The thing that annoys me the most is how it cares about whitespace/carriage returns. I remember back in college when I was taking a CS class, learning Python and writing the Code on a Windows PC, emailing it to myself, and then attempting to run the code on Linux. Before I learned about the carriage return conversions, I remember having to rewrite about 75 lines of code before I got it to run. 🤬

Or Google/Reddit/Meta.

Meanwhile in Miami it’s a low of 82 and a high of 89, with a feels like of 100 everyday because of 80% + humidity until the end of October. My apartment is in a newer building and is well insulated. I forgot to turn on my AC two nights ago before I passed out for the night. When I woke up around 10 AM it was 71% humidity in my apartment 🥵 I walked around outside for about 10-15 minutes yesterday in basketball shorts and a light T-shirt and was dripping in sweat.

SmartTube for Android TV is a must as well

I’ve had YouTube Premium since the days when it was called YouTube Red, so like a decade. I’ve grown used to not seeing any ads from Google and anytime I watch a video not using my account it’s torture.

A lot of creators have just turned into corporate shills. I stopped watching ETA Prime’s channel about tech reviews because it was becoming pretty clear that mostly everything he got was paid for by the company. Also, most creators are putting their own ads into their content.

So it’s not as bad as it seems, at least.

The tickets were only like $100 a piece for second level seats and that was mostly because of the ticket pricing bullshit. It was like $60 for the ticket and $40 of “fuck you, pay me” money and then the taxes on top of that. I saw Metallica back in 2018 and it was $100 for pit tickets. I was like 30 feet from James.

Ah, I misread the last part. Of course if it’s a small Indie band they’re not going to charge out of the ass for stuff, that’d be dumb on their part.

For point c, it’s actually cheaper depending on how they do it. One of my favorite artists, mc chris, has done USB discog sales for over a decade. He charges like 100 for it last I saw, but it’s also a custom USB along with having like 10-20 albums and Eps.

That’s pretty cool, but at what quality? MP3? AAC? M4A? FLAC? You don’t know until you buy it and plug it in, you know that a CD is going to be WAV files which is uncompressed audio mastered at the best quality possible, which you can then rip to your desired format. If whats on the USB drive isn’t FLAC, you’re limited to what they gave you.

It would be much more expensive to press, bundle and package/ship that many CDs in comparison to a single USB drive

It all depends on if you’re doing it yourself or if you have someone that’s already setup to do it as a business. After a quick search, I found a site that will do 100 CDs with inserts and jewel cases for $255, I’m sure the price goes down with the more you order. The same site offers custom USB drives with silkscreen printing (how else are you going to know what’s on it amongst all your other flash drives assuming you intend to keep it?) is $330 for 100, so if the artist is actually putting multiple CDs onto a single USB drive than it definitely is cheaper for them, but I’m not sure how many bands would actually do that.

And since it’s also merch, point 4 is unlikely. He’s never cared about his music being pirated (and even has lyrics about his music being ‘forever free for the poor kids’, so B isn’t an issue either.

That’s one artist, lots of artists care about their music being pirated because it cuts into their revenue, which they get very little of in the first place (referring to CDs, not streaming which is a lot better for them in terms of revenue). IDK how old you are, but I’m guessing you don’t remember Napster/Limewire/Kazaa. Also, a lot of the time it’s the companies that own the rights to the music that care the most because they’re the ones that get like 70% of the profits.

Option a is basically do you trust the artist, which one would hope they’re trustworthy, but they could also Sony you if they weren’t…

Ah, yes, the good old Sony rootkit.

Any plane internet I’ve used has been spotty and terribly slow, but then again, I haven’t bought it in years because of previous experiences. I can stand to be without it for 2.5 hours.

Agreed, people always forget that Google is a company or to make money, they don’t provide all of these services out of the kindness of their hearts.

The reason for this is because switching from Windows to Linux is a lot bigger change, requiring a fair amount of technical know-how, and even knowing that Linux exists in the first place. Swapping browsers is easy in the technical sense, it’s breaking the habit that’s the hard part, but if they piss people off enough all it takes is uninstalling it in order to break the habit, not a drastic paradigm shift. I’m a long time Chrome user, like over a decade and with the recent “unverified download” nonsense unless you enable their invasive tracking has put me over the edge. I had both the Chrome and Firefox icons pinned to the taskbar and just out of habit kept clicking it, I finally removed it last week

Also, there’s like 10 per webpage, and then you have the damn pop-ups when you scroll 🤬

Every time I turn off uBlock and reload a webpage I’m like “JFC this is eye cancer”.

I was gonna say “only $25 for a concert t-shirt?” because they wanted like $50 for one at a Pantera concert about 6 months ago…then I saw this was over a decade ago.

A) it’s a horrible idea from a security standpoint

B) all the anti-piracy groups would probably have a heart attack and attempt to shut it down in any way possible

C) it’s a lot more expensive for the band to pay for this type of distribution compared to CDs

D) it will most likely end up as e-waste

May I introduce you to Ally The Piper

I’m 38 and man, you sound like you’re 75 🤣

I’m assuming you haven’t been to a concert in a few decades? I went to see Pantera and Lamb of God about 6 months ago and the only merch being sold was overpriced t-shirts, like $45-50 USD.

They’re “push” updates so it’s not something you have to do. Also, it would only affect you if your laptop was running Falcon Endpoint Protection.