This is a fascinating question. I don’t think it was just Amazon either. Although the price undercutting definitely helped.

Like many others here, I remember malls having lots of cool smaller shops with various specialties. Toys, books, electronics, games, clothes, decor, whatever. It’s where you’d find more niche things.

Like if “Spencer’s Gifts” wasn’t 99% raunchy sex stuff now. (Although hey, there was that too.)

It was funny in the 90’s watching this idea of teenage girls coming back with a multi-bag haul from a mall run. Ha! Not anymore.

Nowadays though, in my big metropolitan area malls are doing okay, but you get two classes generally:

1. Run down, sketchy malls, with stores that can’t afford to decorate their storefront but they’ll have weird stuff like wall-hanger katanas and other almost-weaponry alongside dragon statues and glass pipes and stuff. Stores like this are punctuated by pushy kiosks that try to sell you snake oil.

These malls are still kinda hanging on. The ones here are trying to do cool things like theaters and experiences. I think it can be a cool place for fledgling businesses to do more experimental stuff. Unfortunately, the said-sketchiness still makes them a bit unappealing to visit.

2. Bougie malls, more numerous here. Every one is a clone because it features the exact same fashion-brand super-empires. And no, your working-class butt isn’t their target audience. Keep moving, because they removed the benches too. Along the way, you will still be harassed by pushy kiosks, but the snake oil is in much fancier packaging!

Each individual suite has like 15 items on display that cost more than the suited foot-aching sales person makes in 6 months before taxes.

I have no idea how these places are still running. Lol

Ah, it could be dubbed the Bear Grylls mod.

“It doesn’t know where you’ve been!”

Wow, I really appreciate you taking the time. I’m bookmarking this. Thanks, Dan!

As I look to upgrade or re-factor the server a bit, I’m gonna take a closer look at Podman. Not running as root by default sounds extremely sensible!

I tried that with a few of my Docker containers with results ranging from “Did it actually do it?” to “Nice job breaking it, hero.” Lol

OMV has a really nice Docker GUI built in, but I’d much rather be ready to understand the open-for-all solution if I could. :)

Hope you have a great one!

I think I remember this one too. It’s fuzzy but IIRC it might have been how he rags on the USA establishment for being draconian but then basically said “Hey if the right people wielded all that State power…”

There were also numerous times going light or outright conveniently ignoring authoritarian human rights abuses in places like China, to make them look like they’ve got it all together. Ick.

If you end up remembering the specific bit though, I’m curious too. :)

I don’t hate the guy or anything. But I do feel like he’s simply slid far on the authoritarian-left-side of the ideology-funnel that leads to extremism reinforced by self-deluding narratives. I hate seeing that happen to people. :(

It does help me feel better actually. Thanks!

I don’t even remember how I found out exactly, but I’m glad I did. I can totally understand how you could miss it. Especially because his videos seemed so tame to begin with.

Apparently the podcast with Yugopnik had a lot more of this kind of tankie banter.

Not sure if he was always this way or if it’s a case of “algorithm-driven-personality syndrome” but I still find it sad. :(

Sidenote: I also got an icky feeling when he’d constantly say “Sponsors won’t touch this content” and immediately started plugging audible and storyblocks or whatever.

To wrap on a positive note: So far I’ve been enjoying OrdinaryThings for my “Anti-establishment funny well-researched video essay” cravings. :p

Quite a few, but off the top of my head, SecondThought. I really enjoyed his accessible antiwork/breadtube video essays for a while, even though they got a little repetitive. It was really hard to find good anti-corpo information.

I’d even watch them with my wife and they’d feel somewhat galvanizing right before heading off to a really crappy job I was stuck in.

What did it for me is when he got kicked off Nebula for his comments on a podcast, where he basically went full tankie and joked about the situation with Israel/Palestine, basically saying all the murdered Israeli civilians “deserved it.”

I refused to let myself be influenced anymore by worldview of someone who would view other human beings in such a way. Apparently I was even late to realizing it. It’s a gross feeling.

Meme gave me a laugh. XD

I see people not happy with Docker as a company, and, I get that, tech co. Lol

But I gotta admit, it’s definitely been awesome for self hosting. My home server would probably just be OpenMediaVault and a Samba share if I couldn’t just spin up compose files and had to worry about every app wanting its own database and stuff!

Are there better alternatives for newbs who just wanna self host stuff?

KeePassXC is such a lifesaver. Back up that local database a few safe places, and even the BS accounts got like 32 char passwords. Good for keeping notes too like “Why did I make an account here again?”

Like when healthcare or government stuff makes you have like 5 sign ups with various crappy contractors to access your basic crap lol.

Lmao I was confused but I think I see where I got it wrong. I said “bread game” instead of “stick game”. XD

Apologies for butchering the language. :)

…Lol the machine translation of “jogo do pau” appears to be…Less than polite? Hahaha.

So, clarification: I think rural stick fighting from Portugal would be really cool to learn. :) lol

Ignorant North American here but I’m now legit wondering what happens to people backpacking-possibly-solo through places like Romania. 😬

Natural hazards like “If you twist an ankle you’ll get no comms service and be eaten by a bear.” aside, of course.

Buddy system is never a bad idea. :)

That’s really sad, because one day I wanted to go and learn Jogo do Pão. I hear it’s a dying art but they’re trying to keep it alive.

That gave such Space Quest vibes and I’m here for it. Just needs the narrator: “Don’t lick that! It doesn’t know where you’ve been!” Lol

Ha! Glad I wasn’t the only one. I fondly remember that about highschool too. My friends group was from all walks of life. Hugs every time!

I got called back by a staff guy once. “You’ve been hugging like lotsa girls. Have you seen our PDA policy?”

I was like “Bruh everybody hugs.”

Guess we hadn’t learned to be proper grown-up, repressed, judgemental shell-dwellers yet.

Society feels like a prison-zoo now: “Eyes down. Keep to yourself. Eye contact could start trouble.”

And we’re statistically the lonliest adult generations in history.

Awesome! Thunar is legit. 😁

That’s the part that makes everybody nervous though. Everything from the global dragnet surveillance network to the marketing company behind your grocery store app is most interested in “metadata.”

Companies like Microsoft will loudly say they don’t want your cat pictures and memes and college papers, they’re not tying your usage to an explicit file with your name and favorite pasta varieties…

…BUT that forced transmission of “anonymous user data”, could potentially be super effective in identifying and manipulating you. With enough of it, you can easily put together a profile of an individual.

Heck, for a while, TOR would advise against resizing your brower window because the window size in pixels could potentially help fingerprint you on the web. How nuts is that?!

Most people actually worried about a spook digging through "\videos\Homework\" are indeed paranoid.

But there’s been a lot of research at what can be done even if you’re just “userID 1284hdkfuw724bfiueb”

Hint for KDE folks: Ctrl + h toggles hidden visibility. Makes navigating lots easier. :D

SO MUCH. Now my standard procedure is to just make a “_My_Documents” folder within Documents, so I can know where the files are that I put there myself.

(Leading underscore pops it to the top of the list alphabetically)

I remember some Windows versions had a Games folder for all that, saved games, etc…but it seems very few games actually decided to use it lol.

LOL whoooops. That’ll teach me to actually read links once in a while. But hey, we can be distant neighbors hahaha.

You’re right though, plenty to go around. If we could all root out corruption starting in our own neighborhoods, they’d have nowhere to run. :)