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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • I literally don’t set up my voicemail, and I typically don’t listen to recorded audio that gets messaged to me. Texting is functional and doesn’t leave me some anxiety-provoking message that I have to sit through and digest without saying anything. If a conversation needs to happen in voice, text to say that and see if it’s a good time.

    Wild that people just ring a personal phone number unprompted in 2024 without that being an established routine.

    That said, I also remember when it wasn’t at all weird to show up to someone’s house and knock on their door. Things have really changed.



  • Planescape: Torment is extremely replayable. I’ve been playing it every few years since I got a copy in I think like the early 2000s. It may be that this has something to do with having gotten to play it a little bit in the 90s but not having gotten to play the whole thing. There was a lot of anticipation there.

    But I don’t think it’s just that. It’s incredibly responsive to choice, and it’s one of the first games I can recall with things like faction reputations and alignments. There’s a lot there to dig through, and even once you have, it’s always cool to wander around Sigil. It feels very alive.

    The other one I end up replaying over and over is Shadowrun for SNES. That’s not so much infinitely repayable though as just a really great game that I’m happy to run through.







  • Isn’t that more of just part of interacting with people, though?

    Like, if you play some kind of real-life game with no regard for anyone else, that’s generally considered poor sportsmanship. That wasn’t invented in online gaming, it’s been a concern as long as people have been coming up with games to play together. We accept that if you sit down and play a game of chess or golf or pool or D&D or paintball, you’re going to try to not cheat or blow the game off or be a jerk about it. Some people are better sports than others, but the general idea is that we accept the wins and losses and the game going in different directions, because otherwise there’s no game.

    What’s an aberration is this concept that people you meet with over an electronic connection aren’t real, don’t matter, and are never owed anything.




  • That’s really hard to gauge.

    I drive a cab. I definitely fall into the category of people whose lives could be significantly upgraded for $5k. Some of the people I drive around are so much better off financially than me that that concept isn’t something that would ever even occur to them, while some of them are in much tougher positions. For where I am financially, I’m pretty lucky. I’ve got cheap rent that hasn’t gone up in over a decade and a reliable vehicle that I didn’t have to pay for. If things go bad I have family that can help a bit, but at the moment I operate on very little. I know people who bring in more but have way more going out and have to make huge sacrifices because of it.

    But like, the majority of the people I pick up really don’t have it easy. Most don’t have vehicles, so that’s a pretty big filter in the direction of poverty in the US, but that financial category is very much built into and intended by the system and people seem to be totally fine with it. I can only assume that’s the case, given that we have suburban neighborhoods full of people with enough throw-away money to completely elevate nearby destitute neighborhoods but it doesn’t happen. And this is in Massachusetts, where we have some half-decent social services.

    But, like, it’s bad. Look at it this way. The next time you go run some errands, try to pay attention to the people who are ringing you up, getting your food, all of that. Think of the sheer quantity of people working in positions that you interact with every single day in service jobs. For the most part, all of them are making no more than a few dollars above minimum wage. Most are probably within 2 dollars of it.

    Wherever the average American’s at financially, there’s a lot more that those who are well off could be doing to make it better. Like, maybe instead of new marble countertops, give someone that life transforming $5k. Because it is absolutely the morally correct move, and your distressed reaction is absolutely the correct reaction.

    Do something about it.


  • millie@beehaw.orgtoMemes@lemmy.mlalternative to trees
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    1 year ago

    Nah, I just think it’s really silly.

    If growing algae is effective at anything, why do it in a small sealed tank in the middle of a street? Most of the oxygen we breathe is produced in the ocean, regardless of where we personally are. Why would we need to stand vaguely near a rather sealed looking algae tank? If simply growing algae is effective for oxygen replenishment and carbon capture, surely we’d be better off simply growing massive ponds of it away from city centers? Like, out in the open?

    It seems like green-washing bullshit to me.

    Trees provide a lot more than oxygen. They provide shade, habitation for animals, and psychological well-being for humans. Dirty fish tanks don’t provide any of those things.

    People are seriously in this thread complaining about roots like they’re a reason to replace trees with algae boxes. Getting some big plant-based NFT cryptobro carbon-credit nonsense vibes.





  • Ehh, Linux has better hardware flexibility than it used to, but there are still devices that don’t have equivalent functionality with the drivers and software available for Linux. It might be a situation where you can code something yourself, but you may also need information from the manufacturer that they won’t necessarily be forthcoming with. I’ve run into this with a Logitech mouse, but I’m betting there are other peripherals that will face the same issue.

    Windows doesn’t use system resources as efficiently, but there’s a huge amount of software for it and it definitely lands on top of the pile for compatibility.