yeah, I appreciate the push towards more privacy-centric search engines but as a result searches that are relevant to me geographically on places like startpage are next to useless. I understand why but I wish that local results were a bit better on the alternatives.

Oh I bet, and fwiw I think that’s a pretty good estimate of that bell curve – I’m just on the tail end of it, so I got to see an actual decline in tech literacy in the people literally in my immediate orbit. It was an interesting experience, for sure

I was born in 98, my brother was born in 2000. The level of computer literacy just between the two of us is astounding. While a lot of my aptitude with computers stems from a personal interest, even growing up many of my peers were relatively tech savvy – as far as laypeople go. But people in my brother’s grade in school, people just two years younger than me, i noticed a meaningful difference in how they interact with computers vs how people I spent the formative years of my life around do. It’s insane.

As someone that’s put a lot of time into platform fighters and grew up on Nickelodeon, the character designs in that game are so void of personality and it makes me sad. Aang barely moves like the avatar, he just kind of generically slings around elemental attacks. It’s really frustrating how much potential they let languish

Multiversus has that overproduction stank all over it, so it being this void of sauce as it were isn’t surprising, but NASB is the one I feel actively kind of betrayed by

The sad thing is like, it’s an INCREDIBLY mature piece of software. It’s well regarded for a reason. But if a piece of software requires that I fight with it to get it to behave how I want, that maturity has zero value at all. It kind of feels like a microcosm of Linux itself like 10-15 years ago, when I was tinkering with it in middle and high school. It’s functional, but it asks you as a user to change how you think about using something like it in the first place while also forcing you to make concessions that seldom seem worthwhile.

And if Linux at large can get there, with things like proton and flatpak and Wayland and mature desktop environments and whatever else, gimp can too. But it seems like it’s got a contributor base of people that like it’s weird eccentricities, and take the UX development companies like Adobe and affinity (now canva) have invested and just shirked it on principal. And like, I get having an aversion to those sorts of companies/projects/developments, there’s a lot of dark patterns there that are concerning. But I also feel like the kind of Linux user that defends and possibly enjoys GIMP in its current state is content fighting with their machine and the software on it, and forgets that there’s value in taking joy in interacting with your computer. Good UI and good UX are implicitly valuable (not to mention the accessibility benefits, but that’s a whole different conversation), and I feel the FOSS space forgets all of that completely. It’s a shame.

The demographics are stratifying, more than anything. I work in child education and kids do not understand computers nowadays. They understand how to interface with their phones, but kids see any electronic that behaves outside the “app” paradigm – landlines, desktop computers, what have you, and immediately don’t understand. I do think that linux usership is going to go up, but there also needs to be an investment in increasing literacy in kids to make sure usership of linux stays up, otherwise the pendulum will swing back hard

the UI for GIMP is so horrifically bad that I basically refuse to use it. Not like, on principal or anything, if it improves i’d be happy to give it a shot, but because every experience I’ve had with it has been pretty immediately negative, and finding solutions to problems I have seems more effort than its worth. I want gimp to be good, it’s a mature piece of software with a lot going for it, but it also feels like its design is kind of up its own ass, in a sense? It’s weird.

This is literally the only reason I’ve kept using reddit. I hate reddit, but I love the communities I’m involved in and I want to give back to them. As someone that’s at least a little recognizable, I can’t do that on the fediverse, and that sucks. I’m doing my best to encourage people to move over to this side of the fediverse, as well as continuing to use it myself (granted, more mastodon than lemmy, given more of the communities I’m a part of congregate there – anime fans, namely) but it sucks that the exodus wasn’t as big as I’d hope. But i’m doing my best to contribute to the trickle of users over to a part of the internet that does actively feel more joyful than the wastelands of other services. It’s a slow process, I just wish it wasn’t so slow-going

More pokemon makes the game objectively better, especially if you care about newer generations for any reason at all

and even if the game hasn’t evolved much, a cute game that encourages me and my partner to go on more walks together is a net positive in my life lol

do chinese players keep their accounts on these servers from before the wipe? I’m a hearthstone player and I remember feeling so bad for the players that had invested all that time to build all those decks and collect all those cards and then suddenly they just poofed out of existence.

I don’t expect that data to have been preserved, but it’d be nice for the CN playerbase of blizz games to actually get their account back

honest to god if I wasn’t a valorant player or looking forward to 2XKO as a fighting game enjoyer I’d likely have made the switch to linux a long time ago, linux stocks are way up (metaphorically speaking) and windows is just like. Fine? I don’t mind windows 11 but I just feel increasingly like I have less reason to be on it.

thank you! do you have any resources for someone new to using i2p?

wait can you explain what this is/how it works? I’ve never heard of it before

Piggybacking on my genshin suggestion, another suggestion would be Guild Wars 2? It’s world is more open than most MMOs and since it’s over a decade old there’s a ton of content there. There’s a lot as a free2play player, but you can buy expansions if you want even more to explore, and I genuinely think gw2’s exploration is best-in-class. It’s also benefitted by being an old game in terms of old computers being able to run it, you’d probably have to play on low graphics but it’ll certainly run. Hope that’s more useful if you dont wanna do gacha stuff like genshin!

that’s totally fair. I think you can do most of the story and exploration stuff without grinding much but if even that is too much grinding it’s probably not worth the effort. Hope you find what you’re looking for!

In all honesty, genshin impact is a pretty reasonable facsimile of that sort of game. It’s really grown into its own, and it’s really fun and absolutely massive

That said, I’d only advise it if you are 100% confident you won’t engage in any of the gacha systems – you can play and enjoy the game with the free characters the game gives you, but once you start engaging with the gacha that can be a really dangerous slippery slope. If that’s something that you could fall prey to, I wouldn’t recommend it. But if you think you can play it without investing any money (or, really, more money than you can afford, I don’t know your financial situation) it’s actually a really great time, and the story’s only gotten better as it’s gone on. There’s definitely some stipulations with it, but it’s worth experiencing if you feel like those are acceptable

IIRC the quest 2 is jailbroken, if you can get your hands on one secondhand might be worth looking around to see what your options are

Bitwarden because it’s super convenient, as well as Youtube Premium because I watch a ton of youtube. I also leech off my family’s spotify premium subscription, so I don’t pay for that personally but it is a subscription service I use. On top of that, I pay for a debrid service for pirating media since I’m sick and tired of the streaming service economy, which has been an excellent investment. And lastly I do pay for XBox Game Pass, though once I beat persona 3 reload I’m probably cancelling that.

Once I find work I’ll probably subscribe to proton because I’d like to move a bit more away from google, but I’m not really in a rush to do that given my use of youtube premium and such. Kind of a longer term goal.

i hate facebook as much as the next person but the products definitely aren’t worse, I just figure that iteration on VR tech is really hard. The quest 2 and quest 3 are, genuinely, kind of incredible devices from a technological perspective, they’re just hamstrung by faceook. that’s bad but I don’t think it’s fair to say the products are specifically worse when oculus was acquired so early on

I used gog galaxy 2.0 until steam support died one day then switched to playnite. Took a lot more configuring but it’s p robust and I’m techy enough to have figured it out, I like where I landed but galaxy 2.0, if it works again, is a great option.