Come See
1) I'm thrilled to say we've been getting contributions steadily at 
threeforthememories and I just sent out my post today. The session closes on Monday the 24th, midnight UTC so post soon or come visit the ones made!
Something I noticed is that although the DW interest "2020" has been used by two other people (who never updated their accounts), there is no other person/community that has used "2021."
2) I finished S1 of Raised by Wolves and apparently S2 will begin in a few weeks. However I'm not that interested in seeing it. The concept of RbW with its post-apocalyptic atheists vs religious fanatics sides was somewhat intriguing, as was the idea of a group of children being raised by androids for the atheist side. But the execution proved far less captivating for me. For one thing, I expected to see a lot more focus on the struggle of how to raise children that are a different species from yourselves (as the series went on it became clear that the androids were essentially sentient). But as most of the children die off quickly it became a lot less about that and more about the survivors trying to finish one another off.
Then it went loopy with Mother and her visions of the past and then apparent impregnation via who knows what, the whole "chosen one" nonsense and a potentially haunted planet. I'd be interested in reading summaries of next season to see where it goes, but not watching it.
I also watched Encanto yesterday and liked it well enough but don't have much to say about it either. I liked the animation and the music was fine. It is definitely nice to see a Latino story on a big stage, especially in a family movie.
I tried out Miracle Workers and saw all of S1. The concept was great but I didn't find the show that enjoyable or funny. I got through one episode of S2 and realized I didn't care to see any more.
3) We're losing HBO Max in 3 days but have lost more options quietly. Only in November I began to search out live TV options channel by channel and cost-wise to see if switching from DStream would be worthwhile after an announced price hike. I discovered on January 1 when trying to record the Rose Parade that we'd lost HGTV (which we normally never watch). And then as we prepared to switch, I discovered we'd lost more than that. A&E, Animal Planet, History, Discovery, Food, TLC and the Travel Channel were all gone from both the DStream and YouTube lineups. Apparently Discovery+ is now hoarding that content. It's not a huge loss as we rarely watched anything from those networks, but their disappearance (unlike the price hike) went unannounced.
I also found that the current price listed on DStream's signup page of $69.99 was not valid for us as the best I could do was $75 after dropping HBO. So I suspect that the advertised price is about to go up next week as well. And given that YouTube tends to match rates, it no longer seemed all that beneficial to switch over to them. In trying out their interface I've got to say I didn't care for it and was wary of the fact that they noted that certain ads would not be skippable due to contractual obligations. We ran into that same issue on Hulu Live, which is why Mike doesn't want to use it even though it would be our cheapest option. On DStream we haven't though, unless we're trying to watch something On Demand instead of from our DVR recording.
Of course non-live streamers are not price hiking in the same way and the live providers are limited by network contracts in terms of what they can offer and for how much. But I can see standard $100 packages looming on the horizon if one wants to retain the most commonly watched set of networks in a non-cable option.
4) Almost a year old but still relevant Like it or not, tech companies can use your phone location data to map social distancing:
"An analysis by mobile app intelligence company Apptopia found Unacast’s SDK in all kinds of iOS and Android apps, including smart TV remotes, period trackers, games, free wifi locators, weather forecasters, and step trackers. You can always turn location tracking off for those apps, but some of them obviously need the location services to be able to work at all."
"But this means that a company you’ve likely never heard of has a lot of data about your phone and, by extension, you. That data includes your device’s unique advertising identifier; location data specific enough to detect which fast food restaurant the device is in and how long it’s been there; and the network name and MAC address of the wifi router the device is connected to."
5) Old Version is a website which stores older software including OS, multimedia and graphics programs, and office and file sharing programs.
View poll: Kudos Footer-340
Comments at Dreamwidth
.
threeforthememories and I just sent out my post today. The session closes on Monday the 24th, midnight UTC so post soon or come visit the ones made!
Something I noticed is that although the DW interest "2020" has been used by two other people (who never updated their accounts), there is no other person/community that has used "2021."
2) I finished S1 of Raised by Wolves and apparently S2 will begin in a few weeks. However I'm not that interested in seeing it. The concept of RbW with its post-apocalyptic atheists vs religious fanatics sides was somewhat intriguing, as was the idea of a group of children being raised by androids for the atheist side. But the execution proved far less captivating for me. For one thing, I expected to see a lot more focus on the struggle of how to raise children that are a different species from yourselves (as the series went on it became clear that the androids were essentially sentient). But as most of the children die off quickly it became a lot less about that and more about the survivors trying to finish one another off.
Then it went loopy with Mother and her visions of the past and then apparent impregnation via who knows what, the whole "chosen one" nonsense and a potentially haunted planet. I'd be interested in reading summaries of next season to see where it goes, but not watching it.
I also watched Encanto yesterday and liked it well enough but don't have much to say about it either. I liked the animation and the music was fine. It is definitely nice to see a Latino story on a big stage, especially in a family movie.
I tried out Miracle Workers and saw all of S1. The concept was great but I didn't find the show that enjoyable or funny. I got through one episode of S2 and realized I didn't care to see any more.
3) We're losing HBO Max in 3 days but have lost more options quietly. Only in November I began to search out live TV options channel by channel and cost-wise to see if switching from DStream would be worthwhile after an announced price hike. I discovered on January 1 when trying to record the Rose Parade that we'd lost HGTV (which we normally never watch). And then as we prepared to switch, I discovered we'd lost more than that. A&E, Animal Planet, History, Discovery, Food, TLC and the Travel Channel were all gone from both the DStream and YouTube lineups. Apparently Discovery+ is now hoarding that content. It's not a huge loss as we rarely watched anything from those networks, but their disappearance (unlike the price hike) went unannounced.
I also found that the current price listed on DStream's signup page of $69.99 was not valid for us as the best I could do was $75 after dropping HBO. So I suspect that the advertised price is about to go up next week as well. And given that YouTube tends to match rates, it no longer seemed all that beneficial to switch over to them. In trying out their interface I've got to say I didn't care for it and was wary of the fact that they noted that certain ads would not be skippable due to contractual obligations. We ran into that same issue on Hulu Live, which is why Mike doesn't want to use it even though it would be our cheapest option. On DStream we haven't though, unless we're trying to watch something On Demand instead of from our DVR recording.
Of course non-live streamers are not price hiking in the same way and the live providers are limited by network contracts in terms of what they can offer and for how much. But I can see standard $100 packages looming on the horizon if one wants to retain the most commonly watched set of networks in a non-cable option.
4) Almost a year old but still relevant Like it or not, tech companies can use your phone location data to map social distancing:
"An analysis by mobile app intelligence company Apptopia found Unacast’s SDK in all kinds of iOS and Android apps, including smart TV remotes, period trackers, games, free wifi locators, weather forecasters, and step trackers. You can always turn location tracking off for those apps, but some of them obviously need the location services to be able to work at all."
"But this means that a company you’ve likely never heard of has a lot of data about your phone and, by extension, you. That data includes your device’s unique advertising identifier; location data specific enough to detect which fast food restaurant the device is in and how long it’s been there; and the network name and MAC address of the wifi router the device is connected to."
5) Old Version is a website which stores older software including OS, multimedia and graphics programs, and office and file sharing programs.
View poll: Kudos Footer-340
Comments at Dreamwidth
.