Netflix and Spotify almost ended Piracy by making it easy to access whatever you wanted for a reasonable fee. Then they got greedy and everyone else wanted a piece of the pie and now we are in a worse position than package bundle Cable TV.
I’m in my late 30’s and went back to the high seas. I used to sail the seas in my early 20’s when i was broke AF and didn’t have cable TV. When Netflix came around it sudden became easier and more convenient to just pay $6.99/ month to watch whatever I wanted. For years I got by with Spotify and Netflix and I didn’t even look back. Then, all of a sudden there were more streaming services than i knew what to do with and every few months they would all raise their price and reduce their libraries. Then they started putting ads in. Now I’m self hosting all of my media and using Stremio/Torentio for my one off TV shows and movies. I directly support creators wherever I can as well, whether it’s Patreon or Kofi or just buying their Merch.
The day I have to watch ads is the same day I stop youtube. So far ad blocks seem to work well for now and I’m more than willing to spend hours getting them working if needed.
I assumed it was a Patreon because of the name, but its still a for profit company asking their customers for donations in the form of a monthly subscription so they can sell you more games. You don’t get anything tangible out of it, just a private Discord and a badge on your name.
Its skeezy no matter how you spin it.
Gog has been my preference for a few years now, but there’s no way I’m subscribing to a patreon that gets me literally nothing. I honestly assumed at first you’d get something out of it at first, like a free game from the preservation program every month or something similar to Amazon Prime’s giveaways. Its honestly cause me to start to re evaluate how much I purchase from them. Its kinda skeezy.
Its the best way. Its cheaper, you have plenty of user reviews to check first, and you get a completed game, without bugs.
AAA games are just too expensive and many are just not finished at release now. I’m not forking out top dollar for a half finished game. Outer Worlds 2 is still $89.99 CAD. That is absolutely insane in my opinion. I enjoyed the first one, but I also bought it on sale. Indy games nowadays are generally a better bang for your buck anyways and theyre only $30-40 regular price and they are also generally at a finished state or at the very least very honest about the state they are in.
I’ll probably pick the game up in 2 years when its $20 on Steam or something.
I went myself about ten years back when I worked for a small electronics store. It was literally 70% slop and 20% cell phone cases. There was only one company there that we actually got excited about and looked at bringing in their products. Their products were much better than what we currently carried and our current supplier was a pain in the ass to deal with.
They were imeadiatly bought out and closed by the company we already dealt with before we could even place an order. We only ever received a demo unit.
Probably. Its most likely going to look like the steam machine except it’ll run on win11with an Xbox gui instead of linux. Probably be quite locked down in regards to software and store access as well.
Nope. Trust has been broken too many times. I don’t even buy anything anywhere near release anymore. I won’t buy anything anymore unless it’s either an indie game or its on sale and even then I deep dive the reviews and make sure I’m not wasting my money.
The regular price of Red dead 2 on steam is still the full release price even though the game came out 6 years ago. That way they can mark it 70% of and still overcharge.
Lol, I guess that is a thing. They also just jacked the price on that, didn’t they?
No multiplayer paywall, but they’ll probably try to charge you some sort of subscription anyway that’ll end up costing more in the long run.
Man, I was soooo excited about the PS5, but then it turned into such a shit show to get one that I just put my money into my PC and I never even got around to picking one up when availability became more reasonable. I don’t think I’d ever really want to get back into the console gaming space anymore.
I kinda started a “seedbox” for at least my niche torrents. Most of the mainstream things I download I don’t normally leave to seed that long as there’s already plenty seeding, but a lot of the documentaries or other things that only have single or double digits seeding I’ll make a copy and leave it to seed for a while. I used to host my Plex server from that PC and when I build my new dedicated server I left the storage intact, but transferred my whole library over, so I have a large amount of unused space doing nothing else.
I’m also fairly new to all this. I’m now using Jellyfin for selfhosting. What’s the benefit of enencoding everything?
A lot of people are also questioning why they even have a home PC now. Their Win 10 machine is “out of date” and they need to replace it or else, but their cell phone now does much of what their PC did. Instead of installing Linux and learning a whole new OS, they just cut out their PC and just use their phone.
Here’s the link to the docker I used. There are a few others on github, but this one seemed like it was the most actively updated.
https://github.com/sirjmann92/nicotineplus-proper
I liked slskd perfectly fine once I got it going, but I couldn’t get my partner to use it as she was used to nicotine and didn’t like the new interface. Once the Docker was set up in Portainer there was very little additional configuration and the rest was inside the nicotine webui app.
Instead of slskd I recommend using nicotine+. I found slskd worked fine, but was a pain to set up. I found a Nicotine docker that works just like the app inside a web UI. Much less of a learning curb for someone who’s not familiar with servers.
I didn’t realize how truely frustrated I was with windows until I switched a few months ago. I realize now that most of my recent windows troubleshooting was trying to make windows stop doing things I didn’t want it to. Now most of my Linux troubleshooting is just learning how to get Linux to do things I actually want it to do, which is actually quite satisfying.
I’ve only used KDE until recently because it’s pretty familiar feeling after coming from windows, but my wife recently put gnome on her laptop and she loves it. I’ve used it a bit, and besides just being unfamiliar I do actually like it.