You deserve a medal. I couldn’t even imagine responding to this post without speaking down to OP, so I opted to move on. Thank you for giving the advice he needs to hear and not sounding like a cunt about it they way I would have.

Fascinating. As much shit as I talk, I did discover a lot of good games via those discs. The Blades of Exile franchise, for example, really stands out as a series of underrated early windows RPGs.

Balatro, Loop Hero, all three of the noteworthy Mihoyo games, Sword of Convallaria - I’m going to get flak for including gacha games, but these ones are surprisingly well designed and written games, despite predatory monetization practices - Stardew Valley, Dead Cells, Vampire Survivors…

I think we’re kidding ourselves if we ignore that Among Us was a genuinely good game, despite being notorious brainrot zoomer bait.

I’m not sure why we shifted the goal post to mobile games, but the point stands.

Edit: I had to come back because I remembered how much I enjoyed Monster Hunter Stories on mobile, and the mobile version is actually the most complete version.

Hades 2, Silksong, and the FFTactics remake, all of which came out in the last like 3 weeks.

I’d genuinely call the first two 10/10s, and the only thing stopping me saying that about all three is FFTactics’ commitment to staying true to the original, as they kept some features, qualities and even bugs moving forward that are jank in the modern era, but keep the game feeling more authentic.

Ah, I see you have never picked up a “1000 best games for Windows” CD.

There are a lot of low quality games to complain about. There are also a lot of high quality, new games to experience. 10 years from now, the low quality games will be forgotten, while the high quality games will be looked back on, fondly. Posts will be made comparing the “high effort, high quality games from 10 years ago” to the modern slop, and the cycle will repeat…

Funnily enough, I’m on a stock Pixel 6. I flashed custom firmware onto my Pixel 2XL back in the day, and the gain wasn’t super worth it. My phone before that, some Motorola brand, I flashed custom firmware onto and it helped a lot with features I wanted and bloatware removal. But, let be real, save being in the Google ecosphere, the Pixel is as stripped down baseline as a phone gets. And since my job is all-in on the Google apps, I have to be in that space anyway. At some stage, it just doesn’t feel like there’s much of a point.

This is such a dishonest question, I barely know where to begin.

This is literally my “message received” emote.

If people thought it was rude, I’d be fired by now.

Yes? Should I not? “insta” as in instanteous, and “gram” as in a telegram. This is a name rooted in already understood language to give me an understanding of what it is at first encounter. Bard, same, something that tells a story, I’d assume. But I’ve never seen it before so /shrug.

“Lemmy” means nothing to me.

Fediverse is good. “Verse” to the end of anything suggests it’s own ecosystem, or “universe,” and Fedi for federation. Makes sense.

Your best bet is to be in a lot of instances. My experiences so far is that basically any singular instance has its bias’, and while some unapologetically ban users for disagreeing with them, the ones that don’t still down vote for disagreeing with them.

While one of these forms of censorship is worse than the other, it’s all censorship, and the only way to see a variety of views is to stay in the varying instances.

I don’t have TikTok, but if you do, isn’t this easily verifiable? Just go try searching one of the relevant terms.

Eh, I suspect most of those Russia/China fascism lovers posing as “leftists” are mid-30s white dudes, and as a mid 30s white dude, my grandmother was alive during WWII.

The options remain the same, though.

Removed by mod

This is so much more reason that these tankies deserve tbh. I appreciate you taking the time to put it into words.

These people should actually try talking to foreigners, students and immigrants. The picture Ukrainian refugees and Taiwanese students paint is a lot less forgiving than the completely unsubstantiated, pseudo-intellectuslist “but that’s CIA propaganda” arguments these authoritarian “leftists” like to throw around. I’m sure such first-hand accounts would be as readily dismissed, mind you, because the goal is clearly not to have an honest discussion to begin with.

What conclusion are you proposing that I came to? My only statement was that denying Western media in favor of Eastern media is not “leftist.” Everything else you and Dessalines have attempted to drag into this discussion is creating either a false dichotomy or a strawman, in some cases both. The options are not “either you listen to PoC or you listen to Western Media,” because not all Western Media nor people of colour agree on every position. Whatever imaginary propaganda you are creating about the State suggesting that China is torturing minorities this minute is not something I have experienced, nor referenced. We have not presented the arguments that you are trying to deconstruct.

You are boxing with shadows, throwing fists with invisible monsters in the dark. I’m not sure if it’s our of poor reading comprehension, poor critical thinking skills, or intentional dishonesty, but there’s clearly a bias here that is useless to engage with.

No one said I do.

So instead, we should trust… The other ogliarchic and blatantly fascist empires?

Call me crazy, but I don’t think unapologetic fascism is “leftist.”

Either that or engaging with such incredible lies is a waste of time. But hey, they said something you don’t like, so “red lib.”

I’m not talking about weed, though. It’s been traditionally over policed but that doesn’t mean we should stop policing all drugs. There’s hardly any sense in saying that severely addictive drugs with visible negative effects on the human body should be sold for recreational use for profit. The majority of opiods are a good example of this.

But more to the point, giving moral purchase to profit justifies the abuse of the consumer. I can’t say for certain whether the TikTok ban is government overreach, as I’m not knowledgeable enough on the topic to speak with any authority, but “it makes money, so it’s fine” really shouldn’t be the end of the conversation.

A platform should be allowed to function if it can. If it’s horribly made, or supremely unprofitable it’ll find its own way out.

I mean, this doesn’t allow for any form of ethical analysis, though. Should every drug be legalized? How about gambling?

I’m not saying I am for the TikTok ban persay, but if the only conditionals for whether a product or service should exist are “is it ‘well made’ and does it make money,” we are setting ourselves up to achieve a corporate dystopia rather quickly.

They government should consider what parts of TikTok make it not okay, and target those forms and functions with well reasoned laws. Unfortunately, as you said, I suspect they’ll target things that are good and users like, while pretending that the issue is entirely about one small portion of the complete law. Ie, stress that the issue is one of security, and then write a law saying that all social media in the US must be willing to submit it’s data to the American government. (To be clear, I have no idea what the actual law they wrote is, but this is the kind of shit I expect them to get up to )