I suppose this makes sense for those with slower connections. (I remember 6GB games taking ~6 hours on DSL.)

But I have family members on my household’s modern broadband that can download an obscene amount of data, like, Witcher 3 in 15 minutes or something, that still preorder games.

And not even from small studios who need every fundraising tactic they can to get to the finish line. I’m talking major releases. It befuddles me so.

Especially when there’s been a large number of majorly hyped titles in recent memory that have flopped on release, and end up half price like 6 months later.

I dunno, I have like 500+ games I optimistically hoped to get to at some point, maybe I’m just a patient gamer. I can’t help but be a little jealous of the time someone must have, when they can game so hard that they’re like “I gotta play this new game NOW!!!” 😂

Also you used to get really cool physical “feelies” for preorders like maps, patches, stickers, comics, statues (OMG Assassin’s Creed II)…now it’s like …“Play GTA6 with a Shovel Knight helmet.” LOL

Lol yeah, that’s what I meant, digitally delivered videogames. I remember having to secure my copy of like, Halo 3 or Skyrim in advance so I could play it on release. :D

For some people? Pre-ordering digital games. I mean huh? What are ye even doin there Jimmy-Bob? You afraid they’re gonna run out of copies? O.o

Edit: digitally delivered, like say, Steam or GoG games.

AI and subscriptions

❤️

“Everyone’s always asking me: ‘What are you doing, retard?’, but nobody ever asks 'How are you doing, retard?'”

Still use it, unironically, along with things like “righteous.”

I like taking what I like from various ways of speaking, until mine is my own. Don’t let anyone take that away from you. :p

Surfing the world wide web. Sounds so dumb now.

I dunno I still kinda love it. In part I think it might sound a little dumb now thanks to how big money has turned the primary web interaction into “Schlorping at the Centralized World Trough.”

But web surfing is still a thing with the Indie Web, and it can still be an apt description because you can catch and ride “waves” of various networked pages and find really neat stuff. There was a sense of exploration to it, the whimsy that you could get carried really far from where you started and potentially have a lot of fun along the way.

I still like to surf the web. Cowabunga. :)

I love surfer slang because it’s rooted in a verbose comprehension of the English language. The hyperbole of it brings me joy lol.

I would dare to say doomscrolling in lemmy is impossible

Could just be my ADHD but I’d like to contest this. Maybe we need to be really careful about the communities we follow, but besides Linux stuff and some other niche group there’s a lot of politics on Lemmy, and while there’s a lot of insightful discussion there’s a high concentration of unhinged doomerism.

I sometimes feel like I’m addicted, not because of the algorithm but because of the feedback loop that I need to know what’s going on, and I want to reach out and communicate…

I’m sure I have a lot, but comes to mind:

EDIT: Sorry this turned into a big reply haha…

• Zombie (both the original and the 2016 Bad Wolves cover) , the second it opens, just visceral; it’s the same old thing, in [2026], in our heads…
• The Kids Aren’t Alright by The Offspring , I hate relating so hard to this as a generation, watching so many kids with promise just get smothered out surviving in a bleak “cruelest dream reality.” Oft by drugs and hopelessness.
• In the Arms of an Angel by Sarah McLachlan : My mom always cries if she hears this song because her late mom did too. Then my cousin sang it at my dad’s funeral so…Yeah, I don’t let that one play. Sorry, Sarah.
• Immortal by Marina and the Diamonds ; The entire song is beautiful and profound. “And if the earth ends in fire, and the seas are frozen in time, there’ll be just one survivor, the memory that I was yours and you were mine.” (Holy shit just typing that…)
• Pretty When I Cry by Silent Rival ; Such a beautiful song I thought was about a partner who taught the singer about true unconditional love… It’s about her late mother. It empowers me to fight to be there for those I love, and it sends a powerful message that we can be strong in our weakness.
• Dust in the Wind by Kansas ; anything about the fleetingness of life hits me hard.
• Memories by Maroon 5. I miss people…

Lots of happy songs too…Like they’re beautiful and wistful and lovely and I think I cry because I can’t imagine such peace… My wife likes these songs and I guess I kinda break imagining us getting to just unshoulder our burdens and truly live.

• Perfect by Ed Sheeran
• Just Too Good by Phil Wickham
• “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” , a popular Christian hymn from 1907, made prominent in recent history by BioShock Infinite.
• On that note, Amazing Grace really is amazing, but it doesn’t help that it’s the ‘somebody died’ song now…
• The Prayer by many artists: Celine Dion and Andre Bocelli
• Prayer by Hayley Westenra
• In My Arms by Plumb (has some sweet remixes, but man, a mother’s love is truly something…our first is on the way and I really feel it now…)
• Somewhere Only We Know by Lily Allen

… Okay I’m sensing a theme here. Yeah, I’m a person of faith. Thinking of a refuge in my Father where I can stop worrying, stop fearing, stop fighting. Songs about pure and unyielding love, or lullabies , crush me instead of relax me for some reason. Maybe because the contrast with our present circumstances is so harshly defined and such respite feels like it can’t be had in this life.

I’ll have to check these out. I’ll add another Sabaton here:

• Christmas Truce

It’s powerful. The “true meaning of Christmas” has been satirized and watered down to death in our time…

…But there was a time it truly could stop a war. It could get people to lay down their guns and be brothers again.

Their “superiors” forced them back into battle. If we all snubbed our masters and just stopped fighting, what could we be?

This. This. A thousand times a thousand times, yes. Nobody should be blindly trusting their safety to Amazon, one of the worst abusers of trust and privacy.

(Plus they’re the most common hardware… Guess what’s getting targeted for mass exploits?)

Almost anything is better than giving Amazon access to your home.

I think I ended up with a hybrid of your approaches haha. I run Proxmox with a VM running Open Media Vault, and that VM ended up hosting all my Docker apps because it has a REALLY nice interface for managing all of them!

I only have my PiHole and 3D printers on separate VMs

Downside right now is, a lot goes down if that OMV server does, so reminder to everyone (including me lol) backup lots!

Yeah as a warm blooded human being I’m all for a little spicy entertainment, but I feel like the mainstream of that industry is becoming even more depraved and unhealthy because, like everything else, it relies on the attention economy and prioritizes addiction. It’s also notoriously cruel and exploitative of its talent.

the democrats have ignored their voters like this and sided with the republicans.

“ReAcHiNg AcRoSs ThE AiSLe”

Oh definitely! If there’s one thing I’m done with, it’s people calling on speakerphone while their phone is like, seemingly, in their gym bag in the trunk LOL.

Like bro, you’re not Jack Bauer and I’m not your handler, it can wait until you’re done going 75 on the freeway.

Maybe my work’s phone network service is just awful, even landline to landline, but yeah, for how much faster data connections have gotten, I feel like I got clearer voice quality on my cordless Vtech in 2004 LOL.

Maybe it’s me and I should get my hearing checked. 😅

HOW WAS I THINKING THIS EXACT SAME THING.

The standardized NATO phonetic alphabet

…for when you need to read alpha numeric codes or clarify spellings.

Especially with, how, inexplicably, phone connections seem to have gotten more garbly in recent years.

This code was invented to be reasonably understood as much as possible in less-than-ideal communication conditions.

As time goes on, civilian life is full of situations where you’ll need to read off serial numbers, codes, or even spelling your own name, to somebody seemingly connected to you from a million miles away via coconuts and twine.

So, learn it, and you never need to go “M as in…uh…‘Mancy’?” ever again! Your IT department might thank you.

…and let’s be honest, it sounds kinda cool. :)

They just expected us to know how to use them.

And they still do. The “kids these days and their compyooturs” fallacy. Irks me to my core.

I was fortunate to have a middle school typing and graphic design class, and in highschool I learned hardware troubleshooting and stuff (A+ equivalent IT work)…but that “career path” of flipping computers that people downloaded the wrong screensaver on kinda died out.

Still learned a lot though! If the I.T field was still hanging out with buddies in some dungeon nobody visited, I might be in that field today lol.