Outer Wilds

Reviews of the game are fantastic (“this is the best game I’ve ever​ played” - everybody) but trying to fly that damn spaceship is so hard. I also heard there’s tricky platforming later on, and if you mess up you gotta start waaaay back. I did not grow up with video games so I’m terrible at that kind of thing. I should just give up and watch a playthrough but apparently that defeats the whole point of the “incredible” story, which is the only thing I’m here for in the first place.

I guess I’m just holding out for someone to release an assist mode or something.

Seven on 7 is a series of TV news shorts and commercials from The Boys universe. It’s a delightful little parody of Fox News. The whole series is available free on YouTube.

I mean, obviously it’s not for everyone, but it’s important to actually experience urban living for yourself before deciding you hate cities. Especially given the political situation in the United States right now, where so many suburban and rural residents are bashing cities and urban living without having properly experienced it for themselves; I think there would be a huge bite taken out of the urban/rural divide if more people had experience living in cities, and got to personally see the good and the bad for themselves. Plus your twenties is a great time to learn street smarts, because that way you’ll be less likely to have a bad experience when you do visit a big city in the future, whether it’s for something fun like a concert or something serious like going to a medical specialist. There are a lot of basic lessons like “never ever leave anything visible in your unattended parked car”, how to use public transportation, being able to firmly say “no”, and general situational awareness that are just good life skills that city living forces you to pick up.

I’m not at a point in my life where I want to live in a big city anymore, but I’m so, so grateful that I did in my youth.

Travel, live abroad if possible, and experience living in a big, culture-rich city. Unfortunately the economic realities of the 2020s are making this increasingly out of reach for many youth, but if you have the resources and opportunity, absolutely go for it. As you get older, responsibilities and lack of energy will likely sap much of your ability/desire to move around as much (this isn’t true for everyone, but it’s extremely common). Even if traditional travel is impractical for you, there still exists cheaper opportunities for exploration that are a bit off the beaten path, such as the WWOOF program.

Regardless of your situation/location, one thing that basically anyone can do is get involved in a cause. Find something you’re passionate about and throw yourself into it. Make sure it’s something that you can do in-person and not virtually… as in, there are local groups you can join for this cause, although if there aren’t you can always try making one or forming a local chapter of a larger org. With the right networking you’d be surprised how many other people will join you, especially for causes that involve your local community. This is a great way to meet other people, get to know the issues facing your neighborhood/city better, and learn to navigate your local government/NGOs. Again, as you get older responsibilities/exhaustion can make this sort of thing a lot harder.

The difference is if the primary (sometimes only) admin of your instance loses interest, goes to jail, or gets hit by a truck, your entire instance could be dead in the water, whereas there are way more safeguards to “established” social media like Reddit and Twitter. Plus the issue of “well shit my instance got defederated from most of the fediverse because it turns out the admin is an asshat” is completely nonsensical on platforms without instances. Example: before I knew that Lemmy had a tankie problem, I almost signed up on lemmygrad because I thought it was just a witty pun…

Plus when you say “point them to lem.ee” what scenario are you imagining? Because “you should join reddit” or “our business is on Facebook” or “Twitter is a great resource for artists” are all straightforward and easy pieces of information to convey and pick up. “Join Lemmy, a subset of the fediverse, I signed up via lemmy.world although I hear lem.ee is also good, but don’t let that stop you from picking another instance” is like… Dude, people just want to go to [site].com, click on “sign up”, enter a username and password (and maybe email) and that’s it. Just having to explain to people that “lemmy.com” isn’t a thing is already too complicated for most folks.

Lemmy (or at least lemmy.world) was bonkers levels of buggy last summer during the reddit blackout. Like, literally unusable levels of buggy. Getting the word out that it’s (mostly) bug-free now would probably be good, because I’m sure there were many redditors who tried it and quickly swore it off as a pile of shit.

Otherwise I’m in agreement that the instance-selection part of sign-up is a huge barrier, because what instance you choose is actually really important but it’s overwhelming when you’re just getting started. Plus not being able to migrate your account/communities/posts to another instance if yours goes to shit/shuts down/turns out to not fit your needs makes the fediverse feel really unstable.

Absolutely. You used to be able to reliably go to the reddit comments section for more information/context, clarifications/corrections/alternative takes, sources/citations, etc. on pretty much any post. “The real TIL/joke/story is in the comments” and all that.

Nowadays the reddit comments section is all jokes (not even good ones), reaction gifs (not even relevant ones), and non sequiturs. I’m unclear what percentage is bots and what is oblivious people with nothing useful to add but a compulsion to contribute anyway.

I keep visiting the reddit comments section anyway out of habit, and nearly every time I walk away feeling disappointed and a little dirty. Fortunately Lemmy’s comments are more like the old days when you at least felt like you were conversing with a human (and a literate one at that). Unfortunately outside of a few niche topics, Lemmy is severely lacking in subject matter experts, so there isn’t anywhere near the same level of additional context and fact-checking on most posts that used to exist on reddit. I don’t know if this is a demographics problem or a “we’re under the critical mass threshold” problem; I assume it’s both.

Apparently the gardening and eco/tiny-house world is very wholesome, because that’s 75% of what I watch (not including music) and I never see recommendations for ragebait.

There is a subscription page! I had no idea for years that in addition to the home page (which is a mix of subscription and algorithm videos) there’s a subscription page which only lists videos from channels you’re subscribed to, in order of recency.

It really depends on mode of transportation, especially if a car is involved or not. I suspect a number of people in this thread are folks who drive most/all places and aren’t including all the stuff they have stashed in their cars, available if needed. Also, driving means minimal exposure to the elements, so even less stuff is needed to stay comfortable/presentable than if you are walking, biking, waiting at transit stations, etc.

As a former Tokyo resident I’ll also add that I used to carry a folding fan around with me in summer when I lived there, but I have no need in the US where air conditioning is so prevalent (to the point of overuse). I also stopped needing a fan so much, regardless of temperature, when living in less humid places.

Also, shocked more people aren’t mentioning a water bottle. I bring a reusable water bottle with me any time I have to leave the house for more than a couple of hours, especially if I’m cycling somewhere but even if I’m driving. How are y’all staying hydrated sans water bottle???

There’s a huge difference between losing your temper when controlling a digital go-kart versus a real-life one-ton vehicle.

It’s a good first step that you recognize this is a problem, but it needs to be followed up with actions you can take when it occurs. In the case of driving, if your impulse is to follow the driver who pissed you off, you need to get off the road at the very first safe opportunity (a side street, a freeway exit, a parking lot, whatever) to give yourself a chance to cool down and both mentally and physically distance yourself from the situation. It doesn’t matter how much of a jerk the other party is (again, unless they are actively putting people in danger, in which case you should be pulling over to call emergency services); when you’re on the road the only thing you should be concerned with is your own behavior. There is zero justification for escalation; you are not teaching the other person a lesson, you are putting people’s lives at risk over a minor slight.

I used to work in transportation and you wouldn’t believe the horror stories. Please don’t underestimate how quicky and easily road rage situations can turn ugly; it’s never worth it.

Actually some crosswalk buttons are fake. For example:

In New York City, only about 100 of the 1,000 crosswalk buttons actually function

This response is literally road rage. (Given the discussion about literally vs figuratively elsewhere in the thread, I genuinely mean literally).

Road rage is dangerous for you, the other driver, and other bystanders on the road. Please reassess how you respond to perceived aggressions and slights while driving. The only time you should escalate is if another road user is actively putting others in harm’s way (e.g. DUI) and even then the best course of action is probably calling your local authorities for them to handle the situation. If the situation is not severe enough to warrant a 911 call, your focus should be on de-escalation (before it turns into a situation that is).

It depends on what your likes/dislikes are when it comes to languages. I much preferred learning kanji to memorizing noun genders and verb conjugations of European languages.

Japanese has significantly fewer sounds than many languages, so homonyms are inevitable. Thanks to kanji this isn’t much of an issue in written Japanese, but spoken Japanese (and Japanese written without the use of kanji) relies heavily on context.

The alternative would be ridiculously long words. Example: the English word “extra” (five letters, two syllables) is pronounced “ekisutora” in Japanese (still five letters, but also five syllables); this is a result of every consonant needing to be followed by a vowel (except for “n” and a short list of compounds like “sh”). Additionally, Japanese only has five vowel sounds, plus a few that you can force out (e.g. “ka” can be slightly modified to “kya” to approximate the “a” sound in “cat”). Japanese also contains fewer consonant sounds than a number of other languages.

The people who have fallen behind the most are the ones who don’t realize they’ve fallen behind. “What you know you don’t know, versus what you don’t know you don’t know” and all that. They are also the people least open to catching up when the opportunity presents itself; if you think best practices haven’t changed since you were initially trained, why would you even entertain any information that contradicts what you initially learned? Part of this is ego, as it would require admitting that you’ve been doing it wrong this whole time (so instead these people keep doing it wrong as some kind of sunk cost fallacy).

I remember really enjoying How I Met Your Mother when it was airing. I tried for a rewatch recently and only made it a few episodes in because I was so disinterested. It felt empty, and the humor wasn’t hitting. I think it’s a combination of I’ve changed (I’ve aged out of the “20-something singles fool around in a fantasy version of NYC” demographic) and TV has evolved (good comedy shows are no longer just goofy hijink situations and setups for one-liners).

So instead I rewatched Archer season one (same era as HIMYM) and fortunately that one still slaps.

Perpetual growth in a finite system is impossible, and anything that relies on perpetual growth to function is doomed to eventually fail.

For instance: social services that rely on perpetual population growth (especially youth population; e.g. Japan/South Korea), companies that rely on perpetual increase in users (most publicly-owned companies; e g. basically every social media company ATM), industries that rely on perpetual advancements in technology (e.g. industrialized agriculture, which constantly needs new ways to fight self-induced problems like soil depletion and erosion), housing as wealth generation (to be a wealth generator it has to outpace inflation, but at a certain point no one will be able to afford to purchase houses at their inflated prices no matter how over-leveraged they get; e.g. Canada). [Note that these are merely examples where these issues are currently coming to a head; they are by no means special cases, they’re just in a more advanced state of “finding out.”]

In other words, a lot of the modern world, in both public and private sectors, is built around a series of ponzi schemes.

That’s a funny way to put it but pretty accurate. Like, you see a cat walk up to you and you exclaim かわいい! (= cute). You wouldn’t say “that cat is cute!” or “what a cute cat!” like you would in English. Because if you did say the word-for-word Japanese equivalent あの猫がかわいい it implies something like “that cat is cute, unlike all the other cats,” because why would you go through the trouble of saying all those words that were obvious from context unless you were trying to call out this cat specifically?

Sure, but “fridge” is a sentence fragment, not a complete sentence. 行った (“went”) is a complete sentence. You don’t need a subject or an object in Japanese, whereas you need at least a subject in English (e.g. “He went”)