They ran the train but lockdown started the next day so my 8 day trip was off. Then they said you couldn’t get a refund on advanced tickets but could rebook later (at extra cost) up to a certain date but who knew when lockdown would end? I wouldn’t have been able to get more leave anyway. Then they said a few days later that advance ticket refund would be given but when I applied they said “Too late, it’s after the date you were due to travel”. Every other company I’d booked with gave refunds even those bookings that were non-refundable. It looks like Caledonian Sleeper’s days might be numbered anyway. Oh dear. How sad. Never mind.
Van Oak Props. He had some very cool, very intricate builds that were a lot of fun to follow along with.
Now that there are sponsored videos, those videos are somewhat short, almost half assed builds just to use the sponsors product. The quality in his videos and the props he makes have gone down.
If I were trying to get quiet aliens to communicate, I would try to get earthlings to clean up their own mess. I can’t imagine an advanced civilization wanting to bother with the sad tragedy of humanity’s self-destruction. There isn’t a day where some random human isn’t killing another, and there’s usually some government that has organized some mass-kill army operation against another country – or, worse, it’s own people. Even omitting the bloodthirsty, power-hungry, greedy, and liars, the general population can’t get together to work for the common good.
Maybe we could start by fixing the climate catastrophe, getting the trash out of the ocean, and then getting food and housing to everyone. If I was an alien that’d been avoiding Earth, that’s the sort of thing that would get my attention.
Genuine question: do you think most intelligent life outside of Earth, of existent, is equal to or less advanced than Earth? Or at the same level in issues?
Because in that case, you’d become the doomer, cuz that’s depressing.
Which is the perfect premises for a Colonial Invasion by a “superioristic” neighbor. Like the Belgians bringing Civilization to Congo, or France shining the lights of the Republic to North Africa (and S-E Asia). Or the Spanish, saving South America through Religion.
Please, Lizards Overlords, make haste; I have a feeling it is a matter of emergency right now.
I've been playing Journey To The Savage Planet lately, and while the gunplay is not awesome, and the unlocks involve collecting materials, the "rare" materials for each enemy are behind a boss or mini-boss, and it's effectively a 3D metroidvania. There's enough hard platforming that I take more fall damage than enemy damage (or at least close), even in the boss fight I'm currently stuck on.
Apple. They make some decent stuff but it has repeatedly become more expensive to own and maintain because repair is nearly impossible. And because of the monopoly they are building it is guaranteed to get much worse.
Additionally everything they do has a ripple effect across the industry. The average flagship phone is now over $1000. The average phone doesn’t have a headphone jack or micro SD expansion, or replaceable battery, and are all impossible to repair. Computers impossible to upgrade. Extra ram and SSD capacity being prohibitively expensive (8gb of ddr5 is 40$, apple charges 200$, similar scheme with their proprietary SSD’s)
It’s apparent that with Apple’s continued success the rest of all of our electronics have continued to get worse and predatory to squeeze more money out of us.
We reap what we sow and if we sow a company that is hellbent on enshittifiying all of our everyday devices and gouge us for our money, we aren’t going to have any other companies left (or at least those that won’t participate in this practice)
I work in computer repair and I have witnessed first hand how hostile aAple is to the consumer. Serialized components that are impossible to replace, to perforated cables that tear more easily during disassembly. It is dumbfounding that a company with such little respect for their customers is so successful.
There are a lot of brands that aren’t AS anti repair as apple and have devices that are fairly simple to fix, like Nokia and IMO Sony. There is the fair phone that does market itself as repairable but they lost my trust by removing the headphone jack and selling their own wireless earbuds.
Contrary to what you might think, those people probably believe in the thing they posted. Just because it makes you angry, doesn’t mean it has that effect on everyone else.
I’m not aware of communities like that on Lemmy, but Reddit’s got r/terriblefacebookmemes, a bunch of subs with the format r/shit____say(s), r/therightcantmeme, etc. They’re unambiguously posting the content because they don’t like it and want everyone to hate on it with them.
Well, laughing at something in the way you described is kind of just a different way of hating on it, is it not? Even the way you phrased, “…calling out the stupidity of shit other people say,” suggests a strong dislike of the statements showcased on those subs.
Yes, but you also probably don’t repost screenshots of cringeworthy anime-centric posts other people have made so that you can make fun of them with other people. There’s a difference between seeing something, going, “lol that’s dumb,” and moving on VS seeing something, going, “lol so fucking stupid,” taking a screenshot, and posting it somewhere else so you and a bunch of other people can spend time making fun of it and tearing it apart in the comments.
Sorry, I bet this post doesn’t really belong here. Please help me find the right community. I am looking to discuss the bat-shitery of this scumbag / nut.
Here’s one nobody has mentioned yet. Hasbro. Owner of Wizards of the Coast which recently tried to massively fuck over D&D players and sent hired mercinaries (literally Pinkertons) after one of their Magic: The Gathering players for something that totally wasn’t the player’s fault.
They accidentally sent a notable player (dont remember if they were a content creator or something) an unreleased card. Pinkyboys showed up at his house and harassed him to return it.
So, D&D first. WotC back in 2001 realized something. There are a few books that they sell a ton of copies of and make a lot of money off of. (The Player’s Handbook, The Dungeon Master’s Guide, Monster Manual, etc.) And then there are a ton more books that take a lot of effort to make but that they don’t sell many copies of so they don’t really make much money on them, but they still have to be made in order to ensure that the more profitable books sell. (These are mostly the published adentures.)
They figured that it would be in their best interest to incentivize third parties to write a lot of these published adventures so that WotC itself could focus more on the core books. So they licensed a lot of their core content under a license (The “Open Gaming License version 1.0a” or “OGL 1.0a”) that allowed third parties to use it in their own modules and sell those modules. It created a vibrant ecosystem of publishers.
The OGL 1.0a was intended as a perpetual license. They promised third party publishers that the wording of the license didn’t allow WotC themselves – creators of the OGL 1.0a – to revoke the license. (This was on an official FAQ on WotC’s site.) So you’d be able to sell your module that included verbiage and elements from official D&D materials forever.
Well, in 2022, they changed their tune. They created an “OGL 1.1” (which was not “open” the way the 1.0a was) and started pressuring publishers they partnered with to accept the new license. It basically allowed them to rip off any third party content and include it in official WotC stuff without paying the third party publisher and also ban the publisher from using the material they wrote. It also put ridiculous restrictions on virtual tabletop software (software for playing D&D remotely.) Now, that’s not so catastrophic because they couldn’t revoke the OGL 1.0a and publishers were under no obligation to accept the OGL 1.1, right?
Well, they came up with a legal argument why the language of the OGL 1.0a that they’d been telling everyone couldn’t be revoked on existing works actually was something they could revoke. Basically, if they convinced a court they could do that, every third-party D&D module that relied on the OGL 1.0a would have to accept the OGL 1.1 terms that would let WotC rip off their work or stop sales immediately.
There was massive backlash from the community. D&D players were remarkably unified in their response. And the CEO of WotC was really tone deaf and dismissive and soured WotC’s relationship with the D&D community even further. Enough subscriptions to D&D Beyond (an online service owned by WotC) that shareholders started asking tough questions at shareholder meetings.
So, finally, WotC hired a slick PR firm to smooth things out. And, honestly, I have to admit they did good. They ended up leaving the OGL 1.0a in place (unrevoked it, sorta). But also, WotC had already said “actually, we can revoke it” and nobody trusted the OGL 1.0a any more. So WotC also dual-licensing the same OGL-1.0a-licensed content also under a Creative Commons license that is (more certain to be) unrevokable and is more open than the OGL 1.0a. The upcoming version of D&D will be OGL 1.1 only, but players and third party publishers are pretty unified on the idea of refusing to migrate to the new version and the current version is safer from the evil clutches of WotC than it was before this whole fiasco went down.
Now, the consensus among the D&D players is that WotC isn’t the bad guys so much as Hasbro, WotC’s parent company. When WotC backpeddeled and did the dual licensing thing, I decided to end my boycott of Hasbro. (I was actually DM’ing a D&D campaign at the time.) I looked forward to buying more D&D books. To seeing the latest Transformers movie and the D&D movie. Stuff like that.
And then, very shortly after that all went down, there was the other fiasco started by WotC.
I’m a little less familiar with this one, but some player of Magic: The Gathering purchased packs of MTG cards from a small reseller and the reseller fucked up. The reseller, not knowing the difference, gave the customer packs of a not yet released but similarly-named line of cards that weren’t supposed to be available to customers at all yet.
The customer made an unboxing video of these not-yet-officially-released cards and stuck it on YouTube. And that’s when shit hit the fan. WotC could have DM’d the customer on YouTube and asked if the customer could take down the video and exchange the cards for the ones he’d actually purchased, but instead they sent the actual, literal Pinkertons (a private security/mercinary company known for union busting and lots of illegal quasi-military/quasi-police actions against innocent people) to go harass the customer’s neighbors and intimidate (like while sporting assault rifles and body armor and camo – on the customer’s front porch) and bully the customer.
Now, my understanding is that the customer did nothing legally wrong. The fuck up was the reseller’s. The customer was under no legal obligation to return the cards or take down the video or otherwise cooperate in any way. The customer also said in later videos about the whole situation and the visit he got from the Pinkertons that they would totally have fully cooperated if they’d have just contacted him and asked.
As soon as I heard about WotC sending the Pinkertons after a customer, I recommitted to boycotting Hasbro and I intend never to end that boycott. I really didn’t expect something far worse to follow right on the heels of the OGL 1.1 fiasco.
Glad it was informative! Back when the D&D situation was all happening in realtime, I was so addicted to any and all news about it. I watched all there was to see about it on YouTube constantly. (And there was a lot.)
I’ve never played Magic, but especially given how soon after the D&D debacle it went down, it felt like a continuation of the same story. So I watched a lot about that as well.
First day in the dorms at college I see a name tag next to a door that says “Shithead” and thought what a mean joke to play! Turns out her name was shi-thee-ad. Rest of the year she was Thea.
Also worked with a woman named “Noname” (no-nam-ay) and apparently that gave her all sorts of trouble on official forms.
I heard about a guy who got a custom license plate of “NULL” and he ended up getting assigned a ton of parking/speeding tickets for every case where the ANPR system failed to read the plates.
Agreed. My rule of thumb is: if it takes enough more than a second to figure out why I had the tab open, then I might as well just close it and re-open it if the need to have it available reemerges. It takes a lot of effort (several seconds and a lot of mental energy) to create the mental context that I need to make use of the tab. On the other hand, opening it takes a few seconds and requires little to no thought whatsoever.
So I just close them. In fact, having too many tabs open just makes it take longer to find the open tabs that I’m actually currently using.
I’ve heard many people rave about the Moondrop Chu’s. Even Crinacle likes them! Also I’ve ordered myself a pair for ~£15 as an early Christmas present :)
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