Live service games, MMOs, gatcha games, and many hardcore multiplayer games are the worst for this. They love to waste player’s time on some repetitive grind because they want players to keep playing their game. They usually have either microtransactions (often for cosmetics) or a subscription.

Personally, I love MMOs, but I try to avoid playing any grindy content (or at least as long as I don’t think I’ll genuinely enjoy it). So I’ll usually play a game for a few months (they’re really big games) and then quit for years, if not permanently (I have a bunch of MMOs I intend to someday return to, but have not yet).

Single player games are generally much better at being genuinely fun. Especially story driven games. I also love open world games because you largely get to make them your own. It’s perfectly valid to beeline the story missions if that’s all you care about. Or you could do just the side quests. Or you could additionally explore like crazy. e.g., with Tears of the Kingdom, you really can ignore most of the shrines and largely focus on the story quests. None of the side quests are necessary, either. You don’t have to explore the depths except for a tiny few places for the story. The vast majority of sky islands can be ignored. But I personally had a lot of fun exploring, so I explored nearly everything and loved it (except most of the depths – they were way too big, empty, and repetitive).

Some people don’t like long games, though. And that’s fine! There’s tons of short or more streamlined games out there that you can have fun with. e.g., The Last of Us is a fantastic one. The sequel is about 24 hours long for the story and it felt like it flew by in the blink of an eye for me cause I was having so much fun.

I also can’t stand the fact that smokers can take unlimited ‘breaks’ whenever they please just to come back stinking up an entire room with their smoke.

That feels like a workplace problem. Why would a workplace give them unlimited breaks? And why would nonsmokers not be allowed comparable breaks? This feels odd to me. My recent jobs have been ones where nobody is micromanaging my time, so anyone can take whatever breaks they want. As long as productivity doesn’t obviously suffer, nobody cares. My past jobs in retail didn’t allow smokers to take extra breaks. They’d get the same breaks as everyone else (for an 8 hour shift, that meant a 30 min lunch and 2 x 15 min coffee breaks).

Well… I’m not surprised. Disappointed, but not surprised. We all knew this Supreme Court was not in favour of its citizens. The Supreme Court should have been stacked long ago. Leaving it be with its insane appointments just because stacking it might start a war with the GOP was a short sighted move, as the GOP is always going to play underhanded (that’s how they managed to get so many SCOTUS appointments in the first place). Biden’s insistence on trying to play nice with the GOP has always been his weakness.

This really sucks for those with student loans who were depending on this. We’re already in an economically rough place for the kinds of folks who would have student loans. Inflation has been sharp in recent years and wages have not kept up. In my field of tech, layoffs have been widespread and new grads would be the most severely impacted (they already struggle to get hired and now they’re competing against an increased number of experienced people).

As an aside, it’s also a shame that lawmakers have not managed to pass a law for this debt relief. My understanding is that the strike down is specifically because it’s not a congress passed loan forgiveness. But congress isn’t willing to do the right thing (not in enough numbers to pass a law, anyway).

And that’s just what the Parliamentary Budget Office predicted. The article also has another prediction:

“There’s a zero per cent chance it would be worse than what the Parliamentary Budget Office is saying,” said Wolinetz, who predicts a cost impact of under 10 cents a litre by 2030.

Good. Some people will try to phrase this as a bad thing because yes, you will pay more (eventually, anyway – article says they don’t expect “any real bite until around 2025”). But we should be paying more given the environmental damage that burning this fuel causes. We should not be effectively subsidizing oil companies by paying the cost of their negative externalities.

If anything, I think there should be even more than this. We should have Norway style taxation on fuel. They have a massive savings fund that massively dwarfs our own closest equivalent.

Does anyone know what special equipment includes? (I asked this last time but don’t think I got a response.)

Unsliced? Greatest thing since never.

Yeah, to be clear, MediaWiki is open source and also has alllll sorts of really cool extensions. You also already can download the entire contents of Wikipedia.

I think this desire to federate everything is going too far. Most things don’t benefit from this and in fact just become over complicated. If you can host a regular copy of a site easily… that’s frankly most of the benefits there.

Terrible. And while we don’t have enough details at this time to do anything but guess, I wonder if incel and anti-feminist rhetoric had an impact here. Gender studies as a subject is heavily loathed by those types, sometimes to the degree of wishing violence on them.

I’m sorry, are you saying you indent the braces? Cause if that’s not unintentional, those are both horrifying!

Blood for the blood cats!

It’s really hard to get them started though. Especially when I want a discussion on the topic now. I actually did try and start my local city sub and it was me shouting into the void as the only poster. It’s not very fun posting stuff without ever getting replies.

Yeah. It might not be some massive move, but it does mean something. It’s great to see your employer, other possible employers, your local politicians, your municipal services, and even just random businesses that you might use (or not) show that they’re accepting, especially when the status quo is to keep quiet to satisfy bigots.

Naw, I still use Google. With an ad blocker, I find it to provide the best results by far (though the ad blocker is important, because they get misleading ads sometimes). It’s superior when searching for descriptions (e.g., you can’t remember a movie title and have to describe it) and local results. Plus I use Maps heavily (it’s superior to its competitors) and that integrates into Google.

I just frankly don’t care that much about tracking my searches or the likes. I see it as the cost of getting a quality product for free. The only reason I even have the ad blocker is frankly because their ads are terrible. They don’t do enough to curate their ads, so scams sometimes slip in. I also think it’s very scummy that you can search, e.g., “pizza hut” and get an ad for Dominos above the Pizza Hut result.

If your employees (even if they work without payment) dont follow your instructions you search for someone who does follow them.

If they work without payment, they’re not your employees. And reddit isn’t a registered charity either.

It is their site so they can technically do what they want, but it makes them assholes and is not “ok” as you put it.

… UPHILL! BOTH WAYS!

I don’t follow what you’re saying. I love the shit out of many of my smaller communities. Reading TV subs after a new episode dropped was my favourite (and required a lot of active people). I wanted to discuss the Horizon DLC when I beat it the other day, but the Horizon sub here is super tiny. I tried to post on a generic gaming sub instead and did not get the discussion I wanted.

Similarly, Pokemon Go subs on Reddit were super detailed places to discuss the game, including with detailed analysis of any change, data mining for upcoming stuff, etc. Here, there’s two subs that have just the sub creator trying to populate the sub. No actual discussion.

It sucks and I miss those kinda communities.

Same. I actually love Linux and don’t like to do software dev on anything else. The only reason windows is my main personal computer is for gaming and streaming services. And some of that is inertia, cause I’m aware that Linux gaming has improved a ton in recent years.

Problem is that there’s a bunch of major communities on that instance. They have no affiliation with the server admins and mostly just chose the instance because it seemed like the default very early in the migration to the Fediverse.

I currently have a 7T. It’s not bad. Felt pretty impressive at the time that I got it. These days I feel like the camera is a bit lacklustre and every now and then something freezes. I’m gonna upgrade to something else soon. Probably something much higher end as I’m more comfortable spending money on a high end phone these days. But it’s been a pretty solid phone, especially for its price and age.