Onii-Chan

I’m never sure when it comes to America, but I’d love to move there. Like us Aussies with dropbears and Americans, I was totally convinced by your post haha.

I’ve always wanted to visit a Bucky’s! We’ve got nothing like it here, so it’d be a genuine experience.

ngl the fact you can buy alcohol and ammunition at the gas station over there is making me jealous af. We legally have to have entire separate stores for those things, no exaggeration.

It’s wild how different the refueling process is between our countries. Paying at the pump was trialed here about 10 years ago, but next to nobody used it. We just rock up to the servo, pump our fuel, then walk inside to pay. I can’t see it changing anytime soon. Some rural, more crime-ridden areas require pre-pay, as well as a few locations in urban areas between 11pm and 5am, but even then, you still walk inside or up to a window on the actual building to pay.

“You’re not sad. Now consume, peasants. Consume and never stop. You don’t WANT to be sad, do you?”

No shit, I saw fucking Afterpay available for petrol at the pump the other week. I’m Australian, so I’m unsure if this ‘buy now, pay later’ shit is available for gas over in the States, but it was certainly a shock to see here.

I’ll legitimately be moving to Linux today. This just broke the camel’s back for me.

Living in Australia means piracy is essentially legal - individuals can only be taken to court for the cost of one physical copy of the pirated media, so companies don’t even bother as long as you aren’t distributing. The more things in this area get worse, the more justified I feel in filling up my 10TB HDD.

It’ll be such a surprise when it turns out all 10 have been suicidal for years and/or extremely susceptible to infection.

Cool, please do.

Happy I stuck with my older Samsung dumb TV. Great screen, decent size, flat enough to mount on a wall, and does everything I need it to do regarding hooking up my little i5/8GB baby office PC turned media hub. I don’t care that it’s only 1080p, looks just fine when I’m in bed and watching movies on it. Even when smart devices were first becoming THE thing to have, the idea of having to download updates for my TV got me thinking about the more nefarious aspects of such tech the future may hold.

I think a lot of it comes down to me just not being very materialistic, or needing my household devices to be internet ready with installed apps and no way of managing permissions or data harvesting. Even my cars are older, and were made well before integrated SIM cards and constant data collection, and I’ve no plans to upgrade any time soon. I guess I just never ‘got’ the appeal of having a smart device that wasn’t just my phone (and even then, I barely use any apps on my phone outside a web browser (which eliminates the need for most apps anyway) and the camera.)

No, and the answer isn’t policing speech. The block button exists for a reason. Use it.

Legitimately yes. You can call me whatever you like.

I’m not going to start censoring my own speech, thank you. You don’t have to agree with it.

I have autism and ADHD, so no, I won’t stop using it. I don’t like the idea of a word having any real power, which restricting its usage does. There is no debate here for me, I am completely against that kind of thing.

The very same AI that shows pictures of black people with dreadlocks when asked to show a typical viking also has a braindead response for a question involving Hitler and a guy who posts retarded tweets and regularly pisses off his shareholders? I am shocked.

AI is still so ridiculously tainted by bias and the relative infancy of the tech.

True, I guess I’m speaking from the perspective of someone who genuinely loves cars.

An older Camry or something just wouldn’t do it for me, but I’m lucky in that Australia used to make pretty reliable cars (modern post-'09 Falcons are unkillable, and get great mileage on the highway - 800-1000km per tank out of mine) and which also have plenty of power and comfort. Not the most technically advanced cars, but I actually can’t stand the modern obsession with car tech anyway, and feel that '08-'13 era really offers all I need.

Honestly, sometimes you just need an auto loan to get out of the “stuck in an unreliable shitbox that leaves me stranded at random every other week and the AC doesn’t work and it looks like shit and fuck this I want something nicer” hole.

I bought a nice new (ish) car about 8 years ago, and 350,000km later, it’s still nice, still reliable, and I still enjoy driving it. Hell, it got me out of the shitty little town I was stuck living in, because I could finally trust my vehicle to go further than an hour from home (being Australian, leaving for any interstate city is at the very least an 8 hour drive, unless you live in Perth, then it becomes a 30 hour drive.) I don’t regret getting a car loan for even a second.

In saying that… I’d never go for another loan unless I absolutely had to. I’ll drive this car into the ground before I get another one.

Is Session actually secure though? I know they’re based in Australia, and as an Aussie myself, holy fuck would I not trust this country for even a fraction of a picosecond with anything private or sensitive. We have some of the world’s most draconian and far-reaching digital privacy and surveillance laws, and I’m not ready to accept that Session hasn’t been secretly compromised by the AFP, given the law against revealing government backdoors.

Happy to be proven wrong, but I always err on the side of extreme caution when it comes to Australia. Digitally, we’re closer to the CCP than any of our fellow western nations.

I was a member of What.CD back in the day, and holy fuck, the elitism was insufferable… but the amount of genuine lossless music was unlike anywhere else, and the site was so well organized.

Yeah, I’m officially too old now to understand a lot of this gen Z slang. Is it ‘ahh’ as in to scream? Or ‘ahh’, like a sigh? Some post-drink proclamation of refreshment?

“I don’t expect to see any change in how we do things.”

Oh, this is going to age like fucking milk. You belong to the shareholders now, mate. They’ll MAKE you change how you do things, and you’ll love it.