

When I was a kid, there came a time when I wanted as little to do with my folks as possible. I’d be out until just past dark (“when the streetlights come on” was the time we’d start heading home) and from a pretty young age. Like 9-10. We’d go for a mile or two, explore the world around us. Ride bikes to another neighborhood or (later) get on a county bus and go to another town. We didn’t have cell phones, let alone pocket computers like kids have now.

I see kids as old as 8-10 still needing to cling to mommy’s skirt or daddy’s jeans. That could never have been us. And when they’re not clinging to their parents, they’re playing Minecraft or Fortnite or Roblox on a hand-me-down phone that doesn’t call (and probably has its serial blocked for non-payment so it just works on WiFi) or a tablet. And I’m not generalizing. I know kids like this. Kids in my family are like this. I have no control over it. I’ve tried to tell them they should be out playing. They won’t hear it. Family doesn’t care. I’m the old man shouting at clouds. I imagine those kids will be living at home at 30 being told when to take a shower and when to go to bed. It’s not just this generation, either. I have a couple aunts and an uncle (young Boomers/elder GenX) who were the same way. Minus the electronics, naturally.

Parents: Raise your kids to be independent, or they’ll be your babies forever.

Thanks I guess? Surely Mac and Linux users can be friends or at least allies against Windows. Linux comes from UNIX which macOS is based on so they’re very similar, only one is FOSS — which I suppose is the point — and the other is not. But another commonality — Macs and PCs can both run Linux.

If you like chicken, go to the corner of 53rd and 6th and find the halal cart with the longest line. Ask for the chicken and rice. Go around back and squirt half a gallon of white sauce and maybe a little red on it. Cover it up, walk about half an hour to work up an appetite, find somewhere comfortable to sit, and thank me later.

They have a chain now but nothing beats the OG cart. Even the pizza. Rose’s Pizza in Penn Station has my vote. May not be the best but it’s good! First pizza I had in NYC and while others were good, I haven’t found one I liked much more.

Absolutely. But to clarify, Apple Music pays more per stream than Spotify and others. Spotify trends to cut bigger checks to popular musicians because they have more subscribers.

Also — someone feel free to fact check this — I’ve heard that if, say, you put an album out on BandCamp but not streaming, and I buy it and sideload it into both services, and you later add it to both services, Spotify won’t pay you for my streams because I’m streaming the sideloaded copy whereas Apple will match it. I keep the metadata if it’s different but you’d get paid for the streams because it matches it.

I’m sure some are, but I stand by my assertion that I’ve met flat-earthers who were simply sceptical and pushing that particular point of view.

This was also when they were new. I’m not sure if those people represent the whole or if I just met an outlier (and online, at that, where anyone can say/claim anything). I certainly don’t mean to speak about all of them.

Insofar as humidity exists everywhere… I suppose it is.

Speaking as somebody who’s lived where humidity is stupidly annoying… no, it’s not. And those of us who have experienced real humidity love it for that reason. We love getting out of really bad humidity.

I mean, I suppose it could get humid. I’ve only visited. I also suppose any coastal area could get humid, due to proximity to the ocean. But the South ain’t playing when it comes to humidity, and that’s what I meant.

Yep. The kids born in the late 80s/early 90s were my little buddies, kids, who kids my age, would look after. Just like the kids born in the late 60s/early 70s would look after us. But now, I work with people that age, and we’re all just old. Like you’re still young in your 20s, you hit 30 it starts to be over for you as far as doing young people stuff. I have friends in their 30s, 40s, and 50s and I identify with all of them age-wise. 60-65 and up I respect but I think of them as “older and wiser.” Younger people (20s) seem like they’re too young to relate to. We’re cool, but they’re a generation apart.

As far as generations go, I’m technically GenX, but I identify with most of GenX and older Millennials. I feel like we had a lot of the same experiences. I don’t really buy into generational divides anyway. They’re fine if you’re in the middle. When you get closer to the edge and start mashing the names together, I feel like you’re admitting the groups are not that distinct after all.

I switched to Mac after my old Asus laptop went out. I figure why bother with a PC laptop, it’s not gonna game and let’s see what the fuss is about. Love my MacBook Air. So then our desktop dies and I give my wife 3 options. A Mac, a cheaper PC, and a more expensive PC. She’s Android, figured she’d want to stick with Windows, but she picked the Mac! So happy. I mostly game on Switch and Xbox these days so that’s fine.

I keep feeling like I left Windows at the right time.

A little, but none of us are young anymore. ‘79 here. Love being able to claim the 70s though I don’t remember them.

I like Quentin Tarantino but mostly in theory. He makes classic Hollywood type movies because that is what he loves. I don’t often agree with him though. Like others, I think Pulp Fiction is his best work. It’s the most fun and that’s important to me. It also stars people I like, and that shouldn’t matter, but it does.

Never lived there but I’ve visited CT. Went to a movie with my wife. The first Narnia film, so it was like 3 hours long? It was nice when we went in. It was nice when we left. However, during the film there was a blizzard, seemed like it dropped snow a foot deep! That being said, the city had cleared all the roads. They know how to deal with the snow. Of course when you get to side streets it’s a bit dicey, but the main roads? Like to our hotel? Clear as you like. The roads are twisty and windy up there, and people drive crazy — well, they drive appropriate to the state of the roads, to be fair — and I never felt unsafe despite being unaccustomed to driving in snow.

Beautiful area. Summers get hot, winters get cold. You gotta plan for each. But it’s nice and not too humid.

I’m using Voyager. I don’t really care if it doesn’t get the Liquid Ass interface. When I was still on Reddit, I was testing an app (Lander) that used it. It looked so bad on iOS 18, but on the 26 beta, it looked a little better. Very crash happy though.

(I like Liquid Glass, but I’m not gonna use that name. I say “Liquid Ass” with nothing but love. It looks great to me!)

Anyway, I like how it looks. Like how Apollo used to.

Anyone who uses something different, why? What’s it got over Voyager? Android and iOS answers valid — I have an iPhone 16 Pro Max, and a Galaxy S10. The -E version with only two cameras and the side mounted fingerprint reader/track pad. Currently rocking Voyager on both. But always open to change!

Voyager is free but it has tips, so there are IAPs for that.

I think it’s based on Apollo source?

What’s cool is it’s also on Android (I have one of each). Apollo was never on Android. And it’s neat, being on Android and you open Voyager and you’re using an iOS-looking app in Android. It’s not the first. I also have Apple Music on both of them, and yeah, that’s iOS design language through and through. Some Google apps are Android-themed on iOS, and that’s fine… for the people who use them. I really don’t, except Gmail.

Yeah, I don’t know why this is a debate. LGBTQ+ ally my whole life, though I’m cis/straight myself.

I almost get it. Like the fear that you hook up with a girl and she has boy parts. It’s not really reasonable but it’s a common male fear, I guess. Like she’s gonna be so convincingly female, so perfectly female presenting but she hasn’t had the bottom surgery. I think that’s kind of a fantasy, because pass as the sex a trans person feels isn’t as easy as cisgendered people think it is. I have trans (MTF) friends, and they do not pass well. Oh, I fully accept that they are women; what I don’t do is assume I’m entitled to every female body, or for the female bodies I have access to, to fit into my potentially narrow view (it’s not narrow, but if it were) of what makes a woman attractive. At the end of the day, she’s a person and her body is what it is, take her — as a complete person — or don’t, but don’t waste her time and definitely don’t think you can shame her for it. And it absolutely don’t mean she’s any less a woman. That, I do feel strongly about.

Also, I’ve known a couple tomboys, girls I grew up around who weren’t conventionally pretty, who liked to play and fight with the boys (and they’d kick your ass, too), and the older adults said “oh yeah that’s a baby butch right there” and later, when trans people became more visible to us (I’d say late 90s early 00s), the assumption that she’s gonna transition. Going on like 30 years later, they’re still girls and they’re still straight (and the one I’m thinking of, definitely wears the pants in the relationship, her guys tend to be kinda meek) but that doesn’t mean she’s gay or trans. Oh, plenty of LGBTQ+ in the family, but you can’t say because a girl doesn’t like pink and doesn’t like dresses that she’s lesbian or trans. It doesn’t work that way. But as her peer, as her playmate, and often as one whose ass she’d kick, I didn’t care. I love her for the person she is, not for the box society puts her in, or checks for her. And if she did bring home a girlfriend, or if she did tell me she never felt like a girl and was going to transition… my sister (not really but like a sister to me) would be my brother or whatever and that would be okay with me, whatever the case, and I’d have their back regardless.