My first computer was a VIC-20 lol

I’m switching for political/ideological reasons TBH. It’s a good service and it works well, but one of the company’s co-founders recently made a huge donation to the Örebro party in Sweden (as in, big enough to account for 72% of the party’s entire income for 2025.) The party’s leader, Marcus Allard, has called for mass forced remigration of immigrants, including people born in Sweden, and has referred to immigrants as “damn parasites.”

In fairness, this isn’t the political position of Mullvad the company, it’s a personal donation made by one of the founders and the CEO and others have expressed discomfort with it. But the fact still remains that if I keep giving the company money, it will keep funding the co-founder, who will (presumably) keep funding the party and I can’t in good conscience send money if I know it’s going towards something I disagree with that profoundly, even in a roundabout sort of way. I only have about 30 days left on my subscription anyway so I’m going to just let it run out and then switch to something else.

Yeah I use QBittorrent, and Mullvad for a VPN (although I’ll probably switch soon once my subscription runs out.)

There’s an Android app for it too.

Haha I actually used a similar one recently. I was talking about how much of a piece of shit Mitch McConnell is back when he was in hospital and someone called me out for being mean so I said “I hope he receives the same amount of respect and care that he showed to others throughout his life.”

I genuinely think he just doesn’t have that part of his brain. He has people that he temporarily stops fucking over and tries to charm-bomb while they’re useful to him (who he then throws under the bus again once he doesn’t need them anymore) but that seems to be about as close as he can get.

I think that’s the same reason why he’s never had a pet - if you take things like companionship and love out of the equation, a pet is just something that consumes resources without giving anything material back. I wouldn’t be surprised if he just sees them as pointless.

And when we do, all the conservatives will suddenly start their pearl-clutching bullshit about being ‘respectful’ once again.

For this very reason, I have my VPN set up so that if it’s off, the whole internet connection is shut off. And as a backup, my torrent app will only work through the VPN interface, not the general network. I know what I’m like, and would definitely forget this all the time lol.

I use syncthing.

I saw a Curly Wurly in a shop the other day, and they’re now a pale imitation of what they were.

It’s a weird thing to think about, but in a ship-of-Theseus sort of way a lot of the products we grew up with don’t really exist anymore. By that I mean, if it’s half the size and made of different ingredients then the Mars Bar as it was introduced has effectively been discontinued. There’s just some other, crappier knock-off being sold under the same name now.

That’s good to know! It could also be because I just switched over, so it doesn’t have enough reference yet for what I’m listening to.

I bailed on YouTube a few years ago. I had a video with a very clearly public domain piece of music (both the song and the performance) in it, which I didn’t monetize just because I hate ads and the channel wasn’t very popular anyway. Some bot flagged the public domain song for copyright and YouTube not only gave me a copyright strike but also added paid ads into my video without my consent so they could send the ad money to whoever it was that flagged it.

I didn’t even bother to contest that one, I just deleted my entire channel and sent them a very angry message telling them to go fuck themselves lol.

I will never use them again because of that, and I’m so glad I got out before AI became a thing. Fuck YouTube.

I wonder if it could be that the AI trains on popular content, meaning AI slop sometimes looks like Kurzgesagt because it’s ripping it off, which means the slop filter learns to recognize the original content that got ripped off as slop…?

Yeah I switched over to Tidal and I like it so far. The music quality is good and there’s just a simple toggle in settings to turn off anything to do with AI.

The recommendations aren’t as good as Spotify’s but I’d rather deal with that than a barrage of AI bullshit.

It also kind of made the villains seem a bit daft. The rule seemed to be red sun = no powers, green sun = kills her, yellow sun = super powers and the main villain seemed to be pretty powerful no matter where he was, and they establish early on that there are lots of red sun planets where people live, so literally just hide out anywhere without a yellow sun and you’re 100% safe?

I think that’s kind of the main issue with any character that has Superman-level powers, they’re so OP that it sort of limits what you can do to keep the story interesting. You basically have:

• Try to make the powers irrelevant and embroil them in a complicated psychological/moral issue (great if it works but difficult to pull off and not especially visually interesting for a superhero movie.)

• Create an enemy with the same power level as them (then you just basically have two invincible characters bouncing off each other and smashing everything around them (visually interesting but essentially no stakes.)

• Have them lose their powers in some convoluted way and then get them back at the climax of the movie to do an ass-kicking scene (which seems to be the default.)

I think it’s the same problem that The Boys TV show had - at first there was kind of a tension about them just being normal people and Homelander being so powerful that he could hear their heartbeats from half a mile away and level the entire city they were hiding in if he knew they were there, but the longer it went on the more preposterous it got that he hadn’t just squished them yet. Especially when the show has them meet face-to-face multiple times and he either lets them go because reasons or they escape somehow.

It was a weird one I thought. It has all the good elements I like - a sort of grungy vibe, ass-kicking woman protagonist, kill-all-sex-traffickers central theme - but somehow it was also kind of boring? I’m not entirely sure how they managed to pull that off TBH.

I genuinely don’t understand why printers are so shit. Like we have a 3D printer that looks like a pile of bolts put together by a drunk person (which is was) that creates pretty much any object you tell it to with seemingly no trouble at all. And those are a relatively recent invention. Meanwhile, the 2D printer has decades of advanced technology behind it and looks like a sleek white sci-fi cube, it’s only job is to put words on a fixed-size sheet of paper (the thing that the Gutenberg press was doing in the 1400s) and it fucks it up about 60% of the time.

On the total stranger thing: last time I moved we got everything in except for a mattress. There were three of us and we couldn’t get it up the stairs. Some random man was walking by and saw us, offered to help and then just hauled the mattress up the stairs by himself and was like “have a good one” and carried on with his day lol.