yeah, they really lost their early edge on the granny gamer market lol. they’ve all jumped ship to those bejeweled like games and virtual jugsaw puzzles. maybe wordle if they’re bookish.

i think there are little things you can play in some of their messaging platforms, but they change so much on those so often that these kinds of users probably ignore 90% of the interface. i think those hit more with the gen z and gen a younger crowds. especially when it can also become social media content. tiktok is great at that.

i guess, but it woulf require the least likely people to adopt a new and expensive technology. think about how long it took for the older generations to catch on to the internet and smart phones. they may be glued together now but it took 20 years and every single other person on earth getting one to make it happen.

warcraft for your lonely aunt is a fine idea. making that vr was poorly conceived. it would have to work on a phone AND be more compelling than just taking on call or text.

but also, the early adopter types that are more or less necessary to get something like this off three ground were never going to like it. that’s us. you can’t create a new tech market segment that wasn’t explicitly asked for without at least considering the nerds. meta has negative trust among nerds. we all saw this as the marketing and data collection tool that it is meant to be.

it was never going to happen. at least until they have full control of all of our devices and platforms and can just say we need it to continue existing in society now. that or b2b contracts are the only ways i could see this ever taking off. it would take some serious marketing voodoo bullshit to convince any sizable businesses that this would increase profits.

how about a wait and see model that i like with all megacorp pushed updates now. that way i can decide if i want their latest batch of ai bullshit, or read the headlines about which cpus their vibecoding bricked this time before it’s too late.

unfortunately automatic updates require a small amount of trust that the update will not break things or change things without permission. Microslop currently has negative trust.

maybe this is good for the average end user, but dissallowing powerusers from doing stuff like this is exactly what annoys me about apple. now microslop is even worse about it…

i just want to actualy control the things i own and not be told how to use my computer.

the blame can fall equality on both. it’s not all or nothing.

yeah, $500 is tough to get into astro with.

plenty for general photography, but astro can get gear heavy fast. astro landscapes are becoming more accessible as more fast lenses get cheaper, but the kind of astro that needs a tracker is just pricy.

why does this graph have a 2:1 ratio of content to border? did you open it full screen on an ultrawide monitor to screenshot it then not crop or?

I’m used to seeing lots of vertical borders because of phones, but this almost seems like it took more effort to make this way.

aah, but it didn’t say steam, it said boiling water.

smaller gas generators based on internal combustion engines don’t boil water though, right?

I’ve only ever known Christians to think fish aren’t animals. I’m pretty sure that’s something random that the Vatican decided for bending lent rules or some shit.

at least in my life most people do not have a “reasonably underseood line” where they arbitrarily stop considering animals as animals due to their perceived lack of communication. they have a line where they stop caring about them, but that’s usually about how cute they are, not about how they communicate. if more people understood koalas better they’d be way less popular. they barely have a brain, can’t communicate much, sound absolutely awful…

most people just don’t actually think that much about it. trivia is for the people that do think about things. and it certainly should at least have its answers checked on google.

idk, that had already changed the basic nature of how gods work from the book.

they also tended to go for cheap shots where the author really thought a lot about how to use certain gods.

for example:

in the epilogue of the anniversary edition of the book gaimam talks about wanting to incorporate Jesus, but deciding that the scene he wrote for him wasn’t good enough to capture what Jesus was to Americans. but he includes the scene in the post script anyway. it’s a quiet scene where Jesus comes and offers guidance in one of shadows most desperate hours.

in the show Jesus gets shot trying to cross the Mexican border. which is the absolute lowest hanging fruit when it comes to Jesus. i have made that joke before. I’ve heard others make that joke before. “if Jesus actually was alive right now he’d get shot at the border for being brown and communist”. they clearly just wanted shock value at the lowest intellectual price.

i don’t hate shows or movies just for adapting a story to a new medium. for example, the new dune movies really aren’t actually capturing the point of the books very well so far. that’s because the dune books are mostly people thinking about what people think it doesn’t adapt into visual mediums well. what villenuve has made is a great movie series regardless. the shining is another great example of that. i had a Stephen King fan try to tell me that Stanley kubrik was a hack for not following the book better. I’d argue that Stanley Kubrik is a better filmmaker that king is an author. the shining is an all time great movie regardless of what it was based on or how much it changed that material. that said, i do hate adaptation that add story elements and change basic rules of reality without putting thought or effort in to making it worthwhile. these two examples are great because kubrik and villenuve are masters of their craft that made these movies with immense amounts of care and effort.

deviating from the source material isn’t inherently a sin, but making a much worse story when you started with a good one that was already written and loved and using its name to draw people in is worse than just making a bad show. a bad show is easily ignored, but a bad adaptation will put people off of the source material you love. or worse, will supplant the source material in the cultural zeitgeist and you’ll forever have to specify “i mean the book, not that terrible movie they did”. i think tv American gods was… just ok. it completely failed to capture what i liked about the book, but others seem to like it well enough. it has gotten multiple people i know into the book, so i can’t hate it entirely.

similar to the Witcher show. i hated it. it had nothing of the books in it. it was schlocky and the plot BARELY made sense. they just went off and did entirely their own thing after season 1 and it was shit. but everyone who hasn’t read the books seems to still like it so maybe I’m just a hater.

thematically it holds up fine. productuon wise it’s about what you’d expect from 90s scifi. it even has early cg aliens, with a tv budget. lots of big rubber suits or people with skin paint and wigs.

surprisingly dark too, especially in the latter seasons. they just keep making the main characters fail and suffer and betray each other and get tortured and have their friends and family die in front of them after failing to escape the body horror mad scientist that wants to steal your organs and trap you in the matrix…

i actually had to stop watching it towards the end over the continuous concentrated negativity. it’s not a very happy show very often. still good, i just can’t deal with shows that never turn on the lights. like bojack horseman and mr. robot. two other shows that are just too depressing for me to watch. i resonate too hard the consistent downward spiral with no positive moments, then the feeling sticks with me. all three are really good shows that i had to turn off for my own wellbeing.

would only work if buying in full and would still require a messy title transfer and taxes when he gives the vehicle over.

the best way would be to have the non-buyer do the first part then the person that actually wants it do the second.

that said, it would still probably give you a big hit to your credit score unless buying outright, and if you can afford to buy the cat in cash you probably don’t need to be running two man cons for a discount in the first place.

ah yes, psychohistory. math predicting the future is the initial idea that gets asimov’s “foundation” rolling.

nah, that all lives in short form video these days.

it’s the perfect format for it. just long enough to say something crazy, not long enough for you to ask questions about it.

that and social media. take this website for example. lemmy.ml and lemmygrad both have some veeeeery interesting ideas about the history of certain authoritarian governments.

show a map of the land area it takes up and you might actuality convince some people it’s not lol.

it could be like milk lovers trying to call almond milk bad for the environment due to water usage. despite cow milk being infinitely worse. the propaganda machine did its job well. if you bring up non dairy milks to an American conservative in 2025, nine times out of ten they’ll feel the need to smugly tell you how terrible almond milk is and how we shouldn’t be allowed to waste all that water on it. if you try to tell them that cow milk is worse they’ll just tell you you’re wrong and that the data is lying.

i straight to showed one of them the hard numbers on how much cows are putting out greenhouse gasses and she just said “that can’t be right”. it didn’t FEEL right to her so she just didn’t believe it…

if you wrap a burger in foil it’ll keep in the fridge as long as there’s no veggies.

put that whole thing in the oven for like 15 minutes on like 300 and it’ll come out nice with a bun that has a pleseant, light crunch on on the outside.

thicker burgers might be harder, i usually do this with smash burgers. just, for the love of God, add the veggies after reheating. please.

no no, it just needs your location data every second to make sure it’s set to the correct time zone. Microsoft and their 1.8 million partners decided that the clock can’t work without your location data.

(I’m joking, for the inevitable person that’s going to try to disagree)

this whole exercise is really meant to exist in schools. like, schools for young kids.

we’re adults arguing about which nursery rhyme is cooler while forgetting that this isn’t for us. it needs to be easily understood by children. that’s why we use one with only short easy words.

even the sentence structure of the second one is complicated and hard for a child to remember.

i think it’s more about being words that kids will know.

i guess lol. america is the great innovator. it’s just the the only innovations that are being invested in are “how do we squeeze people more while spending less” America is cutting edge on that front.