Oof, I’m mostly the opposite these days. Multiplayer games either have too much toxicity from randos, or they’re stuffed with progression systems that actively make me hate the game even if the gameplay itself is good.

Still like coop games like Darktide every once in a while.

I played Red/Blue as a kid. Enjoyed the crap out of them. And then never played any of the later games ever. I think if I tried now I’d feel the same as you.

As someone whose friends got me into destiny 2 on launch… even if you played through the story it was meh at best.

I played through the base game and the first major expansion, but the whole gameplay loop just got so boring so fast.

That’s… an interesting one. Uniquely frustrating from what sort of perspective? Like, do other fighting games work for you but platform fighters don’t? Or are fighting games in general just not your thing?

I’m one of the “company-provided-phone-only” folks. Thankfully, I work for a pretty decent employer who has never abused that in the nearly 10 years I’ve worked there. But I realize that’s a pretty rare privilege.

Like most really early animated characters, Mickey Mouse was a lot of things over a long period of time. And as far as American animation goes, Mickey Mouse has been a staple for the childhood of literally every generation. Younger millennials and zoomers grew up on Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. Children in decades prior watched Mickey be a musketeer in one short and starving due to poverty in the next.

So while the rough edges of the character have been sanded down over time, he’s still very much a plucky, brave, kind, and helpful protagonist in most of the media he’s in.

Which to your average adult viewer means… he’s a bland and uninteresting character.

That said, he’s still an icon of animation as a whole, and most things with Mickey in them are doing some new and novel something (design, production pipeline, whatever) that pushes the whole industry forward in some way.

I wish Democrats were willing to put in the same amount of endless, ceaseless planning and toiling and preparing so when an opportunity arises, you can snatch it up. Republicans did this with the Supreme Court, with religion in schools, etc etc etc. Last time Democrats had both Houses and the Presidency, we got barely anything (to my memory at least).

I wish Democrats had an ounce of Republicans’ ability not just to shape narratives, but to conjure them from thin air and still dominate the news cycle.

I wish Democrats were as willing to bend to the extremists in their own party as the Republicans do. That’s a real monkey’s paw wish right there, but at the moment the extreme right is literal fascists and the extreme left just wants the cool quality of life stuff the Nordic countries already have.

Speaking personally… yeah we ARE divided here in the US. It kind of IS that bad. There are a lot of reasons for it, but in my mind the biggest thing is the legacy of slavery in this country. It’s not a scar… it’s still bleeding because bigots keep picking the scab. There’s been so many knock on effects from it that have gone unexamined and unaddressed because there are enough bigots to be a stupid but effective voting block.

The “people want to hear about celebrities” part is relevant to the fact that interests drive a big part of the audience to the site. Meaning, you and I both want celebrities to be off Twitter because if we can convince them to go elsewhere, that would be an effective way to cripple Twitter.

Complaining that people like celebrities when they’re not “relevant to your daily life” doesn’t really do anything to further your goals. It just makes you sound like an asshole who isn’t relatable to the kind of people that we want to listen to us.

Like it or not, people are interested in celebrities. I wouldn’t call that irrelevant in the attention economy.

Kagi, you say.

I know Google search has gone down the shitter… but it’s still far and away the most useful search engine I use. Every now and then I try to use bing or ddg or whatever, and they waste so much of my goddamn time I just run the same search in Google and get something usable on the first page of results, even with all the kludge.

At this point I’d rather pay for a search engine if it meant better searching and no ads.

Bling Bang Bang Born by Creepy Nuts Spain by Chick Corea

“what’s the Judge Rotenburg Center?” looks it up “Jesus”

To be fair, Lemmy is my reddit replacement.

To be fair, Tesla is the primary culprit of this. Waymo and other AV companies have just been slowly but steadily ramping up their testing and operating in relatively safe ways, and they are by and large doing pretty well from the coverage I’ve read. It’s not happening as quickly as anybody hoped, but we’re seeing steady improvements over time.

Tesla is just reckless, though, branding things in ways that make the whole AV endeavor look much worse than it deserves.

I don’t live in that particular rural area anymore, so it could just be my ignorance, who knows.

Guess it depends on where you live.

In my hometown (rural Midwest), there’s a Walmart, a Schnucks (Midwest chain), maybe an IGA if it’s still around, and about five Dollar Generals (more convenience store than grocery). I don’t think I’ve seen a farmers market there my whole life, despite being literally in the middle of a million farms. Super odd now that I think about it.

On the housing thing - there’s been a major intrusion of private equity firms into the regular house market. A report came out recently claiming as much as 40% of all single family homes sold in 2023 went to private equity firms to turn into rental properties (iirc). On mobile, otherwise would try to actually give you the source.

I can’t speak to the food price increases. My only thought is that most people are creatures of habit and always have been, so I doubt that individual shoppers ‘not putting pressure on the stores’ would explain a historic rise in costs. That said, if we did find evidence that shoppers are less savvy or willing to change habits, my first guess as to why would be people overall being more overworked and stressed. But until the data comes in, who knows.

That explains why my DDG searches have been less than helpful… it’s just as unhelpful as Bing. I usually find myself trying other search engines, but run back to Google when I can’t find anything relevant to the problem I’m trying to solve (most of my googling is tech help stuff).

Would that work in the case of photographers? I would only think to use Maps for business that are likely to have or must have by necessity some building or office.