If all you consume is news and social media -- which have incentives to show the most extreme views, events, and content -- you're going to have a distorted picture of the world as a 100% awful, dangerous place.

But most of the time, in most parts of the world, most people are just living their lives. I live in the Portland, OR area and you would have thought by the news coverage of the 2020 George Floyd riots that the city was burning to the ground; in reality, the disruptions were limited to a few square blocks downtown. The majority of the city went on like usual.

There's a lot more nuance to things about the US, too, than those outside realize.

People do fight back, every day. Our courts are prosecuting Trump. The House Speaker loony you mention in the thread came about only after a long, drawn out debate; the Republican Party is incredibly divided and ineffectual right now. Roe vs. Wade fell, but many blue states strengthened protections. Mass shootings get a lot of press, but they affect a vanishingly small part of the population.

Obviously there are problems and not everything is fine. And we have to be vigilant. But this sentiment among people -- especially certain Europeans I've noticed -- that the US is just a pure dumpster fire is a wild exaggeration by people addicted to screen time.

"ESA survey showed" -- not exactly an unbiased report

The housing market isn't going to crash. We're at the highest mortgage rates in 23 years and it's STILL a sellers' market. The fact is, inventory being incredibly low + home buying being desirable for many == no reason for a crash. Even the Great Recession only resulted in a temporary price dip.

I know a lot of millennials and zoomers would LIKE for there to be a crash because they think it would let them afford a home. This is a false belief, though: if there were a major crash, it would likely be accompanied by a recession in the labor market too, so there goes your ability to pay for the house.

Also, it's not black and white. If house prices and interest rates cooled off, it would let me (a homeowner) refinance my mortgage.

Morever, there are benefits to home ownership outside of equity / profiting off a sale:

• Tax benefits (I can deduct my mortgage interest and property taxes; can't do that with a rental)
• Do what I want with my house -- customize, upgrade, etc.
• No landlord to tell me what I can or can't do, or kick me out
• For complicated reasons, there aren't many detached house rentals in my area, so owning a house means no loud, obnoxious apartment living -- this is the BIG one for me

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/housing-market-crash-experts-191734802.html---

helps to boost posts from less active communities to the top

Nice!! This and the instance-blocking are welcome changes.

Rate it? Rate it what? 5/7?

Yes! I hated that on reddit. I would sometimes have a cool thing to add, but because the thread was 8 hours old and had a thousand comments already, virtually no one would see it. There were some exceptions: on TV episode discussions sometimes they'd use new/contest mode default sorting for the thread and you didn't feel like you were shouting into a void.

Honestly there's not that much one can do, but I will:

• Hope Trump is thrown in prison
• Vote straight ticket Democrat
• Hope another Jan. 6 doesn't occur
• Try not to lose my shit when idiots say stuff like "both parties are equally bad"

I live in a solid blue state, so my national-level votes don't do much (though I'll cast them anyway).

In past years I've thrown a few hundred dollars at close senate and house races. In 2020 I volunteered for a phone/text bank sort of deal to make sure people were registered to vote.

Fast travel simulator 2023

Username checks out

Dyson Sphere Program. Factorio and Satisfactory tend to get all the press, but DSP is AMAZING.

• They learned a lot of quality of life lessons from older factory games and built them in, e.g. you get bots right away.

• The visuals can be breathtaking: not because it's raytracing/whatever fancy tech, but simply the scale of the game: giant gas planet rises at the horizon, etc. -- and you can fly to just about everything you see. Star 5 light years away? You can fly to it and visits its planets and moons, and then ship stuff between your home system and the new system

• It does power exceptionally well: there are a ton of power sources (https://dsp-wiki.com/Energy_Sources#List_of_Fuels), and a lot of depth in figuring out how to power your mega factories. You can even charge up a battery and ship it by spaceship to another moon/planet. Going back to Factorio's simplistic steam/solar/nuclear power feels like a let down (of course, Factorio has its strengths, like trains and extreme polish).

It's in early access, but it's one of the most polished early-access games you'll find. They're currently working on a large combat update that should drop in December. Price-to-value ratio is ridiculous. It's $20 and I have 155 hours in the game.

I'm happy enough to spend time and energy and get into new games. The difference is my standards are WAY higher than when I was younger. I've played so many games that it's hard to impress.

SAN SERO Vented Microwave Cover. I was just thinking about this the other day. I've owned this thing for over 9 years and use it nearly every day. At the time I think I paid like $20 for it (it's $34 now). And I thought that might be silly for what is basically a piece of plastic.

But holy crap, it's got to be my highest value-to-dollar ratio item EVER.

With it, I hardly ever have to clean my microwave. It keeps splatters to the cover itself, which is trivial to wash out.

And it helps with energy efficiency too, keeping heat close to the food, instead of it being lost as waste heat.

It comes with tiny vent holes at the top, so it won't steam up much or pop off.

And it has a nice handle built into the top middle of it, so most of the time you can grab that without burning yourself.

It also fits perfectly onto your typical round dinner plate. I mean perfectly.

This thing has been with me through four different homes/house moves, and hundreds of times of cooking or re-heating items on bowls and plates.

It's easily the best thing I've bought in my life.

RimWorld is incredible. I’m hard pressed to think of another game with as much customization of play style or as vibrant a mod scene.

Thank you! There was a lot of vitriol coming from that instance.

Weekly polite request: can we please get a setting to "hide downvoted posts"? :-)

The Enshittification* of everything continues

* https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

Not mine, but I used to have a coworker from Romania who'd say, "Of course, white horse!"

Thank you. Long Covid is exactly what prompted me to create this post. I've been having symptoms for 15 weeks (insomnia, brain fog, exhaustion). My primary care doctor was useless.

I've since discovered a lot of literature on my own that has validated my experience: that it's typical for general doctors to have no clue, they're still working on finding good biomarkers for the condition (it's not easy to test for), and I've learned a bunch about PEM (post-exertional malaise) and self-pacing / energy-management techniques to prevent the push-crash cycle that people with Long Covid experience.

all hail Lord GabeN

Practice/passion/skill > gear in music

And Gear Acquisition Syndrome is a real disorder

Don't get into modular synths unless you have serious $$$

I thought there's no way... when you boot up!? Sure enough. "the ad in question pops up when players boot up their Xbox"

Wow

I have memories of buddies in college being SUPER into it. I was never very good. But it still stands out to this day as a game with a unique feeling of speed and motion and control.

I use it for soooo many things:

• help with learning a new programming framework/language
• questions about basic home repair and issue prevention
• when I feel anxious or vaguely depressed but can't put my finger on exactly why or what's causing it, it's a great sounding board
• nutrition questions about specific foods or meals
• things to add to a simple meal to make it more interesting / complete
• weighing pros and cons for an important decision, getting ideas I may have not thought of
• conducting a mock interview for me when I give it a job description and my resume
• random *nix commandline recipes where I don't want to spend 10 minutes googling and inevitably landing on SEO garbage blogs and just need a quick snippet
• running AI art contests on Lemmy... 😆 https://lemmy.world/post/8173373

Factorio would cost me $370

as our menu options recently changed

They've ALWAYS changed... 😭

I feel you. The Network Effect is real, and the niche subreddits need a HUGE overall userbase to work at all.

The total population of Lemmy + Kbin is about the size of a medium size city subreddit.

I'm staying here for now. I sometimes cheat and browse reddit not-logged-in. I don't know what the answer is.

Cool. I remember a buddy showing it to me in his college dorm room. I was more interested in Unreal Tournament (which released a year later) at the time and probably couldn't afford to buy another game anyway. But I was positively obsessed with Half Life 2 a few years later...

Price aside, just don't do what I did: use an old mattress way past its usable life (e.g. like 10 years... it was creaking).

I started having back pain. And once I got a new one, I immediately felt better.

I'm very happy with my purchase and it wasn't even that expensive. It's one of those internet "mattress in a box" ones. I paid ~$300 back in 2019, though it looks like it goes for $420 now. Brand is Lucid on Amazon. It's a hybrid style: it has both pocketed / encased coils like a traditional mattress, and layers of memory foam and latex on top.

Each day I hope there won't be news of Elon saying something painfully stupid or embarrassing himself

Each day I'm wrong

Starfield bad

Yeah, I feel like "a country with strong social safety nets" would be a better way of putting it

Socialism has a TON of historical baggage

For years I've been wanting a simulator simulator simulator. It's like those simulator simulator games you've played except it's simulating the next level up, playing the people who built the simulator simulator.

1958 suburban house

Yessss! This is the game that caused me to have the idea to do this post.

I first played it about a year ago. I used the two hour Steam refund period, which in retrospect probably caused me to rush or not give it enough of a chance.

Fast forward to now, when I’m dealing with a nasty chronic health condition and lots of time on my hands. And I’m between games - basically waiting for stuff to come out, like the Factorio DLC.

So I poked around and somehow Elden Ring came up as a possibility. And then I found THIS video:

Elden Ring Is a Masterpiece — my thoughts after 60 hours

https://youtu.be/kdstSHeoNGA?si=xo1ea2b1WGYBexJJ

And it got me so hyped that I ended up watching a ton more videos. And finally I plunked down the $60 and gave it a shot.

Now I can’t stop thinking about it. I am in love with the jaw dropping terrain, inventive enemies, depth of play styles and options, the brilliant way it hints at things instead of spamming a map with quest markers and to do lists. I’ve had moments that felt like I was on the inside of an epic fantasy novel, living an otherworldly fever dream of awesomeness.

BG3 is amazing

with Valve continuing to rapidly improve Proton, just about any Windows game runs on Linux now

I hope this is actually true, or becomes true. The only reason I'm on Windows is for gaming.

Heck even my Bitwig DAW runs on Linux.

How do you know?

I just want an option to "hide downvoted posts" like reddit had... I'm tired of seeing the instance-stickied announcements hang around forever in my feed

I wish Valve could count to three :-(

Whoopie is not going to be happy

Fully-raytraced Pac-Man