This crap has sent me back to physical stores. If they have it in stock, I don’t have to wait for it to ship, I just drive there and pick it up. Same with returns too, and exchanges. Same day.
Plus, I can trust that the company itself has probably looked at and tested the products, and has a real product and not a fake. I doubt I’m the only one going back to brick and mortar as well.
Makes me think of the Privateer / Elite style X spaceship games, but that’s probably because of my personal bias towards games like that.
Everyone else would probably think Porn or the X-games first.
I’ll probably transition my AMD 8350 build over to Linux when Win10 stops being supported. As opposed to my mom’s FX-8370 build, which I’ll probably just have to replace with a new Windows 11 system, as there’s no way I’m expecting her (an elderly woman) to learn anything other than Windows. Especially since she’s reliant on Windows-only apps.
The actual hardware she’s using will probably be converted to a Linux Desktop, but I’ll have to migrate her data to a new mini Windows 11 PC or something.
I think it’s a smart move. I like my G502, but have learned that ambidextrous mice are more for me. I get soreness if I only use my right hand for mousing all the time.
Like I (and others) keep saying. We’re already a Cyberpunk Dystopia, just without the Cyber.
Everyone else has answered your other questions, but let me just say that I’ve used KDE Neon (while distro hopping) it’s both beautiful and functional. The latest KDE developments are really solid and intuitive, and based on their development updates I’ve seen on Mastodon and elsewhere, it seems like they’re really starting to understand their userbase.
I.E. they understand that most people want to double click icons to launch them even though almost the entire development team prefers single click. They’re not doing the tunnel-vision dev thing where they force what they love on users even though the vast majority of the userbase prefers the opposite.
Edit: It looks and feels gorgeous, and even similar alternatives like Kubuntu kind of feel a little worse to me. Then again, I’m a serious Cinnamon / KDE fan, so other peoples’ mileage may vary.
Not shocking. A lot of the people who claim to be the most “patriotic” or “religious” seem to be overcompensating for something else they’re hiding. Kind of like the extremely “straight” types with gigantic closets.
Sounds about right. When I joined the military I met people from Alabama, and even people from other Southern states had nasty things to say about that state. I didn’t believe it at first, but then I saw enough over time to realize, “I hate to say it, but maybe they’re right. At least about some of the smaller towns and more rural areas.”
I met a few nice people from Alabama, yes. I also met… a surprising number of not so nice types. I’m Asian by the way, not White. I’ll let people fill in the gaps.
Ironically, for old stuff at least, Piracy is the only way it’s reliably preserved. Even if you do want to buy it new to support the creators, oft-times you can’t. It’s because I can’t buy it that I turn to piracy. Not just for old games, but sometimes old comics and manga too. Occasionally Anime that’s no longer licensed or available.
Plus, it’s only going to get worse now, with Streaming services and online platforms delisting anything even that might not make a profit because they don’t want to pay residuals. I’m not big on pirating new releases, but that’s because I think we should support artists. I also think we should call for the creators to be paid more of the profit share vs. the money people at the top who seem to do nothing but fire people and shoot down good ideas to try to make everything the same carbon copy live service.
I also don’t have to pirate new stuff, because it’ll old stuff on sale at half price (or less) soon enough, and with all the bugs fixed and the features added the way it should have been at launch. My backlog is so huge that I won’t have time to go through it anyway before I die. So there’s another reason I don’t care much about new games. If I’m still interested in them a year or more later when they’re on sale and fixed up, I’ll buy it then.
As for stuff like Anime and Manga. Anime subscriptions are surprisingly cheap, and so are monthly manga subs if you know where to look. Viz’s Shounen Jump ($3) Vizmanga ($2), Azuki.co ($5), Mangamo (also $5 last I checked)… so long as you only subscribe to one at a time and rotate, you’ll probably never run out, and it’s a lot cheaper than buying it one volume at a time $10 each or whatever.
This tracks. Youtube’s introduced 30 second unskippable ads for some reason I cannot fathom (I exit all the way out of the app whenver they try that) and the slow and steady decline of most mainstream social media is expected, due to the enshitification.
Twitter and now Reddit are probably going to die slow deaths, although Twitter will most likely go first. Reddit… may hold on for longer until a mainstream competitor arrives to replace it, or people finally decide to try the Fediverse.
Yeah, don’t understand that. Elon’s a guy that overpaid for Twitter: a site that swings between mostly unprofitable and sometimes slightly profitable and then saddles it with a huge loan with interest payments so large that it basically guarantees that it’s already dead because there’s no mathematical way for it to make enough profit to continue.
Unless the Saudis and other dictators aligned with them decide that it’s worth giving Musk a break in order to turn Twitter into a propoganda machine / spy site to catch activists and dissenters, Twitter’s already dead. It just hasn’t finished bleeding out yet.
How can Spez look at that and think, “Oh hey, I want THAT for Reddit.”
Also: we’re still not going to pay you, but treat you worse. And if you quit, and the people after you keep quitting… we’re going to have to replace you with PAID moderators… and if you play your cards right and we forget who you are, you might be one of those paid mods, so uh… shut up and get back to work for free!
Only thing shocking about this is that it took this long. Any drone capable of carrying a weapon was going to get one. I mean, look at Ukraine right now. Consumer drones with soda bottle improvised explosives and cardboard drones. I can see a future where most warfare is drone vs drone, to see who can hit the other’s supply lines / storage first.
The way Russia’s turtling with illegal mines, drones are basically one of the only ways to attack without taking massive losses while also moving slowly and being sitting ducks for artillery.