You are describing Real Time with Bill Maher. People continue to watch his show. At least, I think you are, because I’m not sure what a “questionable guest” even is.

For me it was playing Life is Strange for the first time. I bought it because it had been listed on Steam as “Overwhelmingly Positive” for ages, and at the time I was really enjoying the story-based games that companies like Telltale were producing. So, knowing nothing about the game, I picked it up and started playing it.

The first act was slow. What I didn’t realize at the time was that the writers were establishing Arcadia Bay, a city in the Pacific Northwest, as a character. All the people in it needed to be recognizable, so it took time for them to teach the player about who they were, what mattered to them, how they fit in to the city, and what their flaws were. I actually stopped playing for a while after the first act. But, luckily, I picked it back up over the holiday season.

I still remember playing it in my living room. I was so thoroughly absorbed into the story that when something tense happened in the second act and I couldn’t stop it the way I normally could, I was literally crushing the controller as if I could make things work by pulling the triggers harder.

I am decidedly not the demographic that Life is Strange was written to appeal to, but they did such a good job writing a compelling story that it didn’t matter. I got sucked in, the characters became important to me, and I could not. put. it. down. I played straight through a night until I finished it.

(If you’ve played it and you’re wondering, I chose the town the first time I played it.)

I’ll never forget that game. I’ll also never forget the communities that spawned around it. I read the accounts of people who had just played it for the first time for about a year because it helped me relive the experience I had when I played it. It was incredible.

This has been going on forever. Decades ago, it was common to be charged more on travel websites if you were using a Mac then if you were using windows. These days they use a lot more profiling to try to squeeze more money out of the people they think are willing to pay.

My purpose in life is to be happy. My primary challenge in life is to find the things in life that make me happy and try to find ways that those things can make other people happy.

I’m a 15-year user of Reddit. Lemmy right now is very similar to very early Reddit. Reddit’s users were more technical back then, too. I’m betting the early adopters of places like this are usually the technical types.

Another nice thing about Lemmy is that a lot of the low-effort, casual users on Reddit haven’t gotten here yet. Interaction here is definitely a lot more pleasant.

Our system of measurement. There can be only one!

Thank you for posting this. I have been avoiding updating to synergy 3 and now I’m glad I did. I still like version 2. I would still recommend it. I even use it with gaming.

Exactly. These things seem common because we see examples of them amplified on social media. Most of them are vanishingly rare.

Be sure to get a nice headshot of the CEO. Something lighted from below. Make sure he or she doesn’t smile; tell them it’s more professional that way. Desaturate the image so it’s black and white. Take the picture from a low angle to give it that look of distinction and confidence!

Now this has some potential! I have something for my nighttime reading list! Great post!

Most people pick an instance by collecting a list of instances that are physically close to them, and then reviewing the /instances page to see how big the block list is. Lemmyverse.net can tell you how many users are on those blocked instances.

Heck yeah! I can’t believe how popular that game was. Every time I bring up this era, everyone talks about it.

I was a big Tradewars 2002 fan, myself. You can still play it, which is what made me start to think about connecting it to Lemmy somehow. That, and Nethack.

As a site admin, I really wish it was easier to modify the content on the front page. We’ve had some interesting ideas over here, like linking to some simple online games and posting high scores for the site, or maybe just adding some analytics boxes to the site. But for us that’s difficult.

A lot of our ideas come from a shared experience in BBSes from the 90s, where they had game doors, ascii art, and other fun site-specific elements. Technology has changed, but there are modern equivalents to all of those things that we wish we could implement.

Religious people clearly use critical thinking. They just base a lot off of flawed premises.

I live in Utah. Mormons are absolutely required to tithe in order to participate in temple ceremonies. I’ve never been LDS, but my understanding is that the accounting for how much you tithe is carefully monitored. It’s also my understanding that you must participate in temple ceremonies to achieve admittance into heaven.

As an atheist, I had to ask myself how I know people are worshiping a god. In the US, it seems to boil down to a few things:

1. Giving money to an organization in order to participate with the community
2. Showing obedience to authority by allowing them to dictate some (but not all) of one’s behavior
3. Being hyper-focused on how the organization got to where it is today and whether what they do today aligns with its initial values and goals
4. Performing rituals in hopes of causing specific outcomes

Based on this, I am already worshiping Apple.

The Plex Pass unlocks hardware transcoding, which is a huge benefit alone. As others have said, it unlocks things like skip intro, credits detection, playing trailers before movies. It also unlocks the DVR feature, allowing you to attach an inexpensive antenna to your network and start recording over-the-air channels. It is very worth it.

Excellent! This is good to know! I bet other users who aren’t admins/mods can’t see the post at all when it’s removed. I’ll avoid purging from now on.

However, I’m surprised to still see my posts there. I would have thought you deleting them on your instance would propagate out to my instance.

Well, I purged them from the database. Maybe if I had removed the post instead of purging, that would have propagated. Right now the posts don’t exist in our database at all.

But I bet the more likely scenario is that once a post gets propagated, it persists forever on the instance it gets propagated to unless someone purges it there.

Assuming I am correct, this could end up being a bit of a problem. That means, users on my instance could go about spamming the fediverse, and I would never see reports of their activity unless they are spamming communities on my instance. The only way I have to know that they’re being bad users is if I notice we get defederated, if an admin of another instance specifically reaches out to me, if another user on my instance reports them, or if I manually monitor my users.

This is actually consistent with something that happened to us in the early days of lemmy.ninja. We had a few thousand bot accounts get created on our site. Some other sites defederated from us, but it took us weeks to notice that this happened. One of them happened to be a Mastodon instance, and that person indicated a ban reason that indicated that a user was an edgelord. Well, this was back in the beginning of our site, so we knew all of our users personally. If we had not been really on top of things and really plugged in to what was happening across a lot of the Lemmy instances, we would never have known that the bot users interacted with anyone. We still don’t know how many posts or comments they made before we deleted them all.