Man I haven’t thought about kkrieger in a looooong time. Thanks for that!

I agree though. I think it’s been happening for years. Hardware has gotten so fast compared to where we were a few years ago. But it hasn’t caused rapid innovation like everyone thought it would. It’s just made devs lazy and we get massive unoptimized piles of shit released that take hundreds of gigs of space, require 8gb of vram and 16gb of RAM and still run like trash.

I’d love to see another era where we have game developers truly innovating and really trying to get the most out of hardware but I wonder if things have gotten so complicated that those days are gone.

The movie, despite being unrelentingly bleak, actually isn’t quite as soul crushing as the book. At least it wasn’t for me.

Appreciate you finding numbers when I didn’t go to that effort. It makes me wonder if numbers are pretty similar globally. 2% having chronic insomnia doesn’t sound completely out of line to me.

I think because it’s a pretty gross mischaracterization of the demographic? Usually hyperbole is used for effect to more emphatically illustrate a generally true or accepted point.

The number of Americans who use nightly sleep aids is extremely low. Like, a vast vast majority of people never take them. I don’t know anyone who regularly takes them, and honestly I don’t know many who take them even occasionally.

So this meme uses hyperbole to drive home the idea that Americans have a pill problem regarding sleep aids and no one in Europe does. I have no idea how the numbers shake out in Europe but I can say in America it is not as characterized. So it’s less hyperbole (exaggeration of a fact) and more like a lie.

I’ve just started dipping my toes back into the waters again too, also after many years of downloading absolutely nothing. It’s a combo of things prompting me.

First, costs have gotten out of control and prices just keep creeping up. This is happening at the same time as content libraries per service dwindle. I make more money than I used to, yet it feels like it goes not nearly as far these days with prices of everything skyrocketing.

Second, it’s becoming a bigger and bigger pain in the ass to find things. Part of the issue for me is interfaces (though I can get around that, generally). Part is content shuffling from one service to the next. But a big issue is all the trash content companies like Netflix are shitting out to pad their libraries. You have to wade through oceans of garbage to find a single thing worth your time. This experience is exactly why I dropped traditional cable years ago! I hate endless filler trash. I don’t want the illusion of a large library to make it seem like I’m getting value. I just want actual good content.

I totally get wanting to play the game when it’s fresh. You miss out on being part of the buzz of a new game if you wait to play it. Every gaming site is full of memes about a new game for the first few months after release and it’s definitely part of the experience to be on the “in” side of that.

With that said, I just pick and choose which games matter to me for that nowadays, and I commit myself to actually beating the games I buy (assuming I don’t hate them). Committing to beating them before buying a new game has really cut back on my buying of new games only to have it languish in my backlog and see price drops before I ever play it.

This way I do get to be part of that community for the games that really matter to me, but I also am not just buying everything out there at full price.

Fully agree with you on artists not getting their fair share, and I would argue that the issue is sadly endemic across the entire music industry and was that way long before streaming services even existed. Spotify is merely the most visible representation of a long festering issue that spans generations.

I can only speak for myself but I do actually still buy CDs for bands I really like. I will also occasionally buy merch or go to shows. Some of these bands I very certainly would never have discovered without Spotify (or a service like it).

Ultimately I agree that I’d like people to understand their options. I think the biggest likely barrier is convenience. I have a NAS server, and a virtual host set up that runs a Linux server with Plex on it, and I have that open so I can use Plexamp to play live albums or any other stuff I own that isn’t on Spotify. But like… That’s a massive barrier to entry to simply create something close to the experience Spotify offers out of the box. And it’s definitely not as polished. I do it because I’m a hobbyist, but most people aren’t like that. So then if you want to buy music individually, you’re stuck listening to actual physical CDs, or ripping them and loading them on your phone or mp3 player. Old school cool for sure, but new school convenience is sure hard to beat once you’ve had a taste.

This is your rationale and that is ok for you. Ownership is important to you. That is ok. But people who make the point you are making never understand the point those of us who like Spotify are making.

We do not care that we don’t own anything after paying. I am not paying to own it. Never felt like I was, never felt like I needed to. In fact, it’s almost a perk that I don’t because then I am not sitting amidst towers of CDs (something that was definitely possible if I had continued my pre-spotify trajectory). Anyway, I pay for access. No more, no less. I pay for access to Spotify’s library, which is many orders of magnitude larger than anything I could ever hope to amass myself, even if I was pirating shit.

I want to listen to whatever I want, whenever I want, instantly. I don’t want to go pirate it, I don’t want to go find it at a store, if someone suggests me a song or album or artist I want to go listen to it right now. Spotify enables that. I have discovered so much music I would absolutely never have tried without Spotify.

And again, I am 100% comfortable paying for access to something not owned by me. I’m a member at our local zoo. I don’t expect to own the animals, I pay to just to get in. I’m a member at our museum. I don’t feel like I should own the artifacts, I pay for the privilege of seeing them. I am a member at a community pool. I don’t own the water, I pay to get in, and have someone else handle all the hassle of maintaining that pool.

Spotify is the exact same for me.

If we are trying to dig into the root cause? Then yes, honestly. It is Google. And don’t call them the “search engine guys”, that’s not what they are about. They are the “mass aggregation and correlation of user data guys”. Search has been a means to an end for Google for a very long time.

All those other things didn’t exist when google was developing their model. Google paved the way for the internet no longer being free, but being “free” with payment rendered in the form of user data. That in turn directly led to all those other evils you referred to. It is not an exaggeration to imply that Google is ultimately at fault for the way the internet functions today.

There’s already been a new flavor of coke developed and allegedly chosen by AI. If that’s not some kind of singularity moment, I don’t know what is.

From a pure graphical fidelity point we’re there now.

From an animation standpoint we are light years away. The absolute best animations or facial expression renders I have seen are nowhere near good enough to actually pass for real. And honestly I am not sure I’ve even seen meaningful improvement in this area in a long time. Even in this demo videos the cars don’t look quite right as they move, and cars are much easier than people, or the way cloth moves when on someone who is moving.

I’d like to think this is the next big focus for graphics, but animations are a lot harder to get right than pure visual fidelity. I hope studios start focusing on it because it will take take us to that next step.

The Typing of the Dead

First, sure. It could be that. My opinion is that it’s awfully likely that a photo in this format was a paparazzo. And if it was a random neighbor it’s pretty rude of them, too.

Second, the title of the post had zero indication that this would be a photo taken from the bushes of a celebrity and his child. Comments here in the form of “engagement” are doing absolutely nothing for the person who took the picture. I’m certain the person who made the meme didn’t pay for the shot. We don’t need to feel guilty because we accidentally viewed it for free on a website that generates no revenue. The people taking the picture are the ones who are wrong.

There are lots of groups out there who could use random people on the internet defending them. Paparazzi are absolutely not in that category. They are terrible people.

Seriously, this.

All I could think of was wow, this poor little girl can’t even have a normal childhood experience trick or treating with her dad because some fuck head paparazzo is chasing them around snapping pictures of them. That’s so sleazy and shitty. She didn’t ask for this. She just wants to be with her dad.

I don’t get it.

Is raisins in Mac n cheese like, a big thing in other countries and us Americans just don’t get it? If so I guess more power to you, that is news to me. I’d try anything once but I don’t really like raisins to begin with so it’s a bit of a tough sell.

And yes, pineapple on pizza is delicious. I’ve seen some truly abhorrent pizza toppings from elsewhere in the world, so I don’t think we have some kind of monopoly on those crimes.

Well you see, it’s important to aggressively gatekeep anything that people start to use and enjoy.

Yeah I agree. Arguably reddit isn’t even mainstream, and it is exponentially larger than Lemmy now and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

I’m really loving Lemmy, but it is not even remotely a factor if we are having a conversation about things that are mainstream enough to reflect popular opinion.