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paultimate14

@ paultimate14 @lemmy.world

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Comments
266
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • What have you completely stopped buying because the price has gotten ridiculus?

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  • I never liked going out to eat or drink, but its gotten insane lately. Seems like everywhere is $15 or more for a simple cocktail, $10 or more for a Miller Lite. Insulting when the staff might only be making $2.13 per hour, and I need to tip and add tax so that gets close to $20 for a drink I could have ppuree myself at home for probably $1. Bars and restaurants have also started to use Kore and more tactics to make themselves less pleasant to hang out in, enoucoraging faster consumption and quicker turn times to try to get more customers. Louder music, less comfortabke chairs, etc.

    I used to build a gaming PC for both myself and my wife roughly every 6 or 7 years. I never needed anything top-of-the-line: I am perfectly satisfied with 1080p 60fps and playing older games. I liked to maximize value. I built myself a PC in 2019 and my wife one in 2020, just as the pandemic was starting to hit. At this point I am starting to wonder whether those will be the last PC's I will afford in my lifetime.

    I expect Streaming Services will be a common answer here. I started messing around with Jellyfin a few years ago, and my wife and I had slowly been buying DVD's and Blu-Rays, occasionally supplemented by the high seas. This year we finally canceled our HBO and Netflix subscriptions. We also decided to try to cancel Spotify, so I went ahead and ripped all our CD's, gathered our pirated collection (organized separately to make it easier to potentially decide to buy that music later), and started buying more music from artists directly. I'm good enough to cancel today, but my wife has become accustomed to the near-infinite supply of variety that Spotify has so... Yeah

  • What were your thoughts about religion at 25 ?

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  • I was raised Catholic, went to Catholic school until my parents got divorced in 2nd grade.

    I remember being very young, probably around 6, and realizing what fiction was. A lot of things which did not make sense to me I just waived off as me being young and was told I would understand when I was older suddenly were revealed as just... Lies. I think Santa Claus waa the start, but within a couple of days I realized that the Easter Bunny and tooth fairy were lies too. The "government" is not some all-knowing benevolent entity that makes sure everyone is nice to each other. The claims companies make in TV commercials are lies. And there is no God.

    The world suddenly got a lot scarier, but still felt more... Right. More real.

    Aa I grew older and got more exposure to other religions, I realized that religion emerges from 2 aspects of human nature. First, we want to understand the world around us. We want to know where the ground beneath us came from, where we came from, why we exist, etc. Second, there are always people looking for opportunities, who are willing to lie (or otherwise hurt others) to get power and resources for themselves.

    There are some good lessons to be learned from religion. Jesus overturning the tables of the moneylenders for example. This could be my own personal bias, but when I read the Tao Te Ching it seems to me like Lao Tzu was an autistic person who used "The Tao" as a way to solve the double-empathy problem.

    But also a lot of religion is just old fiction. From the days before the internet and copyright laws. Imagine a Star Wars or Harry Potter fanfiction website, then imagine that those people can only communicate physically and in a world where most of them cannot read or write, and these communities persist for hundreds or thousands of years.

    I really like going down the rabbit holes at the intersection of archeology and theology. There are plenty of books that did not make it into the Bible, and even the books that did make it in have different versions and translations across history and sects. A lot of what we think of as modern Christianity comes from Dante's Inferno rather than the Bible.

    So all this means that the messages tend to be inconsistent. Even when the actual text remains the same, the way those texts are interpreted and used in practice can vary significantly. So it's really more about you interpreting and applying things for yourself than the actual texts, and this is something you can do just as well with any other piece of art.

  • What was the conversation about sex and drugs like in your home growing up?

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  • My parents said that they would let me drink under their supervision once I turned 16. I didn't take them up on the offer because i wasn't interested. Any time my Mom lit a cigarette I would start talking about how bad it was for her. So they never felt a need to talk to me about other drugs. Eventually when I waa 20 I let a girl talk me into drinking with her at her place when her parents were out of town, and she's my wife now.

    For sex, my parents were like "you talked about that stuff in school right? You know to use protection?" And I was like, "yeah I'm good".

    I was a responsible youth, the one in the friend group always thinking about the consequences and long-term effects of actions. My parents knew they didn't have to worry about me.

  • Neil Patrick Harris once hosted a party where he served a meat platter designed to look like a hyper realistic depiction of Amy Winehouses rotting corpse

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  • Idk that doesn't seem a all that weird for a Halloween party. I've been to tons of parties where the decorations and costumes are based on deceased, or otherwise macabre, celebrities.

    People dress up as Charles Manson and Sharon Tate. John Denver as a pilot. OJ Simpson costumes with tiny bloody gloves. David Carradine with a rope around his neck.

    I've looked into this before because some friends of mine commented they don't like Harris because he strikes them as a "mean gay", and this was the only unsavory thing I could find about him. It was only made public because some vegans dug through social media and found old photos of the party and decided to make it a huge deal after-the-fact, and Harris has acknowledged it was bad taste and apologized for it.

    Like, I'm all in favor of canceling people for being g problematic but I'm going to need stronger stuff than this to get angry over.

  • Neil Patrick Harris once hosted a party where he served a meat platter designed to look like a hyper realistic depiction of Amy Winehouses rotting corpse

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  • She was a drug addict who was notoriously difficult to work with, who bragged about physically abusing her spouse.

    She was also a great singer and her death was tragic. People are complicated.

  • Deleted

    Why is the grass always greener on the other side? How do you learn to be satisfied?

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  • I find this is often a conflict between what i want and what other people tell me I should want. And by "other people", that is usually advertising companies.

    There are billions of dollars being spent to convince me to go to bars and buy alcohol. Billions being spent to convince me to go out to eat at restaurants or order something delivered through an app. Billions being spent to tell me my body isn't good enough, so I shoukd get hair treatment kr skin products or exercise equipment. Billions being spent to try to convince me to buy a bunch of cheap plastic shit, and a bigger house or even a separate storage unit to put it all in. Billions being spent to convince me to go to concerts and stand-up shows and raves and movies and festivals and conventions where I can spend more money. Billions being spent trying tk get me to sign up for a monthly subscription for everything. There's billions being spent by various religions to try to convince me to join. For women, there's actually money being spent by misogynists to convince them to promote the "tradwife" lifestyle.

    A lot of the best things in life don't have marketing budgets. There's no one advertising the relief you feel when you have a solid emergency fund, gow great it feels when an appliance breaks and you can just replace it withoit having to stress over it. There's no one advertising how good it is just to go for a walk, or to spend a summer evening sitting on my back porch, watching the bats catching fireflies in the woods. There's no one advertising how good it feels to re-read your favorite book fkr the 20th time, or to watch your favorite TV show on DVD for the 10th time. There's no one advertising having a couplr of close friends over for an evening to just... Talk. There's no one advertising the evenings where my wife and I just put on one of our favorite albums and lay in bed listening to it. There was advertising involved to get us to BUY that album, and even that bed, but no advertising to get us to actually ENJOY those things. You need to do it yourself.

    It is also not a binary system. Plenty of people go out to raves or burns once or twice a year, going on benders, then go back to quiet and simple lifestyles the rest of the time.

  • TIL almost half the states in the US ban buying alcohol on christmas

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  • That's nkt very Merry of them

  • Is they're an easy way to make my Jellyfin accessible outside of my home network for free?

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  • I ended up using duckdns for a free domain. It sucks that I had to tie it to a google account, and maybe one day this might be an area where I buy a proper domain instead.

    I have a glinet Flint3 router that makes it easy to spin up Wireguard servers on it. It was a bit more finnicky, but eventually I was able to get into the advanced settings and configure the router to sync the dynamic IP with DuckDNS too.

    So I have Wireguard on my phone and my wife's phone. We have one pair of close friends who have a connection on their router too (and vice-versa) and their own Jellyfin server.

  • What is your favourite album of all time?

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  • Yellow by Baroness.

    Well, technically its a double album: Yellow & Green. And I would say Green is a close second.

    Something about it just blew my mind. Like, I had heard Baroness before, stuff from Red and Blue. They had a song or two on the early Guitar Hero games. I just thought "oh another okay metal band, whatever". Yellow and Green were just... Different. The tone, the vocal style. The whole approach to writing ans playing guitars was different than what i was used to. Thr production has this kind of modern dirtiness, like the noise came from radiation or something. The lyrics are absolutely battling, as they were translated across multiple languages and the meaning was only clinging to them by a thread. The album art is incredible too. The bass is perfect, never too much or too little. The drums use disco and other dance beats along side this metal-ish music in a fantastic way.

    It kind of felt it cane fron another dimension. A different timeline where English and western music evolved similarly to ours, but jjsy different enough to be uncanny.

  • Meta is adding ridiculous ‘rate limits’ and a soft paywall to its smart glasses

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  • Maybe its just me, but nowadays every public apace is incredibly noisey.

    Every bar and restaurant is blaring music. Vehicular traffic, air conditions, all sorts of other machines are pumping noise in too.

    I just went out with some people this weekend and found myself wishing we had, noise-canceling headsets to be able to talk to each other. Kinda makes me want to not go out any more.

  • The real deal

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  • Have you really never had the misfortune of encountering one cracked in the carton?

    In my experience there is usually a small pile of cartons with cracked eggs set off to the side of the shelf in the refrigerator in the store.

  • We live in the future!

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  • How were they broken?

  • We live in the future!

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  • Uber is too expensive these days

    That was always the goal. Uber and Lyft prices were heavily subsidized early on. Their investors poured billions into them in order to not just establish market share, but tk drive existing taxi services out of business. Taxi services that had things like: fleets of company-owned vehicles instead of personal vehicles, commercials grade maintenance schedules, stricter licensing requirements for drivers, unionized employees instead of independent contractors, etc

    Uber and Lyft just plain ignored a lot of existing regulations by saying "those don't apply because this is an app" to legislators who were too old to know how to turn on a smart phone. They got the public on-board by temporarily offering artificially low prices and high payouts to drivers. Now they have established themselves and removed the competition, so the payouts are going down and the prices are going up.

    There are still some US cities that do not allow Uber or Lyft to operate, and there are other countries in the world that do the same.

  • Why I moved my Plex library to Jellyfin after 14 years

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  • My router (GLI.net Flint 3) makes it really easy to set up Wireguard servers on it, and from there all I needed to do was get a domain name to use. Set up Wireguard on my phone, and I can access my local network remotely without needing to pay for a VPN subscription. I still use Mullvad, but that's for privacy not remote access.

  • Can someone who works in an industry or for an employer with clear negative impacts on society/the world maintain a clear concience?

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  • Thr unsavory businesses are paying a premium for being unsavory. There are SOME people who will not work there, which reduces the size of the labor pool and drives prices up. There are others who can be bought, for a price, and that also drives prices up.

    Industries with neutral or beneficial impacts on society do have this pressure, so the wages are lower. Simple supply and demand.

  • Removed

    Gabe the GOAT Newell

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  • I'll be a lot more open to comparing Valve with Amazon when I hear reports of Valve employees pissing in bottles

  • Removed

    Gabe the GOAT Newell

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  • Steam also provides value by acting as an intermediary.

    There were 21,503 games released on Steam last year. How the hell is a consumer supposed tk make informed purchasing decisions with all that? Steam is a discovery platform which connects a game with the individuals most likely to buy that game.

    It is also a central launcher to organize and manage libraries, including non-steam games. It's easy to move games between drives, and to use the various library tools to pick out what I want to play.

    Then there's Proton, a completely free comlatability layer for Linux that has allowed me to mostly stop using Windows.

    There's the Steam Workshop, which is far and away my preferred method to mod games. It's so much easier to click a button to add a mod tk Cities Skylines or Civ 6 than it is to fuck around with Nexus Mods and a mod manager for Skyrim.

    Steam is a centralized location for support from developers. It also is convenient tk keep track of updates.

    Steam Remote Play is probably the single most umpactful thing to my gaming in the past decade. I just need my 1 gaming desktop and I find myself playing on my Shield in my living room, my phone in bed, my tablet on my exercise bike, my Steam Deck on the porch, or even over at my friend's house on an old laptop. All for free, when I've never even be able to get Moonlight or Sunshine to work at all in my desktop.

    Steam has social features like friends lists, chat, and even voice, which is relevant with how shitty Discord has been as a company lately. Support for family sharing and multiplayer is phenomenal.

    It is not like Steam is just pocketing a bunch of money and not doing anything. They beat out not just their legitimate competitors, but even piracy, because they provide better value for the consumer. They do a lot of tasks that publishers otherwise would have to handle themselves, saving them costs.

    And I'm sure there are more features that I'm forgetting kr that I don't bother with, but other people find valuable.

    I do think they should be heavily regulated, but there hasn't really been much to regulate with them. They had a minor lawsuit in Australia early on relating to the verbiage displayed about refund policy. I don't like loot boxes, but my solution is... I don't buy them, and usually I don't even buy games with them.

  • Removed

    Gabe the GOAT Newell

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  • Steam was launched in 2003.

    By that point the ships had already sailed. You didn't own software, and micro transactions already existed. Steam did not "bypass" copyright laws- the facilitated a storefront that sold based on already established and litigated law.

    This goes back tk the 1960's with the origin of computers, when they were gigantic. Manufacturers like IBM would lease the hardware to institutions that used it, and the software was just included for free. This practice ended because of antitrust lawsuits in 1969, which led to IBM charging for software seperstely.

    It's funny you mentioned Apple, because one of the foundational cases of software copyright law was 1983's Apple vs Franklin case that ruled against a company making Apple II clones, who argued that machines readable code was similar to machinery designs and thus not subject to copyright law. 20 years before Steam existed.

    But I guess you can just ahead and make things up on the internet to jump aboard a hate train.

  • Removed

    Gabe the GOAT Newell

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  • I've literally never seen any of these so-called "simps"

    Like, the internet is a big place and I'm sure some of them exist, but you could make that argument about any view at all. I see way more hatred for these alleged simps than the simps themselves.

    Steam, and Valve, operate in a capitalist system. They've been successful. They are similar to a handful of other companies, like Costco, that seem to understand that in order for capitalism to be sustainable, corporations need tk govern themselves and show restraint. They need to focus not on merely achieving profit for ownership this quarter, but on establishing long-term and stable business relationships with all of their stakeholders. Customers, emplpyees, suppliers, governments, lenders, the planet itself.

    The biggest failure of capitalism is that the system does not incentivize for any of this. Which is why such corporations are so rare.

  • People who journal, why?

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  • I started last year, for several reasons. Most of which werr related to my wife and I creating a polycule with another couple a year earlier. After 1 year in I did some evaluation and realized I needed to make some changes, and journaling was an answer for a lot of those.

    1. Memory. I'm almost certainly on the autistic spectrum, and for most of my life I've had a remarkably good memory. Not "photographic", and I known better than to trust any human memory too much, but in general I was pretty good at remembering details. I am also very introverted. I like to spend time alone, reflecting on the last couple of days and solidifying my memories in meditation.

    Being in a polycule means that I both have much less time for that meditation and much more stuff to remember. I also was a mild THC user before, mostly for my knee pain or jjsy because getting high on occasion is fun. But ibstatted leaning on it more heavily to deal with the stress of constant socialization.

    So when I found myself in conversations remembering that I had been told things, but unable to remember what they were. Like my girlfriend's home town or my boyfriend's favorite Zelda game. Not stuff they even necessarily expected me to remember, but stuff I felt bad for forgetting.

    1. Validation and evaluation. One of the establishing philosophies of the polycule we talked about up-front was that we woukd still prioritize our respective marriages. We were all established adults and homeowners with no children- this wasn't a full joining-of-households or roomates situation. Last summer I started to feel like my wife wasn't spending much time with me though. I started journaling and after a few months found that, sure enough, we had pretty much stopped doing all of the things the two of us used to do together (playing videogames, watching TV and movies ,etc). It is not at all that I minded her spending time with the other people, but when she WAS home with me she woukd just lay on the couch reading, sleeping, scrolling Instagram, or playing Stardew Valley.

    My wife also has a medical condition that derailed her career, so a while ago we decided it made more sense for her to stop working and be a homemaker. So I became the sole income earner, and she took over the chores we used to split(laundry, cooking, dishes, cleaning, grocery shopping, etc). I would still contribute on occssion: I am not some boomer stereotype of a man who doesn't know how a laundry machine works, and I like to cook on occasion. But as she spent more and more time with our girlfriend and boyfriend she also did less and less of those chores. It led to a lot of Saturday mornings, which are supposed to be so e relaxing time off work for me, but instead I need to spend time cleaning or scooping the litter or getting groceries because she didn't do it, and with our gf & bf coming over that night I want the house to be respectable.

    I FELT all of these things, and discussed them with her a little bit, but journaling gave me the confidencd to talk to my wife about it, provide details, and help her to see what she was doing too. When I said that we never did anything together anymore, her first reaction was "wait didn't we just watch that TV show like a week or two ago?". And because of journaling I was able to say "that was 5 months ago".

    1. Working through feelings. For most of my life I have done this without needing to write anything down. I would just spend some time alone and, well, think. Let the thoughts and feelings flow naturally and sort them out. But with so much less time to myself I wanted to take a more direct and active approach. I still think I prefer my natural approach- doing it through journalling feels forced and rushed. But its better than just struggling.
    2. Monitoring health. I weighed 207lbs when we started this polycule, and now I'm down to 161. Largely due to a couple stints of low-carb dieting.

    Also, not to get too graphic but group sex is very different from duo or solo. So having a record of how things have gone and how I've felt about things has been nice.

    I should also note that for the first 6 months, I just logged narratively. I tried to remember to write down important things, tried to predict what my future self might want to go back and check later. Using keywords I would know to search for (digital is better for me- I use Joplin). After 6 months, I decided to pull out some key measurables and use a separate app to log those. My weed and alcohol use, exercise, and sexual activity.