Like I get that the first post to the community was negative in tone and downvoted, an auspicious start, but from the perspective a media lover...

The book nerds are the loudest. Possibly because a paper book is a very visceral experience because for the several hours it takes to read a book you're touching it the whole time. They talk about smells and sounds and feels of a thing designed only to be looked at.

After that it's probably the audiophiles, who have spent decades arguing about vinyl versus CDs, that one is warmer or whatever. I get the appeal of vinyl, you get to fiddle with something. A turntable is an inherently mechanical thing, you get to touch it and move it. And large discs come with huge covers with lots of room for artwork and liner notes to look at and display. CDs often get a miniaturized version of this in their jewel cases.

Personally I'm not really a media quality snob; I grew up listening to 128kbps mp3 files and watching movies on VHS tapes. "The Force will be with you, Luke. Always." was just as magical on VHS as it was in the theater on 35mm film, as it is on 1080p blu-ray. You don't need a 4k transfer of Groundhog Day.

I'll admit I have some nostalgia for the clacks and whirs of a tape deck or VCR, not enough to bother keeping one hooked up.

In the modern day, to a lot of us, owning physical media is a badge of at least attempting to uphold the social contract. Artists made a work of art, a movie, a TV show, a song, a book, a story, and having a legitimately purchased copy of that work rather than a pirated copy downloaded from the internet means I'm trying to pay the artist for making it so he can live. Streaming services were for a time a better way, very convenient means of legitimately accessing content instead of pirating it. Except corporate greed has almost entirely undone this; they keep altering the deal and telling us to pray they don't alter it any further. So many are returning to physical media, which in the modern world basically means CDs for music and blu-rays for movies, 480p DVDs as a mostly obsolete fallback. And blu-rays are so riddled with paranoia that they're difficult to actually live with. "You aren't willing to live up to your end of the social contract under any circumstances, are you Paramount Pictures?"

That and the combination of blu-rays being very high resolution and appearing at a time when physical media is secondary to streaming, and you get lazy releases where they dumped raw video to disc without putting any effort into making it a good experience. Hence bad cropping, horrendous mismatched film grain, bad color grading, and basically nothing fitting a 16:9 screen because that's not the aspect ratio of old TV or old movies, and you get a kind of garbage product. You get kicked in the face for trying to do right.

Copyright and patent law is a social contract and a very fundamental one.

United States Constitution has some pretty cool ideas in it. Freedom of speech? That the government cannot punish you for expressing an idea? That was added as an afterthought. Freedom of religion? That congress shall make no law establishing a religion, making our society secular and preventing the government from punishing those who do not conform? Afterthought. The right to a trial by jury of peers, the right to not be compelled to testify against yourself, the right to be secure in your person and property? Afterthoughts. All of that, all of the things we call the Bill Of Rights, were added on the basis of "Wait we should probably have this."

The basis of intellectual property law isn't in an amendment, it's too important. It's in the main body of the constitution. Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 Intellectual property:

To promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respecive Writings and Discoveries.

We The People grant creators for a time exclusive right of way over their creations to monetize and profit from them as incentive for doing the work of creation so that we may have the creations, after which the creation becomes the heritage of all mankind forever so that other creators in the future may build upon it. Americans tend to view our first amendment right to freedom of speech, broadly defined by our supreme court to include symbolic speech to include overt actions such as burning a flag, as near absolute. Even the allegedly liberal allegedly enlightened democracies in Europe will outlaw ideas; America will not. Copyright and patent law is one of the very few where we will limit speech or the press, for it is one of the few laws that came before the first amendment. You may not be free to print an idea if it currently belongs to someone else.

Without that incentive, the ability to personally profit form the works you create, you get the Soviet Union, which invented...Tetris. Whose inventor didn't earn a single kopek from his invention until he became an American citizen. Without the expiration date for copyrights or patents you get...Disney. Who gobbles up creative works without the intention of letting go with the apparent goal of monopolizing the very idea of storytelling itself, hoarding wealth in perpetuity and simply buying any competition.

For a society to properly function it is important for patents and copyrights to be temporary in nature; they must exist and yet they must within a lifetime cease to exist. Lack of either condition is an intolerable rot. Copyright terms being the lifetime of the author plus seventy years is a rot the United States probably has not survived. I think we're soon to find out.

I'm going to come at this from a movie rather than a video game place, but:

Which is more "woke:" Enemy Mine, or She-Hulk?

Enemy Mine is about a human and an alien (played by a white man and a black man) starting the movie as enemies. Actual shooting war "We were in a dogfight and I was trying to kill you with guns" enemies. And when marooned on an inhospitable planet they learn to understand and even love each other.

She-Hulk is about Nth-wave feminism talking points. "They catcalled me in a parking lot and it made me mad."

You know that guy who does "honest movie trailers" on Youtube? He did one for Star Trek TNG, and he says "It's the future, and the Future. Is. Woke!" And he said this before the word "woke" was co-opted by the right meaning "anything regressives don't like."

Gene Roddenberry had a vision for the future where we were past it all. Humanity is beyond racism, beyond sexism, beyond classism. Even if he couldn't live up to it himself (He did put Marina Sirtis in a minidress and in a chair with no console in front of it to make it easy to look at her legs. And there was that really cringey episode where they go to the black people planet where everyone is all tribal and primitive, that was ugly) he aspired to that future. Probably the most powerful to me, he wrote characters who, when confronted on their ideas, would re-evaluate and even change their minds. Data called Picard out in "Measure of a Man" and Picard changed his stance and fought for what he now realized is the truth. That is the manliest moment ever broadcast on television.

I grew up with that show, I was born in 1987, same year the show premiered, some of my earliest memories is watching TNG on my parents' Zenith console TV. That idea of "we're past that now, we put aside our differences and we work together as a team of equals now" vision is what I thought we were all working toward. That that was the future we all wanted. Couldn't be farther from the truth. The radical right are actively avoiding it clinging to some weird idea of a white hegemony. Surprised they don't call the invention of the diesel powered tractor an affront to their heritage because it deprives them of a reason to harm black people.
Most other groups of people are busy fantasizing about having their turn as the despotic rulers. "When we come to power, we'll enslave you and see how you like it." That type of shit.

The people who call themselves "Woke" like the aesthetic of people who aren't straight and/or white and/or male doing creative things, but the things they create are basically never about everyone learning to get along and building better futures for each other. They make talking point grievance airing revenge porn and dare their targets to dislike it.

they are indeed.

This was years ago now; I did an experiment to test various AA battery chemistries in real-world conditions to determine if the price difference was worth it. This was tangentially related to amateur radio, I first got the idea from overhearing a conversation on 2 meters.

I used rechargeable Ni-MH, zinc oxide "Heavy Duty" batteries, alkalines, and lithiums to play a lot of video games on my Nintendo Wii. (the batteries in the controller) I found that the Lithum batteries performed less than twice as long as the alkaline batteries, nowhere near worth their price. The "Heavy Duty" batteries were less than half of the alkalines but that actually made them more cost effective. The Ni-MH batteries had the shortest single charge of them all, I forget what it worked out to be the break even point.

One thing I did note was the Lithium batteries were noticeably lighter than the Alkalines, so if weight is an issue they may be a viable option.

Care to elaborate on the bullshit?

Woodworker here, y'all want me to cave some for ya out of hunks of wood?

Look out it's a hidewinder.

Tarheel here...nuh uh!

Also a lot of our biggest military bases are in North Carolina. There's Camp Lejeune, our largest marine base, and to give it it's full legal name, Fort Bragg I Mean Fort Liberty, a very large army base. Also in the state you'll find Seymour Johnson AFB.

I bought a small pack of hamburger at the grocery store once. Same foam tray but it just wasn't overstuffed like so many are. The checkout girl, holding this, says of it "I don't understand why they underpackage it like this." and I say "Well some of us are bachelors and will only eat a pound of burger before it goes bad."

I think the young people enjoy it when I get down verbally, don't you?

Then what the hell are these?

Difference between a chickpea and a garbonzo bean.

I've never paid $200 to have a garbonzo bean on my face.

tbf he didn't.

I could just record myself talking to my cat and be a bad podcaster.

chokes way up on the mic, drops voice an octave Welcome back to the Aggravated Hour, I'm the Captain, and on this week's episode we're going to get right down to tonight's questions: Who's a good kitty? Are you a good kitty? Who's a kitty? Are you grey? I think you're grey. Let's examine the evidence.

At least semi-seriously, yes. Men making podcasts has been kind of a femisphere thing, I think it started a few years ago as one permutation of "Men will do [x] instead of going to therapy" joke and got kinda latched onto.

Okay, if you insist.

I worked on a light sport aircraft imported from Eastern Europe that was held together with a lot of metric cap screws instead of hex bolts. These wanted to be torqued to similar values that AN Standard Steel bolts wanted for their size but the drive is 5 times smaller, so it tended to be the point of failure. Worked out okay I guess because the head would round out instead of ruining the threads so you could usually get a pair of vice grips on the head to remove the bolt.

Nope. The Grumman LLV has a shitty little fan.

Hex, especially in lower quality fasteners, has a tendency to round out.

Either everyone knows how to compensate for a southpaw or everyone is a southpaw. Fencing is a lefty's game.