Tried it again, it works great. It plays a lot of the Rockband customs I’ve collected over the years. Ran it with bots. Seems to work.

Would be cool if there were a solid place to get tracks for it. Even if you gotta source the actual audio yourself. Everyone being afraid to share that information is what’s gonna keep this thing from getting big… whether that’s a good thing or not, I’m not sure.

Kinda mixed on the whole thing. Like sure, like any red-blooded (cis/het) male, I like seeing naked ladies. Sure, who (among cis/het men) doesn’t? But I also want the girls to be safe, and not abused.

I’m honestly tired of hearing questions like “if you saw your daughter/niece/sister on a porn site what would you do?” and people want to see your daughter, niece, or sister, but not theirs. I feel like the correct answer is “keep scrolling, and make a note to check in with her.” Not like “hey I saw your shoot” but more like, “is everything good?” like you should be doing anyway. I mean women don’t necessarily do porn because there’s a problem in their life and we should stop pretending showing some T&A is indicative of a problem in the first place. Like, seeing a family member in porn isn’t one of the best things, but it’s not the worst. The worst is, she’s at a low point in her life and she’s being forced to do it, or being abused, or hooked on drugs, because it’s taboo and it shouldn’t be.

But at the same time, I’m not gonna pay for porn. There’s so much free shit out there anyway. Everyone’s got a good camera in their smartphone and people aren’t gonna stop posting on gonewild type communities. And I wouldn’t care if porn just went away. Maybe it would make society better. Or maybe we’d just get more desperate.

As far as what I like/dislike… I’m not really gonna get into that, but I’ve noticed, on Lemmy, there’s a trend with AI generated women to generate more older women! I love that. Even if they’re in their 60s. It’s not like a kink or anything, but the older I get, the less I appreciate stuff like “she just turned 18” or whatever. I don’t think it’s utterly terrible some people wanna see that, but I’m over twice that age! I would never date an 18 year old. Friends maybe, but never more. But the AI stuff is really fucking weird, but it’s also kinda cool because these aren’t real people, they’re people generated by an algorithm. Maybe the algorithm is trained on real people with real bodies, but it mixes so much up you can’t really identify it as a specific person. I’m fine with that. But if we can stop people from looking at the illegal/dangerous stuff, and use AI to create it, let those people watch that instead, I think that would be a net positive. Of course you’d want to identify them, tag them and keep them separate from the rest of people; it’s not a solution to the problem they create, but if you can reduce the demand for it, I dunno, I want nothing to do with that kind of stuff, but I feel like there’s a solution in there somewhere. I probably won’t be the one to come up with it. My solution is small, metal, and you can hold a few of them in your hand. I’d like to think there’s a better solution out there.

Aware of it, might even have it installed. Nice thing about YARG is, it doesn’t require Windows. I have Macs, and I ran it on my Mac. So I think it’s on Linux as well, but I’m not sure.

Ah — I’m a bit used to that. While Rockband 3 added vocal harmonies, the first two would just pick which vocals you sang. You were never singing more than one part at a time. There were some, though, that gave more attention to a backing vocalist than the primary one. It’s fine if you recognise the pitch/tone change. One that was notorious for that was Spoonman by Soundgarden. I know that Chris Cornell was the singer of Soundgarden, but at some points in the song, it follows a backing vocalist and you have to completely change your pitch and tone, though the voice you hear does not sound like it is. It’s a very tricky song to sing and it’s generally disliked except by Soundgarden fans, most of whom would rather play it on guitar. There are others — and I’m struggling to think of an example, and threw Spoonman under the bus to try to give myself more time to think, but I’m drawing a blank on names — where it straight up turns you over to backing vocals. Like I didn’t know those lines were in the song. The main singer is singing one thing and the backing vocalists are singing something else.

Never been to “actual” karaoke. However, I played Rockband games for about ten years, off and on. That’s karaoke with a score system. And you can also play guitar or drums, but I suck at that? Singing though? That, I can do.

The Final Countdown (Europe). This one’s so fun to sing. It feels like it goes to some 80s movie, but I don’t recall one that features it.

What’s My Age Again? (blink-182). I went into these games not caring for pop punk and emo, but hands down, they’re the most fun to sing by far!

Headphones On (Miranda Cosgrove/iCarly). See above, but pop rock. According to You (Orianthi) is even more fun to sing, but unless the guitarist is warmed up, he’ll have it in for you for the rest of the night if you pick this one early! Headphones On is a great warmup though.

Enter Sandman (Metallica). This one’s upper mid tier for everyone, but everyone loves to play it. Easily the most fun Metallica song to sing. The Black Album was basically their pop record. It’s a legit hard rock/radio metal album (and, not for nothing, but Nothing Else Matters was highly rated by Sir Elton John of all people) but it’s a pop record. It was engineered to go viral and it did. And most of the songs are a blast to sing.

I wish Rockband was still around so we’d get the KPop Demon Hunter songs. I’d sing the shit outta What it Sounds Like or How it’s Done. I wouldn’t object to any song from that soundtrack being picked. You can fake it through the few Korean lines (and hope they’re written out phonetically rather than the symbols). I stood and sang for all the songs in the Sing-Along version in theaters (twice!) and I feel like though I said the Korean words as written, they didn’t come out right.

This is good advice. However (more toward OP), be advised that call recording laws like “two-party consent” (which means both parties must agree to the call) only means the call cannot be admissible in court if recorded improperly, not that you can’t record it or that the recording is illegal.

A lot of companies with numbers you can call will say that the call may be recorded, regardless of where you call from. This is good because it covers their side of the consent. They cannot legally only consent to their own recording. Even in a state with one-party consent, once they consent to their own recording, if you record that, they just consented to yours. They might fight this if it goes to trial (it won’t), but if you are in a one-party consent area, you can argue that you can disagree with being recorded and still have a right to call if you have business with them. They will argue and say your consent is absolute because you stayed on the line. If they say that, they’re fucked — their consent becomes absolute as well. “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander” for the most part. Also, with an iPhone, when you start recording, it plays a similar message. If you do that while they have you on hold, they won’t record it, but it will be recorded on your end. They can’t say “you played the warning while you were on hold, we couldn’t hear it” because then you could say you couldn’t hear their warning while you were on hold. After all, some smartphones handle hold for you, alerting you when a human comes on the line. Therefore, if you did not hear the warning and it’s still valid, the same is true for them.

Alternatively, be more honest and start the recording when a human gets on the line. If they refuse to continue the conversation, you can at least assume they are up to no good. That should tell you all you need to know.

I think a lot of companies operate on similar principles to a cult. When it benefits them, they say they are like a family. When it doesn’t, know you can be replaced in an instant. People who don’t have a life outside of work, or they do but it involves people from work almost exclusively. And companies that have cult-like ideas or ideals. Even some aspects of professionalism (such as dress code or uniforms) are cult-like in nature. The military sees value in dehumanising people, by making them simple cogs in the machine, and private industry likes to emulate this.

The question is, can you leave? A true cult won’t let you. That’s the difference with a lot of companies. If you get out, you are basically out. They may not re-hire you, but they shouldn’t interfere with your life beyond that point. Cults absolutely will.

I don’t really downvote. I try to be helpful, so if someone’s just being rude, I typically just block them. Probably more efficient.

The default for Reddit was to hide posts with X downvotes, so people could manipulate that to hide posts they don’t like. Lemmy doesn’t do that by default, so there’s no real utility. Also users can choose to sort by time and ignore vote counts (I do) so your downvotes literally don’t do anything for those users. Thus, I just block people who go out of their way to be rude or offensive.

I upvote people who are helpful and/or kind. Otherwise, I don’t interact with that system.

They say at some point your parents put you down and never pick you up again.

The truth is, the age of a person’s child is the image of them they hold in their heart. It could be a certain milestone, or a certain bonding moment.

For me, it varies from person to person. I’m not a father myself, but I’ve helped raise more than a dozen kids over the years. Many years, some of those kids have kids of their own now. To answer the question, I think of two sisters, who are cousins of mine, and 11 and 13 years younger than me. It seems, from my experience, small girls are either shy or cautious around older/teenage boys, or are drawn to them (not like attracted to, like they see them as bigger kids who can pick them up and carry them, and get them into more fun/risky trouble and maybe deflect some of the blame from them). The younger sister was the former, the older sister was the latter. The older girl was fun when she was small, but got bossy, possessive, and generally bitchy as she got older (like to preteen age). The younger one was shy and reserved, she’d follow her sister around (who would follow me around, or be carried by me), but she wouldn’t let me pick her up, except one time she asked for a shoulder ride, and then proceeded to pour a can of soda over my head. But, she started getting attached to me around 8 or 9, and even cried one time when I had to leave, and my aunt and uncle made me put that fire out. So, to come back to the point, whenever I think about them (or I see them in my dreams), the older one is 3 or 4, and the younger one is 8 or 9.

Now if you mean, like, when do they stop sending you gifts? You might have a ways to go. I’m almost 50 and I still get birthday and Christmas cards from my mother. Not so much from my cousins, though occasionally they send me those photo collage cards with pictures of them with their husbands and kids.

…Gridiron football as opposed to association football? Do people not know the difference and confuse them? Or just him?

I’ve seen handles in kanji — I assume Japanese, could be Chinese. Some browsers will translate that if they can. At least to something you can say (if you don’t know how to say those symbols, that is). For example, people whose first language is English can say “konnichiwa” — the Japanese word for “hello” or “good day” written in Romaji, which is Japanese using the Roman alphabet — but they wouldn’t know how to pronounce こんにちは — it’s the same word. So you can look at that in my message and say “konnichiwa” out loud, but if you happened upon it in a week and you’ve forgotten I said this, you probably won’t recognise it. But, you can highlight it, long press/right click and search your favourite search engine to find out what it is.

(Side note: I do recognise は which is pronounced “wa.” It’s part of the title of my favourite film, 君の名は。 (Kimi no Na wa., or “your name.”) I also recognise の when I see it. This was the first one I learned — because it looks like a fortune cookie!)

Not necessarily.

You’re kind of talking about two different things that are somewhat interchangeable. First you have a username which is used to log into a network or system. Second you have a forum/chat handle which is used to identify an anonymous or semi-anonymous user (e.g. CerebralHawks for me). I don’t think it’s strictly necessary for a forum handle to be pronounceable, but it’s easy to read mine and call me that, or just “Hawks” or “Hawk.” If it’s not, the mind isn’t going to retain it as long (this could be a good thing) and it’s hard to say, so it’s hard to address.

Usernames absolutely don’t have to be. Forum/chat handles should be, but it isn’t necessary.

Just going from the article.

The article said he was exonerated because the bite matching science was bunk. But she wasn’t killed by biting, she was killed by drowning, so I’m not sure where the bite even came into play.

They never said he didn’t rape or kill that baby. Just that he didn’t bite her.

The girl’s mother wasn’t there. She left her baby alone with this guy. She doesn’t think he’d do that because, as is commonly the situation (and thus, this becomes speculation), she lacked the self-confidence to meet a man who wasn’t a child predator. That’s one thing child predators do. They seek out poor women with low self esteem who have children who are a burden to them. “Oh yeah I’ll stay at home with your child while you go to work,” they say. They don’t have to work, and they have free access to the child? Win-win in their book. Of course the guy treats them well, they give him all he wants. Many of them even excuse the abuse, they’ll say their child seduced their man, their child was jealous, or the abuse isn’t that bad, or whatever. Happens all the time. Again, speculation here but it is pretty common.

So, you would give the death penalty to a prosecutor who has sought justice but condemned an innocent man to death?

That seems somewhat reasonable, actually.

…But not someone who raped and drowned a 23-month-old girl in his care? Assuming he actually did that, of course.

I’ve always believed in death penalty for sex abuse of minors (and especially preteen/younger kids). I won’t debate it because I understand the arguments that capital punishment has no place in civilised society and all that.

I do not, as a rule, play games where my enjoyment affects others. When I do, no, I don’t cheat. The rest of the time? I’m not above taking a shortcut if it brings me more enjoyment if the product I paid for. I occasionally cheat at Animal Crossing. Look up treasure islands. I don’t abuse them but I definitely make use of them.

Won’t matter if they’re held liable by US law.

We need justice that is not beholden to any king or emperor (or would-be whatever). International courts should rule on this. Because local ones won’t do anything.

It’s insulting because there are a lot of LGBTQ+ voice actors who want to do this but the powers that be won’t greenlight it.

Look at Amazon’s relationship with Trump, Trump’s positions on LGBTQ+ people, and ask why Amazon is doing this. They aren’t contractually obligated to do so. They are doing various animation projects and paying real voice actors. Though Hazbin Hotel is pretty gay, and so is Helluva Boss (same people/same universe). The only other animation project I know at Amazon is Mighty Nein, and I wanna say those guys are LGBTQ+ friendly but I’m not sure they’re on the spectrum. So I don’t wanna say Amazon is acting prejudicial here, but it smells.

Wasn’t this posted like a week ago without the paywall?

Hot garbage. Really don’t think about it much these days.

Wife and I collaborated to write a pretty good article for them once. I guess we should have expected that it would get messed with, being that it’s a wiki, but they totally messed it up and it looked like we were spreading misinformation. Not really their fault, we chose the wrong platform to post on. The article did kinda go viral though, and she got a few people who contacted her from around the world and said the article helped them. So that was kinda neat. Now it’s like… AI slop, almost. I think I looked at our article once fairly recently, and they took the detailed photographs we’d provided and replaced them with something that looked generated by AI. If I had to guess, Devil’s Advocate kinda thing, maybe we didn’t specify the rights clearly enough with the photos we provided and they wanted something they could confidently host. So, I get that.

I’m not mad, hadn’t thought of it in a while, but it was kind of a negative experience. They took a good article on how to do something and made it worse at every step. It didn’t benefit the reader, anyone who was looking to follow our directions. So yeah, we just walked away. Even reading the headline, I had to stop and think “who/what?” for a moment.

I wouldn’t trust it. I have had it come up when I look for a solution to a puzzle (like in a game), but I don’t consider it a trusted source. And I think that’s a problem: if you can’t trust a wiki, whether it’s due to admins or users, what good is the wiki? I’m sure it’s good for someone (advertisers maybe?) but once they tell you something you know is not right, why would you trust them again? The same can happen on Wikipedia, but they take great pains to keep it from happening, in general.

Yeah, but Apple has a history of doing that. They dropped support for Motorola chips in the PowerPC era. They dropped support for PowerPC chips in the Intel era. And they’ve started dropping Intel chips in the Apple Silicon era. They keep reinventing the Mac to stay current. Meanwhile, Windows supports stuff going way back regardless of it being updated to support the newest stuff. Except Microsoft decided to try a similar thing, but also kinda not really? I mean, you can run Windows 11 on 7th gen Intel (I was running it on a 4th gen Xeon), they just don’t want you to.

At least with Apple you know what you’re getting, and it’s a lot more secure and stable for it.

Besides, I wouldn’t expect someone with a perfectly good PC to throw it out and get a Mac. I’d suggest they run Linux instead. It’ll run better than Windows, too. But if your computer is dead, dying, or on its way there, I do suggest Mac as a perfectly good alternative.

No one’s really running computers for 20+ years, except the government. For whatever dumb ass reason.