• 0 Posts
  • 148 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 18th, 2023

help-circle
  • Yeah I know there is a lot of overlap, but there’s also specific ADHD and AuDHD communities.

    My partners have severe ADHD and I am quite confident i do not. I made a multi-community for the various autism spaces across Lemmy, and I wouldn’t mind the occasional ADHD meme mixed in, but it seems like all of them are just flooded with ADHD posts.


  • As silly as this is, licensing was the straw for me.

    In high school, I built my first desktop and pirated Windows XP. In college, i built a PC for both my wife and myself and purchased two Windows 7 licenses really cheap with a student discount. In 2019, my PC died so I built a new one, re-used the license, and saved a lot of the old parts. In 2020 I got my wife a new PC (barely managed to buy the parts as the pandemic was starting).

    So as the pandemic was in full force, I had enough functioning spare parts to make one gaming PC that would have been mid-tier 6 years prior. I put it in our unfinished basement and planned to mostly use it for playing videos or music while I worked out, maybe do some light stuff like personal email or web browsing or light gaming- since I started working remote full-time I didn’t want to spend much time in my office when I wasn’t working anymore.

    So I had to choose an OS for it. Pirate Windows? Buy Windows? At that point I was constantly running into issues with Windows on our machines. Updates forcing themselves on us. My wife’s machine has upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 8 on its own somehow and was pretty terrible until she moved to Windows 10. I had tons of driver issues with the audio interface I used for music production. Windows had been getting slower and less responsive and had been rough on the older hardware. So I installed Mint Cinnamon.

    There’s still a lot of things that are frustrating and annoying. More advanced things that almost no one would ever want to do are way easier, while simple everyday tasks make you jump through hoops. Installing programs from the default repository is great, but good fucking luck if what you want isn’t there. But it performs way better, is way more customizable, doesn’t have the spyware. Works way better with my audio interface.

    Eventually I got an OrangePi and set it up as a Pi-Hole with Debian. I got a steam deck and love it. My wife got a laptop with Windows 11 and hated it so much I set it up to dual-boot Mint Cinnamon too.



  • I played a decent number of games this year, and a lot of games that have huge fan bases. God of War 2018, Bloodborne (my first ever soulslike), Baldur’s Gate 3, Disco Elysium, and more. But the one that keeps gnawing at me is Subnautica

    I remember when it was in early access I watched Markiplier play it, and it piqued my interest enough that it was the first time I ever bought anything in early access. Which is very unusual for me (I think the only other time I’ve done that was Hades, which was also great). I played through as much of the game as there was at the time, or at least as I could find. Which was still mostly in the safe shallows, no deep areas. Still out in a dozen hours or so and was satisfied given the price so I moved on.

    In 2024 i recommended it to my wife, who loves marine biology and base building games. She, in turn loved the game and I watched her play through it. I got to see all of the deep areas. After watching her play it and the DLC I got the itch to go back to it, so I started a new file in late 2024.

    By mid-January 2025 I was about halfway through that file. My wife visiting her friend in another city, so I had the house to myself, I think I took some PTO too. Single-digit temperatures Farenheit outside. My wife had taken our only car, so I was loaded up with plenty of weed, drinks, food, and snacks. So I had a few days to focus and finish that first file. I had such a great time I did something else I almost never do: I immediately started a new file to play it again. While I had so much fun, I also learned so much and had so many ideas of what I could have done better. Better places to build based, exploring in a different order, knowing all the great spots to farm resources and get blueprints and everything.

    So I played through again. The soundtrack is phenomenal synthwave that perfectly suits the game, but by the time I had built my cyclops and was ready to plunge down into the depths I was also ready for a new soundtrack. I put on one of my favorite albums, which is also one of the most appropriate: Oceanic, by Isis.

    I strongly recommend this to anyone who likes Isis or Subnautica. Just absolutely sublime. It’s like peanut butter and chocolate.



  • AI has slop is a problem, and Shovelware has been a problem for decades, basically as long as videogames have existed.

    However, a LOT of these cheap and obscure games on steam have more innocuous explanations, with that explanation often being “the dev doesn’t really care about making money”. Perception, for example, is a student project that was released for free and I wouldn’t pay much for anyways, but it was a fun way to spend a couple of hours.

    Or when I was in a band, one of the other members was a developer by trade who, as a hobby, connects with a couple of his other friends to develop game that he released on steam. I recorded and produced an EP for that band and we released it for free and we certainly spent more money buying drinks at the bars we played than we were ever paid for playing. I think his game was similar: they charged money for it to cover some of their costs, but he certainly never left his day job.

    Or Mind Over Magnet, which was the project of the YouTuber GamerMakersToolkit. The whole thing was a multi-year project where the guy made videos covering the game development process and culminated in the release of the game. The actual business model was based on the video content, while the game itself was just a side piece that was probably profitable, but I doubt made enough profit for him to survive on for years.




  • This can result in support for hardware and software being upwards of two to three YEARS out of date. Which for gamers for example is unacceptable and causes issues more often then not.

    I think your perspective might be a bit biased towards your own bubble here. People are still buying Nintendo Switch’s. People are still buying Steam Decks.

    I am getting close to 600 games in my Steam Library, but only 2 were released this year. Both were Indie games (Fragrance Point and Tower Wizard).

    Ram is costing hundreds of dollars. GPU’s are costing thousands. Desktop gaming, heck desktop ownership in general, has been falling off. If people are still on x86, they are more likely to be on laptops.

    For the average person, the idea that you need your OS to be updated every couple of weeks so that you can check your email and play Minecraft with your kids is insane.



  • Laundry detergent. The detergent instructions, coming from a biased manufacturer, will always tell you to use waaaaay too much in order to encourage consuming more. They stuff them with scents so that you can tell they are working and have a constant reminder with you about your purchasing decision. It’s bad for the washing machine- residues stick around and can clog things up and cause moving parts to wear out faster. In fact, washing machine manufacturers often recommend running loads of towels without adding any detergent a few times regularly just to clean out the excess.

    I could always feel it on my skin and feel suffocated by it. When I lived in an apartment, most of the rest of the building was from some Caribbean country and used some expticly scented detergent in the shared laundry machines, so unless I wanted to spend time and money to run empty cycles I had to just deal with it. I’m so grateful now to have a house with my own machines that only see my own, unscented, detergent and in reasonable amounts. And it gets cleaning cycles regularly.


  • It’s a real shame that bigots have historically used “it” to de-humanize people.

    Personally I use male pronouns because it’s easy and obvious and I don’t really care enough. I don’t love constantly identifying with a gender. But I also don’t want to be identified as plural. And yeah, I know that singular ‘they’ has been around for hundreds of years, but you can also find grammar authorities speaking out against it for hundreds of years. For exchanging information efficiently, I think single vs plural is a much more important distinction in our modern world than which gender someone identifies as.

    I wish I could identify as “it” without freaking people out. I also wish people respected objects, without having to give them gendered pronouns or faces or human names to do so.

    I respect all my they/them homies, including one of my partners, but it seems to me like a linguistic bandaid on a bad system.



  • I don’t like graphic tees, for several reasons. I don’t like the feeling of printed fabric kn my skin. I also swear, no matter how many times someone claims “we looked everywhere and are proud to say we found t-shirts that actually feel good!” The shirts never have as good of a material or cut as the generic ass solid color t-shirts I get. Seeing the print slowly start to crack and fall off over time makes me sad. I don’t like the visual stimulation of a bunch of text or graphics or busy patterns.

    Finally, having something, especially words, on my shirtt feels like I’m trying to start a conversation with the world. For a lot of people, t-shirts are a way to signal their interest and that they WANT random strangers to come up and talk to them about it. It allows people to form a community. And I absolutely do not want that. I don’t care if we listen to the same band: I don’t want to stop and chat with some random stranger as I’m walking around.

    I can’t stand hoodies. The weight on the neck is weird. I have long hair that makes hoods a pain. I don’t even like pullovers- I prefer to have something that zips or buttons or is just open in the front.

    I hate having my forearms covered. Always rock a rolled up sleeve when I have to wear buttoned shirts.


  • Personally the only time I turn it off is if I am putting it in the case. Even then if it’s just a 15 minute car ride to a friend’s house I might just leave it on.

    It’s also rare for me to go more than 2 days without playing it, and I mostly play around my house where I have USB cables around to plug it in if need be, so battery isn’t a huge concern. In fact I usually have the battery saving feature set to limit it to 80% charge.

    The only reason I really turn it off in the case is our if heat concerns, and I suspect that’a just me being over protective. I guess the other thing is that there could be security and privacy concerns from carrying around a device with WiFi and/or Bluetooth on.


  • There’s a lot of other issues, especially with newer content, but I have found that watching movies with headphones helps.

    Over the summer we use window AC units which are quite loud, so we finally decided to ignore our expensive speakers and I bought a cheap headphone amplifier with 4 independently controlled outputs, plus some Bluetooth adapters for when they are needed.

    The downside is that our ADHD friends like to be able to talk during movies and the setup makes that difficult. But other than that it’s great.





  • I hope you’re able to get that alone time soon, and I wish you the best of luck in hanging on until then!

    Alone time is something that’s been on my mind quite a bit recently. It seems like I’m the only person I know irl who actively seeks out time alone. Most people i know seem to dread the prospect.

    I hear people use phrases like “I am stuck in my head” or “being around other people helps me get out of my head”. To me, the idea of your own head being something so bad that you want to avoid is horrifying. For as long as I can remember, I’ve always loved having time alone to organize my thoughts and like, do maintenance on my mind. To review memories, get them all organized and solidified in my head. To try to evaluate myself as objectively as possible. To directly confront ugly and painful thoughts and work through them. To update my impressions of other people. To make predictions and forecasts as best as I can, to mentally prepare for things. Not as in psychic visions or anything like that, but like a chess player tries to predict the opponents moves. Stuff like “I got invited to my friend’s Halloween party, but he’s also friends with this guy I don’t like, so there’s a good chance he will be there too. I better be prepared to be civil and neutral and try to avoid him”, which is way better than just showing up and being surprised.

    Alone time has been hard for me to come by the last few months too, and I can feel it. It’s like I’m floating, disconnected from reality. I’m being reactive rather than proactive in my life. I’m normally known for having a great memory, but lately I’ve been forgetting things or worse, incorrectly remembering things. I have always been aware of the fallability of all human memory and tried not to rely on mine too much, but I e been disappointing myself lately. I’ve started journaling to try to structure what alone time I have, to be more effecient, and to have a record to use to help my memory. I’m not sure if it’s working.

    I’m curious to hear about yours, or any other people’s experiences.