I think this shift will be the end of me buying newer games, period.

I am that person who doesn’t ever buy digital. I have not bought a single digital game thus far (I haven’t pirated a game since like 2006, either). I have certainly played some, like with the PS+ subscription I got for a year when it was pretty cheap, but I wouldn’t buy them because I can’t be sure I own them, and there’s really no way to transfer the license to resell them.

If I can’t buy physical media, I simply won’t buy the games. Maybe I’ll use subscription services now and then, but more likely I’ll either find a way to play free or won’t play them at all and find other stuff. I want the physical media because I’m poor, and having the option to sell them in a pinch is important to me if I’m going to shell out a significant amount for something I’ll probably only play once, particularly since there won’t be a used game market to reduce my spend. I haven’t had to sell my games in a very long time, so I have some 400 discs, but it’s something of a savings option that inflates alongside currency, and sometimes much more.

I’m a pro-immigration canvasser in a rural-ish area of a swing state, and I’ve seen a lot of dem canvassers from other orgs on my turfs.

I’ve seen a car of people putting out door hangers for trump, but they weren’t canvassing at all, just leave the thing and take off. Meanwhile there are a dozen dem flyers there already. That’s it. That’s the extent of what I’ve seen out there.

In 2020 I’d run into lots of canvassers for trump… buuuuuuuuuut those groups didn’t get paid like they were supposed to, and those canvassers got super salty. Rightly so. It’s no wonder nobody wants to do it this time around.

Yep, I literally get paid (almost as well as my last job requiring a degree did, this just isn’t permanent) to canvas for progressive politics in a swing state.

Honestly, I wouldn’t do it if I wasn’t getting paid, even though I firmly believe getting out the vote for progressives (or as close as we can manage at any rate) is important. There’s so much money being pumped into it, that I’m not willing to give my time for free. I’m not in the top 10%, so my time is actually valuable.

But getting paid means I’ve had conversations with ~200 voters in the last week, the majority of whom are voting dem up and down the ticket, even if they used to be strong republicans. Maybe it won’t help overall, but we have a GOP-sponsored referendum almost nobody has heard of, for which our org is encouraging a no vote, so if nothing else this effort may help defeat that.

(Hopefully this plug is ok, it’s not my organization, I just work with them. If not I’ll edit it out.) If anyone reading this is in the US, and interested in getting paid (well paid, and with insurance available from day 1) for canvassing work for a couple months, check out the outreach team’s website. They have open positions for various sponsored regional campaigns in lots of important areas across the US, and they hire quickly with minimal hoops to jump through. I worked with them for the 2020 election as well, and in both cases it was 2 days from interview to start date. https://www.theoutreachteam.net/

I actually have a number of games that are Ubisoft that I love. They aren’t super new or anything, but they aren’t flops by my metrics (granted, I bought them used long after launch)

I didn’t know they were when I got them, then the ubiconnect thing comes up and I just don’t do that, and it’s just a game that takes longer to load than it should.

Idk about any super bad practices, maybe PC is different from console stuff? (which is how I play, hence used game market, because I can sell it later if needs must) or is this something that spans console as well? What sort of bad practices?

Afaik, the closest walmart is way further than an actual grocery store, since we shut down their plans to pave a marshy woodland to set up a super center eyesore just across the highway (walking distance from my place; that would have been a nightmare). idk, I haven’t shopped there in over 20 years. Don’t really plan to start now for the sake of convenience, since that’s how we got that mess in the first place, but I appreciate the info all the same :)

Around here, that stuff tacks on a huge convenience fee for pick and pack, making it actively not worth doing. Last I looked, it was some $18 fee no matter how many items, and I’d still have to drive 20 min to pick it up, so might as well just… do my own shopping. (For reference, I live alone in a semi-rural area, so each trip is like $100)

Now if I could get it delivered (same fee, but nobody has a service area that overlaps my address), that’d be a different story.

Sure, they might know my identity. But very importantly, they aren’t every single random company out there whose website I happen to briefly access for whatever reason. They don’t need to know anything about me, and they shouldn’t.

I can’t do anything about big tech companies knowing things about me, tho I do try to limit it when I can, but not literally everyone needs to know who I am just because I want to access their content. That’s absolutely absurd.

It definitely isn’t impacting me in the slightest. Idk what you do with your time, but I don’t really want my platforms to be unmoderated cesspools, and the places I do choose to exist or use are in line with what I want, so… meh. It’s literally not an issue I have.

Breweries and bars in my area are often kid-friendly with toys and everything, and I just don’t go to those places. I do the same with online spaces. They aren’t meant for me if they aren’t what I’m looking for, so I don’t go. There’s plenty of places that are for me, though, and I go to those places on and offline.

Nope.

I don’t want anyone verifying my identity for any reason other than government or financial business, where there is a legitimate reason to do so. There is absolutely no reason some random-ass company needs access of any sort to my demographic information, when I am a legal adult doing things well within my rights to do. Especially if this thing was automated to feed that data without my consent or knowledge, as you are suggesting. Absolutely fuck all of that. Plus that would mean there’s a central query database of all the sites you’ve ever accessed for any reason, and that’s fucking scary, even if you aren’t doing anything wrong.

This wouldn’t work any better than any other privacy-leaky method anyway. People hand down phones to their kids a lot without factory resetting them. And stolen IDs/identity theft are a thing. And you don’t think that central identity bank would be prime target #1 for hackers? If the last decade has taught us anything, it’s that companies WILL NOT protect your data properly, and they WILL NOT suffer consequences of any sort when (not if, when) there is a breach.

At the end of the day, ensuring someone else’s kids don’t have access to something said parent doesn’t want them to access…? Not my problem, and absolutely not a good enough reason to violate my privacy that thoroughly.

Y’all would be fucking horrified by the state of food manufacturing if you knew.

I used to work at a food processing and distribution company, in the document processing department… we weren’t strictly supposed to read the audits, especially the internal ones, but we did, to make sure they were complete and compliant, which was our job. Also our job was intensely boring and we needed something to gossip about.

The number of our distributors (first level manufacturing) who got C or D grades on their inspections… fucking gross. I reported a few of them, but the company did not care.

Before that I worked at a chicken hatchery. The cultures I cultured -doing an audit just like those I read later in life- were sooooo gross and problematic. But I was instructed to cover it up because, and this is important context, it was all self report after the initial inspection. I was doing this at 16, and was likely significantly more thorough than any veteran employee would have been. (Absolutely not why I was chosen; they chose me due to incredibly mild nepotism, as my manager was my step-dad, and he knew science stuff was up my alley… plus I was a filler worker, being under 18.)

I really hope things have improved, but somehow I doubt that the past 20 years has made a positive impact from my audit experience. (The document processing was less than 10 years ago, supporting my belief nothing has changed for the better.)

There’s a lan/vr arcade near me, has like 40 super high end gaming rigs… they only get busy when there’s a big event like a non-local tournament or something. We also have multiple pinball/arcade bars, and most of them also have some retro consoles set up. One of the 4-man arcade machines at one of the places even has something like a retropi installed in it and you can pick between hundreds of games up to GameCube era, but nobody really ever plays those either. (The pinball is the draw).

Can’t see this doing a lot better, at least not in places with options.

You can get them in pink and white too! As an extra fuck you over the normal yellow which can happen on their own.

Make seed bombs of pink dandelions and launch them before a storm.

Side note; I want pink dandelions but I’m sure my neighbors would hate me… but I also have an asshole neighbor and I’ve totally thought about seeding his property with them and letting them spread to mine…. I won’t do it, because cameras, but I want to so much.

Nah, that only works in super close-knit, small town communities.

I don’t know any of my neighbor’s last names and I’ve lived here for 12 years. I’m in a semi-small town. I know my direct neighbors first names, and that’s about it, because anything more is unnecessary.

If I got something sent to a random name at my address, I’d treat it the same way as junk mail addressed to me; recycled without a second thought. I still get stuff for 3 other former residents, including pension stuff, despite being here over a decade so…

Be interesting to see what scotus does with it, as it will almost certainly end up there, but I don’t really have high hopes of a good outcome…

It’s worth the watch if you like existential surreal stuff.

It’s been one of my faves for decades. The mad world song is easily one of my faves so I’ve naturally watched it a bunch.

If you like it there’s a sequel S. Darko, which tells the story from his sisters perspective, as I understand it, but I haven’t seen that one; you can’t improve on something already perfect.

I have an eBay account from 2000 or so, and my email is nearly as old I believe.

I don’t use the eBay account all that often now, but on and off throughout the years. Last used last year.

By that logic literally anything other than blasting it into space is temporary. Mountains weather, oceans turn over, even the planet as a whole has a cycle that involves melting the subducted sea floor and releasing gasses.

Sure it’s temporary, but if we have enough temporary storage to offset the (drastically reduced, I should hope) emissions, and continue to replace what is used/burned/etc, does it really matter if it doesn’t last forever?

When I was in the service, whenever someone would complain about something mundane, someone up the chain of command would always pop in and say something along the lines of “a bitching sailor is a happy sailer. It’s when they stop complaining you know there’s a problem”.

I still haven’t quite sorted that one out, nearly 2 decades on…

Tho it is true; my most recent job (that I quit for mental health reasons) near the end I tried to just keep my head down and not get fired before the 2 year mark… kept my mouth shut about everything and avoided talking to anyone as much as possible. I was quitting because none of the issues were ever addressed when I brought them up…

This is one of those things I’ve been afraid of my whole life that, crucially, I didn’t know could actually happen.

At least now I feel justified.

I’ve always wanted to be crammed into a tiny spaceship with a big fuck-off telescope and the collected works of humanity loaded on the computer, and be launched perpendicular to the plane of orbit. (This is, by necessity, a one-way trip, as it would take a very very very long time to get far enough for good data)

We don’t actually know what the galaxy looks like from a top-down (or bottom-up, depending on how you choose to view it) perspective so it would be a really unique experience and would send very useful information back…. probably. Eventually.

So I’d definitely take the space station. Not the same, but close enough.

Those and milk bottle rings.