u/jackfaire

I used to watch this show with my daughter when she was growing up and I was scrolling saw it and a thought exploded into my mind.

The family wizarding competition applies to every family not just those where one of the parents is a mortal. At least in Jerry's family the kids are born and raised in the mortal world. Any one of his kids that doesn't win the competition will still have a reasonably good life in a world they know and love.

Full Wizard Families are having kids that have to go from a Wizard's life to a mortal's life with possibly no experience of what that's like effectively becoming a stranger in a strange land.

Every family that has more than one kid is condemning their other kids to losing not just their magic but all their friends, family and community.

Is a horribly phrased question. I don't like Tic Tac Toe at 45. It sucks as a game now but no it didn't suck when I was 5 just because playing it as a middle aged adult sucks.

Can we just say "What did you like then that you don't like now?" Because that's honest. Something doesn't suck now just because you don't like it now.

I will not get to watch the first episode when it drops this week as my counterpart is going on vacation so I'm covering his shifts. I've decided to wait until the second week to watch both episodes after I get off my last shift and roll into my weekend.

It's also after my payday I want to do some sort of solo dinner party.

Anyone have good idea for foods that fit the Lanterns theme?

I've been living paycheck to paycheck for 20 years. During that time I would try to be social. I went to a march for rights. I've hung out at places that don't cost money. Gone to parties at people's houses but most friendships have dried up as I couldn't afford to go places that cost money.

My best friend is the only one that's consistently stayed in my life during that time. A year and a half ago he let me start renting my current bedroom from him which lowered my expenses by a lot. I bought all new furniture and moved in.

As of January I'll have the furniture paid off and every paycheck I'll have money just sitting in my account able to be used to go out and have a life.

I don't know how. I don't know what to go do outside of my house that isn't just go to a library or where to go meet people. I have some friends at work that are going to start including me when they all get together as a group.

I hat that I've been in survival mode for so long that coming out of it feels like a mess of "Well what do I do"

If a show is deep, complex, and should sit with you for a week as you let it percolate in your brain it gets a whole season dropped in one go.

If a show is sillier and fun great for binge watching the whole thing it's one episode at a time.

This is so backwards!!!

Can we just normalize asking "What X do you not like?" I do understand the hype. Other people have different tastes than me it's not that complicated. If you want to know what food, movie, drink, etc. I don't like? Just ask. Why other people like a thing I don't isn't a cosmic mystery.

I get it you don't want it. You're upset that the studio is putting money into this project and not whatever list of fan wants you have. But then just say "I don't want this" enough of this speaking for everyone BS it's just annoying and floods the conversation area with so much negativity about the thing no one that likes it feels free to discuss it.

I love Marc Cohn. I have rarely run into a peer who even knows who he is. I've never run into people younger than me that knows who he is.

When I was in high school after my grandmother had passed my dad turned her apartment over our garage into his home office. I would go up there after school and just sit on the couch. He'd be listening to music while working.

Marc Cohn was a frequent listen. I still listen to Cohn to this day.

There are other artists I got from my dad like Tom Petty but he's pretty well known amongst my peers so I would have found out about him eventually anyway.

Marc Cohn I never would have known about without my dad.

Anyone else? A band, singer, etc. that you only know about because your mom or dad introduced you?

If I live in a place where there's a regular time lawn work is done and it's the same time for years no one would respect me storming out of my house to yell at them for doing it.

Rather I would be expected to get ear plugs, put in soundproofing, etc.

So why isn't that expected of day walkers? Twice I've had a person call a client and scream about the lawn care company their community uses starting their work at 7. According to this person it's been starting at 7 for literal years. (Which is in keeping with the local ordinances in their area according to them)

If I were to complain about "Why do they have to do this at 10AM when I'm trying to go sleep" everyone would tell me "Get better ear plugs, put in better soundproofing, etc" They'd suggest things I myself could do to stop dealing with the noise. Good suggestions.

Yet if one were to suggest to a day walker "Well you could try..." they would lose their cool and object to the idea they have to do anything.

Why?

When I was 25 my life got very small. I took a low paying office job. Between that, weekends with my daughter and long commutes I didn't have much of a life. Sometimes friends would come over but most of my free time was spent reading webcomics. These were the only things I could afford.

I couldn't get TV in my home neither cable (couldn't afford) nor broadcast TV seemed to work. So I found webcomics a free form of entertainment and those writers/artists and their characters became my world.

As many of my friends started abandoning me for not having time nor money to go be out in the world my world got smaller still. Then I met my best friend who is still my friend all these years later. He always understood the smallness of my life and ours became a friendship of hang out when we could but mostly via text.

When he was going up to the beach and driving past my place he invited me to go along. When I was turning 44 and officially becoming older than my dad had ever been he sat with me at his house while we watched The Batman.

When I needed a place to live he rented me a room for far less than anyone else would. I'm in a good place now. My daughter's an adult we talk on the phone every week. My finances are improving my life is getting better.

But I felt like revisiting old friends. I went back to some of the webcomics that kept me going. Some the creators have died their comics vanished in the ether. One had their comic turned into a movie that I enjoyed.

Others ended their comics and moved on with their lives. Others still update either regularly or infrequently. Other peoples 20s and 30s were full of clubbing, going out on dates, restaurants, parties and the like.

Mine were webcomics and other stories I could disappear into the only life I could afford with moments of real world adventures but mostly fictional. I'm sad that some of the writers are gone. I'm sad that some of the comics are gone. I know some of the people moved onto other projects that they can make more money with than free comics thrown out into the internet.

I posted this in this group because all of you are around my age. Some of you bought cars, got married and then houses. I never did the house thing but I think beat most of you to marriage and divorce. And being a dad.

I guess I see a lot of the lives I often wish I'd lived but know that I can't be the only one that found themselves in a quieter life than I planned. This is meant to be celebration of the quieter lives some of us have lived. Where we might have felt like much of our time has been spent spectating on others lives.

But we're here too and our adventures, or I suppose lack thereof, matter too. The thing I realized looking back at Webcomics I loved is that even when I felt all alone I was really part of a bigger community of people enjoying the work of people often around our age putting their work out there for people like me to have a lifeline they'll never know they gave me.

Sorry for the rambling.

There is a glitch where the game on UbiSoft Connect tries to connect to a dead server causing stuttering. The only thing that stops it is having my internet entirely off.

Even getting UbiSoft Connect to run in offline mode doesn't stop it as it still tries to make the connection with the internet on.

There is a steam version of the game and Steam has a native offline mode that doesn't require tricking it into not seeing the internet. Does that work at stopping the stuttering glitch?

Honestly this one's more silly than serious but I've loved The Proclaimers for years. I've also loved David Tennant for years.

But now when I mention the former anyone that knows he's my favorite doctor nods knowingly and all "Because Tennant loves them"

No. Those two things were independent of each other. We just coincidentally love the same band. It's not because I love him dangnabbit!

My new TV is a smart TV but the Plex App it has access too won't grant access to my personal media server. My TV doubles as a monitor for my computer that is also my Plex server so in theory I could just run it that way but then there's no convenient way to control it when I'm sitting in my comfortable chair for viewing.

I'm contemplating buying a FireStick but with my TV already being a smart TV that feels redundant.

Does anyone else have any ideas?

ETA -

I forgot I had a back up wireless keyboard and mouse as when I got this computer it came with new ones. And turns out you can change the Plex interface resolution without having to change the computer's resolution so I can clearly see everything from my other chair which is further back.

Thank you all for the suggestions

Not sure how to phrase in title. But basically when someone changes their voicemail "Hi I'll be out of the office until January 20th please leave a message"

But then never changes it back. I had one person tonight that's been their message since 2024. It's a very minor annoyance but it just irks me.

I can discuss Sherlock Holmes and no one thinks I'm talking shit about Benedict Cumberbatch, RDJ, or Jeremy Brett.

But if I discuss Dawson Leery that role is forever tied to James Van Der Beek. Doesn't matter that I know he's not that character. That I don't think of him as that character and that when I'm discussing the character I'm literally only talking about the character.

I can't do so without evoking the image of James.

Now that the actor who brought the character to life has passed it feels almost disrespectful if I discuss the character in a negative way just because odds are no one will ever replay that character while plenty of other characters will have more faces than The Doctor.

I don't like that. I never thought of the character and actor as interchangeable when he was alive but now my brain worries others might.

When I was a kid my dad was a software something I don't remember the exact title. He spent most of my childhood in school to get degreed in computers even co-writing books on the topic. Where some kids were taught how to fix the carburetor my dad sat me down at a computer and told me to mess around and figure it out for myself.

I've been figuring it out for myself ever since. I don't know how to program. I can't open deeper functions without an already created program but I can generally figure out if a computer can do a thing I want to do and how to locate a program that does it.

The way I would put it is that while I can tell a computer to dance my dad could teach it a dance.

I feel like a power user is much closer to what my dad did than what I can do. I'll be honest the idea of trying to run Linux scares me. But at the same time what I can do is beyond the stuff many of my co-workers can do.

It's annoying that there isn't really a term between those two. The term User often, depending on whom you speak with, evokes images of someone who knows how to use a spreadsheet and that's about it. While power user evokes someone building their own machine and then loading a Linux framework.

I wish there was or I knew of some commonly accepted term between the two that I could utilize.