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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Not really into travelogues like this (and this was no exception), but I will say I love me an Amtrak trip.

    In 2015, I rode from Portland, OR to Boston, MA. Took 5 days, through Sacramento, Chicago, and DC. I was traveling alone so every evening in the dining car I was seated across from a different Giant Train Nerd and got to learn about the engine on the current train, the type of track we were riding on, who owns or owned the land, really interesting stuff.

    Both before and after that I’ve taken trains between Boston and NYC several times, and taken the Auto Train (which carries your car!) between DC and Florida.

    Every trip makes me wish I had the leisure time and the country had the infrastructure such that I could avoid even more plane travel and take a train instead.

    So I definitely get the urge to write a meandering travelogue about just such a trip. But as you can see, the same information fits just fine into a reasonably-sized internet comment.


  • I guess I don’t see what the incentive would be for this, or even what it realistically means in this case.

    Do you mean like relicensing the backend and frontend with a closed source license? I don’t see what the incentive would be for that unless they wanted lemmyml to be the only instance in existence (which runs counter to it’s raison d’etre) and to make secret/proprietary/commercial extensions to it that are difficult to develop in the open.

    Or I guess unless they wanted to start charging instance admins for the honor and pleasure of running their software, which at least right now would be the quickest way to ensure nobody runs their software.


  • I tend to agree here. But it has been interesting watching the proliferation of streaming services and trying to figure out what’s gonna happen next.

    Like Netflix was a big first-mover, then everyone realized they could keep more money if they built their own streaming service, then everyone realized that building and running a streaming service is expensive and complicated, then everyone had to get onto the Original Content treadmill to try to keep folks subscribed which has led to somehow even more commodification of art, and now that running at a loss and pouring cash into original content to bump up numbers has gotten too expensive some services are pricing themselves out of the market.

    I’m fascinated to see what the next big move is for these businesses. With more and more people starting to choose month to month which one or two services to subscribe to rather than keeping them all, I wonder if we’re gonna continue seeing the return of ad-supported plans or some services only offering yearly contracts or what the next move will be in pursuit of endless growth.



  • I guess my reaction is partially because I never see articles like this for my other hobbies and while I don’t see articles like this about video games often, I do see comments around the internet about this fairly regularly.

    I don’t hear people saying “playing board games helps me with strategizing” or “playing guitar has really improved my hand-eye coordination and playing in a band has helped my ability to cooperate with others.”

    Maybe that’s because gamers tend to feel more defensive about the hobby as it has historically been disparaged. People are more likely to picture “CoD yelling person” when they hear you play video games than they are to picture “wonderwall at parties person” when they hear you play guitar.

    But, on the other hand, D&D players and Marvel nerds seem to have largely moved on from “but it’s actually really cool and fun and not weird at all.” Maybe video game players should consider doing so as well.


  • I dunno, ‘game company commissions study to ask gamers to self-report about how gaming isn’t a waste of their time’?

    I’m in my mid 30s and have played video games my whole life. I also participate in some gaming communities online and my real-life friends are about 50/50 with regards to gaming. And if asked, yeah, I would probably self report that video games have had a positive impact on my life.

    But have they? I’m not qualified to say. I don’t have any actual data in front of me. I do know playing video games often makes me feel good, but I can say that about lots of unhealthy habits.

    Was pumping 150 hours into Tears of the Kingdom better for me than the couple weeks of workouts I skipped? Is it good that I drank more beer during that time than I normally would have?

    Would my life have been more or less improved if, instead of talking about video games online I had been practicing guitar and finding an open mic night to play at?

    Would it have been better for my mental health and hand-eye coordination instead of playing Elden Ring to have gone to Home Depot, bought some wood, and built the shelves I’ve been putting off building in the basement to ease some of our storage issues?

    If video games really were an unqualified good, would “my loser boyfriend stays up all night yelling into his headset about Overwatch/CoD/Fifa/Fortnite” be such a common stereotype?

    I’m not suggesting video games are bad (or even that the sometimes-unhealthy way I engage with them is bad), but I am suggesting that “gamers say gaming is good for them, actually” does not provide useful data for analysis or discussion.



  • The title of this post is at best misleading and at worst simply wrong. From the source that OP linked in a couple other comments here (emphasis mine throughout):

    Since the start of July, the app’s downloads have fallen by almost 30% compared to the preceding two months, according to data from app performance tracker Apptopia. … Twitter has gained usually 15 million to 30 million users a month since 2011, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It gained just 10 million users between August and September of this year. … Visits to the web version of X, which still operates as twitter.com, fell since the start of the year, with global web traffic down 10% in August and US traffic down 15%, compared to a year ago, according to an analysis by Similarweb. … So far in September, daily users are down to 249 million, a roughly 2% decrease… Monthly users are down by about the same percentage, now at 393 million users from 398 million in July.

    That is emphatically not “loses over 30% of users in two months.” That is, though, “signs of slowing growth” and “signs of the most recent round of dramatic announcements wearing off and folks moving on with their lives” which is why Musk is doing his best to get back into the news cycle.

    Maybe OP should go ahead and update the post with a more accurate title to avoid spreading misinformation.


  • As someone without an Xbox or a PC, Starfield has very much gotten me back into NMS. Loving the last couple of updates, especially as a PSVR2 player.

    I hope I get to play Starfield some day, cause it looks like a lot of fun, but it’s not a hardware seller for me. Probably some day I’ll pick up a gaming laptop or steamdeck or something and check it out along with the other PC games I’ve been missing for the past few years.




  • Yeah, it’s not for everyone a lot of folks prefer emulation on steam decks, anbernics, retroids, pis, etc.

    The things that drew me to Evercade are:

    • Licensed emulation. Lots of folks don’t care about this, but I’m happy to pay for my media when I can. In cases of indie/homebrew releases, devs get paid which is great. In cases of retro releases, rightsholders get paid which is sometimes just someone with a piece of paper saying they own a particular IP. Which is maybe less important than paying the people who directly made a thing, but in the way our society is structured, imo it’s also important to pay people willing to keep something commercially available as long as they aren’t trying to gouge you.
    • Curated library. I mean, part of this is just because not everyone will license to Blaze so they need to pick and choose. But back in college when my roommates and I built a mame machine, or later when I was emulating on a raspberry pi. I would mostly play the same handful of games over and over again. I love that I hadn’t heard of like 70% of the Evercade library and hadn’t played like 80% of games in the library until they came out on carts. So much discovery. I also love the fact that not all the games are all-time greats - average and below average games deserve a chance to be preserved, played, and loved as well.
    • The community. I probably should have listed this first because I’m not sure if I would have gotten as into Evercade if it weren’t for the community. The folks in the discord are great. Lots of really chill and knowledgeable folks to chat games with, a few colorful characters to keep things interesting, and Blaze themselves are pretty active and transparent in the chat which is really great to see. There’s a weekly games challenge (often but not always high score related) that one of the moderators runs that has lots of us playing the same games at the same time which is always fun.

    Anyway, definitely no judgement for you wanting to enjoy games the way you want - that you are enjoying them at all is the important part. Just wanted to share a little bit about how Evercade works for me for folks who may be curious.



  • It’s always interesting when someone is like “I wish I could go back to using smaller sites/forums or try some more open/ethical platforms, but I can’t because all of my family are on Facebook.”

    Remember just 20 years ago when most of your family wasn’t anywhere on the internet and that was just fine? I recognize that I’m saying this as a semi-isolated weirdo on some relatively obscure corner of the Internet, but it’s okay to not be in constant passive contact with everyone you’ve ever met. Yeah it’s more work to keep in touch with the folks you actually care about if you can’t do so passively via Facebook, but that’s how it always was. Email exists, texts and phone calls exist, meeting up exists.

    If there are people you care about you can still keep in touch with them without using the same social media platform as them. Just like in the 90s you didn’t need to read rec.models.railroad to keep in touch with your model train loving uncle.

    I get that these connections (whatever one might say of their quality or tangibility if the interaction is just “look at picture, press like button”) are important to people and one of the positives of platforms like Facebook, but if you’re going to bemoan not being able to seek alternatives solely because the entire world isn’t switching with you, it’s important to realize that is a choice and not a requirement.






  • But it’s not an invitation from an owner/occupant. I say it’s no good. Or at least not directly, of course just like with regular police the warrant is useful in coercing an actual invitation.

    On the other hand, the implicit invitation offered by the welcome mat by the door does provide entrance.