Snapblade 18mm razor, sharpie, blistex (superior to balm/stick in every way), bandages and alcohol prep wipes and triple antibiotic, Sawyer mini filter and a vacuum insulated bottle, and a towel - you never know when you’ll need a towel.

Oh also an extra mask, couple napkins, some new folded up tissues, and earplugs.

Make a SWOT analysis for each option. Quantify EVERYTHING you can into personally objective and subjective values. Then A/B all of those values against each other. Then sleep on it, ask other people, and then return to the SWOT tables and try to add and simplify.

If you still have troubles after that, try to figure out what about either choice you don’t know, and work to find it out with footwork and socializing, asking pointed questions, and paying attention to the things you want in life about people.

If that still doesn’t tip the scale, it’s probably because you don’t know enough about something else, probably yourself.

100%, music. Get on a music service (not a video service like YouTube) and go listen to genres of music that feel good.

Music that you liked when you were 13
When you were 21, music that reminds you of the good times
Or music that fits how you feel…

Seriously, don’t underestimate the power of music. It’s literally like magic and has the power to heal, inspire, distract, inform, validate, remind, transport, stimulate, numb, etc… I became a musician because I wanted to help people through hard times and to be better people, because I realized how powerful and important it is.

Go try old stuff, too, like bob dylan. Or go listen to Linkin Park again like it’s 2003. Or go listen through the entire nutcracker suite by Tchaikovsky (i suggest looking for the decca phase 4 London festival orchestra worth robert sharples that was recorded in the 60s https://youtu.be/S7VrwRJ4t-Y?si=cmLUTdUAmg2jw7kr i think it’s the one, I’m not sure on my phone where it is on spotify). Or if you want to listen to the same song over and over and that feels good to you, then that’s what you should be doing.

Just keep searching and following the good feelings and don’t give up, like trying new sexual stuff and not trying for a specific outcome but allowing yourself to be in the moment and feel then sensations.

And feel your feelings. Just find someplace safe, get a good sound source, and let it all rip… if you feel like crying, cry. If you feel like being mad, be mad. You have to actually process your feelings.

A wise man once said to me, “there’s no bad music, only bad timing”. If it feels off or wrong, just switch it. It takes courage to try something different sometimes, though, so try not sweat it too much either way, and just remember to breathe.

128gb here. I sit constantly between 40 and 70gb in use. Heavy multitasking between Internet, professional, gaming, and creative outlets can sometimes push near 90.

16 was the pcmr standard in 2010, but is a complete joke now. 32g is the new 8gb now. “Casual” pc usage is way, WAY heavier now: nobody just uses a computer for only one thing anymore, they use it for multi-window browsing, music, and YouTube, along with the new standard of everybody plays games and nobody wants to close shit just to play a game.

Games are heavierweight and the only reason it’s as low requirement as they are is because of console peasants. CS2 is like 100gb storage, up from the laughable ~2gb in csgo. That’s just not how the world works anymore. The economy has chosen ease of development and priority on graphical fidelity over deep design complexity. Shit; Starfield is basically just a 200gb graphics mod of Morrowind.

And then you have heavy users like us, who actually use bleeding edge functions, who have grown up wanting better and more, experimenting and not trusting and wanting to pay cloud. Despite the neon gamer rog chrome and black image, I’d be willing to bet almost every person here in this thread has at least one HDD currently in use (take note of these demographics: fediverse, English speaking, pcmr, aware of RAM) - and the reason is because they’re cheap, fairly reliable storage and we all ain’t made of money. Ironic because of the amount of RAM being discussed.

32GB has been the new 16GB for probably five years, and realistically, 64GB is actually what you should be getting when you upgrade/make a new build.

Reason: 64GB, right this minute, is one double above “just cutting it”.

If star trek medical care (which implies star trek economy + society) existed and were THE thing, I would be doing so sorts of cool shit. Like… Just wear a helmet and don’t die instantly and you’ll be back to normal in a few hours? COUNT ME IN. Shit. I might even become a doctor just to see cool shit knowing that I could actually help people.

BLEEP BLEEP BLEEBLEEBLEEBLEEP

That… Is so incredibly disruptive mentally and emotionally. It’s like being slapped in the face with a fish the size of a truck.

I can’t believe that actually helped at all. Holy shit.

She’s got dead people eyes. I never noticed that.

It has been an absolute gift to be part of and watching that/this growth. Seeing posts on a new platform go from something like 10/day to the, now, probably, hundreds, if not thousands per day.

I remember in late May/early June this year (2023, when this place really came alive, for archival sake), seeing the posts on Reddit about the ACTUAL api changes, then that evolving into a bit of vocal protest, which surprisingly evolved into an ACTUAL protest with a lot more information why. It was the last straw for me. Everything the world has shit on me and my generation and lifetime, all of it from selfishness and ignorance and greed. Then musk bought Twitter and immediately drove it face first into the ground at high speed and got support by most of the worst demographics on the face of the planet - and I didn’t even care about Twitter. But, a long-standing media giant, brought down by a billionaire simply because he had the money? It was if all of our intuitive fears about the world being awful just came true in real time, over, and over, and over, and over. The past fifteen years have been so bad, it’s actually insane, and it’s nuts to think that it can still be way way worse.

And then along came this dried out, greedy ass, shameless, two faced, wannabe psychopath who IDOLIZED Musk, Hoffman/spez, and just shits in the faces of everybody on Reddit that ever cared about anything. The very people trying to make the world a better place at least for a little while, pleading with him not to be THAT greedy and shitty. And he just spread open his wonderbread buttcheeks, stared us all in the eyes, looked away, smiled into a mirror, and blasted out what was left of his rotten, liquefied spine. RIP Aaron.

Everybody saw it coming, yet we were still all shocked at how blatantly greedy and manipulative every single event was. Now, he’s just trying to wait it out and let it quiet down.

I’m still convinced this or an evolution of this will be Web3.0. The evolution past megacorps as a result of direct abuse of power, anti-competitive and other dark behaviors, anti privacy, ultra-rich maximizations of profits, and late stage capitalism. Decentralization and a reinvigoration and re-emphasis on integrity and quality, put truly into the hands of the users by stripping abilities of people like musk to literally capitalize on and destroy is hugely paramount in the next step. We all want it, the world needs it, and maybe the Fediverse is it. Maybe, maybe not. It feels like the right direction and I’ve had enough bullshit to know it.

There’s something very satisfying about it being actually pixel-perfect.

However, there’s also something to be said for a/b comparing for each sperate game and deciding what you think looks best for it. Having options is always best.

It’s a hot take, but I agree with you.

Actually, I try to find a noise overlay that emotionally simulates the nostalgia effect, minimizes the looks-like-shit effect, but then also makes sure to impart the minimum amount of dither needed to technically have it look it’s best.

Less is more, and even back in the day, a lot of these games on crappy CRTs looked like absolute trash. A lot of them were bright, colorful, and actually good, but a lot of them just looked like smeary poopoo.

If I can just squint my eyes and it looks better than your filter, you’re doing it wrong. I think it takes a high nit display, vsync, with the right array of colors to hit the crt emulation just right.

Just go get an old tv at this point, damn. You’ll get the buttons, the sound of it turning on, the high pitched whistle of it just being on, the smell of the burning dust, the ozone or whatever smell too, the brightness, the curve, the colors, the emotional risk of hitting the wrong channel and blasting yourself with full volume white noise and having to panic look for the volume buttons or the remote… You can even use the in-tv speakers to output sound! Tv speakers were actually decent before flat screens.

Am I selling us all on this idea, yet? ;P

Oh yeah. I totally missed that because I’ve seen this before. That’s actually pretty messed up.

Lol this is well put. Better than my response. Rip John snow. Did you read the ghost map? A wild guess, from your use of the cholera example. If you haven’t, it was an interesting read.

There was an episode of vsauce or veritasium or cgpgrey several years ago that kind of talked about this a little bit. Basically, inside and outside of us, alongside covering all of our things and everything we touch and are around and other people, are all part of an extended network of poop particles and bacteria.

You get sick when new things get past your exterior & interior poop network of bacterial defenses. Same for anyone, anywhere. It’s all just how much, how fast, and how far and how new, the new bacteria and viruses get. If it gets too far, too fast, we might die.

But, people are disgusting and COVERED IN POOP BACTERIA AND VIRUSES and so we’re all fairly familiar with everything, and nothing is too different.

COVID-19, for example, was very different and spread in large amounts very quickly, I believe it’s why it’s called a “novel” virus. It was different enough that it just waltzed past all our defenses and killed millions of people. And then, it mutated enough, and quickly enough, that when it came back to us with the new form, our immune systems were like “damn this one virus came in here and caused a ton of damage, but for some reason we don’t know exactly what it looks like. Are you that virus or it’s relative?” And the mutation was like, “uhhh, no?” And the security guard/immune system was all, “okay, come on through.” And it would get us sick again.

Biology is weird and epidemiology is incredibly difficult when half the population is fucking homeschooled and thinks horse dewormer helps this type of thing or that it’s fake or something.

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Now, I do the thing for streaming series and movies:

Don’t buy into hype. Ever. Just don’t. Don’t play anything new. It’s all shitty and it’s always broken. And don’t play anything that doesn’t look and review and gameplay and has real, organic lasting feedback unless it’s a few years old and people are STILL playing it. It’s the “if it’s good, it’ll stick around” test. Let it get fixed. Let it get patched. Let the suckers waste their time. It’ll be around in the future no matter what. And if it’s good, it’ll still be good later. I know this isn’t the best for the studios, but they need to stop making fucking bad games with bad business models. I do absolutely buy full price games if i actually think they’re good. If you, publishers, want to milk all the suckers and people that can’t help themselves, I don’t like it but I can’t do anything about it, but you won’t see a cent from me. D4 being GaaS and ultra brown and me buying it was a calculated mistake. I was sure that Blizzard wouldn’t fuck it up, but they did. I’m also sure that they’ll fix it. So we’ll see.

To the person who initially posted this: I want to know how old you are, what your history and experience is in gaming, and why you even care or want to hear what bitter old gamers have to say. Assuming you’re gen z or alpha, or at least younger than me, the fact that you asked this leads me to believe you’ve either noticed the old gamers complaining ISN’T totally unsubstantiated, or are curious. Well, I’m curious, too. I want to know from the people that DO buy and HAVE BEEN buying AAA games, why you do that? I want to know if it’s just me, or what about me and my experience makes me not see these games as fun or valuable? Are they really as mindless as I’ve found on my own? Or is there something I’m missing in my bitterness? Do I know too much and have played too many good games? Or have I created masterpieces out of nostalgic memories? Why can’t I find newer games fun? Am I unable to be developed for? Or am I just not worth as much? What’s the deal? Where are the games I want to play?

There’s literally no WAY that I’m a small democratic of untapped low-prioritized gamers. Do people in my experience group just whine too much and expect too much? Because we’re probably very much willing to pay. If ff7 remake were actually good, released all at once, and was 500$ for the FULL game that succeeded the fun that we had while he playing the original, there would be obvious questions, but TONS of people would still buy it. Video cards in 2000 cost like 250$ high end, and ff7 was 50&, about 1/5th the price. High end videocards now are 2000 and 1/5th is about 400$, so not super far off, really. Sure, wages and cost of living are FUCKED up right now, but it’s the same for everybody, including developers. Just, you need more developers for longer, now, since it takes more people longer to do the same amount of playable content. It doesn’t HAVE to, but we all want fancy new graphics and mocap and studio recorded and mastered orchestra and shaders and complex sound programming and layered animations and all the other complexity it takes. Why not just pay more, all at once, and have games be ACTUALLY good?

Apparently because you make more money on addicting kids to micro transactions than you do being fucking responsible.

Once again, unethical business practices doing the same shit are to blame. And WHY do they do that? Because stockholders and corporations dictate maximization of profit and not what’s good for the workers or the consumers. It ALWAYS comes down to this. Always. And us old fucks know it and don’t support it and do our best to educate the ignorant. We say “don’t do that” and “that’s bad” and “it used to be better” and “go play this old game so that you’ll know better”. But unfortunately, graphics and dopamine farms far outweigh smelly old, paced games with some old technical flaws, and unless played fully, can’t even draw an audience when compared to the dopamine fix and the invigorating outrage and frustration you get from playing CoD16: Black Hawks 5 - BloodTide deathmatch in 8k HDR @120fps vsync on a 70 inch oled on the brand new console. So cooooooool~ “Hold up, just gotta buy my season pass, the dungeon key, renew my sub, buy this 40$ emote dance that’s super funny, and this skin. Yeaaah, 70$ for a Zelda game is a bit much for a game though, nobody’s gunna buy that…”
<---- translated to Nintendo-eese: “Hi, we either want more microtransactions instead of paying $10 more for the game, or we want the game to be a little shittier in every way… and ALSO microtransactions.”

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Also, I love great graphics. I love tech and think a lot of the technical progress we’ve made in the past decade has been really cool…

But I just don’t give a shit about any of it if the game sucks. The other day, my brother in law bought the group of us this weird Japanese game, made in 2019 but looked like it was made in 2001 called Earth Defense Force 5. It has some technical issues and honestly looks embarrassingly bad. But - it’s FUN! It’s a bit limited in scope for a full price game, but it’s ACTUALLY fun.

Contrary to that, we bought diablo4. I liked Diablo 3, especially after they added a ton of lategame stuff after the expansion, it is honestly a super good game. Diablo has always been a fairly small scope, somewhat casually playable party game - it has never been a long dramatic epic, that’s just not what it is, it’s a fun game that you play with your friends and grind out new gear. D3 was colorful, goofy, adventurous, and felt good (only after the expansion).

But d4… is both literally and metaphorically brown. It isn’t colorful, it’s built around a micro transaction shop and basically a quarterly subscription meant to draw you in and keep paying. There’s a reason I didn’t play world of warcraft - I thought it was overpriced and grindy, meant to slow your progress to make you play longer.

Compare that to guild wars… you buy the game… And that’s it. An mmo that you just play when you feel, no subscription. They sell expansions every few years and have a cash shop, but most of the things are silly skins or hats or musical instruments. You aren’t SUPPOSED to buy them all, they’re just there to further support the studio if you want. (There’s the bag limitations, but I forgive that for all the other positives).

Things have changed. I don’t buy AAA games basically ever since basically the ps2 era. I’m always watching and waiting though. I remain hopeful, watching dunkey and total biscuit before he died, and zero punctuation, and a few others. But, very few things made me want to buy them, and none have motivated me to do so on consoles. I think PC is superior in every way, but I love consoles and have been looking for an excuse to buy the new PlayStation now for a LONG time. The dualsense almost made me do it, but the games were just so MEHHHH and derivative, and I just bought the controller and use it on pc anyway. It’s a bit dumbly designed, and is somehow inferior to a lot of the previous controllers, I really think the ps2 was peak controllers minus the long throw L/R2 triggers. Did you know that the buttons on the PlayStations in that era were analog? The BUTTONS. It would know how hard you were pushing them and the GTAs of that era used them for throttle. They didn’t have to do that! But, xbox was all shitty stolen design and super cheap and nicked and dimed at every chance they could, even forcing developers that WANTED to give free content to sell it so as to not set a precedent (ex: valve l4d map packs).

So, to try to close this book of a post out, yes, there have been changes to what games I buy and play. I am a hell of a critic, a cynic, and am sad and depressed games are like this now. I’m aware of how it all happened, but I’m no happier for it. I miss super integrous critics that would outright fail games for good reasons and act constructively to everybody’s benefit, and how they were super influential and gamers world actually listen to them.

But now, instead of word of mouth “play this it’s fun”, or somebody showing me a game every few months and it looks awesome…

Instead of those ways, I hear that trailers for a game have come out, watch it, and I’m either immediately deflated and disappointed, I’ve got red flags shooting up that just end up being true, or I’m entirely not interested in another fad battle royale early access game.

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[Tldr: I’m too experienced and jaded to be the industry’s target ez-prey dolla-dolla demographic, but trying to be hopeful]
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It was first expansions that you could buy. Like add-ons to the game that added content. You’d buy them in a store and have to install them separately over/in the original game.

Then they were served over the internet and would just install themselves.

Then there were patches and stuff.

Then… Those started to sort of blur together. Different companies would give them to you for free, others would charge you for it. Most pc titles only charged you for the big additions, and PlayStation stuff was also largely free services. But Microsoft on xbox was like lolno u gota pay. And everybody followed suit.

And now you pay for the game, the expansion, skins, save slots, storage space for items, quality of life fixes, new audio, etc.

And now it is the sole purpose of the “game” studios, the worst thing to happen:

“Games As A Service”

You pay for everything and the game is designed around selling stuff. It’s not fun, it’s bad quality, it’s expensive, and it’s just the way things are now for everything except small foreign indie studios.

Specifically those things together. Small AND Foreign AND indie. I was looking at what games I actually liked playing in the past ten or so years, and almost every single one was a small studio, in Scandinavia or croatia or Asia, and was an independent studio. I was SHOCKED.

I get that games in the 80s and 90s (I’m only 33 but I know my history, I started gaming in the late 90s) used to cost 60-70$ and have gone DOWN in price despite massive and constant inflation. But instead of accounting for the real need for now cash to still develop games with the same scale, features, depth, and quality by just increasing the price, they’ve chosen to itemize the price behind the lie of a free trial of an intentionally limited and frustrating “game” full of mechanisms to coerce you to constantly spend money.

I’ve worked in construction, and this is the same unethical behavior a lot of contractors do. They start out with a low price, and “find” problems that you’re basically forced to do change orders on. It’s super predatory and deeply unethical, and the same thing that the game industry is ALL moving towards.

I really wish studios would just come out and say “this is how much the game costs us to build if you want lv 1 quality, this for lv 2, and this for lv 3. This is how much we forecast it will cost you players for each level.” And just try to gague interest and make the best possible game possible within some forecasts, with maybe ranges of price with the final price being different at the end. I know that’s probably too much to ask, but GaaS is soooo, so frustrating.

I love gaming. I played, in their eras, a lot of the greatest games of all time. And NONE of them felt like you were ripped off. Not even for the mediocre titles. And it feels like the scopes of games now are just taking a decent minigame from some masterpiece game of the past, adding in some extra features, polishing it up a bit, selling it at full price, then selling extra bits piecemeal to try to make even more money. Like, bro, that was a MINIgame in ff8! You didn’t even have to play it, it was just there if you needed a break from the rest of the game!

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Trillian was the shit! I always wondered if they stole my information or it was a virus, but the combining all the stupid services into one with an the quality of life improvements was fantastic!

You remember their little multicolored round glass minimize, maximize, close buttons? It was like yellow, blue, red iirc?

It was eye opening and made me realize how nice things COULD be.

I mean, let’s be real: it’s a silly joke and I remember that episode. But, many influences, including ZP and TB have explained why desktop isn’t so much a master race, but rather the platform that can do it all, better, because it’s the only one that you can seriously upgrade, is fully modular, and is doing fully multi purpose. Pcmr people spend way more money on their pc because you CAN get all these things, and they WANT to. And, you don’t have to buy the same games over and over.

I dunno, master race is obviously tongue in check, but it’s definitely my primary and home platform because of these benefits and many more.

50k very active users that try to have integrity is a pretty big deal. Because with that will come development of the platform, meanwhile Reddit is going to struggle with a new chapter of shitty moderation and decreased quality. There are also a lot of people burnt out on the issue and so I expect real numbers from the immediate to be more visible over the next month or two.

Plus, which instances are you looking at for those numbers? Are all the lemmy instances and kbin included in those numbers?

Let’s just assume that it’s going to be about 1% of reddit’s userbase. Does it matter which 1%? How will the platforms evolve? Because both are very different now than before, we’re seeing realtime changes across a lot of tech and the internet. A lot of faith was lost by the public in many platforms by the people at all paying attention, and a lot of hope was garnished by the successful move to new platforms.

Stuff is definitely changing. I’m curious what big tech is gonna do to try to restore faith, or if they’ll try to pretend nothing’s happened and try to sweep it under the rug. A lot of people already try to downplay the events into just numbers, but in reality, there are a LOT of eyes watching and waiting to see what happens. People are tired of the same old capitalist bullshit and want something better, it isn’t just ex/reddittors, it’s Twitter users, Linux users, Amazon users, Netflix users, students with debt, homeowners, and a LOT of young people. People want better and the messed up economic future is making people pay attention more than ever.

It’s all interwoven and something’s gotta give.