Nice to know I can finally cancel Prime though. The entire value proposition has now gone. Free shipping is hugely conditional (and prices are artificially jacked to cover it in the first place), and now they want to put the worst thing on the internet (ads) into the only component of Prime I still sorta kinda use sometimes. I’d rather keep the $140 a year or whatever.
I’m gonna have kids just so I can make sure to raise them on the correct media diet. They’re getting all the classic video game consoles, in order of generation, so when they get to something like Elden Ring they have the context all the way back to Space Invaders to appreciate it. And we’re going to be a home of physical media, god damn it. We’re not streaming things. We’re putting CD’s and vinyls and blu rays in their respective players. No iPads. Only books, comics, coloring books and notebooks.
How the fuck did parents start giving their kids iPads, anyway? Nintendo Switches? My first Gameboy cost $90 and I bought it with my own birthday money. A children’s book from a young reader series cost $6 new in the 90s and is probably not much worse now. Less, if you buy it used, which is much easier now. And people are just like, “here, my 12 year old child, have an Xbox Series whatever, and an iPad, and a Galaxy phone. They’re all pre-connected to your YouTube account. Don’t let your other parent know that I told you that for Christmas we’re getting you a gaming PC, Logitech C920, condenser microphone, wireless headset, gaming chair, scissor arm, and LED lighting array so you can chase the completely impossible dream of being a professional streamer. Can I kiss your feet while I’m at it? Will that make this a good half-birthday for you?” Unfuckingthinkable. Knock it off.
Zillow, who had aBsOLuTeLy NoTHiNg tO Do WiTh ThEsE pRiCeS now has some thoughts on it huh
Only an aspiring Trekkie over here. Can you explain this line? I don’t follow.
I think you know very well I would never engage with this possibility as a means of self preservation. Good day sir!
Forgive me, sire; I hadn’t $80,000 to spend on a luxury truck.
You fuck.
Then I mean a later year because my girlfriend and I each own X1s from around that time which we bought on eBay. Mine, I believe, was listed as a 2018. Hers is a year newer. So those figures might need budged but I do not mean a T480.
Unless you’re just recommending a T480 over an X1, in which case, I apologize for stepping all over your punchline.
Preowned ThinkPad. You can get a 2018 or so X1 Carbon for $400 or less on eBay.
“Threatening”.
Threatening to make that place a lot cooler, sounds like.
Researching the situation regarding work visas…
Objectivity in reporting is a nice goal when you’re trying to write objective journalism. But this dude clearly wrote an opinion piece. It literally says “you shouldn’t” in the headline. That sort of thing can’t be objective, and it would look embarrassing if it tried. Objectivity for objectivity’s sake regardless of context is not really sensible. What you’re asking for is a fact sheet, not something written by a person because that person believes a thing.
That being said, I’ll give it to you: it wasn’t an especially good op-ed piece. It would’ve been better if he elaborated some of the stuff he said. But that just means he’s got some work to do as a writer, not that his crime was ‘not being objective enough’.
Anything that is, or once was affiliated with Gawker / GMG is, in its current state, a cringe-inducing, shambling husk of whatever it once was. My muscle memory still directs me to a number of those blogs and everyday I recoil at what has become of them.
Just speculating here. And building off some half-remembered On The Media pieces. But as (for any number of reasons) the faith in a social platform collapses (and often the safeguards against toxic stuff go down too, a la Twitter), people with a low tolerance for that shit are likeliest to bail and the ‘call people the N word on Xbox’ folks are likeliest to stay behind. People who could watch what Reddit did and stay behind aren’t bad, I’m not saying that, but their tolerance for unethical stuff is way higher than the tolerance of those who decided to find a new home. Self-selection, ya know.
I still type shitty things. But then I stop and rephrase in a more human way.
Sucks for me. I use iOS (I’m sorry) and that’s the original reason I got YouTube Red (back then): they make iOS users pay for background playback. Most of my YT consumption is documentary / essay / spoken word stuff so I need that feature to treat it like a podcast player, basically. Most of the rest of my YT consumption is in my living room, where ad blocking isn’t an option (and I hear even if it was, they’re catching up fighting ad blockers).
I hate the Web 2.0 “enshitification” of platforms, and I hate advertisements, and I’m willing to pay for a good, useful service. But this is a mixed bag. It’s still ‘enshitified’ because most of what it serves me is algorithmic and nothing to do with the hundreds of channels I’ve subscribed to over the 13 years I’ve had this particular account. It’s still chock full of ads because videos do sponsor blocks these days.
And the worst of it is they’ve got you by the balls and there’s really nothing stopping them from being Netflix and just continuing to raise and raise the price. I was an OG Netflix Instant Streaming for Xbox 360 user…years later when they finally booted me off my own family plan, we were paying like…$23 a month? For what had at that point become the worst video service? What stops YouTube from bumping up to $19.99/mo a couple years from now? It’s the only game in town.
OH and they’re also selling all your metrics. That’s the other thing. If I’m paying (through the nose) for a service, it shouldn’t be double-fucking me by selling predictive measures of who I am and what I care about to filthy fucking “advertisers” (for-profit behavior manipulators).
YouTube (like every last piece of Web 2.0) was fun while it lasted. But it is now barely better than worthless.
Spotify has higher bitrate files than YT Music.
We have strayed so far from God