My own personal experience over the past year with it has… Largely not lined up with that? The install process was easy, I do have gplay enabled but rarely use it, favoring fdroid, and it’s… Been fine? It’s felt mostly like stock android tbh

I’d say that it’s a bigger red flag when they start introducing cash shop fashion items that aren’t thematically appropriate, really. It happened with TERA shortly before it closed down.

Reason I say that is because I started playing FFXIV about a month ago, and it’s a fashion show early game xD They have released thematically inappropriate apparel, but they’re like… T-shirts that cost in-game money, I’m pretty sure TERA had a goddam little tikes car to drive around in.

Oh! And if it gets sold to Gamigo. That’s another massive red flag. Happens so gods damned much.

It’s about the same is what I was saying, yeah

I mean… American minimum wage comes out to $1256 monthly (assuming full-time, and that’s pre-tax). Community college comes in pretty cheap at $450 a month on average, but four year universities come up to $4,800 on average (assuming full-time enrollment for both). The cheapest MD programs I can find are still close to twice the minimum wage, and that’s assuming you get in-state tuition, since out of state is usually 2-3x more.

Oh, absolutely, I do very little to hide it online. Might start posting my RAADS-R score in profiles for fun xD

Ahh, fair. I generally see that as a justification for recommending it to the general public, sorry xD

Fair point. I’ll need to figure out which stick it is, and if it’s the old one hope they’re still in business

someone just told me I was willing to die on a hill for my opinion

Yeah I saw that one, that was… Weird as hell.

This may not be the case here, but idioms like this can sound particularly weird when they’re in a language that isn’t your first language

Or when you’re autistic, which is the case here, I’m a native English speaker xD

It is about steadfastly holding to an unpopular (…) opinion in the face of adversity.

Yeah, I frequently don’t share those opinions to avoid the adversity. Not all of them, hell if you sort by “Most controversial” on my profile there’s some good examples of me dying on a hill. More just the quiet beliefs that shape massive swathes of my worldview that I don’t talk about frequently for one of a number of reasons.

Think that one might be the root of why this thought occurred to me, tbh; the difference between the opinions I hold that I will actively argue in favor of, vs the ones I hold that I don’t really talk about in any context because, while they’re important to me, they’re not worth arguing over.

You said you have a few opinions you would be willing to die for. That’s probably a bit more extreme than this phrase is intended for.

Fair, yeah. I tend to overanalyze these things, it’s fun for me xD

By RPGMO, do you mean MMORPG?

No, RPG MO (forgot there was a space there) is an MMORPG. It’s also on Steam if you want to see videos/screenshots

Well, no, they’re not actually.That’d be basically AAA live service games.

I more meant as a genre. Everything gets more expensive when you get into the AAA world, but that’s more a matter of scale than genre. There are probably some single player games that have cost more than some MMOs have cost the devs over the life of the game :P

And also… I remember the early 00s. We had a bunch of fairly big, and also actually fairly novel and distinct kinds of MMOs coming out, fairly regularly.

Same! I kinda miss those days for MMOs. Some of those are still hanging around, but a lot of the ones I used to play are just shells of what they used to be. Perfect World, Conquer Online, FlyFF… Well, FlyFF was never that good. Damn lootboxes.

they’re allergic to MMOs, unless they make them insanely pay to win or gacha or something like that…

Yeah, it’s partly because most MMOs aren’t that profitable, at least without p2w/gacha mechanics. It’s due, at least in part, to the nature of MMOs.

Generally with theme park MMOs (Final Fantasy, Runescape, GW2, etc) there comes a point where the player runs out of content, or burns out. At that point they switch to doing something else, and stop paying you money, even if just for a while. Some will stick around, but most will move to another game, usually one with more money, and a larger dev team, that can release content faster. Through a few cycles of this, smaller studios are often choked out of resources, because while server costs go down during slow times, it’s not proportional to the amount of money lost. Each additional player is cheap, but the base dev+server costs aren’t, at least for a game that’s trying to compete with the big ones.

Wasn’t there one that was basically giving away cubes of tungsten for free?

Remember: Companies don’t learn lessons, they react to profits. They’re 100% gonna boil the frog here.

Yeah, the fact that so many things just automatically require 16gb of RAM is wild to me. Why does a web browser need 16gb of RAM??? Why did a calculator leak 32gb of RAM???

Yeah, at least one of my RAM sticks seems to be going out… Very not happy about it, but not much I can do about it rn

Oh, absolutely, it’s just the sheer amount of data they do use on people is wild when compared to the fact that they basically ignore the contents of emails xD

I mean, Mozilla themselves are calling it that, or at least were

Waterfox if you want something that still feels like a modern browser, LibreWolf if you don’t mind having stricter defaults. If you want the nuclear option, Mullvad browser is good, it is very inconvenient thoygh. At least for desktop. On mobile I use Vivaldi/Fennec/Vanadium depending on need

That’s the kinda mentality that lead to the fall of Yugoslavia

Yeah, those are bigger issues. It’s still easier to find people who’re using PGP than your specific email provider, though. Your friend using gmail can use pgp via a client.

I’ve heard of the exploits, but the ones I’ve heard of do typically require the hackers/whatever to have the emails (either via intercepting them as they’re traveling, or getting them from the server), then injecting some HTML, then emailing the emails back to you to trick the server/client to sending the unencrypted emails back? While I don’t use email for much, and my threat model involves much more “Google” than “The government”, I’m not sure how much of a concern this would be for people who’s threat model isn’t that high?

(Admittedly this is also the first I’m hearing of the exploits. I don’t tend to use PGP for my emails, since I don’t send that many emails anyway)

Yep! The other side benefits are that if your info gets sold online/leaked/what have you, and you start getting emails from your “bank” at the email you used to sign up for a random browser game in 2018, it’s easier to tell that it’s a scam. Not even that expensive either, I think I pay a total of $56/yr for the domain and the email?

Only issue is I usually put the month/year in the alias so if something does happen I don’t need to remember if this is the first or third email for a service. If I don’t mark down the email in my password manager (rare, but has happened), I have the fun issue of forgetting my email and password for the account, because idfk when I signed up for this

This post, to my reading, is about how desktop PCs are disposable, and my comment is providing evidence to the contrary