Now that is being damned with faint praise!

Ohhhh. Imma gonna lay this on the husband when he gets home tonight!

Tell kiddo that she done good!

Ah! the one Theodore Sturgeon story I did not need to read, as I experiecd it in real life!

Dude…

You’re not paying for the education, you are paying teachers and university buildings/materials.

Bingo. When my mom went to the University of New Hampshire in 1962, they had one cafeteria in the Student Untion Building and the athletics was run out of a “field house” built in the 40’s and the students in dorms slept on WWII surplus cots in a room with 4 others. The amenities were sparse, to say the least.

60+ years later, it’s all spiffy amenities, a huge arena with the bells and whistles for the athletics department and shared rooms with washer/dryer hookups and a Memorial Union building that contains the restaurant/cafeterias “dining halls” now… and the cost soared once the flashy stuff was added in.

Thing is, it’s been a self-feeding spiral as schools raised prices, parents demanded more luxuries for their little darlings, so the schools went into a upgrade game with each other that took on the tint of a competition and it just furthered the pressure on the price to rise.

The education - the actual purpose of the schools - seems to have gotten lost in the game of chasing after the money.

This is part of why I’ve been telling my friends kids to aim for a trade school with an apprenticeship or journeymen’s program tied to it. Done right, the kids can come out of the school go right into paid training and be debt-free and working by the time they’re 20.

And honestly, given how shit the quality of housing built in the last few decades has been, it’s gong to be a guarantee that repair and maintenance is the wave of the future.

Sause: Have been in the Trades since 1980…

This is why we can’t have nice things.

Urghh. Apparently Tim Cook is stepping down soon and for the love of all that’s holy, I hope the next person in line to run the company is more tech-oriented.

F’ck’n hell, some of the products they’ve released since Jobs died - I swear, they were/are designed solely to sell icloud. Just rubbish.

There’s a reason the newest Mac I own is from 2010. Gotta love Open Core Legacy Patcher. Once I can no longer update - it’s coming soon - I’m on to My Next Adventure - Linux!

Late stage/End stage capitalism is here and we can’t get past it fast enough. It’s gonna be a shitshow until we do.

If you ever get a chance to see any of his works in a gallery or museum… do it! The colors glow like nothing you’ve seen.

When I was little, I had an aunt that had one of the prints called Ecstasy - from 1929 - in her home.

Faded and of course stained (even though it was under glass) from the chain smoking she did.

It was one of her most cherished things, so I learned everything she knew about Parrish - she had an encyclopedic book on his technique which I read from cover to cover and as I got older, I tried my hand at glazing - a fierce technique of layering transparent and translucent color onto panel or canvas.

Each color separated by a clear coat so you look into the image, like stained glass, layers deep.

Years later, there was a comprehensive show of his pieces that came to the Currier Museum in New Hampshire (early 90’s IIRC) and I got tickets for myself and auntie…

I got to his most famous image - Daybreak - and the colors in it are beyond anything that any online photos show.

Not even the NY Lithographic Society that initially had rights to the image come close.

Pinks and magentas in the trees that frame the image that take your breath away. I stood in front of that painting for a good 15 minutes and have the colors burned into my mind.

At some point, if I can find a good enough high-res copy, I’m going to try my hand at doing a CMYK color separation of the image (with Photoshop or GIMP) and readjust to what it actually looks like. No one’s gotten it right. I’ve always been a bit of a colorist and zoom in on tint, tone and shade, so this challenge is one that hits my artistic monkeybone, big time.

I won’t even get into the landscapes of the New Hampshire winters and the evening light he recreated in those images. You can fall into them.

Definitely, again, if you ever get a chance to see a real Parrish… do it. It’s absolute magic.

Maxfield Parrish’s use of color theory and it’s application in his glazed paintings made using most often (esp. for commercial works made for print) cyan, magenta, hansa yellow and lamp black pigments in a translucent medium.

To be honest, this has always kinda been how the conservatives in the US talk when they’re by themselves. I grew up in the 70s and heard it quite often from uptight assholes on the right.

It’s not anything new, really. It’s just that today the communications, instead of being face to face, are online and they leave records of their conversations.

Bigoted jackasses, gonna jackass.

I have a cup of coffee (milk, no sugar) two fried eggs and a piece of buttered toast.

I’d say Elon Musk. He threw how many millions at Trump’s presidential run thinking Don would return the favor once he was president…

So how’d that work out for you, Elon?

This place (old.lemmy.zip) is downright chill. Then again, I just came off Reddit (after 14 years there…) and that is in full rage-bait algorithm-driven meltdown. Feels like Reddit in 2010 here. Just lovely…

Flying fish? Am in!

There are many spiderbros… we are legion!

I cut the cable TV cord in 1999. For whatever movies/TV we’ve wanted to watch, we’ve just gone to our public library to get DVDs and later on, streamed stuff.

uBO in all the browsers as well.

If you make a concerted effort, you can de-TV the household and it takes little time to find ways pick up on watching the things you like - w/o commercial interruption… I could not imagine watching an evening of broadcast TV.

Given that the average show is now 40 minutes long - thats an hour of commercials between the 3 primetime hours of 8 and 11 pm.

I’m not going to waste an hour every night looking at things I do not want or need in my life.

Fuck that shit.

I see you’ve dealt with comcast…

No, they won’t. You’ll only get a new car if the vehicle is new (within 5 years and under a certain mileage) and still being paid off, because then the financier/lender is still in the mix. Lenders can and will aim their own lawyers at the insurers.

This is the way.

It’s hard though, to just get liabilty on a car if you’re still making payments on it.

It’s gotta be 100% yours with no payments or liens on it.

Then you can go for a nice high liability policy. I’ve always bought older used and just gotten policies to cover OTHER people I may accidentally hit. No collision - If i’m not paying attention and slide off the road into a rock… that’s on me.

I also would add glass and theft to that liability policy. The glass coverage saved my ass a few years ago when I caught a rock behind (what else?) a dump truck.

As I almost got banned on Reddit for pointing out, Kirk stated he was willing to accept firearm deaths to protect the 2nd Amendment, he also said that executions should be live streamed and thirdly, that children should be allowed to watch them.

Dude hit the trifecta.

Win, place and show.

I do my backups manually.

As I have run unsuported Mac installs for the last 20 years, I started a long time ago, automatically partitioning my OS drives and making storage volumes to work off of.

The storage volume in the computer will have subfolders for the type of data - music, video, photos, etc.

When my storage volumes fill, I will pull my latest backup drive out of storage, hook it up then go into each storage subfolder, sort by date and add everything that’s newer than what’s in the backup drive. (which is actually how Apple’s Time Machine backups work - incrementally sorted by date - but I’ve had this method since the start, so I just stuck with it)

I just make sure to take note of how many files/folders I’m adding to the backup drive and note what it has at the start, then at the end, as a double-check of it all, before I clear the storage drive on the computer. (I did not do this and lost almost a years worth of music rips, waay back in 2003. Rebuilt the music I lost then iTunes threw a wobbler and lost the library for me. FML…)

The longest backup will ALWAYS be the initial one if you’re dealing with a first time backup. The rest, once you work out how to organize your files, is academic.

What I’ve found is that your tastes will change, you grab content you think you’ll want to hold onto forever… and then years later, you realize it’s low-bitrate, low-resolution, too pixellated… whatever… and you decide to delete it.

With the software doing the backups for you - it’s too easy to just let it rip and go have dinner while it works and you end up with files that you’d otherwise get rid of. Part of being a data hoarder is not keeping everything forever. There’s a ton of garbage online. Tastes change as you get older… You want to curate that shit so you can keep what’s most important - like family stuff.

And really good porn.

Yikes. Before you dip into any of the self-hosting, take and get a WD Gold drive - from Western Digital directly (wd.com) - do NOT go through Amazon or NewEgg or any third party merchant. Send in the warranty that goes with it and register the drive (this is for covering the off chance it’s a DOA unit) Then get a good quality enclosure to pop the drive into and take your time and back up EVERYTHING onto that new HD.

Don’t use an SSD.

You want a spinning platter drive, as this is backup only, so once it’s full with all of your content, it gets dated and labeled and popped into a drawer for safe keeping. If you have countless terabytes of data, get more drives and swap them into the enclosure, date and incrementally fill. A fine tip sharpie to note what’s on the drive is fine, or if you’re obsessively anal about it, make a spreadsheet with that info… If your drives are kept dry and stored with care they will last for DECADES…

The truth if being honest here - I’m a data hoarder and most of the stuff I’ve tucked away since I first came online (in 1999) is now on drives that I maybe spin up once a year. I used to have the notion that it was critical that all my shit was accessible all the time and I ended up dropping money on networked storage… and over time, realized that as long as I knew where the files were, DID have the most important stuff - family photos and scans - tucked away not only in long term storage, but on multiple drives in multiple machines, (home, work, laptop) it was okay not have it served up instantly.

Just reading your post made me go cold inside - I can only imagine what you were going through until it got sorted. From a bonafide old school data hoarder… Please, back your shit up locally. Use enterprise drives.

Then sort a self-hosting soultion.