It’s the path of least resistance to achieve Musklessness. The second two of the positives you listed are actually negatives to the average Joe. Choice paralysis, overwhelming number of apps and servers, these are things that put people off even trying, especially if there are easier-to-use alternatives that are familiar and instant.

Mastodon is great, but it’s not quite there yet in terms of convenience. Too much copying and pasting and clicking through to different instances in order to read old posts etc. It needs to be more cohesive in a way that doesn’t require constantly leaving your timeline or going into the settings.

It’s also the case that the Twitter diaspora who are famous tend to choose BlueSky, and that brings a lot of people along with them.

And it’s also the case that Mastodon doesn’t have much of a marketing campaign outside of word-of-mouth, whereas BlueSky does.

Preserving good old games!

Asterisk: Unless the CCP don’t like it, in which case it can go fuck itself.

AIMP ^{[Windows/Android]} has been my Winamp replacement for ~15 years. I’ve never found a player that comes close to rivalling it.

P.S. I have no idea what the licence is for AIMP, I just know it’s free and is excellent. You don’t need Winamp.

I feel only slightly less ridiculous asking for Steam Controller support in games 😆 But I will keep asking because I fucking love that controller.

As in real life, it’s pretty sound advice to ignore, block or otherwise disengage from trolls and other forms of belligerents. Even in the '90s when I first started using the internet, the phrase of the day was “don’t feed the trolls”. But people just can’t help themselves. They will even reply saying “I know you’re a troll, but…”.

The Steam forums are a great example, where every other thread is a fake “is this game woke??” screed. The fact that you can be rewarded for being a cunt there with jesters (which translate into points that can be spent to buy profile items) just makes it a thousand times worse. You get ‘paid’ to be a troll on Steam. It’s insanity.

The only anti-troll weapon that works or is needed is oblivion. Let their steaming turd of a post curdle in solitude. Don’t even downvote it. Being downvoted is a victory for them, an acknowledgement that they exist and that they’ve gotten your attention and that they’ve annoyed you. Shadowban them from your mind. Block them so that no future posts of theirs will infect your screen. Report them so mods can remove/ban them. Just don’t engage directly with the post or the user. Don’t say “blocked and reported” in the troll’s thread/post. Just do it silently.

We grew up watching those dudes get butchered in increasingly-grotesque ways by a diverse conglomeration of psychotic murderers and animals, both natural and supernatural.

I’m good with my plain black t-shirt that’s long enough to serve as a dress because I’m fat and need uberlength shirts to make it over the curvature of my Moo Deng pregnancy and still have enough fabric left over to not leave me looking like I’m wearing a cummerbund made from pale hairy human skin.

Fat guy dress > being split vertically, starting at the willy, by an industrial saw because I unknowingly spent a summer afternoon in a swimming hole that once hosted a cruel gang of teenagers who pretended to befriend a lonely man with a deformity and subsequently caused him to drown in it by shoving him off the rocks into the water even though they knew he couldn’t swim.

This act is so profoundly counter to increasing pro-Palestinian sentiment that I have to wonder if it was the fuckin’ Mossad that did it.

This is the only way Bill Gates can go to the grocery store unaccosted.

😆

I can tell if you’re Catholic or Protestant by the way you pronounce the letter H.

Thank you, really interesting!

On a side note, I always through Stack Exchange was just for computery stuff. Didn’t know it covered everything!

This is why I keep my front door key in my foreskin. Either I evade the pickpocket, or I make a new friend. I cannot lose.

As a younger man, I was able to unlock the door hands-free. These days, I need to fish the key out of my floppy beige KKK hood like a sock trapped in a duvet cover on laundry day.

Known to horror aficionados, but not to general movie watchers: Lake Mungo (2008)

I highly recommend you don’t read up on it. Besides the fact that the film just works so much better when you come to it fresh, most reviews - both in print and YouTube videos - spoil pivotal scenes, including in the artwork they choose to use as a thumbnail/heading. Just watch it. Even if the horror doesn’t work for you (many people report being bored by the film), it’s still a great film with surprising depth and heart. It’s worth checking off your list for sure.

The basics: It’s a mockumentary set in Australia, made by a director/writer who hasn’t done anything before or since, featuring actors who probably aren’t known to you, even if you’re an Aussie. Much of the dialogue is improvised, so it feels very real and natural.

Try to watch it alone, in the dark, with no distractions (turn off your phone). This will help maximise your chances of being one of the lucky people the film has managed to scare in a profound way. I’m one of those lucky people, I’m happy to say!

😭 the only thing worse than an animal going extinct, is being the last member of the species who still has a life left to live. Jesus, that’s some profoundly, cosmically depressing shit. And I’m not sure if it’s better or worse for the animal to be aware that it’s the last of its kind. Fruitlessly calling for a mate, or knowing there’s no point bothering.

You just use two forks, with the prongs on one fork filling in the slots of the other. They call this practice ‘spooking’.

I hope this judgement helps Imane Khelif with her lawsuit(s).

I thought the little markings on his nose were his teefs 🤣

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Your kid’s first musical instrument. It’s counterproductive and false economy to buy them a piece of shit guitar or tuba or whatever it may be, in the belief that “if they like it and want to continue with it, I’ll buy them a better one in the future”. You might well turn the kid off the instrument for life if their instrument is harder to play/maintain and worse to listen to than it ought to be.

If you want your kid to be enriched by music and to be creative, buy them a decent mid-range instrument. Make it so that the kid can’t wait to pick it up, don’t make those crucial early days of learning the instrument feel like eating watery gruel for months with an expectation of pizza at some point down the line. A shitty instrument will be an additional barrier the kid will need to deal with every time they use it. Get out of their way, buy them something serviceable. If they lose interest regardless, well at least you know they had a fair shot at it and it wasn’t the crappiness of the instrument that caused them to abandon it. And you can always sell or donate the instrument if they really don’t give a shit about it.

The best instrument you can reasonably afford is significantly more likely to hook your kid than a £50 piece of junk would. It doesn’t need to be fancy, it just needs to be well-made, pleasant to play, and easy to tune/maintain/clean/whatever the case may be.

I can’t help but pronounce it like a Slavic surname.