CerebralHawks

Monogamous person here. I would not be offended if someone asked me if I was, or if someone else is. I think it’s kinda hot. It’s not something I’d want to be in long-term, but for a night? Shit, why not? That said, I’ve been married almost 20 years, and my wife and I aren’t looking for a third or a couple to play with. Maybe when we were both 20 years younger. Not now. That’s a younger person’s game (to my mind anyway). But offended? No way. You do you, boo.

You can also ask me if I’m gay or trans. I’m neither, but I won’t mind being asked as long as it’s respectfully. And I’ll answer in kind. I have been hit on by men. Not often, but it’s happened a few times. Always flattering, as long as they take no for an answer. They always have. I mean, it’s kinda dangerous for them if they don’t. Not from me. I just mean in general. And violence against LGBTQ+ has always been a factor, unfortunately. Still, I’m flattered they think I’m worth their time. But I don’t swing that way. I thank them for the compliment and wish them well. I think it’s the best you can do in the situation. And while best is the enemy of good, well, I try to be better.

Does anyone remember when they said digital games would reduce prices?

For them… never seen them go down for us.

Look at GTA 5 sales. Just wait for a deep discount. The initial price is just for the whales. Paying full price does not get you a perpetual discount on the shark cards or whatever they’re called. You still gotta pay full price for those. The purpose of the game is to sell those online currency cards. The initial price is just for those who want in sooner. I’m willing to wait a year or two, get it at deep discount (or buy it used), play the single player campaign, and then never touch it again.

If you cook, you taste. If you don’t taste, you’re probably not a very good cook. You have to be able to balance the flavour.

I wouldn’t eat someone else’s table scraps though. That’s more hygiene than anything.

You should be able to take leftovers home, though. What you cook but no one orders. What’s left in the pan. That should go without saying. People who make the food should be entitled to eat some of it. That isn’t stealing, that’s guaranteeing the food is good, the people who made it are willing to eat it. One of my first “real” jobs was Taco Bell, and for years I was willing to eat it after I left. Following policy, they don’t really do anything wrong. The meat comes cooked and frozen, and they boil it in a deep fryer with water to heat it up. The beans come dehydrated in a bag, they pour them into a metal bin and fill with boiling water, stir, and let set. All fine. I just don’t have the taste for their brand of “Tex-Mex” anymore. I still think the bean burrito and soft taco are good. Keep it simple. The fajita wraps were good, but they haven’t had those in 30 years. And the gordita — the flatbread taco. That’s been gone a while, too. IIRC it was never profitable, the flatbread cost too much. It was good stuff though. Probably the best bread in fast food back then.

I honestly can’t recommend any one forum platform. I didn’t mean to recommend Invision and I’m glad you didn’t read it that way. Nothing against them, it’s just my information is way out of date whether I liked them or not. The software was good. I was on their host/demo board and interacted with other customers and some people on the team. Nothing bad to say. I’ve never heard of humhub and Flarum, but again, my information is out of date.

I don’t know much about blogging, micro or otherwise.

I think people were always mean online. But not everyone.

At one point, I was too. It didn’t last long because I had compassion and empathy and it just wasn’t that fun.

Then I easily reacted to vitriol and was easy to manipulate.

These days, I get mean replies or DMs and I just go “huh, okay” and then continue about my day. Stoicism. It may not do anything, but hey, I feel less bad about hate mail.

I think what you want is a private forum. Someone will have to pony up some light server costs, but as long as you aren’t using a lot of bandwidth — you could disable image uploads, and make your users upload to Imgur and the like instead — it shouldn’t be much.

I remember seeing a private forum. It was for the movie Boys Don’t Cry — or rather, the trans man the movie was about. He was a real guy, and he was murdered for being trans. There’s a forum out there (or, there was 20 years ago) and all you can see is the name. You need a password to see anything else. Don’t have that? You’re probably not getting in. It’s a place for his friends and family, and probably some trusted friends they’ve made along the way.

I ran a forum once, about 15 years ago. I think I paid $10 or $20 a year for the dot-com, the URL. And I was paying a company called Invision something like $10 a month for them to host their forum on their server. I had admin access, I could do anything I wanted with it, but I had bandwidth limitations, and I had space limitations. It was fun for a bit. I ran it for almost two years. I wanted out, and a guy on the forum wanted to take it over. I said he could even keep the name, but I wasn’t going to keep paying for the address. I didn’t sell it, I just transferred ownership over. I never got charged again. I didn’t keep visiting it. I heard he shut it down a few months later. It’s not for everyone. If you’re not passionate about running a forum, get someone else to do it for you, and just have them maintain it. You don’t even have to be a mod. You let people apply and you tell your guy who you want to be a mod. He runs it from the shadows, only there to do upgrades. Maybe he posts the rules, too. But doesn’t participate in conversations. Maybe once in a blue moon you see him, but he’s not what you’d call a forum regular. Or he’s a snarky arsehole, I’ve seen admins like that.

You really can’t have a super private Lemmy comm. Not sure about instance. With the comm, you can make it so only approved people can post, but I don’t think you can hide it from everyone by default. That’s not what Lemmy is for, and we’re too small anyway (though, I don’t mean to speak for the people in charge). I think the forum thing might be your best bet.

It’s marketing. Corpos decide what you listen to when you rely on the radio. There’s always a better artist or band than what the radio is playing (or streaming services are highlighting) but they may not fit what the corpos want you to hear.

Couldn’t be me… but some people don’t care that Meta can read their messages. Or they still don’t know but I doubt it.

Mark Zuckerberg has a term for these people…

What bugs me — and Apple Music is guilty of this too — is when I search for an indie or eastern song and it only shows popular results from the west.

Marvis Pro, a feature rich front end for Apple Music, knows my favourite musicians or bands are ONE OK ROCK, Enya, and Nightwish. I don’t want American Top 40 trash. But it still pushes that stuff.

I don’t. I browse /all and block stuff I don’t want to see. Grifters, people who post dick pics outside of gay or penis communities, and other stuff I don’t want to see. I don’t block NSFW but I leave it blurry. Most of the time I don’t want to see it (Demi/Ace) but sometimes I do.

That’s gonna be a hard no.

Unfortunately, for many people that hard no will become a soft no, which will become a maybe, which will become sometimes, and then it’ll be commonplace.

I’m pushing 50. I’m starting to wish I’d been born like 30 years prior. To still witness peak technology, but to dip before the big fall. Rather than having to survive it. I just hope we will.

You got some good answers already, but I feel like what’s missing is “so they can say they did something.” That is, if they do nothing, people complain (like the comment about the Karen who saw nudity on their neighbor’s screen), they have some recourse. “We edit what we can but at the end of the day, you can’t call the police because you looked in your neighbor’s window and saw them watching a porno or a violent movie, it’s no different on the plane, watch your own screen and don’t worry about what others choose to watch.”

To clarify what someone said about countries, if you’re flying to/from the Middle East or Russia, I don’t think you can show anything gay because that’s illegal in those areas. It’s a fight they don’t want.

Yeah, but at least on PC you can block the updates until all your mods update. And IIRC it just breaks scripting stuff like F4SE… for the most part… but a lot of stuff relies on that.

I like how GOG just flat out refused to push the “next gen update” until they fixed their shit or something. Thing is, they never did. Modders told them how to fix it, but apparently it had to be fixed on their end. They never do. Because they don’t care.

Fallout 4 is good until it just stops working. It’s fine on PC but they never got it fully working on Xbox. They still sell it though.

This belongs in a “Leopards Ate My Face” comm. They jacked up the price of the Xbox. They doubled the price of GamePass Ultimate, and most games added to it are just shovelware trash.

Here’s a solution: Add Steam to GamePass Ultimate. What I’m saying is, for $23 a month or whatever it’s down to now, you can use Steam and play all your Steam games that will run on XSX (which should be most of them since it’s an x86-64 platform running a bastardised version of Windows). So you can get a game dirt cheap and play it on Xbox, but you have to pay Xbox monthly. You will still save money! Especially if you have a large Steam library. And not just Steam — add GOG and maybe Epic as well. So basically the platforms that have free games all the time. That would massively boost the value of GamePass, and since an XSX is still cheaper than a gaming PC, would offset the rising price of the console.

But who knows, maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about. Let the Steam Machine come out and eat their lunch.

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/06/09/eu-says-decision-not-to-launch-siri-ai-in-europe-is-apples/

There you go. I saw it on MacRumors yesterday. It’s weird to see Apple stuff on an Android site, but Android Police used to review iPhones when they came out. They’d give them an honest try. Reviews even varied from “decent phone but I loved going back to Android” to “I could use this and be happy but I still prefer Android.” I think they gave them a fair shake.

the physical media only containing some of the game files, requiring a download to play

Fallout 4 did this like a decade ago (and probably wasn’t the first). It came with a DVD that had like 5GB of data. The rest had to be downloaded.

It was a fucky situation because those of us who bought the Pip-Boy Edition but had slow Internet couldn’t play the game on day one, we had to download the whole game when we got the game in the mail. People who paid far less for the digital version were able to preload it and play on day one. I found a torrent for the preload (not the game and not cracked!) and put it on my computer. So when I put the DVD in and entered my code, it went to download it, found the preload, and just signed off on all of it, and I was off to the races. But that wasn’t how Bethesda intended for me to play. They intended for me to have to wait for several hours or the next day to play the game I paid for.

So yeah, nothing new there.

How does it make sense? They call it a Tri Fold but it only folds twice, not three times.

It’s a phone and a tablet in one but costs more than the two of them together, even if the tablets are an iPhone Pro and an iPad Pro.

Make it make sense.