Khrux

Hey that’s exactly what my rent / wage split was in the UK last year. The only reason anything got better is that minimum wage went up while my rent hasn’t yet.

I honestly don’t think Lemmy will function well without a way for identical communities across different instances could subscribe to eachother, allowing a single feed of information. This would stop the instances splitting the userbase.

Early Reddit had a subreddit for everything, but most were dormant. However as soon as you posted on it, enough people had it on their front page that you’d get a response. I think Lemmy feels very similar to how Reddit did 10 years ago, except many of the dead communities are totally dead.

No.

This isn’t my standard instance but I do take a look at it sometimes. I’m definitely very far left leaning, I don’t have a label that clearly fits me but I’m probably close enough to anarcho-communism or syndicalism. I live in the UK so it’s pretty common for my views to fall further left of the USA.

I’m not particularly good at actually adhering to my own views, infact I don’t think I’ve ever done e anything substantial to bringing my ideals into reality. My dream would be for small federated housing / workers co-ops and unions to get a good handle in my area, and then have the stability to grow.

The crucial reason I’m not a tankie is that I actively oppose top down leadership structures, and I’m actually more against authoritarianism than I am against the right, but I feel that in my country, conservatism and authoritarianism are deeply linked, and a bottom up power structure would do more to actively oppose facism and power consolidation than a far left authoritarian regime.

In short, No. My principles may make me a commie, but I’m an anarchist first.

I just always give too much context to my stories, and quickly realise that I’m giving context for context for context and cant remember my point.

My closest friend is very similar here though, and we can have great long conversations that are 20 layers deep of tangents and forgetting our original points. We also sometimes yell ‘pin’ at eachother as a shorthand for ‘lets put a pin in this’ which basically means that at some point we’re trying to remember what we wanted to say at that point because it was fun.

Often when I try to copy other people’s facial expressions, I realise I have no control over my facial muscles if I try to move just the left or right side. It’s absolutely fine if I move both sides at once but I literally can’t even sense the muscle to move it when I try one side, but my friends can. I can wink though, but I used to do it very unnaturally.

I remember doing this on Reddit Sync years ago by combining this option,

Settings shortcut: History > Mark posts as read on scroll

With something like this option,

Settings shortcut: General > FAB action

Set the FAB to hide read posts. The main difference to how I had it working in the past is that with this, you must use the floating action button to periodically purge this content, where as I’m sure I had it working automatically before.

Indie also covers an enormous financial area. People generally group games into AAA, Some nebulous middle ground games that are generally produced by the major studios but aren’t AAA and Indie.

There is a difference between indie games that sell millions of copies vs dozens and this lack of discrepancy makes this complex. I once pirated a game called infernium after seeing a friend play it on switch, then learnt that it’s an absolutely tiny game by a solo developer. I happened to adore the level design and lore of that game so much that I bought it on steam and then bought all of his other games too just to support him.

On the flipside, we refer to a game like Hades as indie. I love supergiant games and have purchased all their titles but I would have felt zero remorse at pirating Hades.

Maybe the only thing that I feel is sad in all of this is that the massive AAA games takes years to be cracked nowadays, which means only indie games are pirateable. I don’t like the unfair dichotomy this creates. There are probably a reasonable amount of people who pirate indie games and buy AAA games for this reason, and that’s bad for industry.

Oh no, I hate this art and design style:(

This is my favourite, it’s a little cheesy and fun, but it doesn’t have my biggest issue with the Reddit one which is for some reason acting like it’s a birthday party.

The Witcher novels are one of the few epic fantasy franchises I’ve read and man, I didn’t really like them.

Unsurprisingly, I came from the playing the Witcher 3, and I loved the first two books; the collections of short stories. The actual main plot felt that it never knew clearly where it was going, and it often suddenly meandered at times that killed the pacing, and man was it horny.

I don’t mind horny either. I really enjoyed reading Murakami’s The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, and the authors horniness is prevalent throughout the novel, but it actually works to complement the narrative. Even in the Song of Ice and Fire series where GRRM can get distractedly horny, it doesn’t read as off-puttingly as Sapkowski’s “edgy horny” style.

I was so amazed at how common they were. I spent a year in Australia and probably saw more kangaroos day by day than I see all wild animals combined day by day here in the UK (excluding birds).

Hell I grew up in North Wales and may have seen as many kangaroos day by day as I saw sheep here, and that’s saying something.

This isn’t a perfect example but Cormac McCarthy has been my favourite author for years now, and his first major work Suttree was from '79.

My all time favourites novel is Blood Meridian from 1985. If you’re familiar with metamodernism, which is basically very modern works that have their cake and eat it when it comes to modernist ideals and postmodern critique, you’d clock that practically every western is either a modernist white hat western or a metamodern “the west is grim and hard, but also fucking cool” western. The only straight postmodern takes on the west that I know of are either Blood Meridian or pieces of work that take direct notes from it, such as the films Dead Man from ‘95 (except maybe the Oregon Trail video game from. 85’). Blood Meridian otherwise is a fantastic novel which meditates on madness and cruelty, religion and fate, race, war and conquest and so many other themes. It also has one of the best antagonists ever written in Judge Holden, a character who I would have called a direct insert of Satan if not for the fact that his deeds and the novel as a whole are closely inspired by true events. I feel the novel takes inspiration from Apocalypse Now, specifically the '79 film and not Conrad’s 1899 novel Heart of Darkness. If you enjoy that film, you’re likely to enjoy this book. The opening and closing chapters are fantastic, but I often find myself re-reading chapter 14. It has some of the best prose and monologues of the entire novel, and encompasses in my opinion the main turning point of the novel.

His other legendary work is The Road, a 2006 post-apocalyptic novel. I’ll talk on this one less but as our climate crisis grows and our cultural zeitgeist swings more towards this being the critical issue of our time, the novel fantastically paints itself as both a fantastic warning to our 21st century apocalypse and the unresolved 20th century shadow of nuclear winter. Despite this, it hones in on a meditation of parenthood and could be considered solely about that, with other themes of death, trauma, survival and mortality being explored through parenthood. Of course the unsalvageable deatg of the world that make the setting also makes this theme extra tragic. There is an adaptation into a film from 2008 but it isn’t anywhere near as potent as the novel and I’d suggest should only be seen in tandem with reading the novel. The prize of this novel has really evolved to fit the novel too. McCarthy is renowned for his punctuation lacking prose, but where Blood Meridian is practically biblical in its dramatic and beautiful prose which juxtaposes the plain and brutal violence, The Road sacrifices no beauty in it’s language but is so somber and meanders from mostly terse to so florid, while also always perfectly feels like how the protagonists are seeing their world.

I’ve been using this for years> .

It’s part of my phone’s overall aesthetic of lock screen, home screen and keyboard.

As for where I found it, I believe somewhere on Reddit 5 or so years ago that I changed to my phone screen resolution. I also made a version with animated twinkling stars and moving waves but ithe waves were less pretty so I dropped it eventually.

The only silly thing is that all my friends and my partner all have eachother as our lock screens in a cute way, but I am too committed to my lock screen to change.

Unfortunately I suspect we’ll get third party ‘consoles’ that are basically the equivalent of the handhelds from nthe console market, potentially locked to set stores.

The only reason we currently don’t have any prevalent under TV consoles that are glorified steam deck competitors is because anyone interested in that market is tech savvy enough to see you may as well have a PC doing the same.

I don’t see consoles dying out for a decade yet but I suspect the next step is this. That or they’ll embrace cloud gaming, where people are just streaming games of their servers, making them much harder to pirate, easier to charge a subscription for and easier to maintain and release smaller hardware changes. This has 99 downsides although does come with the upside of basically not requiring the larger tech companies to hold back innovation by generation, which may accelerate the the gaming tech industry slightly. I saw an article back when the PS5 was releasing that was basically about how a huge field of graphics tech has a boon on a major console release and stagnates with it, which is caused by so many of the people making content for high end graphical tech being people making games for consoles and there is little reason to outpace what they can perform.

All of that is my speculation from absolutely nowhere in the industry, so take it all with a big swig of salt.

I was weirdly forgiving of Fallout 76 (never played it, I’m not too hot for multiplayer games) because it was made so soon after fallout 4. It always felt like one of those DLC that got so large that it got released as a standalone game, which practically any large game studio has done and Bethesda did with Arcane’s Dishonored 2 and Death of the Outsider.

A huge soft spot I have for the elder scrolls comes from the heroic fantasy exploration with enormous orchestral music and adventure in every direction, something people say about Starfield is that it’s large and sparse, which is accurate for a grounded space game but goes against what makes half of Bethesda games fun. Fallout falls in the middle of the pack being far more pulpy than Starfield and in 4, I feel this was a large issue with it feeling bland; it’s pulpy wackiness was toned down when it should have gone up.

I don’t expect Bethesda to give me the video game equivalent of game of thrones but I do expect the Saturday morning cartoon that I’m equally fond of, and they still hold all the ingredients to make that recipe. Unfortunately Starfield was always tonally wrong for that, but ES6 is perfect for it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ll still only buy ES6 a year or so after release, maybe 2-3 if it’s really crap, but I think a fair few of the ways that they’ve deviated from the working formula post Skyrim may not be an issue here.

I’ve been trying to get a LAN party together with some IRL friends for a little bit, but we all are so different in experience level that even playing vanilla, we’ll inevitably have some people run rings around others.

My current pitch is that we all share one house and bolt different spaces of different styles onto the sides of it whenever we need a new space, share all resource except a small personal chest and the experienced players can only do specific tasks like going caving or into the nether if it’s as a whole group, so the newer players get to experience some of those parts fresh.

I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone outside of Lemmy where I feel their lives would be better if they used it. The only time I feel a want to yell about Lemmy is when people who are on Masterdon or the like blindly promote something on Reddit.

That’s a complicated place to be in and I wish you the best. Until I found my current partner, I’d fallen into a similar friendship / romance pattern with a few friends and it does suck to have both unrequited love and a friendship built off it.

You said you just want her to be happy and I believe you. You can still be a good friend to her despite those feelings do don’t ever feel like that friendship is built on your love, even if that’s how it started.

It’s totally up to you how you progress, you could choose that distance between the two of you helps let that desire simmer until you meet someone else and wonder how you felt so strongly now, or you can make your love known and see where it takes you, which is whaf I’d recommend. If you do this, then both of you are able to take action about it and nothing is left disingenuous. Perhaps it’s mutual and that’s fantastic, but if it isn’t it puts her in the same position as you, which is deciding how to navigate your friendship going forward knowing about this aspect of it.

The other option, which I absolutely would not recommend is continuing to hide these feelings and try to be a good friend regardless. A good friend is trustworthy and can give sincere advice on things like love and dating which is really difficult if you are romantically interested in the person who you give advice to. Even if you mean well and don’t try to keep the person you want to be with from being with other, any time a potential person comes up, you will inevitably compare their worst traits to your best. Not just is this insincere, even if you can’t tell in the moment, watching them have feelings for someone else will really hurt.

I think I’ve had strong romantic feelings for a close friend or best friend 4 times in my life. Once was in school and she never knew so whatever. One time it became obvious and basically ruined the friendship and caused both of us a lot of hurt and without a best friend. The most recent two times were a little different, I was between two friendgroups and sort of ended up in this situation in both. One is now my partner of 4 years and the other is my best friend who I no longer feel that way for. I do think that the final case here would have ended badly if not for the fact that I found the other person in that period.

I’ve done a lot of rambling here but you really should let them know, it’s probably the most difficult of the choices to do but also no happiness can come from the other options.

Hey apologies if I sound like I’m greatly underestimating your maturity but it’s probably better to act on the side of caution.

Flowers are lovely I really hope she likes them! I also have a best friend who I really want to be happy and would probably appreciate nice flowers, although I’d personally steer away from valentine’s as I wouldn’t want them to be interpreted romantically.

As for that, I trust you know if you want them to be interpreted as a romantic gesture and you should absolutely let her know they’re from you and if they are or aren’t.

If you want it to be mysterious if they’re from you, absolutely expect her to either figure it out or assume they’re from someone else secretly and show them gratitude, it’s a rare person who would receive something anonymously and not try to presume the sender.

It is a really thoughtful gesture to get flowers for someone you care about today in the want for them to be happy, but it’s not fun for anyone if it’s misinterpreted and someone ends up less happy for it.

This is it for me, I basically don’t use those keys daily and can access them via a function key when I rarely need them, so I’m gonna prioritise the aesthetics and compactness.