Yeah there’s a lot of games I would’ve never played when I was a kid if it wasn’t for the video store renting out games. I had a second hand Mega Drive, one controller and two or three games of my own, not bought all at once. And I can say that I got a lot more out of renting games than feeding coins into an arcade machine at least. They even had games available for swap, so I could trade something I bought and regretted, or finished and got everything out of.

I also definitely wouldn’t have watched 90% of the movies I got to watch if it wasn’t for the video store.

I think like anything else it’s neutral, or a good or bad thing depending on what kind of predator is running it. Same as second hand stores. Renting out things that people need to survive sounds fucked. But renting out Sega games and whatever fantasy / sci-fi / horror movie caught my eye made part of my childhood.

Ah that definitely makes sense. I think by the time I was experimenting with distros, things had probably moved on a bit. I can say from experience that using Arch just requires the ability to read, really. But it was probably more hardcore in its earlier days when the wiki wasn’t as well formed yet.

Where did this stereotype actually come from? I’m genuinely curious. Because Windows users wouldn’t know Arch from Ubuntu and to them, all Linux users are “I use Linux btw” types. And I don’t think I’ve seen Arch users just randomly telling people they use Arch in Linux spaces. But it must’ve come from somewhere.

It’s been a while but for me personally, the number one thing that saves your ass in event of failure is installing both the up to date and the LTS kernel. If you fail to boot, it’s gonna have something to do with a kernel update 90% of the time, in which case you just boot with the LTS kernel. Just about anything else can be fixed either while you’re up and running, or with a live distro installed on a USB.

I don’t trust banking apps

Yeah, even banks are something that’s forced onto us, that you actually just can’t live without in the current system. I also tried fighting it for a bit but the bank I’m with is trying to eliminate ATMs and making it really difficult to do online banking the old school way. And afaik, other banks are trying to do the same now. Just a matter of time before a vanilla smartphone is as much of a requirement as a bank account itself.

I spent a long time typing that last paragraph and debating about whether or not to include it in this comment

Yeah I was honestly just making a joke about the chic thing. It’s definitely not even close to mainstream. I really love your passion for this though lol. And I agree with the cause. Glad you stuck it out.

Nah it’s really not convenient when it comes to things like banking apps that get fussy about how customised your phone is. It’s fine most of the time but you’re going to be running into issues at inconvenient times when you don’t really have the time to sit and play. Although I’m also talking a couple of years ago now, chances are things have improved.

disabling javascript

Yeah you’re basically breaking everything. I did this before it was chic when I had a Nokia phone running Opera Mini lmao.

I tried it for a while. I got caught up in the ‘privacy’ crowd on Reddit and went all out for a bit. Even de-googled my Android phone at the time. It is inconvenient as fuck. And you’re going to be spending more time tinkering and looking for workarounds and alternate software than actually ever getting anything done. All just to stop an advertising company from detecting what you clicked on, or for the website owner to never get any telemetry.

As someone that hasn’t been around here for a few months, I’m just going to guess that it’s these freeze peach people who feel entitled to say whatever they want wherever they want, and like the rules don’t apply to them.

They were complaining about the Blahaj admin a lot as well before because she’s hardcore with moderation just like the instance says on the tin. And the neckbeard edgelords that grew up using 4chan and think it’s “early internet”, always get up in arms when moderators and admins try to create spaces for like-minded people without needing to ‘debate’ bigots, just like they did on the actual early internet on forum sites.

This doesn’t excite me enough to do my homework particularly but I’m gonna guess there’s more to this than “wah the evil blue haired SJW with nose rings is censoring us with the woke agenda”.

That seems like a promising app. I was using Librera for Android, which also handles just about every format and has a lot of settings to play with. But Readest seems like that, plus with a nicer, less clunky look and feel.

Can someone explain to me how games are “dying”? I see this sentiment a lot and I can only assume that the people who say this are the same people who think that their personal inability to scroll past the Netflix show with a gay character and choose one of the hundreds of shows that don’t, is a conspiracy theory to erase white cisgender christians.

Because there’s any endless wealth of good games around, especially in the indie scene. But if you’re an own face hammering, piss drinking conservative that hates anything and everything, I can see how you would be having a hard time.