val

My coworkers were talking today about all the hoops they were going through with streaming to find the content they wanted and navigating the byzantine extra charges to share it with their family. If piracy wasn't an option I still wouldn't go through all that, it's madness how much worse the paid service is to the high seas.

Lemmygrad I can't comment on. As far as I can tell they basically just talk politics and I'm not interested in microwaving my brain by obsessing about politics online. Haven't seen them out in any of the threads I've been on.

Hexbear I've enjoyed honestly. They've got nice hobby communities and it's all I'm here for. Quality of discussion is usually pretty good. My take on people hating Hexbear is people have made their personality getting mad about politics and Hexbear don't share their views. People screaming "tankie!" just seemed deranged to me, literally who cares what a handful of nerds in the US think of China. Neither of you have any influence on what China does at all.

My better ones are too legally dubious to post, but I do have one about fairly mundane office drama.

A coworker once dropped some particularly angry comments about a manager in the work chat instead of our private one. I panic post some inane shit to try and hide it before hurriedly tabbing over to the private chat to tell her to delete it. Too late. Along with a very clearly 'upset but trying to be professional' reply, there are some ominous words spoken about how this proves the existence of our private chat and action will be taken if this is the kind of thing being said in it. But it's clock out time for our manager and on a Friday so it gets shelved until Monday with no action taken.

Our private chat wasn't exactly secure so there was fair chance our bosses would access to it. I spend the rest of my work hours that day scrubbing it of the most damaging things I had said while trying to leave enough unflattering stuff that it looked somewhat natural. It wasn't particularly spicy all told, it was mostly just "how to do x?" without sounding incompetent in front of people who dictate whether you get paid or not, but better safe than sorry. We're still sure that our coworker who dropped the bomb is going to get shit canned though.

Monday comes around and we're all waiting for the hammer to come down. Each moment that goes by we expect the retribution is going to be worse. Around midday I realize we've got a different manager than usual overseeing us, but the usual is still clocked in. I spot a bunch of higher ups have away messages saying they're in a meeting and have been for hours. Then in our work chat comes a "x is typing" from one of them, who very rarely says anything there. I message one of my coworkers putting my bet that this was it and to brace for punishment.

The typing message from this person goes on for a good 20 minutes. It's going to be a big one.

The message finally comes. Our coworker was fired.

...and so was everyone else except myself and one other person. They were getting laid off. The meeting I noticed wasn't about our punishment, it was an emergency meeting because an important contract hadn't gone through. Company got gutted.

I just happened to be in the room when my recruiter got a call from someone looking to fill a vacancy. I have no experience in the industry or anything like it, let alone the qualifications, but have the really basic general skills required. They put me forward anyway. I got the job - it's basically stress free, great people, decent pay, clear advancement track, extremely low employee turn over and the commute is really short.

Easily the most confused I've been getting a job.

D&D. When I got back into it as an adult it was mostly because I could get into it for $0. I was dead broke at the time. I pirated the books downloaded the free basic rules 😉 on my trash find laptop and was good to go.

But man once I had money it turns out I really like collecting books and the D&D ones are not cheap. I do not want to think about how much I've spent.

Watching the new season made me wonder if I Futurama was ever actually good. Are my fond memories of the old episodes just nostalgia?

The joke that really illustrates how creatively bankrupt the new season was for me is the non-binary robot. It's a joke I'd already heard before, complete with the same stand up framing. It was just someone seeing something funny online and just sticking it in their TV show completely wholesale. It got a laugh out of me just because I was surprised to see something so blatant.

Every time it'd do a "topical" episode, it was just them going to beat a dead horse whose bones were already bleaching. Late to the party on Amazon, Crypto, and NFTs, showing up with only the shallowest, most well trodden observations.

Without RSS I'd stop following the vast majority of online content. I'm not checking all these different websites individually, where their follow options have substantially less functionality.

I currently have 121 feeds. Podcasts, youtube channels, TV show releases, some blogs, a surprising number of reddit searches, etc. I used to have substantially more feeds but I trimmed it heavily a couple of years ago - mostly I stopped follow the news so closely for my sanity.

It might sound kind of overwhelming but I create pretty strict filters so I get maybe a dozen updates on a busy day.

I've got no motivation to take over the world, nor am I sure it's really possible in a life time. I don't really have a non-boring answer to this hypothetical.

If the ticket is available anyway I'd happily take it, I'm single at the moment with no dependents and being younger and healthier would be huge. There are lots of ways to make money with the knowledge of future history, even if it'll change when you start impacting it, and any one of them could make me wealthy enough to never have to work again in my life and do so wherever I please.

I've never really understood the need of the rich to continually amass wealth or how they spend it.

Over the years I've seen a lot of articles about former Bioware devs leaving to form their own studios but nothing has ever really come of it. Whatever magic they had in the 00's just seems to be lost.

I have a few chronic illnesses. Individually I think they're at least easy to explain, if not something people already understand, but trying to communicate the combination is hard.

None of them are usually that bad by themselves. Together the issues compound and make it extremely hard to attribute symptoms to something specific. Like, are the migraines a rare symptom from a condition, a result of them interacting, one of the medications I'm taking or a new issue? I don't know.

And when you're vague (as in, don't pull out your entire medical record and attribute each symptom to a specific condition) or the issues sound too severe for what people already understand, you get some pretty... negative reactions. "My uncle had X and he was fine, you're milking it for sympathy!" but did he have Y and Z as well? Did he have the same variant of X? Was he actually fine, or did you never really talk to him about it? It's rarely apples to apples comparing disabilities but that's how people a primed to react.

I've learned to deflect and fall back behind medically privacy in professional settings, but it can be stressful.

I struggled with The Outer Worlds' really ham fisted centrism. While it's been awhile, I remember the best result on every major planet was to find compromise between the two factions. It's done so clumsily that it makes none of the factions feel authentic in any way.

With anything made when 20+ episode season was the norm, I'd recommend just searching for a skip list. I remember the /r/DaystromInstitute skip lists being pretty good: https://old.reddit.com/r/DaystromInstitute/wiki/index#wiki_episode_guides

I'd recommend the same with more modern stuff, because the ratio of good episodes to bad sure as hell hasn't gotten better despite shorter seasons, but the death of episodic story telling makes it pretty hard to skip episodes.

Given every single system in Starfield is already explored and built on, I think they should have just given up on the jump system and gone with a gate system like Freelancer or the X series. You get to fly to every point without menus while still being time efficient. The reason they didn't go with this is presumably because of the supposed "exploring the unknown" angle, but you never explore anywhere new in Starfield anyway.

I don't think I've seen any public backlash hitting the developer or publisher for the content of a mod being "offensive to public order and morals" since the hot coffee stuff, and that was only because it was content already in the game. This is almost certainly a lie and the real reason is they're worried mods will compete with things they're selling.

Baldur's Gate 3. I loved it as a cRPG fan who grew up on them. It's ambitious, innovative and I'm really happy it's brought the genre to a whole new audience. I hope we see something of a genre revival. But if you've been online at all you've seen all the praise I could give it already anyway, so lets talk about the bad.

It's shockingly buggy and it's weird that it's always just a footnote in the discourse. I'm not sure I've ever finished a game this broken before. I was constantly encountering issues that would cause me to reload a save. There are plenty of posts about the bugs - pretty much every single quest in the game will have dozens of threads about various issues - but when it comes down to reviews people are really forgiving of it in a way I haven't really seen before.

It's also made some fundamentally terrible design decisions that wont be fixed by patches. Long resting to progress the story triggers is particularly awful. It absolute kills the pacing, despite the narrative suggesting a heavy time pressure (that isn't actually there), and encourages you to just nova everything. I found myself just spamming long rests after every narrative beat until the cutscenes stopped triggering just to make sure which was very tedious.

The private sector, like corporations? It happens to a degree but you'll find connections to both intelligence agencies and organized crime pretty quickly. Just look into Coca Cola's assassinations of union leaders in Colombia if you want an example.

There is a fairly significant amount of planning that goes in to these, but it doesn't have the "cool" of fiction. Killing in reality is brutish and horrific.

I sometimes tell people to try the network troubleshooter if they're having issues because it's idiot proof. All it'll do is occasionally disable and enable a network adapter which can fix some common problems. If you're even the slightest bit tech savvy though, ignore it.

Startup Repair has been useful when I've actually gone to use it, but I can count on one hand how many times I've gotten to that point.

Otherwise, no.

I think technically it's just my key ring. It's loop is just from a charm thing my grandmother gave to me like 20 years ago. The charm was lost a long time ago. Kind of boring though.

My favorite pair of jeans and my favorite jacket are both about 15 years old at this point, heavily worn and patched together many times. Not daily use though obviously. My most comfortable pair of boots are about 10 years old which are closer to daily use.

One of the hard drives in my computer is more than 10 years old but I rarely read/write anything to it anymore. For a long time a lot of bits from it were very old, but I think everything older has been ship of theseus'd now. My mother still uses my handy down 15+ year old MX518 mouse daily though.

Another comment without watching so I might be repeating something in the video, but did they mention how poor bloated the site is? I was trying to use the Forgotten Realms wiki and after a few tabs it would grind my browser to a halt. For something that really just needs to be serving text and a few images it's wild how badly the site performs.

I almost always start digital, either ebook or audiobook then buy a physical copy later if I liked it. It's just a lot less friction for starting something new, no needing to go out of my way to a library/bookstore or wait for something to be delivered. Sometimes I'll just take a gamble on something physical if I'm looking for a new travel book or I'm killing time in a library/bookstore though.

I wish, my iPod gave up the ghost many years ago. When it died - at the time I was way too broke to replace it - my interest in music kind of went with it too. I still listen to music of course, but I've never been passionate about it since.

Also, I still sometimes get the feeling like I forgot something when I leave the house because the weight distribution in my pockets isn't 'right' anymore lmao

I’ve been using RSS feeds for youtube channels for a few years.

Same. Don't really follow any kind of content feed if I can't combine it in my RSS client. I don't want to check dozens of web pages individually.

To be fair, I should have said our department got gutted instead of the company. We were pretty siloed off from everyone else so it was kind of hard to keep the bigger picture in mind.

I technically started with Lemmy pretty early, long before any of the Reddit exit stuff, but it was hyper focused on politics still and I feel like spending that much time talking politics online is extremely unhealthy. I was really only interested in a hobby forum with the Reddit format that didn't have the suffocating debate bro culture.

I started lurking since the Reddit exit stuff to see if it would grow enough to support other topics. It has, but I'm not certain if I'll stay. Unsurprisingly an influx in Redditors has made this place culturally a lot more like Reddit, for the worse.

I also dabbled in Mastodon years ago but I've never particularly liked the Twitter format so a federated clone didn't really gel with me.

Yeah, you can sideload pirate ebooks onto a Kindle. There are some restrictions with file formats, most people use Calibre if they run into issues with them. For ebooks I just grab mine from libgen most of the time.

I was thinking about epub support, but apparently they do now but dropped mobi support. I haven't used a Kindle in awhile so no idea if there are any caveats. Here's the full list for anyone interested:

Send to Kindle for Web

Microsoft Word (.DOC, .DOCX)
HTML (.HTML, .HTM)
RTF (.RTF)
Text (.TXT)
JPEG (.JPEG, .JPG)
GIF (.GIF)
PNG (.PNG)
BMP (.BMP)
PDF (.PDF)
EPUB (.EPUB)

Send to Kindle from the Kindle App for iOS and Android Devices

PDF (.PDF)
Microsoft Word (.DOC, .DOCX)
HTML (.HTML, .HTM)
RTF (.RTF)
Text (.TXT)
Images (.JPG, .JPEG, .GIF, .PNG, .BMP)
EPUB (.EPUB)

Kindle Personal Documents Service

Microsoft Word (.DOC, .DOCX)
HTML (.HTML, .HTM)
RTF (.RTF)
Text (.TXT)
JPEG (.JPEG, .JPG)
GIF (.GIF)
PNG (.PNG)
BMP (.BMP)
PDF (.PDF)
EPUB (.EPUB)

Send to Kindle Desktop Applications

Microsoft Word (.DOC, .DOCX)
PDF (.PDF)
Text (.TXT)
Images (.JPG, .JPEG, .PNG, .BMP, .GIF)
RTF (.RTF)
HTML (.HTML, .HTM)
EPUB (.EPUB)

I don't think it's stupid to have a reaction to stuff that happens online, but the trick is to not get baited into investing even more into whatever it is if there is no likely resolution. It's kind of vibes based, but sometimes you get someone who you can just tell is a bit unhinged and will never stop posting at you no matter how much they are embarrassing themselves. So I distance myself from whatever it is. Maybe just turn of notifications, other times I need to unbookmark the site to stay away or sometimes I just delete my account and move on entirely.

I'll also often preemptively disable notifications if I think a take is going to attract weirdos.

bonus points for not answering ‘go outside drink water read a book’ etc etc

I mean I hate to say it but these are still honest, good answers even if you've heard them before. Sometimes you just have to touch some grass.

At least other systems tend to be cheaper and more condensed. The D&D brand tax is real.

Slow cooker stuff if I'm lazy but thinking ahead a bit. Just throw shit in a pot and turn it on. I tend to get big lumps of meat rather than steaks or whatever, so the slow cooker has the added benefit of me not needing to do much cutting. I just do a few big chunks and it'll be so tender by the time it's ready it'll fall apart. Takes longer to put it away in containers than to prep it, then I'm done cooking for a week lol

Spaghetti bolognese is a regular if I need something soon. Little more work, but it's extremely quick and doesn't require being in the kitchen for the whole thing. Still makes a ton of meals that keep and reheat nicely.

Roasts are nice if I'm sort of having to impress someone but I'm lazy. You just throw shit in the oven and wait. Occasionally come back to throw in something that has a shorter cook time than the meat. Might be heresy but I've never really been keen on the leftovers of a roast though, so one cook is usually only one meal and maybe a sandwich the next day instead of several.

It was literally the reference point I used in my post for the last time I've seen any real backlash, in the first sentence.

Meh, this probably would have been a terrible remake anyway.

If this is your vibe normally I wouldn't want to engage and would just post a troll image as well, it's rancid.

It can be easy to dismiss it due to the 90s TV budget and effects

It's a plus for me. Something about the sets and effects being more 'attainable' makes them more interesting to me.