Hey, long as you’re working on it. I’ve been working on ripping my entire music collection from Spotify the past couple months before I tell them to go fuck themselves for the ICE ads, after ~10 years of paying for their service. I’m aiming to be done before January.

sounds to me like all of your shows should become free. Properly free.

Remember, companies die when people stop giving them money.

I fucking despise this kind of gaslighting. YouTube does it too, with their “experiencing interruptions?” popup that then takes you right to the FAQ section telling you to disable your adblocker and that it may cause problems. no, you drooling fucking simpletons, you are causing problems deliberately, problems I will circumvent without disabling anything out of pure spite.

Journalists should be funded by the public, as they perform a public service, while simultaneously they should not be required to report favorably upon the state. We just fail to do so because it’s more profitable for the old money that own the current media empires (and Larry Ellison), with the added benefit that the general public are treated like mushrooms – feed them shit and keep them in the dark.

yeah, truth is only something those who can afford to pay should have, better that the poors get their news from Facebook posts as God intended

golly gee whiz it sure looks like I’m finally getting around to getting off the stock android on my Pixel, I’ve been lazy and dragging my feet for some time. Thanks, Google, this is just the kick in the pants I needed!

if say, Spotify or YouTube complain about them.

… who owns YouTube?

Yeah, they’re going to block ReVanced.

I’m not saying you can’t do that, but booking.com or Expedia could just as easily be hacked. They might invest more in security, but they also have a much larger attack surface. Furthermore, when you use a third party site, your credit card details usually won’t be passed on to the hotel directly, that’s true – but then, when you arrive, third party reservations (which only have a virtual card on file from the third party site) usually need you to provide a credit card for incidentals. So one way or another your card details will end up in the hotels system.

Travel credit cards are always a good idea, or pay in cash, just be prepared to have to leave a deposit with the front desk for damages (that you’ll get back if you don’t trash the place) if you choose to pay with cash. Dealing with the hotel directly, though, will almost always drastically reduce your headaches. Need a refund? Just talk to the front desk or management. Need to change your stay dates? Call the front desk directly. No waiting in a queue for an available operator in a call center in India, no “well the hotel has to approve of it before we can […]”, no bullshit.

I am legitimately trying to save you the headaches I watched probably hundreds of different people go through for five years on night audit, and almost every time it was a problem I couldn’t solve, it was because it was a problem created by a third party site.

okay I don’t know who needs to hear this but as someone who has actually worked at hotels:

Stop. Using. Third. Party. Sites.

They do not care. Booking.com, Expedia, Trivago, Travelocity, whatever fucking stupid ass third party site out there – they only cause more problems than they solve. You want a good deal? Hell – you want a straight-up better experience? Call the hotel directly, explain the price that the third party site is showing you, and ask them to match it. 99 times out of 100, they will, because when you book directly with the hotel, the hotel doesn’t have to pay the third party site jack shit. The way third party sites make their money in the first place is by telling hotels charging a rack rate of $200/night “we’ll promote your hotel to guests in the area for $175/night, but you’ll only be charging us $150”. The guest pays Expedia or whoever $175, Expedia pockets $25 as a fee for promoting the hotel and passes on $150 to the hotel. In other words, they can either lose out on $25 by price matching, or lose $50.

Every hotel would prefer you book directly, and will happily price match, so they don’t lose any money to a third party site. More than that, if there are any problems with your booking – wrong days, wrong room type, want to cancel, whatever – you would have to go through the third party site again to do any of that. And waiting on or talking to customer support staff with thick accents at 3AM while your kids are wailing and you just want to go to sleep to fix a problem with your booking that, had you not gone through a third party site, the front desk agent standing in front of you could fix right now, is not fun.

Please stop using third party sites. For the love of God and all that is holy, use them to get discounts but do not book with them.

Like, yes, this wouldn’t have done anything about the bedbug problem this hostel had, but the point remains that any issue is much easier to deal with when you don’t have to play a game of telephone with a middleman corporation that does not give a shit about you as a guest.

Sounds to me like you need to update your blu-ray collection to 4K during your stay.

Sure, they could pull a Nintendo and do that; but then you’ve got a handheld running Linux. Linux that’s trying to tell the user how they should use it/how they’re not allowed to use it. And thus if they do it is guaranteed that there will be a dedicated, pissed-off Linux nerd somewhere who spends hours a day doing everything in their power to revert or circumvent whatever bullshit they pull.

In fact, if they did a “Nintendo move”, a workaround would probably be integrated into Bazzite within days or weeks.

Is this a Samsung thing? My S9+ used to do this all the time and it annoyed the fuck out of me, never had it happen on my Pixel

I would but there’s a site I use called RVRB that only works with Spotify Premium AFAIK, and I enjoy the site too much to give it up. Great way to discover new music.

legit I pay for Spotify and I love spicetify, been considering canceling it because spicetify and revanced spotify exist

I was gonna say, 4x the amount of RAM I have, made me feel inadequate. like, “am I really that poor now? is my 2080 now considered potato gaming?”

it’s simply been so long since I’ve gone “ok I need to upgrade” that I’m starting to get suspicious

Whenever I encounter that while trying to view something in private browsing (to avoid it tainting my recommendations), I go out of my way to use an alternative frontend just to spite them.

I dunno, maybe provide such a good service that it makes me want to pay, voluntarily? Like I do with Steam?

also, “you aren’t paying them, therefor they have the right to invade your privacy and serve malicious ads to you” is such a stupid, shit take. Are you some megacorp CEO’s personal ball-gargler or something?

see, I don’t negotiate with terrorists, so I use PopUpOFF and Bypass Paywalls Clean. Also AdNauseam, TrackMeNot, CanvasBlocker, and SponsorBlock to round out the “fuck you, fuck your ads, and fuck your tracking” suite.

Hostile consumer practices becoming ubiquitous? Become a hostile consumer.

I’d switch if there was something like RVRB for Tidal or, better still, your own local music collection. Or if RVRB supported other platforms.

Seriously, that site has helped me find so much stuff I like, it’s hard to let that go.

what the other guy said. Send it to the media if it was a national scandal, it’ll be extra spicy.