cobysev

Firefox has tons of extensions to remove/hide/block AI overview in Google searches. Just search “Google AI” on their extensions page and you’ll get nearly a dozen extensions to choose from.

if a movie or TV show had subs we had to take turns reading it out loud

I do this for my wife, because she spends most of a film on her phone.

She’s listening to the audio and can mostly follow what’s going on by glancing at the screen and reading subtitles every now and then, but if there’s a foreign language with subtitles, or a text description (Paris, 11 AM or 10 years later, etc.), she’ll miss it and then be completely lost.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to pause a movie and give a quick recap to get her caught up with the plot.

I actually have electric number pad locks on both doors. They’re separate locks; the back door has had one for years and I just installed a new door on the front a couple years ago.

So they technically have two separate keys, but we don’t really use the keys. I know the combo to both doors (since it’s my home), but my friends living on the first floor only know the combo to their front door.

I like it because they’re set to always be locked from the outside, so I never have to worry about whether I locked my door or not. If the door shuts, it’s locked. And I don’t need to carry a key around. Just enter the combo and it unlocks for 10 seconds.

Who has front and back doors that are keyed differently?

My house was designed to be a duplex (despite being a single house on a 6-acre country property), so the two floors have their own separate amenities. They only connect with a rickety staircase in the basement. Otherwise, they might as well be two separate apartments.

The house is embedded in a hill, so the first floor walks out at ground level in the front yard and the second floor exits at ground level in the back yard.

My parents used to rent out the first floor when I was a kid, so that door always had a separate lock. Now, I have a buddy and his mother living in the first floor while they’re trying to get back on their feet.

Their house got foreclosed on when they were 95% paid off on their mortgage, so they lost everything. And rentals are way too expensive in my area for them to afford. So they’re staying with me until they can save enough for a home of their own.

I like that they have their own key separate from my floor. I don’t have to worry about them snooping in my home when I’m not around, and vice versa. They get a sense of privacy, knowing that I’m not just gonna walk into their home.

Genuinely, thank you for the original. I see this edited into a meme so often, I couldn’t even remember what the original was.

Change “nurse” to “housewife” and you described most US military spouses. So many of them were pushing pyramid schemes… err… “multi-level marketing” amongst one another.

My wife served in the military alongside me, and yet even she got roped into an MLM scheme at one point.

Don’t forget the blue silicone wedding ring. They pushed those at the BX/PX as a way to show your marital status without taking your valuable ring to a deployed site.

I’d be careful looking for jobs while at work, especially on a work computer. That’s a great way to get let go if they notice you doing it.

A friend of mine clicked a link to Twitch on his work laptop once. He immediately got pinged by his HR team, saying he was accessing unauthorized streaming sites and might be fired if they catch him live streaming. He has a strict clause in his contract that claims he’s not allowed to live stream at all while employed with the company, for fear of him spilling company secrets in a public forum.

As a former IT guy myself, I can confirm it’s super easy to monitor employees’ activity on their work computers. Don’t do anything but work on your work computer. Save all the job hunting or personal browsing for your personal phone/laptop/home computer. Don’t let your job build a profile on your browsing habits, because they will absolutely use it against you in a termination.

I won’t accept any free trial that needs my card info. Especially as someone who suffers from ADHD; I’ll never remember to cancel before the trial runs out.

Heck, I hate it when the free version of a program forces a trial membership that gives you access to advanced (paid) settings, then guts all your settings when the trial runs out. You’re not gonna trick me into spending money to get the advanced settings back! I downloaded the free version for a reason!

Blindness comes in many different forms. It’s not about your vision being blurred or completely dark. Some blind people can only see clearly through tiny slits or pinholes in their vision.

Imagine a sheet of paper that you poke maybe 2 or 3 small holes in, then hold up a few inches from your face. Those holes are all you can see through in your field of vision; the rest is obscured.

And then there are people who need bottle-lensed glasses just to be able to barely read large 100-pt text in front of their face. They’re considered blind, even though they have some vision.

My mother had a Polish friend from her work who was like this. He had insanely thick glasses and walked mostly without a cane in familiar areas, but would have to touch your face to gauge your reaction while talking with you. Or practically press his face up against yours to look you in the eye. He had a laptop that would scan documents and display them in massive font so he could read them on the go.

Also, one of my best friends in high school woke up blind one day. His corneas detached from his eyeballs; a genetic defect from his family. He didn’t wake up in a dark room, he could still see shapes and colors. But he couldn’t focus on any of them.

I was tasked with walking him to each of his classes in school, because I had experience leading the blind. His greatest annoyance was when people waved their hand in front of his face and asked if he could see it. When he flinched (because a large blurry object came at his head), they accused him of faking blindness because he saw them. But he couldn’t make out what was coming at him, he was just reacting to sudden movements near his face.

My friend eventually got corneal transplants, which restored most of his vision. But he can never drive a car because his vision isn’t good enough to read road signs, even with corrective lenses. He’s considered legally blind.

When you need to split hairs, blind folks will call themselves “legally blind” if they have some limited sight, or “totally/completely blind” if they have no vision whatsoever. But if your optometrist claims you qualify for legally blind, you’re generally considered blind amongst their community and qualify for any associated disability benefits that come with blindness.

Blind doesn’t mean they can’t see anything. Just that they have impaired vision.

My mother used to work for the Minnesota State Services for the Blind, so I grew up around a bunch of blind people. Most of them could partially see. They were considered “legally blind.” But they still needed tools to help them “see” better.

That’s what my mother’s job did; they provided access to equipment to assist blind people in their day-to-day lives. Converting books into braille or audio recordings, supplying walking canes, tape decks, and access to other resources to help them out.

They also gave out radios tuned to their own station, and they had a broadcasting studio in the office where employees or volunteers would just read newspapers or magazines for blind people to listen to over the radio.

Granted, my memory of all this was back before the Internet was a thing. I’m sure there are more advanced tools for this modern day and age that help with computer access.

Taco Bell

Pizza Hut if you saw the international version of the film. Taco Bell wasn’t well known outside the US at the time, so they changed the restaurant to something more familiar for international audiences.

I would love to see ReBoot (1994) with modern CG. And also a modernized plot, considering we know so much more about computers and the Internet now.

1994 was when the Internet started to spread publicly around the world and became a thing you could access from your very own home. It was this cool new technology that connected humanity across the globe, but most people didn’t really understand it yet.

So shows like ReBoot captured our fascination with the “Information Superhighway” and built a fantasy/sci-fi story around it. Even if it was horribly inaccurate to how computers and the Internet actually worked.

The Lion King (1994) is Hamlet.

“O” (2001) is Othello.

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (1990) is based on two minor characters of Hamlet.

She’s the Man (2006) is Twelfth Night.

Romeo + Juliet (1996) is a modern-day Romeo and Juliet.

O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) is Homer’s Odyssey. Not Shakespeare, but a brilliant modern retelling of one of humanity’s oldest surviving stories. In the same vein as the above mentioned films.

These are all I can think of off the top of my head. Not to mention dozens of modern Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Macbeth retellings over the years. Those three alone are the more popular Shakespeare stories for reinvention on the big screen.

The 2011 The Thing wasn’t so much a remake as it was a prequel to the remake, telling the story from the Norwegian scientists’ camp.

The 1982 John Carpenter remake opened with the last two remaining Norwegian scientists chasing “The Thing” until it reaches the Americans’ camp. But they’re misunderstood by the Americans. When trying to shoot at The Thing, which has taken the shape of a sled dog, the Americans instead return fire and kill them. Then the Americans explore the Norwegian camp and try to figure out what horrors killed everyone there, while slowly discovering why they were shooting at a dog in the first place.

The 2011 film shows what happened to the Norwegians before the 1982 remake. You’re correct, it wasn’t as great of a film (hard to compete with John Carpenter), but it wasn’t exactly a remake.

I wish I was a millionaire. If I liquidated all of my assets, I might have about a million… But in liquid cash, I’m a low thousandaire. 😅

I joined the US military at 18 years old; I literally left for basic training 2 weeks after I graduated high school. After 20 years of service, you qualify for an official retirement if you so choose.

So at 38 years old, and after suffering through one Trump presidency, I decided it was time to grab my benefits and get out before he somehow got reelected again. It was definitely a good time to leave; it seems that Pete Hegseth has ruined what remaining integrity the military had. I couldn’t serve in today’s military.

Anyway… I joined back when the US military offered a pension. So even though it went away 7 years before I retired (replaced with a 401K-type program), I was grandfathered into the old program because I wouldn’t be able to serve long enough to build up a proper retirement savings. So I now get 50% of my former military pay in my bank account every month for the rest of my life. It’s not much money, but I’ll never starve or go homeless.

On top of that, the military broke me (mentally and physically), and I was quite literally limping my way to retirement. I was walking with a cane at the end of my service, and the only reason they didn’t medically separate me is because I was close to retirement and didn’t need my legs to do my job. I was an IT professional, so I mostly sat at a desk all day.

When I retired, I had enough approved medical claims with the VA that they gave me the coveted “100% Permanent & Total” rating. So I get a lifetime monthly pay from the VA that’s twice the amount of my pension, plus free medical and dental for the rest of my life.

My wife served too, but she only made it to 12 years before they medically discharged her. She was too broken to continue serving and she somehow also qualified for that rare 100% P&T rating. So she gets the exact same VA pay and lifetime benefits as me, just no pension for herself.

So with all that passive income, we don’t really need to work anymore. Granted, we’re not wealthy by any stretch of the imagination. But we have enough to pay the bills and live comfortably right now. We did have to sacrifice our minds and bodies to earn it, but we’re not so disabled that we can’t get out of the house and live a little. We just can’t be as active as we used to, which is fine. We’re both introverts, so we don’t mind sitting around the house most of the time. It helps us not drain our bank account.

Oh, and I inherited my childhood home when my dad passed away, so we have a house on 6 acres of land in the countryside. My state gives huge property tax deductions for 100% disabled veterans, so we’re paying practically nothing in taxes to live here. So we’ve also managed to dodge the housing crisis.

We’re actually helping the mother of a friend of mine who can no longer afford her city apartment (after her house was foreclosed on when she was 95% done paying the mortgage!). So she’s living with us for a while, until her son finishes building her a retirement hut on his tiny sliver of land in Hawaii. If he’ll ever get there; he’s also living here until he can afford to move to Hawaii and build his own small hut on his land.

We’ve been pretty fortunate, despite the disabilities. But it is a shame that we had to sacrifice our bodies just to get the kind of benefits and security that a lot of European countries have. We need medical reform bad.

Heck, I’m dreading the day when Trump decides to gut the VA and take our benefits. I’ll have to go back to work if that happens, and I’m not looking forward to dealing with the job market. One of my friends has a finance degree from Harvard and even HE has been job hunting for over a year now! He applied to just over 100 jobs before he got a single callback… and they didn’t hire him. It’s rough for everyone now.

TL;DR - The military broke me and my wife. We’re both 100% disabled according to the VA and earn just enough in pay and benefits to not need to work anymore. And I inherited my childhood home when my dad passed, so we have a place to live without dealing with rent or a mortgage

I’ve always been like this. I power through all the work (school, chores, etc.) just so I can have the free time to do nothing. My ultimate goal has always been to clear my schedule so I can decide what to do with my time.

I think I overdid it. I retired at 38 years old and I’ve now spent the last 4 years sitting around my house with all the free time I can imagine.

I just got an email from NETGEAR about this. (Yes, they insisted on capitalizing every letter of their brand name)

Which was concerning, because I haven’t bought a NETGEAR product in well over a decade and a half and am adamant about blocking ads and junk mail. How did I get on a mailing list for their company?

Personally, seeing a message like this immediately tells me they’re no longer a brand I can trust. I’m gonna keep using my old routers as long as I can.

Interestingly enough, my ISP forced me to upgrade my modem to theirs last year, claiming that I can’t use a commercial modem because none are made that interface with their company’s technology. Once I installed their modem, my VPN refused to connect over WiFi to the new modem. And several of my WiFi devices just refused to connect in general, including security cameras around my house.

Thankfully, I have an old WiFi router that I use internally in my network and my VPN still works with that. So I’m basically routing all my Internet traffic through an old router, which is set up as a bridge and physically connected to my new modem. It’s the only way I can get reliable, stable, secure Internet in my home. Here’s hoping the old router lasts for a very long time.

“There’s is no Dana, only Zuul.”

Thank you for not calling it “Daylight Savings Time.” That’s never been the correct name, but almost everyone here in America has decided to call it that for some reason.