cobysev @ cobysev @lemmy.world

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63

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549

Joined

2 yr. ago

Find me a self publishing video platform with the reach of YouTube that doesn't require self hosting and I'll happily move my content there.

Nebula is the next best thing to YouTube, but not enough content creators have moved their stuff there, so it's easy to run out of interesting videos to watch after a while. Some of the bigger folks I follow share their content on both platforms, and the incentive to watch on Nebula instead of YouTube is that content creators have more freedom with their videos on Nebula. They can post bonus/extra footage that would be automatically flagged and blocked by YouTube normally. Don't need to dance around the censors on Nebula.

Nebula is subscription-based, so they don't show ads anywhere on their site. But if you don't want to pay for another subscription service, you can also do a one-time payment to have lifetime access to their site. It's $300, which is the cost of just over 4 years of their subscription service ($6/mo). Considering I've had an account for over 3 years now, it's almost paid for itself.

TikTok's moderation is why people regularly say "un-alive" nowadays instead of "suicide."

I worked at an Arby's back in high school (over 20 years ago). They told me free refills were a thing because most customers don't refill more than once, if at all. Also, the soda water costs pennies and the bags of concentrated soda syrup were only like $10 (at the time). A single bag of syrup, mixed with soda water, could fill customer's soda cups for maybe 2-3 days before it needed to be replaced. Fast food restaurants make insane profits on soda, so they don't care if customers refilled multiple times during their visit.

Back when my wife and I were still dating, she found a cheap ring she loved. It was just a normal jewelry ring with her favorite stones in it, not a fancy engagement ring or anything. But she loved it so much, she told me that if I ever proposed to her, she gave me permission to steal it from her and re-present it as an engagement ring. Which I did.

I felt bad about it though. I took the ring to propose, but my plans fell through and it took me a few more days to arrange a new proposal plan. She had forgotten all about our conversation, so the whole time she was tearing the house apart, looking for her favorite ring. She loved that I "found" it and gave it back to her with a proposal.

Otherwise known as shrinkflation. Selling a product for the same (or higher) price, but adding less of the product. By cutting small, barely noticeable portions out a little at a time, the company saves money in materials, but continues charging the same price. Basically, min-maxing profits.

My birth year is the same as the title of a dystopian future novel by George Orwell.

The US owns a bunch of Caribbean "territories" that they still won't make into US states. Their citizens are US citizens, but can't vote.

EDIT: The current US itself was carved out of territories owned by Mexico, France, and England (which took them from Native American tribes). Back in the day, we conquered and stole a bunch of land, both from natives and from other invading countries.

But we've been more interested in foreign politics since WWII and less about expanding our own land. Besides, why own a bunch of foreign soil when we can just set up outposts around the globe and have a military frontline anywhere? I served in the US military and we have so many bases scattered around every region of the globe. We can literally involve ourselves in any global conflict we want to within a day or two. Meanwhile, our actual homeland is isolated on the other side of the planet, where it's difficult for foreign invaders to touch us.

There was a big deal about Ubisoft removing Assassin's Creed 1 and 2 last year, and I remember it because I was in the middle of a replay of the first game, and I quit as soon as they announced they were pulling it. Honestly, I haven't checked to see if they actually removed them; they may have reneged on that decision over the backlash. I'll try to reinstall it tonight and see if I can still access it.

But that announcement was when people really started to hate on Ubisoft for their poor business practices, which led to the comment mentioned in this meme. It started because they talked about removing access to paid-for games.

Ubisoft removed Assassin's Creed 1 and 2 from their online game library, claiming some BS like they want to focus their attention on newer games. The original games had no online services; it shouldn't take any effort to provide access to them online.

Everyone who owns them through Steam or Ubisoft Connect can't play them anymore, unless they still have a physical disc for the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 consoles. If you bought a digital copy, you paid for a game that you can no longer play.

THAT is why this quote is especially evil. Not because of some choice of subscription vs. buying, but because Ubisoft has the ability to make our fully-paid for games unplayable.

I LOVED books as a kid. I was reading at a high school level by the time I started kindergarten, and I just absorbed every book I could get my hands on. I would bring a 100-200 page book to school every day and would finish it before I got home in the afternoon.

I also enjoyed writing and would write my own stories. I was part of an organization in elementary school called Young Authors that encouraged kids to write, and I wrote 3 books through that group. It was my dream to be an author one day.

Then the Internet became a thing.

Suddenly, I didn't need to spend hours in a library reading through dozens of books to find information I needed. I could just do a quick search on Infoseek, or Excite, or AskJeeves, and have a repository of knowledge at my fingertips. It was life-changing!

As the Internet evolved and more data got dumped on it, I started spending more time perusing its depths and less time reading physical books. I ended up getting a job in IT because computers fascinated me so much. Eventually, I realized I hadn't picked up a book in years. Everything I wanted to read, I could find online.

Now here I am at 40 years old and my dream of being an author is gone. In our modern age, most people don't read physical books anymore and authors don't make enough to survive, unless they make it on a best-seller list or something. Even Stephen King is more well known today for his political commentary on Twitter/X. I haven't heard much about any books he's been writing in a long time.

I once wanted a library room in my dream home. I still kind of do, for the aesthetic. But I don't really read physical books anymore, and I could only fill maybe a single wall with the books I currently own; mostly treasured classics from my childhood that have been stored away in boxes for years. I'd be better off having a PC gaming/theater room in my dream home, as that's more where my modern interests lie.

I love the Internet age. It revolutionized my childhood and brought us into a wonderful age of information. But I can't help but think about how completely different my life would've been if it hadn't been invented. I sometimes wonder if I would've been more happy and/or successful in a world without the Internet.

Nope, he did this one himself. The reason? His employees spent so much time at the factory, they didn't have time to actually buy his cars.

Yes, he improved working conditions to make a profit on his cars. A selfish reason, but it inadvertently helped us all.

Mine is video games.

I'm 40 and I'm gaming now more than I ever have before!

Granted, part of that is because I'm retired young and have all the time in the world. But another part of that is because I made a small Discord server with a few close friends from my high school days. It's how we stay in touch, since we've all moved away since childhood.

We game online every Monday and/or Tuesday evening. It gives us time to talk and catch up through Discord while also playing some fun online multiplayer games together. The rest of the week, we share news, memes, videos, and other text discussion through various channels I've set up in Discord.

I've never heard of anyone losing their love for video games as they get older. If anything, continuing to play games later in life will help keep your cognitive functions strong. Remember the Skyrim grandma? She's still going strong in her late 80s. It's never too late to get into gaming again.

Calling her princess but as degradation

That looks like vocal chords. The white part, it's what vibrates and changes shape to make sound and pitch when you speak.

Women are so cute and adorable and I love you too baby girl 😘💋❣️

Yes, it even popped up emojis at the end there, then got stuck looping on the same 3 emojis.

And no, that's not how I text women. My wife would kill me if I called her "baby girl." She doesn't like infantilizing speech; says it sounds creepy to be called a baby, even in the context of cutesy romantic lingo.

Breast augmentation is one of the more common cosmetic surgeries in the military. I actually knew someone who had hers reduced in size because they were too big and interfering with her life. Plus, wearing heavy flak vests with armor plating is painful if you have boobs, and next-to-impossible if they're massive.

I also had another coworker who got implants because she said her flat chest was affecting her mental health, self-image, and confidence. Now she's one of the more confident and outgoing people I know in the military.

The most common surgery, actually, was LASIK/PRK eye surgery. For most of my career, it was considered a cosmetic surgery. The military defined "cosmetic surgery" as any unnecessary surgery a member elected to have done. You didn't need to fix your eyesight, because the military would issue you glasses. So it was cosmetic.

However, in the last handful of years I was in, someone successfully argued that getting your eyes corrected would improve your effectiveness at work, and thus was a benefit to the military, not just the member. Plus, they started allowing people to become pilots if they had the PRK surgery. (You need perfect vision to be a pilot, and eye surgery used to ban you from the job.) So eye surgery is no longer a cosmetic surgery.

I'm actually surprised to see comments saying this is unpopular. I actually thought it sounded refreshing.

When I switched from Reddit to Lemmy, I stopped sorting everything by Top. I got tired of seeing the highest voted posts and comments in my feed and wanted to see a variety of things instead.

Now, the top of my feed is not necessarily the highest voted or most popular opinion, and I can enjoy a variety of comments under posts without just reading what the community most agrees with at the top of a feed.

Finding a different and unique way to sort posts and comments would be interesting, in my opinion. For instance, if I want to see funny or sarcastic remarks instead of serious ones, I could just sort by laugh reacts.

But... I understand how much work it would be to change an entire community over to that standard, and I realize it's not really reasonable. So I get the unpopular opinion. I just think it would be fun to see.

The "Work/Government Issued" one make me laugh because I served in the US military, and a handful of years ago, they approved gender reassignment surgery for trans people.

You're allowed to receive one "cosmetic" surgery for free while serving in the US military, and this counted for that. So you could literally be "issued" a new gender by the government, for free.

Trump became president, and while military people were signing up for gender reassignment surgery, he randomly ordered that trans people weren't allowed in the military and had to be kicked out immediately. So a bunch of people who outed themselves to take advantage of the surgery suddenly were at risk of losing their jobs.

Fortunately, the Department of Defense put a hold on those orders and managed to talk Trump out of kicking people out for being trans. But I guarantee, if he becomes president again, he's not going to be talked out of it again.

I'm terrified of Gabe retiring or passing away. He's been amazing for the company and I don't trust anyone else to not want to use Valve for their own greedy purposes. The next president of Valve will likely ruin all the good things about it, thanks to late-stage capitalism.

I firmly believe in voting with your wallet; I normally don't invest much long-term interest into businesses because you never know how they'll change over time, but I've been so happy with Valve that I've gladly given them thousands of dollars over the decades for Steam games. My library is sitting at just over 3,500 games right now. I don't know what I'm gonna do when Valve crumbles one day. I really hope they give me an option to download and play offline all the games I've bought, because that's a massive library to lose.

I've never given a penny to Epic Games, and unless they get on-par with Steam's functionality, I won't ever buy or play any of their games. The one thing that might make Epic Games competitive (and could convince me to use their platform) is letting Steam users copy their libraries over, so we're not just starting over from scratch with a new service.

That's what got me on Steam in the first place. Back around 2010 or so, I discovered that if you had a physical PC game that was also in Steam's store, you could type in the serial number on the game box and it would register and add it to your Steam library. That's how I got my collection of early Call of Duty titles on Steam, as well as Half-Life and some others. I moved my physical game library over to Steam and I've been a Steam loyalist ever since.

I usually eat it on its own. Maybe a glass of milk to wash it down. Maybe some chips if I'm really hungry.

For me, a PB&J is usually a snack if I'm feeling hungry between meals, so I usually eat light if I'm having one.