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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • I’m torn because I think it’s going to be very different in a lot of different places, and I’m trying to account for my own US-centric biases.

    Ukraine and Palestine are pretty much completely hosed. Heck, you could probably add other countries like Georgia to that list. NATO may dissolve.

    Climate change is going to get worse. We went from “we have to stop now before we reach the point of no return” to “we really need to do what we can to mitigate how hard it it’s”. The US is now re-opening the floodgates for fossil fuels and rolling back environmental regulations.

    People will be persecuted. Police departments in the US will continue to militarize. I expect more riots similar to the BLM ones. Race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, political affiliations, the works. Best-caae scenario is probably class-based riots at this point.

    Billionaires will become trillionaires. Wages stay the same. I expect prices to go down at first with the influx of fossil fuels. The GOP will probably pass some tax cuts similar to 2017- temporarily give each individual a reduction of ~$200 per year for a few years while giving corporations billions in permanent cuts. But the prices will rise eventually.

    There will be bright spots. Weird pockets of normalcy. The Nordic countries might be alright if Russia and Climate Change aren’t too aggressive. China will be its own separate case- you’ll still have the ongoing authoritarianjsm and genocide, but it’ll be a bright and sunny solar punk version. I’m betting huge chunks of rural America will go unchanged- poor, straight, white Christians will remain poror, straight, white Christians. Those well-off enough to have their McMansions in the woods a couple hours drive away from the cities will probably stay the same.

    Maybe California or other blue states are able to hold off the feds and other external forces enough to keep a semblance of the Old World?

    Personally, I expect everything around me to just go downhill. Public infrastructure goes unmaintained. The occasional water boil advisory becomes more and more common over a couple years until it becomes a habit to boil water without checking. Certain websites become inaccessible, then ISP’s roll out bandwidth caps and up prices. Electrical outages become more common- maybe even scheduled rolling blackouts. You’ll need to factor poorly maintained roads when deciding what car to purchase.

    Weird stuff is going to be cheap and available. There’s still going to be new smartphones every year or two for a while. The PS6, the Switch 2, maybe a new Xbox all drop. Professional sports keep going just like theh mostly did during the pandemic. You can already buy a huge 4k smart TV for less than a month of groceries for 2 people, or less than a month’s rent for a 1-bedroom apartment most places. The TV’s will get cheaper while the rent and food gets more expensive. The streaming services will re-consilidate into one or two companies, force ads for everyone, raise their prices, reduce their libraries, and basically become exactly what cable used to be.

    Gonna be weird.


  • There was the whole big lie about Obama’s birth certificate because he was black.

    John McCain was born in Panama but no one seemed to care about him.

    Melania Trump was an illegal immigrant and that didn’t stop her career or prevent Trump from winning the presidency.

    Raphael “Ted” Cruz was born in Alberta yet no one seems to care.

    White and Right is alright. I’ll cede that maybe if some useful idiot with dark skin and murky citizenship rose to power conservatives might decide to look the other way, but you need to be at least one for them to do so.


  • Just to toss my feedback in the ring: I listen to a podcast themed around a local sports team on Spotify, and I often download them to my phone locally because I’m old and still have the habits of being on a limited data plan even though I’ve had unlimited for years.

    I noticed the ads (pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll) and was surprised because a lot of them tend to be local ads for various cities across the US. HVAC services in Chicago, lawyers in Houston, etc. None for the city where the podcasters live, most of their audience lives, or the spots team is based.

    I don’t always download the episodes to listen, only if I know I’m going to be out , or if I’m mowing the lawn and might occasionally stretch my wifi range. I haven’t tested fully, but it seems as though the ads only get baked into the audio upon download.

    I also noticdd a few months ago that downloading a podcast I was partway through resets my progress, which has been incredibly annoying. If the ads are inserted at the time of download, that would make sense because the length of the audio would change.




  • And… Why is that?

    Anime can be found on tons of streaming services that don’t have comments, like Netflix.

    Anime in particular is pretty famous for having its own communities and niche spaces on the internet. If anything, Crunchyroll’s comments section seems to me like it’s unnecessarily fracturing those communities based on who watches on Crunchyroll vs other methods.

    There are costs to maintain and moderate communities. It seems to me like that’s adding a good bit of cost to Crunchyroll’s business model in exchange a vlrelatively small value provided to a small percentage of their customers. Whereas with dedicated social media platforms, the business model revolves around and only attracts individuals who highly valued that community. With a smaller community like that, it’s easier to rely on volunteer mods (like most of Lemmy) or a bit of ad revenue.




  • Lemmy simply hasn’t been enough content. I still use Lemmy (obviously, I’m here) but I also supplement with other places.

    For example, I used to enjoy the sub for one of my favorite sports teams. A lot of posts tended to be articles from the same handful of news outlets. Now instead of reading through Reddit I just have that website up and routinely check for new articles.

    I use the Google News app occasionally. It usually sucks.

    I also use Instagram a lot more. I only reluctantly downloaded it and created an account because my wife and a few friends wanted to send me things. Then I used it more when my band released an EP as a way to promote that. For pure entertainment rather than informational purposes, I usually go to Lemmy first and exhaust what is good quickly, then go to Instagram after.

    I know it sucks. I don’t like having an app from Meta on my phone. I know it can become an unhealthy habit. But I also drink and eat junk food, so there you go.



  • I’ve been meaning to re-watch Korra, but I remember even the first time I watched it being a bit disappointed in the “enlightened centrism” where they are trying to paint every conflict as pacifists vs extremists.

    I think it’s similar to looking at BioShock 1 and BioShock Infinite. There’s a lot of writers out there who just use politics and ideology as a setting for the conflict rather than actually being central to their message. It’s simply a solid formula to make a villain: take any sort of stance and push it to violent extremes. Comstock is a religious zealot, Andrew Ryan I don’t think ever even mentions spirituality if I remember. Ken Levine’s message in the two games is not about religion, but extremes.

    There are benefits. It makes the villains more nuanced and relatable. It gives the protagonist room for doubt and allows for some of the “good” guys to take on antagonistic roles. But Korra also ends up supporting an oppressive regime, and Booker DeWitt gets shoehorned into fights against the people rebelling against his enemy because… Reasons?


  • Any word on a Citra replacement? I remember a while back I tried to look for an alternative just for compatibility for certain games and I couldn’t find much. It seemed like Citra was the only good option for actually playing games. When you add in that the 3DS is no longer sold or supported, plus the hardware gimmicks that led to most games being exclusive to that platform, and also the sheer discomfort my adult hands experience trying to hold such a small device, I’d really much rather play those games on the Deck or with a controller.

    The Switch is still young. It’s Nintendo’s active console so they’re dedicating more security and legal resources to protecting it, but I’m sure that will be reduced after the Switch 2 launches. RyuJinx is still a solid option, and when you add these various forks I’m sure emulation will be in a good spot in time.




  • Basically just install it on all 3 devices, then identify which folders need to sync. And back up any saves you care about first, just in case.

    First I set up the Shield. I think I just found it on the play store. Then set up each folder I wanted. SyncThing gives each shared folder a unique code, so when setting up folders on other devices you just enter that to let SyncThing know those 2 folders should sync. The Shield might not be ideal: a Raspberry Pi or something might be easier to work with than Android TV, but it still works.

    On the Deck, you can just go to Desktop mode and find Syncthing in the repository. You don’t need to do any major changes like the Decoy loader or anything, but if I remember correctly it’s handy to have FlatSeal as well to grant the various programs permissions to each other’s folders. I also installed SyncThing GTK and added that as a non-Steam game, so even in Gaming mode I can access a GUI for it. I think that also made it easy to set up SyncThing to automatically start.

    From there I chose to make a new directory, set that folder up on SyncThing, and then re-configured my emulators to save there. Retroarch, Dolphin, PCSX2. They all have different settings for it: PCSX2 sets up virtual Memory Cards, for example.

    On Windows, I just followed the instructions to install SyncThing, then I also installed SyncThingy, which makes SyncThing run on startup. On a full desktop I found it easier to just use the existing folders for each program rather than create new ones and move them around.