I’ve been a paying member for almost a decade. I’ve been training it that entire time with what I do and don’t like. I’ve also been using their suggested playlists for years and further refining what they recommend. So their algorithm is a huge part of it for me. I am constantly finding songs and artists I wouldn’t have been exposed to otherwise.

That said, I’ve been holding my nose while I renewed the service for the past couple of years. I’m willing to part ways for Tidal if it’s a comparable service with better benefits to the artists.

That’s what I did when I didn’t have physical access to the network where I was living. My little Asus that I flashed with Tomato saved my sanity.

Yeah. I’ve had a couple of their little travel routers which are a lot of fun. But apparently you can’t flash custom builds on one of their more recent models.

What were your must have packages?

I agree that moving to digital saved so much time, and I’ll never miss brainwraps or thrown platters… but working booth shifts threading projectors were some of the happiest times I had running theaters.

I’ve gotten bad keys from the studio before, usually when we were doing advanced screenings. It was a relatively quick fix… I think the longest delay was ~15 minutes. I never had to cancel a show because of it, certainly didn’t have to close the entire building.

For as much as I loved the convenience of digital, I really miss the days of 35 film.

You’re casually blowing off two of the main reasons why I still have to use Windows.

Is there a Linux alternative to Excel that will allow me to reliably write and execute VBA macros that I can then deploy to my windows using co-workers?

Is there a Linux alternative to Photoshop? Doesn’t even need to be the most current version. I’d be happy with something that is functionally comparable to Photoshop 7.

I’m not being glib with those questions either. It’s been probably ten years since I’ve really used Linux. If there are legitimate alternatives I’d absolutely give it another go.

Case in point: a number of years ago I knew a kid who was smart enough to flash Tomato on his router, enable SSH and even install a bunch of Entware packages. But he wasn’t intelligent enough to change the SSH port from 22 or leave the remote access disabled.

Fast forward a month or two and his ISP tells him that they traced some pretty serious botnet shenanigans to his IP.

Just because someone is smart enough to use a device doesn’t necessarily mean they’re intelligent enough to use it safely.

I once dated a woman ten years older than myself. She had two kids.

Several years later I started dating a woman ten years younger than me. I was telling her stories about how awkward my ex’s oldest kid was. Turns out she went to school with my previous girlfriends kids. She remembered the kid exactly as I described.

Not like, same class or anything, but my new girlfriend was a senior when my ex’s oldest kid was a freshman.

It’s weird to think about things in that context. At first I thought I was cool because I was able to bridge generations. Then I realized that “generations” are a construct, ultimately irrelevant to the actual passage of time. The arrow of time is inevitable. Entropy will increase, space will grow. And as long as humanity persists, we’ll likely end up in the same physical and metaphysical place just hoping we did the right thing so maybe people might remember us for a generation or two after we die.

We spend so much time, effort and emotion on things that are ultimately meaningless in the face of the creeping heat death of the universe.

What a great example you are setting! See everyone? You can be an octogenarian while still gatekeeping things like an obnoxious 19 year old!