Politely disagree. M-disc for BD-Rs are still absolutely worth the money if you want to properly archive something. NIST has agreed that the archival lifetime of a M-Disc BD-R is 100+ years.

You have to be careful with normal BD-Rs because there are two different types of recording material on the market: High to Low and Low to High (LTH). You want to stay away from BD-R LTH discs as their longevity isn’t as good as the High to Low discs.

There is a ton of HD-DVD disc rot today. For a format, it definitely did not hold up to age.

Thank your deity that M-Disc exists.

It’s Hobby Lobby so there are Halloween and Christmas decorations up right now even if it’s June. It’s like they always start holiday decor 6 months in advance of the actual holiday.

For me, ChargePoint chargers are the easiest to use and consistently work best, but usually the most expensive.

Blink chargers are the worst. The app is clunky, slow, and the experience just never feels like they actually vetted the process. Also, it feels like they have a hard time keeping their chargers maintained.

What used to be Volta, now Shell (yeah the oil company) is a hit or miss depending on their charger actually working. Nice thing about Volta is that free is free (for now).

For actually finding working chargers, I use PlugShare.

Ubisoft has released many games that require constant Internet access the past decade and then just shutting off the servers making the game completely unplayable. This just happened to The Crew last month. This will happen to:

1. The Crew 2
2. The Crew Motorfest
3. Steep
4. Riders Republic
5. Star Trek Bridge Crew
6. Skull & Bones (A AAAA game)
7. Newer versions of Just Dance
8. Newer versions of Rocksmith

And more…

Pirating doesn’t solve the game being completely unplayable when UbiSoft decides to shut down the servers.

The Crew could be played all the way through as a single player game. It made no sense for a constant Internet connection. The Crew’s credit screen for the final version of the game lasts over 45 minutes. Thousands of employees across the entire world worked on that game and now it is just gone with only gameplay videos being the only record of existence.

They don’t want you to spend time in the restaurant. Less and less McDonalds PlayCenters are surviving. The seats in the restaurant purposely get uncomfortable after 20 minutes of sitting. Harsh lighting. Drab surfaces. They want you to get your food and go. Even better if you use the drive thru or mobile app. Any modern fast food restaurant like McDonald’s, but especially Starbucks, does not want to be your “third place”.

I’m assuming US?

One thing to note is that the US started requiring back up cameras in all cars manufactured after May 1, 2018. Your best bet to find a dumb car would be to look at base trims of some cheap 2015, 2016, and 2017 cars. Cars like the Elantra, Forte, Sonata, Altima, Versa, and Sentra did not have touchscreen displays in their base trim. I know because I basically lived in rental cars during those years and am very familiar with all of them.

Now, definitely watch out on the Korean ones though due their cheapening out of security equipment…but the Kia Boyz have probably salvaged titled all of them by now. I would also be hesitant on buying a used car with a CVT because it’s a crapshoot if the previous owners actually kept up with the mandatory maintenance on them.

I think the Mazda 3 or Toyota iA are good used car choices to keep on your radar. There is a “screen” in both cars, but they are dialed controlled when the car is in motion. They both have a REAL automatic transmission too. No CVT stuff to worry about.

For anyone that has last played the game 2 or more years ago, go and revisit it. The game has had continuous improvements that make it worth a revisit.

Yeah, back in the late 90s, Circuit City exclusively sold PlayStation and didn’t even offer Nintendo products until closer to the GBA / GameCube era.

CompUSA did the same too.

Everyone forgets the old retailers, but one big argument to PlayStation beating the N64 was that the games were cheaper and available in a lot more retailers than Nintendo’s products.

Wow, I didn’t know that some states allow fast food to be purchased by a EBT card. Can’t get away doing that in the south.

M-Disc exists?

Not much complaint about the Meta Ray-bans and those have been on sale for years now. Hell, Snapchat had three separate releases of their spectacles product and I really didn’t hear much complaints. All of these products still look goofy.

Fleabag is worth a watch. Not many episodes for both seasons so you can binge it quick before the ads start taking over. Great writing and acting. If you love watching people get in awkward, cringe situations, I highly recommend it.

Incredibly lucky that our library system has started investing in blu-rays and has purchased many of the Criterion Collection. They have also heavily invested in Shout Factory’s offerings too. Now I need to see what they can do to start getting some Arrow, Vinegar Syndrome, and Severin releases!

When Interplay decided that Sim City needed goofy, over-the-top FMVs on a CD-ROM…I think that was peak Sim City. As a kid, I was disappointed 2k and 3k didn’t have professional, career-oriented adults yelling at you for your incompetence in FMV.

I mean…Microsoft is paying people to use Edge with Microsoft Rewards. It’s not a lot, but you can net a few cents each day with their Edge exclusive tasks.

If you love screwball comedies or ever worked in a theater production, the movie Noises Off…(1992) is a hidden gem of a film that Michael Caine takes lead role in. It’s an insane film that gets crazier by the minute!

The parity of environmental impact of a physical disc versus streaming a movie is 4 play throughs. So, if you play your blu-ray / 4K disc 5 times, it is more environmentally conscious than streaming the movie from a data server.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/05/discs-vs-data-are-we-helping-the-environment-by-streaming/

Such bullshit since most of the recordings sound like shit. That’s the idea though. These 78 records are made of lac bug crap called shellac. The shellac degrades over time so the purpose is to retain the sound off of the recording of a format that is physically deteriorating and will not be around in the future. The project is to capture a unique sound experience that will not be available for future generations.

No streaming platform offers this. No streaming platform offers the ability to hear music ripped from vinyl, cassette, 4-track, or 8-track. Sony and Universal will never offer this. The user is only given one option usually for a song and who knows what master was used and how the audio engineer felt that day to master the track.

Also, we all know how Universal treats their masters…pathetic. So many of them are gone now thanks to their careless warehouse fire. If people don’t create offsite archives, who will? We can’t trust the record companies to do it!