I guarantee this update didn’t drop on Thanksgiving. Photo OP probably hasn’t turned it on since their last BBQ months ago and is just noticing - on Thanksgiving - that an update pushed a while ago that they now need to install to get started.

Pro tip: Start up your electronics a day or two in advance of events, so you can pre-patch anything that needs it.

Source: Former IT guy here, who had to ensure that updates ran at the most convenient times possible for thousands of users. “Patching Tuesday” is an unofficial but well recognized “holiday” for IT folks. It’s not first thing Monday morning, which could throw off the workflow for the week, but it also gives the max amount of time to resolve any issues that patching might cause, so we (hopefully) don’t have to work through the weekend.

Pay attention to when your stuff requires patches. A lot of the time, it’ll pop up on Tuesdays.

I have two original Steam controllers and I absolutely hated them. The track pads, whereas a cool innovative technology, weren’t good for 90% of my games. I needed that D-pad, or at least a joystick. I hardly used my controllers, and now I just hold onto them as a piece of Valve history.

Mine came with the physical Steam Link box. I bought two of those boxes, so I could use Steam from a couple different places in my home away from my gaming desk. Instead of the controller, I just plugged in a keyboard and mouse to the Steam Link box. They did away with the hardware though, and now it’s just an app on Smart TVs and app stores. So I can’t use my keyboard and mouse without some extra steps.

I had been in the US military for around 4 years when I was sent to a mandatory financial education course. Turns out, it was just a guy promoting TSP (Thrift Savings Plan), a sort of optional 401K-type program the military offered. This was back when the military still had a pension program instead of a mandatory 401K option.

I didn’t know anything about financial investments and the guy was basically speaking an alien language to me. But one thing stuck out to me: he claimed that if I started making the max monthly contributions from my paycheck at the beginning of my career (which the govt would match with their own contributions), I could have roughly $1 million saved by the time I was retirement-eligible at 20 years of service.

I was already 4 years into the service so I was way behind, but it still sounded like a good opportunity. I raved about it to my dad, who had spent a lot of time working on his own personal investments. He grew up dirt poor with barely enough money to feed and clothe himself, and by the time I was born, he and my mother were considered upper-middle class for the '80s. He was very money-focused and a living example of the old Boomer mentality of “picking yourself up by your bootstraps,” so I usually trusted him for financial advice.

He told me that he’d never heard of this “TSP thing” and that it sounded like a scam. He told me to avoid it and look into other “more legitimate” options for investing my money.

So I didn’t enroll in TSP. I knew nothing about how to invest money or who could get me started, so I did nothing else with my paycheck, besides stashing as much as I could into a savings account.

For all my dad’s knowledge on money and investments, he was awful at teaching anything. He didn’t have any detailed step-by-step advice, just generic stuff like “set up a Roth IRA” (whatever that was) and “pay attention to what’s happening on Wall Street.” I really shouldn’t have turned to him for advice, but I was young and naive and he appeared to know what he was doing.

Fast-forward a decade later, my wife (who was also serving in the military by that time) mentioned something about her TSP account and asked me about my contributions. I told her I never signed up for that program. Her jaw dropped. Over a decade of service and I had invested nothing?! She immediately signed me up for TSP and had me dump as much as I could into the account.

Today, I’m 3 years retired and I got a decent chunk of change tucked away in my TSP; enough to get me out of a financial struggle if need be. But it’s nowhere near $1 million.

All I had to do was sign up and tell it to take money out of my paycheck before I got paid. That was it; it was so simple! I could’ve had over $1 million in investments by now. Instead, I’m surviving on my measly military pension and some disability payments from the VA.

I’m not hurting financially, but I’m also not rich by any stretch of the imagination. Minus my debts (mortgages, large repairs, county-mandated home projects, etc.), I’m probably breaking about even, if not a little in the red. So I don’t really have money to throw around.

I had a solid govt paycheck for 20 years! If I had just created a TSP account all those years ago, I could have tons of money to retire with. Heck, if I had learned even a little bit about investing my money, I might have been able to “class-jump” like my dad did all those years ago. Later in my military career, I made a point to educate our young service members about their financial options, so they could get the head-start I missed out on.

In 2018, there was a show called She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, which was a sort of reboot of the old '80s cartoon of (nearly) the same name. The girl in the comment above my OP is Entraptra, one of the princesses. She’s obsessed with miniature versions of food.

OP’s post had a miniature-sized combo meal in the last panel.

“…Are you crabs yet?”

I get that reference.

I was born in the early '80s. The 2000s picture was what my McDonald’s always looked like throughout my childhood. I’ve never seen a McDonald’s that looked like the '90s pic.

The 2020 pic shows current McDonald’s, but they changed to that sometime in the mid-2010s.

I only use Lemmy. Fuck Reddit. And this is from someone who spent over a decade using Reddit religiously. I dropped them during the whole API scandal. I had been growing more and now dissatisfied with Reddit and that was the last straw.

The only mainstream social media program I use is Facebook, and I don’t really use it anymore. I only keep my profile because I’ve met people from all over the world who I stay in touch with through Facebook. Plus all my childhood friends and family members are there. But Facebook (and Meta as a whole) is garbage and I have a bunch of tools to prevent them from feeding me garbage content and recording my data while I’m trying to keep up with my friends and family there.

I have a Bluesky account, which I don’t know what to do with. Twitter always felt like social media for celebrities; there wasn’t much going on there for us normal people. I created a Bluesky account just to get away from Twitter, but I don’t have much to post and none of it gets attention from anyone, so I just feel like I’m talking to myself. I don’t have anyone really interesting to follow there either.

I also use Discord to stay in touch with my closest friends, on a personal server I built. That’s pretty much it. I don’t trust any other social media programs. So Lemmy is my main source of news and content.

Your definition of anarchy is what they try to sell on Fox News. That’s not what it actually is. Anarchism is actually a very structured system that opposes a ruling class controlling people and grants more freedom to the individuals to govern.

Fox News just takes the most extreme way in which anarchism can go wrong and promotes that as the default state.

Are you sure it wasn’t “queuing?” As in, “I’m queuing up some food to be cooked for our queue of orders.”

I had this problem learning Norwegian.

• “And” is “og”
• “Or” is “eller”

Everytime I see “og” in a Norwegian sentence, I immediately want to translate as “or.” It keeps tripping me up! “Eller” feels like too many letters to be “or,” so I keep translating it as “and” instead.

Reddit wasn’t immediately known as the “front page of the Internet.” It took time to build up a reputation and tons of content before it started to get noticed and promoted by search engines.

Lemmy is the same. It’s small now, but with enough content, it will eventually become a reference point like Reddit. Every little bit counts.

Thank you. As a former IT guy, I’ve been trying to keep my family away from Apple products. They’re way overpriced for their limited and locked down functionality compared to everything else out there.

My dad had Parkinson’s late in his life and my sister replaced his Android with an iPhone, specifically so she could give him this fitness tracker. He spent the last few years of his life struggling to figure out a new phone, and we could never get the damn app to work anyway. He fell all the time and it never once reported it.

I spent 20 years in the IT field and getting my computer-illiterate family to consult me before buying computer tech is like pulling teeth. I offer them free consultation and support all the time and they just go out and buy spyware-riddled junk on their own. They only come to me when their stuff is no longer useable.

My sister finally stopped buying iPads… only for her to go and buy Amazon Fire tablets for her kids. I had to go in and lock them down because they were constantly shoving ads into every function of the tablet. Her kids kept trying to buy games because they were constantly being advertised to them. And guess who left their credit card credentials on the tablet?

My apologies, /rant.

Always. I spent so much time beating the game, might as well sit through the credits. Sometimes developers hide interesting things in there. It’s not like a movie where I can fast-forward to the credits anytime I want, so I might as well check it out while it’s there.

At worst, I’ll just let them run while I distract myself with something else. I don’t need to be staring at them for the whole run. But I’m nearby and ready in case something interesting shows up.

The first time I beat Metal Gear Solid 4, it was late at night on a work night. I had stayed up late because I really wanted to finish the game instead of waiting until the next evening. I was so ready for the credits to roll so I could sleep!

Little did I know, cinematic cutscenes kept popping up throughout the credits, changing the end of the game! If I had just turned it off as soon as credits rolled, I would’ve missed the true end to the story.

Also… the credits and cutscenes at the end of Metal Gear Solid 4 are 90 minutes long! I definitely didn’t get enough sleep that night. But it was worth it.

Oh man! I had no clue what the program was called. We used it way back in my kindergarten/1st grade days, so I’d long forgotten the specifics. Thank you! This is exactly it.

What’s all this newfangled content being posted as old? My first computer had Windows 3.11 that you booted to from a command prompt. It was an amazing graphical upgrade from the command line computers. Now you could actually see what you were doing on the screen instead of typing commands and hoping a document would print with your data.

Before that, I used Apple IIe computers at school, with their solidly green command line interface. I remember being taught how to program instructions with those computers. You had a “turtle” (green triangle) that you needed to move to a specific spot on the screen, and you typed in commands to make him move.

Whatever content is in this meme, it all released long after I grew up and became an adult. You young whippersnappers.

I care, because what he says and does can drastically affect our lives in a bad way. It’s important to be aware of what’s happening. Ignoring him just gives him free reign to be an awful person without restriction.

Honestly, it’s why most of our government is allowing someone like Trump to do whatever he wants. Because who’s gonna stop them? Who’s going to enforce the rule of law?

Most people just prefer to avoid political BS, so they complain about the way things are, then go back to their lives a few days later and no justice is actually performed. No accountability.

Most of the time, I feel like the #StopMuskSpam campaigns on social media are just teaching us to ignore him so he can get away with more evil acts.

And the fact that he’s supposedly leaving politics feels like he’s just tired of being in the spotlight and is trying to move back to the shadows so he can continue harming us without criticism.

Don’t ignore him; stay in touch with everything he’s doing so you’re informed and can respond appropriately. And that goes for all political figures in control of our lives.

I spent 20 years as an IT admin. We used cans of compressed air to clean dust out of computers. Light, gentle sprays, preferably cleaned outside so the dust doesn’t just fill the room.

If you hold down the spray button for a few seconds, the can turns ice cold really fast, so be sparing with it. Also, don’t tip it upside-down while spraying or it’ll spray liquid that can damage computer components.

In all the years blowing dust out of computers, the only time I actually damaged a computer was when I tried to use a vacuum hose blowing air in reverse. It was too rough and broke some motherboard components.

Because I’m not an anonymous person. This is my default username for most of my public stuff, and it’s how friends and family find me online. I try to be genuine online; I don’t care to hide behind an anonymous profile.

I firmly believe in being a decent, respectable person toward everyone, even when I’m anonymous and don’t need to be. Every time I’ve created an anonymous account, it’s just ended up turning into my regular public profile, so why hide under a different username?

The profile pic just helps me stand out a bit more for others who know me here, and friends/family trying to find me. I regularly write video game reviews to post to !games@lemmy.world, so it helps me to be more recognized in the wild. My profile pic is my semi-anonymous profile pic that I use on other platforms when I don’t want to broadcast my face to everyone.

Thank you! 🥳