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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)PA
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598
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2 yr. ago

  • I'll say that fewer console exclusives is for the better.

    Maybe my issue is just how console gaming has changed, and how all 3 companies have screwed consumers.

    If I buy Stray on PS5, will I still be able to play it 10 years from now? 20 years from now? Will the PS6 and 7 be able to play PS5 games? Does it matter if I have the physical or digital version? Am I going to be able to rip and emulate PS5 games on a PC at any point? Once my PS3 dies, I lose my digital games and at the mercy of the emulation community to play my physical games. Once my 3DS dies... It's all gone, and piracy will be the only way to play the games I paid for.

    I already bought Stray on Steam. It's not a guarantee, but I like my odds better there.

    I bought my PS5 expecting that there would be some great exclusives there eventually, and that even the ones with PC versions would be better on PS5 (at least at launch and while I'm still rocking an RX580). But all Naughty Dog has done is remakes so far. I love Insomniac, but I'm not a Marvel fan and I miss their more creative work.

    The biggest use I've gotten from the PS5 has been using the DualSense in PS4 games because I don't like the DS4.

  • CVS BOUGHT my health insurance company earlier this year.

    If we are going to be cursed with private healthcare, can we at least maintain a competitive market? Right now it's an oligopoly at best, effectively a private monopoly for a lot of people.

  • Haha thanks that's actually what I went with.

    I went with the Wizard because I always thought the GameCube controller was fine. Not my favorite, not terrible. But I'm at least familiar with it. I saw some reviews mention that the QA and build quality might be a problem, and if that's the case my next option is probably to try the Hyperion Pro.

    Honestly I wish I could rip the controls off the Steam Deck or rip a DualSense in half.

  • If PSVR2 was PC compatible I probably would have bought it by now.

    If it has a better library I'd be at least considering it. I'd like to play Horizon, but that's not worth spending over $500 for. Gran Turismo 7 would be intriguing (both VR and regular) if it didn't have micro-transactions.

    Honestly the library issue kind of applies to the whole console. I kind of understand that the pandemic led to more cross-gen games, and multi-platform games are good for the industry as a whole. But I'm still not seeing a lot of reasons to buy a PS5 on this list. The list disregards PC versions, which I kind of get because Sony is publishing AAA games on PC and you often need to spend 3x the cost of a PS5 to get a PC powerful enough to run them. But some of these indie games like Stray and Tchia feel like a stretch.

  • Just because you don't like them doesn't mean other people don't.

    As a kid I had no hope of affording the official PlayStation racing wheel, but I could afford the MadCatz one. When I wanted a 2nd guitar controller to play with friends on the PS2, NYKO offered a wireless one that was much better than the official ones. My first wireless controller, before the WaveBird, was a MadCatz PS2 controller that was fantastic.

    I spent a good chunk of this weekend researching 3rd party JoyCons because the ones from Nintendo are basically cheap novelty toys that sell for $80.

    8BitDo have been making quality controllers for several years now, and they have a whole section of their website dedicated to Xbox stuff. They appear to be licensed, so they will probably still be good?

    Especially with how expensive 1st party controllers are, it can make a ton of sense to get cheap 3rd party ones. Especially if you aren't into hardcore or competitive games.

  • When I first got an apartment with my wife, she brought an old denim couch from her parents' basement.

    It was old and the foam was worn out, but aside from that it was surprisingly comfortable. It resisted the cat scratching pretty well. I would totally be open to buying another one some day.

  • Interestingly it was unpublished until it showed up on a blog.

    I've always wondered if it was made for a commercial use that fell through. It looks like it should be a goosebumps book, or a poster advertising a Halloween event at an amusement park.

  • I've noticed more often I'm getting two unskippable 15 second ads. I've been watching YouTube less and less because of it. A lot of creators I like are on other platforms, like Nebula or Spotify. It's moved to the end of the line for when I'm looking to watch or listen to stuff.

  • Also good stuff!

    For #2, one piece I forgot to bring up is the urgency. One of the reasons I advocate for having a small collection of basic, cheap tools is that there's some cases where you don't have time to get to the hardware store or wait for a delivery. Sometimes you need a wrench NOW to fix a leak. Or there's a foot of snow on the ground, the roads aren't allowed, and something goes wrong with your heat or the pipes are in danger of freezing. Or there was the time I had scheduled my new over to be installed and the old one disposed of: I was responsible for disconnecting the gas from the old oven, but didn't realize until about an hour before that I would need not one but two adjustable wrenches to disconnect it and had to make a mad dash to get another one. I've also had enough issues with toilets that I keep at least one flush/fill valve set and a sealing ring on hand (maybe I need to get a water filtering/conditioning system to go easier on my hardware?). Having a way to move water (either a cheap hand pump or the ability to use a shop vac) can also be critical.

    A couple other things I keep in mind with tools are:

    How often am I going to use it? A lot of experts giving advice, advocating for expensive tools, are craftspeople who use those tools every day. If I only need that adjustable wrench once a year, the $2 one from Harbor Freight is fine.

    And specialized tools are different. It's hard to even try to buy them in advance because you don't know they exist until something comes up. When I looked into converting my home's landline phone network into Internet, I had to get a crimping tool. I noticed the old window AC units has a bunch of bent fins, and research led me to special combs for straightening them.

  • ... Not much.

    I'm not really looking to the automotive industry for completely new innovation like that. If I'm going to spend tens of thousands of dollars for a car, I'm probably going to keep it for at least a decade and I value it being reliable and easy to repair. Mature technologies have a lot of advantages over new innovations there.

    I'm not the one claiming that these features are new or innovate, and I'm not the one claiming that being on the cutting-edge of technology is a good thing. Musk is.

  • Pretty much the entire list seems like features that have existed for industrial applications.

    Which, sure, is challenging to transition to a new company and scale up to consumer levels of production and down to consumer levels of cost. But I agree everything about this truck seems iterative.

    1. This is one of the few things YouTube is still good for. The channel This Old House is usually a good resource for a lot of projects, but you can find tons of other channels that have good info. Some creators are contractors, so their focus will be on doing things efficiently at scale and might not be as relevant to you, but there's still good information to be found.
    2. One of the lessons I learned getting an Accounting degree is that everything around you is constantly degrading. Every object has a limited number of uses, and we can only take guesses at what that number will be. Every time you open or close a door, you are putting wear on the wood of the door and frame, the hinges, and the latching mechanism. Every time you open or close a tap you are putting wear on a valve. Every rain drop that hits the roof is trying to erode your shingles, work it's way into the sealant around fasteners, damage your gutters and downspouts, and erode your land and foundation. So try to be gentle on what you can and keep up on preventative maintenance when you can.

    To start off with, you take care of emergencies. Things that will cascade into more damage to your property or health if not addressed. Sewer line backing up and flooding your basement? Emergency. Water leaks in the roof? Emergency. Hot Water tank leaking? Well, the leak is an emergency, but a lack of hot water probably isn't. If you're strapped for cash, you should be able to turn some valves to disconnect it and live with cold water until you can afford to fix it properly. But if you're somewhere cold in winter, that could put those pipes in danger of freezing. (In case you couldn't tell, water causes trouble everywhere it goes)

    Without knowing the details of your financial situation, I'm going to assume you're like most new homeowners. Young, probably just starting to get financially established enough to break the rent cycle. Maybe some other car or student loan debt you're trying to pay off. Expecting to advance your career and make more money in the coming years. Assuming your income keeps up with inflation and your interest rate on your mortgage is fixed, from now on your housing costs as a percentage of your income will most likely go down.

    So you'll probably have to put things off for the first few years. You'll need a couple of years with mild and extreme summers and winters to get a feel for how much your utilities cost. Try to keep an emergency fund (credit cards can work in a pinch, but they cost you long-term). Some problems might need temporary, cheap solutions. The general financial wisdom most old people gave me was "buy cheap, but twice", but sometimes you just need to "waste" $50 on something janky to last a couple years until you can afford the $5,000 proper renovation. You'll slowly transition from being reactive to proactive over time. First set aside money for an emergency fund. Once you have a couple grand, start setting aside some for cosmetic stuff like flooring and paint (it's less important objectively, but living in a house with peeling paint and stained carpet can be bad for your mental health). You probably want ~$10k in an emergency fund eventually (in today's dollars), but don't feel too much pressure to get there immediately. And don't be afraid to use that money for emergencies either: that's what it's for.

    Identify any big, expensive, non-urgent projects: how much will the cost and when will they become urgent? You'll need a roof every 25-50 years depending on the kind of roof and where you live. In today's dollars in the US you're looking at the ballpark of $10-$20k. You will probably be able to finance part of it if you need to.

    1. You can't control what the previous owner did or did not do, the corners that a builder cut, or the flaws in the architect's designs. If there's something serious that was legally required to be disclosed to you and was not, you could consult a lawyer to see if you have any recourse against the seller.

    You are going to be making a lot of your own repairs and decisions restricted by your budget, equipment, and skills. 10 years from now you might find you're cursing your past self just as much as you're cursing the previous owner now. Either way, there isn't much to be gained from getting upset over what 'the last guy' did. All you can do is try to be nicer to 'the next guy', who may or may not be you.

    1. Just some general advice. You'll probably hear other advice recommending that you do not buy cheap tools, but to wait and buy nice, expensive tools as you find you need them. I strongly disagree. If you don't already have screwdrivers, wrenches, sockets, a measuring tape, hammer, etc those cheap kits can be great. Sometimes it's nice to have tools you don't care about for dirty jobs or loaning to a neighbor. I don't want to use the same screwdriver I would use on my guitar or computer on a sewage pipe or my car, for example.

    Also keep records. Put together a binder with receipts, warranty cards, etc. If something has a 30 year warranty you need a good resource for how to claim that 25 years from now. And it's a great thing to hand off to the next owner. What year was this roof installed? What was the hex code and brand of paint on the trim in the living room? Is there lead paint that is currently sealed behind newer paint? Did you upgrade the Ethernet to cat6? Does the basement flood once every 200 years, once every 20 years, or once every 2 years? Think of all the stuff you wish the previous owner would have told you and start writing it down for the next person. A house shoukd last a few hundred years, and I would argue that the quality of records should be a factor in buying/selling.

  • Weird how these people care so much about women in porn being exploited but don't seem to care about the ones just being trafficked for sex that isn't filmed. Or child labor. Or the various migrants being trafficked and enslaved for non-secual labor around the world.

    It's almost like they're grasping for socially-acceptable justification for hating something they don't like for non-socially-acceptable reasons...

  • True, I just felt like I kind of covered that talking about Jack Welch. He is, afaik, the one who really started off the trend of intra-company competition. I mentioned that other companies follow GE in that regard, and Sears was one of them for sure.