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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • You know, I was really sick and tired when they updated the nvidia shield with the new android TV version that makes most of the screen show stuff that are basically ads. It didn’t even let me show only stuff I was interested in and this constant “oh you are hovering over this item for 0.000001s so you seem to be interested in this, let me start the video for you with audio” no god damnit I was reading something else or got a text.

    I had to install a different launcher so that I could only show on the screen what I actually wanted to see. I have basically removed or reduced all ads as much as I ca.

    Lately, I was at my parents place and they don’t have that stuff. Even the 1.5 minutes of ads for a free service is so disruptive to me watching something.

    What has this to do with PlayStation?

    Well, on the shield you are still able to install a custom launcher that is more to your liking, you could disable the internet access and completely stream your own local content. But on the PS, you don’t have that option and are completely at the mercy of what they think you should watch and see on your screen that you bought with a console that you also bought with your own money.


  • Short answer: Because their motivation is to win!

    I read something about this in the Book “Introduction to Game Design, Prototyping, and Development: From Concept to Playable Game With Unity and C#” by Jeremy Gibson a while ago, maybe that can explain this a bit.

    Basically, every Player has some Intention or the “Player Intent” which is described by the Personality Types of Richard Bartle. For example, you have:

    • The Achiever who seeks to get the highest score in the game and wants to dominate it
    • The Explorer who seeks to find all the hidden places in the game and wants to understand the game
    • The Socializer wants to play the game with friends and wants to understand other players
    • The Killer who wants to provoke other players and wants to dominate them

    And then you have two others that you will be encountering:

    • The Cheater who only cares about winning and does not care about the integrity of the Game and they will bend or break the rules to win
    • The Spoilsport who doesn’t care about winning or about the game but rather will break the game to ruin the other player’s experience

    So, the motivation to “cheat” could either be that this player doesn’t really care about the game, is able to get away with cheating and just wants to beat the game. According to Jeremy Gibson, a cheater might not cheat if they can win legitimately but I would argue that cheaters are usually not great players in the first place so the bar would be pretty low for them to “win legitimately”.

    As for the spoilsport, this is extremely hard to work against or prevent because the motivation isn’t about the game anymore but other players, to make their experience miserable so that the spoilsport can gain satisfaction from it. Hence also the use of “don’t feed the trolls”.

    With that being said, when you ask why someone would cheat, the question would rather be “What is their motivation” and the answer to that is “to win the game, at all costs”. And, most of the time, they will get away with this because they apparently cannot be caught as quickly as they can still continue doing it, if there is any action against them at all.


  • Mountain Man: 10 Books by Keith C. Blackmore. Basically, the Zombie Apocalypse happens and a Dude tries to survive alone, physically, mentally and emotionally while also trying to go on supply runs, running into Zombies and generally trying to stay alive while coping with everything. I think it would be good to have some other zombie-related Series that isn’t The Walking Dead.

    Expeditionary Force: 18 Books by Craig Alanson. Earth and Humanity are attacked by Hamster Aliens, another alien Race, Lizards, who attack the hamsters saving Earth in the process and then recruiting Humanity into a war on a galactic scale but the Hamsters aren’t the real enemy of Humanity. I’m only at the end of the 5th Audiobook but they are great and I would really wish Skippy is voiced by the Audiobook Narrator R.C. Bray in a TV adaption.

    Kyralia series: Been a while since I read it but a fantastic series related to magic By Trudi Canavan, I think there are just not enough good Magic-related Shows.

    Tales of the Otori: A 5-Book Series by Lian Hearn is set in a fictional feudal Japan. The Main story follows a Boy, Takeo, through his life to avenge his adoptive father and escape the legacy of his biological father. Probably the only series in which I had to put down the book at one point and just had to process what was happening.


  • I tried it but it doesn’t seem to work for me correctly or maybe I am doing something wrong. I patch the YouTube app and install it but as soon as I close and open it, all the changes made by the patch are apparently gone. Shorts that are hidden on the first start after the patch are visible again, ads seem to be reduced but still happen occasionally.

    I disabled the default YouTube app, gave the patched version a different name, disabled auto update, repatched it but nothing seems to stick after opening it again.

    And then the whole “I have to download the apk so that I can use it” because I don’t have rooted my phone is just inconvenient.

    I stick with my yt-dlp server and Plex instead.


  • It goes even beyond that.

    With a dedicated app, you go into the store and install it and then you have it in your apps that you then can place everywhere.

    With a website, you need to have the browser, navigate to that website each time. And yes, you could put a link to that website on your home screen as well but not many user are probably aware of that being an option.

    I know that but I still would prefer a dedicated app because it is easier to manage and use more features of my phone. For example, I just tried it on my android phone and the link to a website always opened a new tab in my Firefox.

    Then I can manage the notifications of that app depending on what I want it to notify me about.

    I can’t do that specifically for a single app or website in a browser.

    On the other hand, I also wouldn’t want to miss a website because I am not always on my phone and, in some cases, it is way more annoying to do something over the phone because I am just not used to it (like writing this comment). Doing that over a website version that I can access on my PC is much easier and convenient.


  • I think that it is healthy for a discussion or an argument to have both positive and negative points of view. I also will voice my opinion regardless of the standpoint of the initial question.

    However, this also depends on the context. I won’t go into each thread and post something negative just because I don’t like the post or thread. But if someone is asking for an opinion then they should expect that the opinion of others might not be positive or align with their own opinion at all.

    I always hate to see those “yes” posts in which every criticism is being downvoted or “banned” but I also hate to see those rants/vent posts just for the circlejerk of hate or negativity.


  • I don’t know where I read it but IIRC religion is being used as a simple answer to very difficult and possibly uncomfortable questions: why are we here and what is our purpose?

    It is fairly easy to believe that something, a god, created us instead of that the existence of humanity was just a fluke, a stroke of luck enabling us to evolve were we are now because it is just easier to grasp even if it is proven. That we evolved from simple beings into more complex organisms instead of just “being created”. Evolution creates so many quite difficult questions that it is easier to understand and believe that someone just wanted us to exist.

    When someone is believing in a religion they also always have some form of " it won’t be over" scenario like when you die, there is nothing truly “the end”. You just won’t vanish and this can be terrifying for many because the following question could be, what sense does it make to live at all when our existence is just so insignificant in comparison to everything else?

    So, in short, it is an easy too to make sense of things that almost everyone can understand it.

    Unfortunately, things like this can and will be abused.



  • A lot of anime are produced with a single season that can run for only 12 episodes with 25 minutes each including intro and outro.

    Some of those more popular ones do get further seasons but not on a yearly basis but there could be years between them. In case of konosuba the first season came out in 2016 with 10 episodes and second season in 2017 also with 10 episodes. Season 3 only released this year so quite a long gap between them.

    However, the really popular ones are fairly overshadowing the general amount of shows being released. Just this season we got 54 new anime releases and 29 “continuing” according to MAL.

    Some of those seasons are really strong like the spring season of this year in which a lot of very popular shows are released. Other seasons could then be fairly slow.

    And since they are all produced to promote the source material that source material has to differentiate itself from the rest and draw people in quickly through the title. So you get titles like

    • How Heavy Are The Dumbbells You Lift?
    • God’s Blessing on This Wonderful World!
    • Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?
    • Reborn as a Vending Machine, I Now Wander the Dungeon

    Especially the isekai (transported to another world) genre relies heavily on that to quickly explain what you can expect.

    And then you shouldn’t forget that this is only that visible because more and more anime are actually making their way onto other platforms for the western audience.


  • Connectivity or rather the lack of it…

    I have a Samsung TV and recently got a new cooling fan and now when I start the fan when my TV is on, it says it detected a new device. I don’t know what my TV would want with a fan maybe control the speed for more immersion?

    But there is also no way for me to disable that. I also got regular requests of my neighbor’s to connect to my TV until I disabled the notification for it. No, I couldn’t disable that my TV doesn’t even allow it to be seen, I had to enable to not automatically connect devices and disable that notifications are being shown. That thing isn’t even connected to the internet.



  • I think the biggest problem that people have with NGE is that it just isn’t your typical shounen anime. All of the characters behave in a way because of their past experiences. Shinji being abandoned by his father, witnessing his mother’s death without actually understanding or realising it, asuka being neglected by her mother and Rei being a clone. And all of them in their teens, in a broken world getting told to fight and probably die or humanity is doomed.

    With how saturated anime are with flawed main characters that then use that flaw to their advantage to overcome their enemy, NGE just doesn’t do that.

    I think that viewers just expect this hero story when they watch it.

    I mean. I had a similar impression when I first watched it a long long time ago and thought that shinji was a wuss. But that was after I watched the typical shounen, DB, DBZ, Naruto and bleach. Not to mention that I didn’t understand what the fuck was going on. Only later after watching it a second time and digging into the background a bit, shinjis Oedipus complex, asukas hedgehog dilemma and the general motivation of each of the characters it made a lot more sense. Including the context of their situation made me appreciate the storytelling a lot more because it put everything into perspective.


  • Well, I can only speak from my own experience.

    When the PS5 launched I wanted to upgrade but you literally couldn’t get it because it wasn’t in stock anywhere. You could only find it on eBay of some private seller that started at almost double the price, no, thank you. Then Sony introduced this “Register and on the next event you get a slot to buy one from the official Website” which was great. I got invited the first time and literally couldn’t buy it because the website was broken. Whenever I wanted to select my payment method the checkout got blank and there was nothing you could do. Even worse was that you couldn’t hard refresh the shop because this would have killed the session that the website needed to allow you to buy it. So, even switching browsers with the same “invitation link” didn’t work. I reported this to the support, but they didn’t really care. half a year later, I got my second invitation link and the same happened then as well. I reported it again to the support, but they still didn’t know what to do with that information or wanted to troubleshoot this.

    And now, there isn’t really a need for it anyway. The Games that I would have wanted to buy on the PS5 released on the PC.




  • I would recommend watching the video…

    What you say is “easy” is great for a comment on Reddit or Lemmy but it doesn’t really provide anything to the actual problem.

    The problem is that a company “just” doesn’t, why would they do this anyway? It would open their IP to be forked, modified and used for something else by someone else. That isn’t what they want you to do.

    Since there is no incentive and no one is forcing them to do this they just keep doing whatever they want. It was mentioned in the video that there is absolutely no regulation or anything in that regard available ANYWHERE in the world, not even in the EU.

    THIS is what the video and Ross Scott want to achieve, that there either will be regulations for it so that Game developers and Publishers can’t just create games with some mandatory server backend running that is shut down in a couple of years OR that there is at least some way of saying “well, we don’t care” so that the consumer can actually do anything about it on their own end.

    So it is easy to say they “just” have to do X or Y but the past and the increasing games relying on things like this have shown that they won’t do anything about it because nothing is stopping them.