• 19 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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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 actually played a wee bit of 1983’s Crystal Castles (Atari 2600 version) earlier this year when I was trying out emulators 🤣 I loved that game when I was a kid, I get a major nostalgia hit when I play it. I’m sure some of the other games I tested were older still, but that’s the one I remember because I was born in that same year.

    I remembered it being one of the first games I ever played. As I fumbled my way through those first few sessions, I could physically feel my neurons flowering and blooming and creaking to life like a bunch of microscopic mind-rhubarb. It was the beginning of a life-long love of gaming.




  • The ad industry is truly one of the most reprehensible and insidious things humans have ever invited unto themselves. It’s beyond dystopian how much of our ability to move through the world is now contingent on us allowing our brains to be bukkaked with ads that are designed specifically to bypass our rationality and embed themselves in the very fabric of our beings like psychological rootkits.

    I believe conspiracism is the root of all evil. But ads are gaining on conspiracism like they’re Usain Bolt being chased by an angry bee.

    I have to hand it to those soulless fucking devils though, they might have pulled off one of the most brazen but successful mindfucks I’ve ever seen: they convinced lots of people that seeing ads about topics they were interested in was some sort of concession from the ad industry, like they were begrudgingly implementing measures to make ads “relevant” to us, and that we were somehow gaming the system because of it. It was a “win” for us to have the ads being served into our eyeballs and ears be tailor-made for us. “I’m so sick of seeing ads for products I don’t even care about! I wish there was a way to make the ads be relevant to ME” said no cunt ever. But they managed to convinced us that everyone else was saying that, and that we’d won some sort of victory against them to have their advertising have the precision of a sniper rifle, versus what it was before, like some sort of shotgun fired from 150 feet away in the dark.

    An entire species of marks.





  • 58008@lemmy.worldtoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlWhat isn't illegal but should be?
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    2 months ago
    • Lying if you’re a politician. You should be in a state similar to “under oath” in court, but at all times.
    • Advertising. I should have the legal right to not be advertised at. I should have the right to not have to accept advertising in order to access services, especially so if I already pay a subscription to that service. I cannot put into words how much I loath and despise advertising and advertisers. I hate them. Hate, in the real sense of the word.
    • Loot boxes in video games, whatever age group the game in question is aimed at, but especially so in kids’ games.
    • Microtransactions in video games for anything other than non-essential/non-advantageous items, like cosmetics. Even then, their presence should upgrade the PEGI rating to adult/18, regardless of the actual content of the game. This might help prevent their inclusion at all.
    • Whatever the fuck is going on in Gaza right now.
    • Shielding police or soldiers from prosecution for crimes they’ve committed. If you stand in the way of the due process any other citizen would face, you should be heavily penalised for that. Like, the murderer soldiers who carried out Bloody Sunday are currently being protected by the British state and its lackeys, and I cannot fathom why. Cops in the US who murder people are frequently protected by unions and get to retire rather than be fired etc. All of that shit should be illegal. Get the fuck out of the way of due process.
    • Naziism and related nonsense like Holocaust denial. Germany already has laws about this, but that shit needs to be legally smothered in its crib everywhere.
    • Conspiracism surrounding public health issues like vaccines and masks.
    • Climate denial.
    • Slave labour in prisons.
    • Private prisons.
    • PACs and donations to PACs.
    • Lobbying.
    • Joe Rogan.











  • Greatly appreciate the 2FA improvement! I can finally enable it now without locking myself out, which happened every time I tried to enable it previously.

    However, in true Fediverse fashion, they’ve made it 122.6% more complicated than it needs to be. Why contain all of the relevant information in a button pointing to a highly specific protocol? I had to manually copy and paste the button’s URL into Notepad++ and cut the parts I needed from it. Why not just give the secret or a QR code like literally every other implementation of 2FA that has ever existed? I’ve never seen such a button before on any other website when I wanted to switch on 2FA, even on Mastodon they use a QR code and/or the secret key.

    And no backup codes? 🤔

    I sound like a complainy complainer, but I’m genuinely happy/grateful I could enable 2FA. I’m just a n00b who worries about people even n00bier than I am trying to figure it out.

    Cheers!