Internet Addict. Reddit refugee. Motorsports Enthusiast. Gamer. Traveler. Napper.

He/Him.

Also @JCPhoenix@lemmy.world. @jcphoenix@mastodo.neoliber.al

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • The idea is that people will be willing to pay a recurring fee to use Alexa if it can do more advanced things, like perform multiple commands without the user having to say “Alexa” repeatedly, be more conversational, and manage smart homes more intuitively. Amazon is considering charging $5 to $10 per month for generative AI Alexa,

    I don’t know if that’s worth $5-10/mo. I use Google Nest products at home, mainly to control lights. And yeah it sometimes annoying to be like, “Hey Google do this…Hey Google, do that…Hey Google, do whatever…” But at that point, I usually just use the Google Home app or a specific IoT app. And that’s free.




  • My parents were the ones who pointed me to the high seas. I was a kid (12-13yo) when Napster came out. Being the family geek, they told me to look into it since they heard about it on the news and wanted free music (early case of the Streissand Effect before it was termed as such). So I did. And we got free music. Even asked them to get me a CD burner for my birthday after that and they did.

    As a kid on the earlier days of the Internet, I came across all sorts of ways to get free stuff. Games and Music at first, especially game cracks/warez. Then once torrents came on the scene, movies and shows.

    I actually don’t pirate much anymore. Rarely pirate music since I’ve had Spotify for like 10+yrs now. Same with games since Steam and all the other digital storefronts have so many sales. I still pirate emulator ROMs once in a blue moon. Movies/shows would be where I pirate the most (though like once a month if that), even though I have Amazon Prime, Netflix, Hulu, and Crunchyroll. Even between those 4, I can’t find everything I want to watch.

    But yeah, 99% of the time, I just don’t want to pay for things. The other 1% is that I can’t pay for something (mainly in the emulators/ROMs space). That’s all.






  • A motorcycle back in the late 90s when I was like 9 or 10?

    We were at a dealership because my dad was thinking about buying a motorcycle. At one point, they put my younger brother on a motorcycle because it was cute or whatever. After they took him off the bike, and my parents and the salesguy moved onto another motorcycle, I wanted to try. So I did. And I tried to be careful, knowing it could fall over.

    Getting on was no issue. And getting off was no problem either. Until I was like a few feet away from the bike…and it fell over. Shattered the windshield.

    Even though it was an accident, the dealer tried to get my parent’s to pay up. And I think my parents would’ve been willing to pay something…except the dealer wanted, I believe, $800. The bike was probably only a few thousand bucks – I actually have no clue how much the bike was, but, as an adult, I know how much bikes are. No way a windshield was a third of the price of the bike. Not in the 90s, not today. So my dad and the dealer got into a shouting match. We left, and the dealer tried to get our license plate number as we drove off.

    Nothing ever happened with that. No cops were called or anything, as far as we know. Besides, the dealer should have insurance for these situations. But since I wasn’t supposed to be on the bike in the first place…I got in tons of trouble. Got my ass beat by my mom, got grounded, couldn’t go to a sleepover I was supposed to go to…

    Definitely the most expensive thing I broke. At least based on what the dealer was demanding.


  • So this morning, I had a dream where I was going to a coffee shop. After trying to figure out if I could order like a Frappuccino or other blended drink, I realized this coffee shop had really good bread. I guess it’d be more aptly called a bakery. So I ordered a loaf of their bread, and then they had some kinda really good honey butter. So my friend – I was there with a friend apparently, one I hadn’t talked to in several months – and I tried some. And it was really good. Though I also remember it not tasting sweet or like anything. So Idk how that worked.

    And then I woke up.



  • While I have work friends, and we do go out and drink, it’s almost always within or adjacent to the context of a work event. Like maybe we’re doing a co-workers happy hour. Or we had some work function that stretched into the evening, so we’ll go out for dinner and drinks together afterwards. There’s definitely been a few times where we were drinking for like 8hrs after a late lunch! But it’s very rare for me to hang out with them outside of that. Like I can count on one hand the times I met up with co-workers on like a weekend just to head to a bar.

    As far as topics, they’re still friends, so we talk about all sorts of stuff. But there’s definitely more of a focus on things happening at work and less about our private lives, especially spouses/SOs. My current “work best friend” will sometimes call me afterhours and we’ll chat and vent about stress at work and stuff, and even some of our stresses at home/personal lives, but the latter tends to be more surface level. With my non-work friends, we’d certainly get deeper into those topics if desired.

    It comes down to professionalism. That’s really the “firewall” between my work friends and non-work friends. Yes my work friends and I can have fun, joke around, get a little loose when drinking, share deeper stuff about ourselves, but we never want to cross that line. Sometimes it’s thin, and sometimes it’s even a little blurry or dotted. But we all still strive to never (or very, very, very rarely) cross it.