Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Houthi rebels in Yemen, and militias in Iraq and Syria.

Whenever western media outlets speak of these groups they seem to prefix the term Iranian-Backed.

I'm starting to raise my eyebrows a bit at how universally the term is being used. It feels almost mandated. My understanding is these are indeed supported financially and materially by Iran, but they also very much operate independently. So the extent of the relationship is unknown or at least debated.

Does this strike anyone else as odd or suspicious? Is this use fair and justified?

My mind can't help but wander to the laying of a propaganda foundation for direct conflict with Iran.

One of my favorite rabbit holes is lost media. There are two definitions for how it usually comes up: first is media which is considered lost or otherwise inaccessible. The second isn't necessarily lost for sure, but simply relatively obscure media people can't identify. A lot of searches start with people recounting some vaguely traumatizing memory of some TV show, movie or book from their childhood, which can then turn into a vicious hunt that takes years to solve. The most famous example is probably the "Clock Man" which played a big role in drawing general attention to the concept of lost media.

Famous examples include the early seasons of Doctor Who, London After Midnight (and many, many, many other silent films), the first Superbowl, an extended version of the ending of Freaks, the original 9-hour cut of Greed... You can find countless ongoing searches today for all sorts of media ranging from songs to video games to commercials and even commercial bumpers.

It's a fun rabbit hole, particularly when you look into the searches themselves and how media gets found. Does anyone have any particular pieces of lost media you're looking for or invested in, or a search or piece you just find interesting? Feel free to talk about cases that have been found, too!

Hi

I figured before I start venturing into other forums dedicated to this sort of thing, I'd ask here on Tildes since I'm at least comfortable with the community and how helpful they can be here.

I'm tired of all of the subscription services I have, movies and TV shows disappearing from them, buying a film on Prime and only being able to watch it offline through a specific app. Even then, half the time we're watching comfort TV shows that we have on DVD already (X-Files and Friends for instance).

So I figured that building a home media server would give me the chance to cut the cord with a couple of these services and allow us to start using and controlling our own data again.

I have a budget of around £300 (I could perhaps push to £400 if needed) and I'm honestly not sure at all where to start. I have knowledge on how to build brand new, medium to high end gaming PCs as I've done it since I was in my late teens and built my first PC with the wages from my very first job but building a budget minded PC for use as a home media server goes completely over my head.

I've noticed that a lot of the pre-built NAS or media server boxes are very expensive so my first thought was to buy a refurbed workstation or small form factor PC that has enough "oomph" to do the trick but I don't know what ones to even start looking at and then I start to feel a little bit out of my comfort zone.

Things like getting the right CPU in these refurbed machines that offers the features I'm looking for like hardware transcoding etc., integrated GPU's, ensuring there's enough SATA ports for multiple hard drives and an SSD for a boot drive, and then to top it all off ensuring that while achieving these features the thing shouldn't draw too much power when idling as it'll be on for long stretches of time, if not left on 24/7.

I've also got no knowledge of Linux, I've never even looked at it but if it's genuinely easy enough (for someone with next to no Linux experience) then I'd be happy to give it a shot if it offers better performance compared to using Windows 10 or something.

All the server will be used for is watching TV shows, perhaps the odd film, listening to a bit of music perhaps and the odd podcast now and again. Simultaneous streaming will be fairly minimal, perhaps 2 streams as me or my partner watch one thing and our daughter watches another on her tablet. In regards to streaming outside the house that will also be almost non-existent, perhaps, again our daughter watching a kids TV show like Pokemon or Fireman Sam on her tablet when we're out but me and my partner don't tend to watch anything when we're outside the house, certainly not TV shows or movies anyway.

Redundancy isn't something I'm too horrendously worried about, I wouldn't be storing anything like photos that we wouldn't want to lose on it and while it'd be annoying, losing a drive with TV shows or films on it wouldn't be the end of the world.

Any help would be massively appreciated, thanks.

My examples have to do with tech/media, but it could be anything - old fashioned or "outdated" ways of cooking, communicating, hobbies, or mending things rather than replacing them, etc.

Owning DVDs

Earlier this year my husband and I had an irresistible urge to watch the masterpiece film that is Shrek. I hoped that one of the most popular animated movies of all time would be available at no charge to me, but of course it was not on Hulu, HBO, Netflix, or included with Prime. So that's great, I'm paying something around $50 a month for all these libraries of media, and somehow find myself paying extra whenever I want to watch something specific. Fair enough though, that's part of the deal I guess.

We decide to rent the movie on Amazon for $5. A couple years ago, I'm pretty sure renting movies like this was more around $2-3 and they've been slowly bumping it up. Okay. Everything gets more expensive. We try to start streaming the movie, and Amazon gives us this pop-up that says they've detected the hardware we're streaming it on (it's apparently a bit outdated,) so it's going to choose a specific version of the movie for us, one that didn't use some new technology related to streaming quality. That's fine in itself, but it just got me thinking about how much control these streaming companies have over all of this. My TV is at least 15 years old, works perfectly fine, and I don't see myself replacing it anytime soon. My imagination went the dramatic route, picturing a future where Amazon and its ilk will only stream to newer computers/TVs, either for a legitimate technological reason, or because they've struck a conniving secret deal with the TV manufacturers. Again, dramatic I know, but my point is just the general idea that these companies make all the decisions with streaming; we own and decide nothing.

Ultimately, I realized I could have easily found a DVD of Shrek for $1-2 at practically any used bookstore, and I would have not only saved money, I would have avoided giving my money to Daddy Bezos, and gained ownership of a fairly permanent copy of the movie. And what could be better than the ability to watch Shrek on repeat for the rest of my life?

So basically my husband and I have started a DVD collection. We have date nights at used bookstores and pick up all kinds of unexpected treasures. Childhood favorites we had forgotten about, classics we haven't seen in years, DVDs with extensive special features, some with really nicely designed packaging. For some reason, browsing the DVD shelves is like the fun version of scrolling aimlessly through endless streaming catalogs and not being able to decide what to watch. It reminds me of one of the greatest joys of growing up as a child in the 90s - getting to go to Blockbuster (or in my neighborhood, "Mr. Movies") and frolicking around with your friends/siblings, physically checking out the cases, and debating over which ones are the best (Mom is on a budget, after all.)

I have been pleasantly surprised by how novel and enjoyable it has been.

Owning Music

My second thing started when I realized I really want to spend more time away from my phone. I've also been jogging recently and have been annoyed/confused about what to do with this massive phone that I want with me for music (I try to buy small phones but they barely exist anymore.) Probably inspired by my recent "discovery" of the joys of DVDs, I decided to spend $25 on a tiny, simple mp3 player that clips onto my clothes. A music player that isn't also a social media machine which is connected to the entire world and every human being I've ever known, at any given moment. Just music.

Then I realized that I haven't owned any music (or paid any artist directly for their music,) in at least a decade. I genuinely didn't even know where to buy music at first. The last time I bought music, I was 17 years old and hadn't yet freed myself from the Apple/itunes ecosystem ("freed" myself from it, right into the Google/Pixel ecosystem, of course.) Someone suggested Bandcamp, as when you buy music on there it comes with the option to download mp3s. I've had fun discovering some new artists on the platform. And although I really like supporting artists directly, to make my collection a bit more frugal I've started picking up a couple cheap CDs when we go shopping for DVDs. I just export the music as mp3s with some free software. I'm not an audiophile, and the quality seems just fine to me. Next, I think I'll visit my parents and get some mp3s from their boomer CD collection.

All of this also prompted my husband to dig out an old hard drive of his, which we found had a massive goldmine of all the music he listened to in college (and he had/has fantastic taste in music!) Some of my favorites, plus all kinds of random bands and genres that I wouldn't necessarily think to seek out on Spotify, but they're in my lovely collection now, so why not listen? :)

(A bonus to exploring the old media was finding some ridiculous photos and memes he had saved from college. Bless him and his radical vulnerability, I couldn't believe he was willing to browse the hard drive with me while having no idea what was on it. Thankfully for him, it was mostly just good music, along with photos of sharks with large human teeth photoshopped onto them. He is so pure.)

The DVD/MP3 thing seems like a no brainer now that I've tried it, and I'm sure it will seem silly to some of you, but it simply didn't occur to me for years. Maybe something about my age - being 31 years old, the transition to streaming media happened just about exactly when I graduated from highschool and became an adult. I had no personal DVD collections to bring to my first apartment, and I certainly wasn't going to buy any - Netflix was all the rage, around $8/month, and practically no one actually paid for their own account. And having only purchased one or two physical CDs in my life, I did have a large mp3 collection from iTunes and Limewire as a teenager, but that died pretty quickly once we moved from iPods to phones for music, which happened around the same time. I think I transferred MP3s to my first one or two phones and lost them after that.

Anyway, in a world increasingly impacted by enshittification, with companies relentlessly pushing towards the breaking point of what we will tolerate when it comes to how we spend our time and money, I'm sure there are other "hidden in plain sight" realizations I'm missing out on.

I've had this problem come up so many times. I'll be watching a review on a movie/series and partway through the reviewer will make some rude comment about something they perceived as 'political', or how it was made worse by feminism, or 'woke-ism'. Sometimes it's just a tiny little comment that rubs me the wrong way, and I'll realize: This review is being done by someone with opinions I want nothing to do with. And I especially don't want to further their YouTube career with my watch time. It's become such a pattern at this point that I don't even bother with YouTube media reviews anymore.

I'm not savvy in the landscape of media reviews, I'm relying on what the algorithm serves me, and so far it's only serving up slop. I'm trying to chew through my media backlog and also discover new things, and I'd like to see some perspectives on what's out there. Does anyone here have any recommendations for enthusiastically queer-friendly media review channels? (Not horror focused please, that's not for me.)

https://youtu.be/vodNabH5qoM
But some important context:

Earlier this month I saw a post regarding a Misinformation Susceptibility Test and was curious how 20 binary questions could be an indicator of someones media biases.

I started digging into the related paper and while the methods and analysis was interesting, there was still a lot of questions. So I reached out to Dr Rakoen Maertens who headed the study and we agreed to a discussion on the assessment and his experiences in social psychology.

The video above is an unlisted, unedited cut of the interview and I'd love to get some feedback:

Firstly: I have offered the Dr a tildes invite and he may engage with any questions or discussion. Time was limited and there were a lot of topics that was only briefly touched on or overlooked. Here is the original paper and supplementary resources if you want to see some of the language model work and bigger 100 question tests.

Secondly: I am going to do a more through edit and posting this on a dedicated channel. Since cutting off reddit, twitter and tiktoc; I've sort of rediscovered a love learning and investigations. I'd like to know if people like this form of engagement and discussions. No fancy production, just simply engaging with the research and academics behind topical and interesting ideas.

I'm already reading into fandom psychology, UV reflective paint, children's TV and CO2 scrubbing technology.

I was nervous to post this in ~news, because it's more of a question than a story, but here goes.

I'm looking to turn down the temperature, pace, and volume of my news consumption habits, as well as limit how much time I stare at a screen (I do that enough professionally). I've recently experimented with subscribing to fewer, higher-quality news sources and getting them delivered via RSS*. This works pretty well, but I'm still left looking for something even slower. Something like a weekly news publication, which is delivered once a week in a print format that I can read away from a screen.

I've subscribed to Sunday papers in the past, but it's too much and there's a lot in it - I think I'm looking for a little .. less. A slimmer publication, fewer pages. Almost as if someone selected the top five to seven stories covered on the Wikipedia current events page in the week, then wrote a few thousand words apiece on each. Something I can make it through with my coffee on Sunday mornings in a few hours.

Does anyone do this or have recommendations? If so, what do you read and how would you assess that publication? I think I've tried a fair number in the past, but I will take anyone's suggestions. Thank you so much in advance.

--
*I use Reeder for macOS / iOS - which is great btw, and it's shocking how much of the modern web still supports RSS. Highly recommend folks reconsider RSS in general.

I recently obtained a access to a TON of different magazines and papers from Europe, US, UK and a few from Australia and New Zealand but I have no clue about the quality of stuff outside my native country so I would like to hear some suggestions.

Which ones do you read and would recommend to others and why?

Thinking about the recent incident where the devs for Skullgirls (current devs, not original devs) went and changed a bunch of artwork and other content for the fighting game, which released in 2012 after being Kickstarted. Aside from removing the sexualized imagery of an underage character, probably a good call, what about the other things they've decided are in 'poor taste' in 2023?

Should we be going back and editing games, or even movies, tv shows, and books to reflect more modern sensibilities? Is a game like Skullgirls even worth preserving its original content?

My opinion is no, unless it's something that is now illegal, I don't really enjoy the precedent that's been set lately where we go back and correct past mistakes in media. However, I also see the argument about removing media that may encourage racist or sexist thinking or put down minorities, but is it useful to see the media as it was and see how far we've come? Is that useful enough? Should only the original creators make that decision?

Just thought this was interesting. Tag as desired.