chic_luke

Dating apps are crap. You literally have a higher success rate walking up to a random person at a bar than with a first message on Tinder. They could be a good tool, but we live in capitalism so they are made to extract as much profit as possible, even if that means promoting toxic, mental-health-crushing behaviours.

I think the fear mongering on Steam is excessive. The games stay offline on your disk, and most of them don't have a DRM. Gabe Newell has also said that, in case Steam ever shutters, an exit plan will be provided. As for the Steam native DRM, there are already open source implementations that can be used to bypass it and Valve hasn't done anything against it in years - so the only problematic DRMs are Denuvo and similar, which Steam does not control.

GOG used to be a valid alternative, but it isn't anymore. With CDPR themselves publishing games with DRM on GOG, on top of starting to be lenient on DRMs, they are literally having something similar to a DRM that is required for some games, a GOG Galaxy API that is completely closed source. And it doesn't support Linux, the FOSS operating system.

The fact that after years GOG still doesn't seem to care about Linux, CDPR releases their games for Windows only (and more often than not with DRM), and Cyberpunk 2077 only runs on Linux thanks to Valve's efforts is also worrying from a game conservation and ownership standpoint: Windows is a Proprietary operating system completely controlled by Microsoft, who can perform modifications remotely and is allegedly planning to popularize a model where people are sold very low spec PCs that only need to stream a Windows computer from the cloud with more powerful specs… not the platform I want to entrust the future of gaming to.

All in all, Steam is still the mainstream gaming platform I dislike the least and trust the most. If I'm going to buy a game and hope it's going to be playable decades into the future, it used to be GOG, but now it's Steam from me.

Thanks you!! This looks fun, I didn't know this was a thing

Thank you! I'll check it out :)

There's also audio dramas. Niche but good. They're a narration like books, but they are made for the audio medium.

The problem I've found with audio books is that they were made to be read - and it shows. It requires a lot of focus to listen to an audio book even if it was done well, and it feels "clunky" and "janky" in a way. I can't white put my finger on what's wrong with it but it feels wrong to me. Audio dramas are generally easier to listen to, sometimes they use epistolary formats to make them easier to separate into episodes, and they have a lot more attention on things like the background music and conveying parts of the narration through audio itself, rather than "writing" (so just reading something aloud). I find them fascinating, because they're really fun to listen to and they seem like the compromise between a book and a movie.

"The Magnus Archives" is great.

I agree. I'm tired of always blaming the end users for everything

Yeah :( I love my 2017-2018 phone to death (it's a Pixel 2 XL, and in the ~€400 phone market they are still trying to beat its camera quality 6 years later - and since it's a Pixel it's still more fluid than several phones I try in store, like €400-500 Samsungs, that display evident stutters that mine does not), but it has started with the random crashes and "dying" (boot loops followed by not turning on anymore) for a few minutes / hours before coming back to its senses occasionally

I still can't understand what's wrong with this. I believe we have normalized being constantly reachable and available way too much, and "through mandatory text replies" is already way too much. Calls take this one step further: "I am demanding to have your undivided attention, right now, for as long as it takes, I don't care what you're doing". I just think that's rude.

Actually, even with my partner we have a "Scheduling calls is vastly preferable to random calls" and I am 100% okay with this. If I am doing something else and it's not urgent, I'll get to you later. Let me get my work done and wait until my next break, or let me actually enjoy my friends' company IRL for a few hours, then I get back to you to chat. Why do I have to be available, at your disposal, immediately and giving you my undivided attention anytime? I'm not a chatbot, I'm a human being with a full and interesting life.

I believe not doing this is only doable if you have few friends. If you have plenty of friends + a full social life, you really have to manage your conversations and find various time windows throughout your day to keep up with multiple texting threads and that is time consuming as it is - before I established my own boundaries, it would seep in all areas of my life and I would get absolutely nothing done at days because it was too dispersive.

I have plenty of friends, so that is the only way to keep it sustainable, yes.

Of course, everybody can unschedule call for an emergency or a time-sensitive thing, like "Hey we have decided last minute that we're hanging at at place X in like 10 minutes, wanna come?" - in those cases, I actually prefer to be called because I don't want to miss it.

My family and my girlfriend are basically the only people allowed to do this. Everyone else - if you're calling me directly I will assume it's an emergency and will get annoyed if it's not.

Calls are fine. Unscheduled calls are not. Text me to set up a time to call that works for both. I am okay with giving you my undivided attention - just not necessarily right now.

Text to call. I also really like calls, but scheduled. Calling randomly to chat means you're taking my undivided attention for however long you want whenever you want and that's super disrespectful of my time

Like the entire fediverse, I also feel like it's much easier to reach other people here. What you write actually gets read. On Reddit, you either piggy back off one of the top comments, comment on a thread within minutes from it being posted or you are basically shouting into the void