theragu40 @ theragu40 @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

The internet.

And no I don't mean every single part of it. But somewhere along the line there became an expectation that the internet be free. That continued for sites that rapidly grew well beyond the point where it was reasonable for them to be maintained for free, but instead of a natural progression where we pay for things we use, we simply became the product of the internet at large in the form of data about every aspect of our lives.

We now live and exist in a world where very little of what we do is private in any way, our preferences and relationships and tendencies are digitized and correlated and used against us largely without our active, conscious knowledge. And it's all so Gmail, Facebook, and YouTube can be free. Or rather..."free".

It has always felt like the biggest scam ever to me, that everything I do and think online should be bought and sold without me really ever having much of a chance to have a say in that.

Yeah I mean, I am not paying to own it, you know? I don't think of it in those terms at all. I'm paying for access to Spotify's library. The product is the access. It removes a ton of decisionmaking overhead for someone like me whose primary enjoyment comes from listening to a huge variety of music and listening to as much new (or new to me) music as I can get my hands on.

I wasn't buying an album per month before, but that also means I wasn't discovering music at anywhere near the rate I can today. Before I had to make the decision to spend 10-15 bucks on an album that maybe I wouldn't even like. Now the barrier to giving a new album a shot is essentially zero. For me that is just so cool.

So I think it comes down to what you enjoy and what your music habits are. If you're confident in what you like, don't find music discovery to be something worth paying a fee to improve, and want to listen to a few albums a year on repeat... Then yeah it's a bad value proposition. But for me, it's an astonishingly good value. And to be clear, I still do buy albums for bands I really enjoy because I want to fully support the artists. But there are lots of bands id never even have given a chance if I hadn't been able to first discover them as part of a service I already pay for.

Convenience, pure and simple.

I used to maintain a gigantic Google Play Music library and used that to listen to music. I also had a hard copy locally and used Winamp.

Then Google killed GPM and there was no real good alternative at the time so I picked up Spotify and got easily hooked on the ability to listen to anything I wanted at any time. No ripping, no uploading, no buying, no hassle, no nothing. I've discovered so much music through the recommendation engine. Some are bigger bands I just hadn't listened to, some are obscure.

But the point is, for the cost of a single CD per month I was able to listen to any CD from any band whenever I wanted. It was an extremely easy decision to sign up.

I purchase and play switch exclusives on switch. Multi platform titles I buy for the deck. I don't really pirate much these days.

I think we can handle problematic when it's in a battle vs existential evil

I hate to just shit on things but overall this is a pretty sad looking pile of food IMO.

I think what confuses me most is that the majority of posts knocking TotK say things like "it's exactly the same as BotW" or say it's using the "exact same map".

Having poured over 100 hours into each I just don't understand this take. It's objectively untrue. Yes, the core topical map is largely the same, but the content of it is extremely different. Having put so much time into BotW I've been very surprised at how few things are the same and like you have enjoyed seeing what has changed and where.

And that is to say nothing of the sky or the depths. The sky is somewhat limited but has such a sense of verticality and focus on flight that BotW didn't have. The depths are gargantuan and chock full of things to explore, including some fun ties to the upper world if you can find them.

I've also found the enemies to be more varied, and more difficult to defeat across the board. This has been a fun challenge for me as well.

So yeah. I don't know. It's just a much, much larger game. If people simply don't like it, or played BotW too recently for the core mechanics to feel fresh, then I kinda get it. Similarly if you are more into discovering more and more map and don't care what's in the map, then I can see how it could be a bit boring also. And overall maybe the open world style just isn't for you. Fair.

But I don't understand the criticisms I see most often about limited new content vs BotW because that is just very untrue.

It is not. But if Chad shares my gluttonous exploits then I salute him and I hope he stopped doing things like that in time to be a healthy adult :)

It could be, or it could be hard tack. We need answers!

Hulu does this shit too. I swear every other day it's some new horror show or naked people as the main banner when we log in. I don't want to look at any of that! Jesus christ, I should be able to log into our live TV app without having to tell my kids to turn away. We're not prudes, I'm not offended by nudity, but my kids are in early grade school. They are easily frightened and they're not old enough yet for me to be having "the talk" with them because Hulu can't be bothered to keep their banners PG.

My grade school stopped allowing kids to go up for second helpings of hot lunch because of me. In 8th grade I recruited the help of quite a few classmates and managed to take down 50 chicken nuggets, 2 milks, a pile of veggies, and two dessert cakes at one lunch hour.

This performance became somewhat infamous, and I learned from a friend that they banned second helpings for the next school year in part because of that occurrence.

Still kind of proud of that one. And not sure I could manage 50 nuggets now as an adult.

I'm gonna need an explanation of your bun situation. From here that looks like you're using extra wide english muffins or something.

My argument would be that one doesn't transcend over the other. It's probably obvious but I also think numbered review scores are inherently flawed, because the metric is subjective and meaningless.

I much prefer a tiers system. These are both top tier games. Anyone can agree they are of exemplary quality and represent some of the best their genre has to offer. Any argument beyond that very quickly devolves into squabbles over subjective preference and that is a bit pointless to me.

As an example, a few of my favorite games of all time are Earthbound, Half-Life, Super Mario World, Metroid Prime, and Skyrim. I would rank all 5 of these games in my top tier. But what point is there in trying to rank them amongst each other? They have nothing to do with one another, so I have no meaningful way to compare them. If I use numbering, would I rank Earthbound a 9.7 and Metroid Prime a 9.5 and that means Earthbound is a better game? 2 tenths better? What does that even mean? I just don't find value in that kind of arbitrary comparison.

Yup. He's simply not an exciting person or candidate. He's not really even all that liberal. Just fine when your target voters are moderately conservative swing voters who fancy themselves principled enough not to vote for an obvious criminal. Democrats will already vote for him because he's the democratic candidate. He's trying to appeal to never-trumpers. And it worked.

If there is one thing that should be your takeaway from the last decade of US politics and media coverage, it should be that polls are not to be trusted.

A good pollster can make their data say whatever they want.

What we need is for people to get out and vote. The threat of Trump should be enough to mobilize voters. It's not like Biden was an inspirational candidate last time. And all he's done is go out and do probably a bit better than most thought he would.

In a vacuum, sure. Biden is way older than I'd like to have in the white house. We desperately need younger politicians with fresher ideas.

But like. Let's be serious. It is just as important at this moment in history that Trump not win, and Biden has already shown he can beat Trump. That's the only important thing right now. We can figure out who runs to replace Biden after term two.

Yes, they are.

We wash the zip up pad a few times a year. But we do the mattress pad that sits on top when we wash our sheets.

You can go to the mountains and simply take a marmot. You can take as many marmots as you can carry. They're just laying there in the sun, no one will stop you. Take a marmot.

💀

Yeah it's a cesspool that way.

I live in the mke area and when looking for housing Waukesha was a tempting area because of how much more house you can get for the money, but I just don't think I can handle living there. Not to mention I want my kids going to schools in a community that gives a shit about kids and their education.