_NetNomad

forums face a lot of the same issues federated platforms do, chiefly- why the hell would the proverbial i join it when reddit and discord already exist? i already have an account there, there’s already a community there… i think for some people that’s just never gonna change. there’s no closing pandora’s box. i run an online community with a small but fairly active discord and we have a forum as well in anticipation of discord going full enshittification, but it’s just impossible to get younger people onto it. the fedi at least has the advantage of looking like the monolithic platforms people are leaving, but forums are such a foreign concept

getting a community going is a bit of a catch 22. the best way to get users is to already have users and appear active. if i recall correctly, early on reddit had a ton of staff sock puppet accounts to do just that. i’m certainly not advocating for it but it goes to show how tricky the problem is. the only real answer on an individual level is to pick a platform and stick with it through the thin years and try to recruit a few friends- after that MAYBE hopefully it eventually gets some momentum

i’m gonna level with you, i completely forgot IBM cloud was a thing and just thought this was MS pointing fingers at system Z or system . thanks for catching that!

so Delta’s non-Windows machines were the ones that suffered the most from a Windows software malfunction? that makes sense

seconding this. despite the url, the instance i am on runs mbin and it’s the bees knees

it must have been weird for Hayden to return to a role he’s synonymous with to put a capstone on a long and emotional story arc that he had nothing to do with, but you never would have been able to tell by the way he sold it

“I’ll be right back, gotta check if the bathroom still works”

not a single mention of SEGA Rally or Power Drift? shameful!

a lot of games these days have higher graphic “fidelity” but it’s at the point where they’re exaggerating them just to show off. light and reflection systems in particular have kind of an uncanny valley feel to them now at least to me, and it makes the games much less pleasant to look at

windows 8 is a strong candidate, because that was their huge push into trying to remodel the OS in the image of mobile OSes. you had to perform quite the exorcism to get it functional. i skipped Vista so I’m not the best source on this but my understanding is that the issue with Vista is less that it was loaded with dark patterns and trying to be a walled garden and more just an unfortunate time to be an OS with the technology and security landscapes changing.

of course, while the base OS wasn’t necessarily always the problem, Microsoft has anti-competitive practices going back even further and you could argue Windows stopped being good when MS started bundling Internet Explorer with it, so it all depends where you draw the line. might be safest to say their last truly good OS was MSX-DOS just because they abandoned it before they could do anything scummy

This pattern is driven by an increase in unhappiness among young people both in absolute terms and relative to older people.

also look at the graph in the article, the yellow line representing 2024 is signifigantly lower before 35 than any point on the blue line representing 2005-2018

as someone approaching my 30s in america this sounds consistent with both my experience and many of my peers. our education system is more or less a trauma machine, and couple that with the demise of “third places” (places that aren’t school or home for kids to hang out in without having to spend money) and the general state of the world being hard for even adult minds fo wrap around… our world is a difficult and unpleasant place to be a kid. it ain’t a cakewalk being an adult either but it is relatively better with a relative increase in agency and more experience dealing with everything

“No, you should totally go on this one, captain. Take the XO too. We’ll be fine. We’re all far too busy, uh, reversing the polarity of the deflector dish, and we definitely deleted the template for Romulan ale from the replicators for good this time. Also the transporter is on the fritz so you should probably take a shuttle, and then stay down there and see the sights to make it worth it.”

i think a lot of great points have been made in this thread, but it’s also worth saying- you can’t be wrong about what you do and don’t dig!

Alan Stivell does some incredible fusion of rock and Celtic folk. i usually avoid the term “Celtic” for music because some people find it dismissive to lump multiple musical traditions together like that, but he very deliberately draws from most (all?) of the musical traditions that would fall under that umbrella. i highly recommend the E Dulenn and Á L’Olympia live albums

which of course is a distraction from the fact the main show serves the same purpose in the real world!

of course the movie franchise about killing space nazis famously had no woke agenda whatsoever until they gave a woman a laser sword

does that have a free tier or only paid plans

what antivirus are the cool kids using these days? i feel like whenever i finally settle on one it ends up embroiled in this or that scandal

NOT TIMMY

that’s just me playing Zork