It’s become harder to get clean(ish) audio captures for theater films, but it’s not impossible. There are still theaters with hearing impaired seating and headphone hookups, still a few drive-in theaters that broadcast via FM (one of those here in Reno, actually).

If anything, I think it’s because digital rips/DLs seem to come out more quickly. By the time a group has tracked down a clean audio stream and takes the time to sync it with footage, someone’s probably snagged a digital copy and released it.

Now Telecines, those are basically unseen these days. Almost no theaters still use actual film, and the few that do are way more careful about their inventory management. Gone are the days when a whole film can just get “misplaced” for a few days while someone with a Telecine setup copies it, to say nothing of how few people have the setup for Telecine anymore in the first place.

Elon: Let the free market decide.

Free Market: *decides*

Elon: Wait, no, not like that

I’m not sure how the numbers were doled out, but in 2000 it was a big deal having a sub-9-digit ICQ number.

86336930 checking in. Pretty sure I remember the password, but it’s not like I can check now.

You will be missed, ICQ. When no other messaging service worked, you always did.

Ah damn, so that’s why a bunch of channels disappeared from my IPTV list. My fault for not diversifying I suppose.

Anyone got any suggestions for sites of a similar vein? Sites, not telegram/discord groups.

Seems like if they didn’t want content being viewed by anyone who can connect to a stream they might wanna put some authentication on the connection or something. Crazy idea, right?

EDIT: Yes, I know some of these streams are pirate streams being hosted elsewhere, but a bunch of them are straight from the companies themselves, available in the clear without any authorization checks.

I like to watch TV shows in the background where I’m not going to be watching the screen obsessively, so I have several shows in 480P or sub-480P. There are also some shows where the “official” HD versions are just awful (most 90s sitcoms) or the show was made for 4:3 and has a different feel converted to 16:9 (MASH, The Wire).

Going beyond that though, I spent years on a really limited connection (2.6m down/400k up) and my instinct for saving bandwidth and storage space is still there, along with my need to pay it forward since I ain’t no leech. I’ve become fond of making what I call “Bonsai Encodes”, where the files are small enough to be sent over damn near anything. With mono Opus and VP9 video you can cram 45 minutes of perfectly watchable content into a sub-25mb file that’ll play in Discord, with VTT subtitles even (though those won’t play in Discord itself). Looks a bit like watching it on an old tube TV, but it’s watchable.

Guessing they used Sonarr, Radarr, qBittorrent, maybe an NZB client…

Would you look at that, I’m sophisticated now.

Damn Leftists. They ruined Leftism!

Update: just logged in and this appears to be fixed now.

Sterling and Yahtzee did a few literal road trips together even.

Porn. The porn side of Twitter is still intact and really quite… okay I was gonna say “wholesome” but maybe I should say “holesome”? Ehh? Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhh?

…anyway.

That said, a lot of adult content creators have been creating accounts on bsky once they get invites. If bsky opens up more there could actually be an exodus.

Update: It’s back as of now. Still curious what caused it to go down to begin with.

it’s definitely possible to be unprofessional/toxic while still doing something that you’re legally allowed to do (under that license)

That was my take on it. Nothing I read indicated that the Pushpull devs had done anything wrong per se, other than being bad at PR and the selection of someone to do said PR.

On the other hand, the sentiment coming from the Pushshift side was staggering to me. I mean the licensing wasn’t even ambiguous, and who makes their source code publicly available and then complains about someone using it?

Ah yeah I remember this. I also remember a few of the pushshift devs getting butthurt that pullpush forked their source code and “stole” it, despite the license they use explicitly allowing that. Look, if you don’t want people reusing your code then don’t publish it somewhere publicly accessible under a license that allows reuse.

This SubredditDrama thread touches on it, just so no one thinks I’m talking out my ass.

This just feels like a repeat of Rural Electrification: yeah it’s expensive and not immediately profitable, but we’re at the point where it’s necessary to be a part of modern society.

I’ll be blunt: the fact that they’re opposing it makes me even more supportive of it.

RTF is a rarity these days since basically every phone, tablet, and other handheld device can handle either PDFs or HTML (and ePub is basically just a ZIP file with HTML in a specific naming scheme and structure). Back in the day though you’d find RTFs more often for use in budget/jury-rigged eReader options. It’s much easier to parse, if nothing else.

Windows not having a built in free RTF editor is notable

Yeah, that is a bit odd, but then again when’s the last time you’ve seen something other than a cut-rate eBook in RTF? Everything is either some variant of plain text or a DOC file these days.

Plus, it’s rare that you ever need to edit RTF files. Read, sure, but that could be handled by Word Viewer, which is free.

EDIT: Right, they’re discontinuing the viewers, but apparently they have a cloud-based online thing that’s free? Sucks if you live somewhere with crap internet I guess.

It’s nowhere near as bloated as Word but you have many more options than Notepad when it comes to formatting and presentation. It’s actually impressive how much you can do within the limits of RTF.