Self defense shootings almost universally happen within arms reach. Nobody is using a sniper for self defense, because you can’t claim you were threatened when they’re too far away. A mugger isn’t going to start mugging you when they’re 50 feet away; They’re going to be in conversation range. A rapist isn’t going to make their intentions known until they already have hands on you.

Lots of 2A advocates make the mistake of training for a threat that is 50’ away, as if good accuracy at that range is going to help them when an attacker has them by the throat. Instead, they should be training four basic things:

1. Fast and repeatable draw. By the time they mentally process that you have a weapon, you should already be firing it. Your draw needs to be drilled the same way you drill reloads or clearing jams.
2. Aiming by feel instead of taking time to use sights. Sights are very important at distance, but not so important when the attacker is 5’ away from you. It’s still possible to miss at that distance, but less likely if you’re able to feel where your weapon is pointed. Center mass from 5’ away is a pretty fucking large target. Proprioception is a powerful tool, but learning to use it with a weapon takes a lot of practice.
3. Keeping your weapon close, so you’re not sticking your arm all the way out towards the attacker where they can grab your weapon. This goes hand in hand with the second point. Because again, they’re likely already within arms reach of the attacker, and you don’t want to just hand them your weapon before you even start firing. If you need to stick your arms straight out in front of you and get an eye focused on your sights before you start firing, they’ll have grabbed your gun before your first shot.
4. Keeping your stance solid so the first shot doesn’t immediately knock you off balance. A lot of people do not instinctively know how to maintain balance.

But gun owners bitch and moan if you ever bring these points up, because they aren’t actually interested in training for self-defense. That’s just the excuse they give, because “I want to protect myself” is hard to argue against.

The first time I ever tried a bidet was right after I installed my own. It was one of those bidets that attaches under the toilet seat. It took me a little while to actually attach it, because my toilet had a really weird connection point and was in the world’s smallest bathroom. But after some struggling (and a lot of swearing) I managed to get it done.

I plopped down on that thing like it was a porcelain throne, and I was its rightful king. I had been holding it for a while, (due to the aforementioned struggling to attach the bidet to the damned toilet), so the groundhog was already peeking out to look for his shadow by the time I got it attached.

After doing my business, I confidently grabbed the dial, and cranked that motherfucker up to 11. Up to that point, I believed I was a king… But I sat on a throne of sins. I believed I would simply be greeted with a cool shower. Like Icarus with his wax wings, I was full of hubris. I had flown too close to the sun, and was hurtling towards Poseidon’s icy depths. You’ve heard of Poseidon’s Kiss, where that little droplet of water splashes up and touches your butthole after you pinch one off? Poseidon got all the way to fifth base, in about a quarter of a second… And he didn’t use lube. It instantly blew water so far up my ass I could have brushed my teeth.

But that’s not all. In my shock, my hand slipped off of the control knob. By the time I managed to find it and turn it back off, I had received what felt like a peppermint colonic. And you know what’s even worse than getting your guts rearranged by an icy fire hose? Feeling it come back out afterwards, and it still being cold. My dear reader, I implore you to take a lesson from my mistake… After installing a bidet, check the water pressure before you use it. It turns out, mine had enough pressure to spray all the way out of the bathroom door, and hit the wall on the opposite side of the bedroom. I had dialed that bitch all the way up to 11, when I only needed like a 2.5…

All of this to say… I can sympathize.

My favorite mug was a gift from my first girlfriend, in my sophomore year of high school. My wife hates that I still have it over 20 years later, but I just like it because it’s fucking huge. I can fit like half a pot of coffee in it. It doesn’t even have the original printed design on it anymore; It has worn down to plain white ceramic.

Wow, you must’ve been an early adopter for IEMs. There wasn’t a lot of crossover in the timelines between RadioShack and IEMs. IEMs were just starting to get economical enough (and durable enough) for live shows when RadioShack was going through their big “let’s pivot hard into selling cellphone contracts”. And that was what put the company into a death spiral. You must’ve gotten on the trend pretty early.

My literal first reaction was “we have avatars?”

Yeah, if you’re 100% local, that’s basically the ideal use case for Jellyfin. Plex really shines when it comes to remote access. But if you never use that, then there’s very little reason to use it over Jellyfin.

Yup, just spin up a second Docker image for your porn Jellyfin server. Copy your transcoding settings over from the existing image, and point the new image at different media folders.

It literally gives you a gigantic “hey we want to sell your data. Do you want to allow that” prompt when you open it. They didn’t even make the “no, don’t sell my data” button grey and tiny like so many cookie prompts do. Plex went out of their way to put it up front and center, instead of quietly burying it in an obscure opt-out. There are plenty of perfectly valid complaints about Plex… But if a company wants to sell my data, (and here’s a spoiler warning: They all want to) this is how it should be handled.

This is also the difference between active and passive voice. Passive voice tends to take a more roundabout way to say the same thing. Active would be something like “the man smashed his cup when his temper flared.” It’s very direct and to the point. “Man>Smash>Cup.” The man is directly acting upon the cup. In contrast, the passive form would be more along the lines of “the cup was smashed during the man’s outburst.” It removes a lot of the action. It’s more like “Cup>was smashed” and everything after that is just additional context; We could even remove the context that the man was the one who smashed it, because it isn’t needed for the sentence to still be complete.

You see it a lot when cops fuck someone up, then have to release a public statement about it. They never say something active and straightforward like “our officers beat the handcuffed man to death.” That puts the blame squarely on the cops who killed the dude. Instead, they always say something more passive, like “the man succumbed to injuries he sustained while resisting arrest.” Notice that the former has “officers” doing the action of beating, while the latter removes officers entirely and has “man” doing all of the action. It is used to shift blame away from officers and onto victims. The former is a direct “the man died because of our officers’ actions” statement. But the latter is more like “the man failed to stay alive, and the failure is entirely on him.”

And a Samsung TV app. There’s an entire branch of Samsung TVs that require side loading to get a Jellyfin app installed.

Didn’t even need to dig. As soon as I opened Plex in my browser, it gave me a giant full screen “hey we want to sell your data. Do you consent” page. I disagree with data sale in general, but at least they didn’t go out of their way to bury the opt out. In fact, they actually went out of their way to present the notification in a way that was impossible to miss. If you’re capable of reading, you’ll know what the popup is for.

Yeah, I’d only encourage reporting if I knew 100% beyond a shadow of a doubt that the person who would be taking the report is also an ally. And even then, I’d still hesitate to encourage it.

My workplace is… Interesting. I work in an arts department for an employer which doesn’t do a lot of art otherwise. Each department is managed by a specific person in HR. My department happens to be managed by a raging transphobe. We also happen to have the highest amount of trans people per capita than any other department… Because, ya know, art.

Our HR person requires that they use their deadname for all of their work stuff. Their work email uses the initials for their deadname. Their Windows username uses their deadname. Their RFID ID badge and name tag both use their deadname. Et cetera… She claims it is company policy to require official government names on everything.

Except it’s not. That policy doesn’t exist. It’s just something she makes up every time a trans person gets hired. There’s even someone in HR who uses a chosen name for all of their work stuff. They literally share an office. Our hiring manager has tried to go through or around this one specific transphobe multiple times, but gets bounced back to her every single time. Because apparently the “your department has a specific HR person” is a rule that is enforced throughout all of HR, but the deadname thing is only enforced by our specific HR person.

The hiring manager does what he can to insulate them from it, but there are certain things he can’t control. For instance, he orders them new custom name tags, so they don’t have to walk around with their deadname stuck to their shirt. But he can’t order new RFID ID badges, because those are printed by our IT department, and they use whatever name is in the system. He can’t change their windows username, or their work email address. To put things into perspective, our department is over 25% trans or nonbinary. That’s over 5x higher than any other department…

And what are those trans employees going to do? Go to HR to report it? As cops are fond of saying: “We have investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing.”

Yeah, being a novice in the FOSS scene can be extremely frustrating sometimes. It can very easily start feeling like you’re reading documentation for a plumbus, where every single sentence seems to introduce a new term you’re unfamiliar with. And it often assumes you’re already intimately familiar with how these new terms work. So even just reading the documentation for one specific thing often means having fifty different tabs open, as you also have to read documentation about a ton of dependencies or terms.

Yeah, the sad reality is that Plex’s setup experience is much smoother. And when you’re trying to convert people, the single largest obstacle is often social inertia. So lowering the barriers to entry is extremely important. My mother-in-law would need to sideload the Jellyfin app onto her TV, but Plex is available right on its app store.

Luckily, you can run both side by side. Jellyfin for me and my more tech-literate friends, Plex for those who don’t know/don’t care to learn.

My guess is that it also included things like the 12 year old hosting a Minecraft server for their friends. Which, to be clear, is a totally valid self-hosting use case.

I used to do the same every year or two on Reddit, for similar reasons. Mostly to prevent the accidental accumulation of PII that could be compiled to dox me. Just nuke the old account, start fresh with a brand new account, and import subscriptions so my home page didn’t drastically change. I even had a dedicated lurking account for browsing the NSFW subs.

It’s the best app for Lemmy, honestly. It feels like a spiritual successor to Apollo, which was a successor to AlienBlue. There are certain gripes I have about it, but those are small nitpicks that I rarely encounter, and would be true for virtually any Lemmy app.