Pay off some debts and the remaining 20k I’d put half stored up for covering running costs for a year or two, lessening our household stress for a bit and help us save up or just live a bit more, and another half I’d invest in homelab and some infra I’ve been holding off on due to lack of funds, hoping it might start paying dividends on my side projects / gigs eventually and pay itself back with more besides. So it wouldn’t give much, but it’d be big mental health boon for a few years

Voting for a third party is only valid if a movement, a real one, forms around it. It will never work if it only siphons votes out of the dem bucket and lets republicans to kind of win by default. It has to have real momentum, real commitments, have visibility and voice across the states, so everyone will know they will not be just giving the republicans the win, rather, committing together as a big one, to something better. Even better if the various ideologically motivated but distinct camps within republicans would join the effort. Libertarians are the classic example, but I bet if things get momentum and it looks like the two parties are simply getting fractured either way, a lot of people will jump on the chance to get actual real representation and voice, not just a small camp within a big ambiguous mess the two parties kind of force.

So instead of just voting for a third option and wasting your vote in the current system, organizing would be the real answer, the prerequisite for the third options to be valid. And it’s not that complicated, just needs to get viral and real commitments

Kungfu panda and planescape: torment.

Should be interesting

Very similar process here. I’ve yet to block anyone as far as I remember, but I see red tags, I know to scroll past and ignore. Or if I see it in a thread I’m reading, I know not to engage if it’s bad faith or clearly just unpleasant, even if I have to read it to understand what follows. Wherever I see green or blue, I’ll stop and read even if it seems uninteresting, because those are the people that have proven insightful and empathetic or whatever else it was that made me tag. I usually write the description too in the tags.

Perhaps worth noting though, I’m not sure these tags are a built in lemmy or equivalent feature, or rather a client thing. I use voyager if someone’s interested.

But isn’t it kind of a game of chicken then for the consumer markets? Whoever gambles the other way, can win in both volume and availability, being able to cut the others off market just by pricing, enabled by the prior two points, get brand points by the ladle while at it, and kind of become a staple of the consumer market. When the bubble pops and others return, the market isn’t the same and everyone else sits at a disadvantage?

Yeah, I mean, we were doing things just fine before it. Getting through “an entire workday”? I mean yeah, it’s a challenge, but any LLM or lack of one plays no part in that. Mostly out of touch middle managers and the sales people.

I’m just now realizing there’s a very clear shared quality between those and LLMs…

It isn’t always rational. Sometimes it just comes up in the moment and you go with it.

Either way, the bare minimum to do is talk it through after and see how it impacts everyone in the mix, and address that. The worst to do is not to say anything and hide it until it breaks someone.

I have a habit of openly talking about this kind of thing with my partners. I’ve been in poly relationships and I’ve learnt to talk about all this without emotion taking over, but I still understand the taboo and kind of weird gut reactions to these things people have. So I often like to explain that if things happen in the moment and just kind of pass, that’s okay: but it goes both ways, and I hope they’ll at least try to be understanding if it ever happens to me too and talk it through.

It’s exactly as awkward and kind of “fragile” to talk about the first time over, as you’d expect. But once out there in the open, I hope it gives us confidence and trust to talk freely. To this day I’ve always managed to control myself and break off the fling when it happens, but one day I might not and I think it’s okay. For them too. Life throws us shit and we aren’t really prepared for all of it. And sometimes it throws sweet stuff and it’d be a shame not to indulge if it really is that strong a moment. In mono relationships that is. In poly or free it’s just much easier about all this. But tougher on some other things, like sharing time and learning to accept and deal with not being the sole focus and not keeping a sole focus yourself.

I haven’t had any reason to believe any of my exes would’ve cheated, and I feel like we’d have all been comfortable enough to talk about it if it ever happened. Neither have I broken anyone’s trust once earned and kept.

But things happen and I’m not going to pretend to be immune somehow. World is chaotic and unpredictable and fucking beautiful.

Even if I don’t personally agree with all of the ideology behind the lemmy devs, at least they are ideologically posed to keep the thing open, for the people, by the people. I respect that. A lot, in fact.

Piefed, on the surface, seems a lot less principled, and seems to also attract the non-leftist types by default, perhaps as some kneejerk reaction to the lemmy devs’ ideology. As a rule of thumb that sounds just outright worse to me, as a user, even if it seems not to impact much yet.

This is just me, as a political and ideological layperson, following my fragile principles. I might be betting wrong in doing so, but then again, might be right too. Either way, they work much the same and talk the same protocol, so it seems to me it’s just a choice of principle.

Either will work. Just thought I’d share my two cents.

I don’t know many personally that choose the installment contracts, but I can see it can be convenient for some. But “you don’t own it” only applies to that case, which from my point of view, seems the rarer case than just you know, buying it.

It’s inexcusable, too, but pales in comparison of what the Russian side is quite literally doing, as in, invading a neighboring country, while doing the very same thing you highlight Ukraine does, but in larger degree. At least the Ukrainian side can be understood (though never accepted) as desperation from trying to defend yourself against a much larger invader. Russia still doesn’t have any excuses, they are the aggressor and the invader.

We can both-sides every little thing here, and agree that neither side is flawless, nobody in war ever is, but the main point stands: The one is pillaging and raping a sovereign country, the other is trying to defend against that.

It might even be intentional cultural and ethical cleansing, by disproportionally sending out the non-white non-“Russian” population to the meat grinder…

Yeah, I think this is something that ever gets truly registered in the naivety and confidence of a young adult’s mind, once it bites you in a consequential way.

Can’t talk for everyone here, but I definitely shared the hubris once, the lack of perspective, once upon a time when I was in my 20s. Based on all the late evenings spent recollecting past lives with so many different people through the years, I think it’s just being human, a shared experience, a trial of fire for adulthood, if you will.

To op: Worth listening to everyone here. It might not feel justified or reasonable to you now, but you might consider that all that might come from a place of experience and goodwill.

I have to say, this is so strangely captivating, I can’t stop looking at it honestly! Weirdly in sync between the two very different approaches! I have zero idea why this is so enthralling but I couldn’t just scroll away without explicitly voicing my confused enjoyment, so peculiar

Bad analogy perhaps. But I mean, sometimes games are shit, but look good, and people buy them due to that. Then the sale is made, even if the game is shit.

Perhaps the smell thing was off, but the sofa breaking right after buying or having sharp spikes under the mattress that poke you if you sit wrong, would not work because things like sofas have warranty for those kind of things. I’d bet smell wouldn’t pass so easily there.

Anyway, point was, good games need not look so pretty and “modern”. Bad games can entice you to buy even if they are bad, if they look good enough. Nothing deeper than that

The more the hardware capabilities and our expectations rise, so does the outright complexity of making the games. I’m sure some of us would be fine with less ”bleeding-edge” games if they were otherwise written and designed great, but I think it makes sense, from publisher’s perspective, to hedge the bets and try to also impress with the fidelity of presentation.

If you are looking for a sofa and find one that smells a bit off but is otherwise functional, comfortable and looks nice, you might think you’d be able to live with the smell and buy it.

You almost certainly won’t and will likely regret the choice, but the sale was made and it’s a whole thing to do returns for something so big and hard to transport and move around.

That’s what you want to go for, even if you think it might smell fine. If it looks good enough, it might nor matter if it happened to smell rank ultimately. Numbers must go up!

Wasn’t my intent to undervalue it. Just noting that the strangers for example, could’ve happened to anyone, those times it just happened to be me. I am privileged in that alone, but the privilege isn’t or wasn’t inherent or special to me, just pure chance.

Which is to say, it could and can happen to anyone. Which is the point I wanted to raise, I think. Life and world is chaotic. Nobody’s excluded or fully shielded from good luck. Nor bad shit. Some might have more things going for them one way or the other, but nothing in this chaos entirely discounts anyone, ever.

But these were weird ramblings from me, I tried (and failed) to make a point and be coherent. I’m not an authority to listen to here, not really sure where the confidence came to present myself as such in these comments.

I get where you are coming from, and fair enough, but I strongly feel it’s more sensible not to mirror this through the worst possible scenario, but the average one.

Either way you make more sense here than I, through a more empathetic and understanding lense, and ultimately I’m not sure what it is exactly I intended to convey with all this back and forth.

Maybe just that things are not always as hopeless as they seem, and if a thing feels out of reach, at the time, unachievable, doesn’t always make it so, or mean it’ll always be so.

But the “all you need is some elbow grease” pathos I’m really not sure where that came from, I didn’t intend it to sound that way, but reading back, that’s what my responses sound like.

Oh well. As long as we dare to dream and hope, we are still alive. And as long as we are alive, it’s never too late for anything, however unlikely or distant they may seem.

In that sense, everyone is and can be lucky. It’s not like you know or feel, at the time, that things would ever improve. Things feel final. It never feels like you’ll get another chance at life.

Yet, most do. I was lucky in that it never took years. But even those seemingly stuck, tens of years on the street, can always get a chance, be it luck or resolve. Or both. I suppose luck means nothing if you don’t have the resolve to seize the chance and do something with it.

All to say, with some resolve, and yes, luck, having your own roof over your head is not a far shot, it’s the genuine common case for most everyone. Maybe it takes time and work, and luck, and will, but there’s no place in world where it wasn’t generally the average person’s situation, as in, more likely than not.

Oh I’ve been homeless, couch-surfed and unemployed with clinical depression that recurs even today, driving those periods of my life.

But I’ve found my footing each time with a bit of resolve and bad enough situation to eventually accrue and warrant the resolve. And luckily, friends and empathetic strangers.

But I live in the 1st world and have also had a family to help and overall safe and helpful society to fall back on, even when I’ve fucking lost the map, not even able to kill myself due to my cowardice, no place to stay, ashamed to ask for help for months at end.

So I know a little, the hard way, about not having a home. Not even the one the op has with their parents.

But I also know, the hard way here too, that it’s only about surviving long enough to accumulate enough resolve to figure things out. If you outlast the call of the void and the shame and despair and the uncertainty of even things like where to sleep this night, can I manage something to eat, etc. then it ultimately works out, with enough resolve.

And when it doesn’t, it doesn’t matter anymore. Losing the resolve is either answering the void or giving up and accepting the bleak situation, until you one day either retry with resolve, or join eternity.

Right. But in much of the world the average wage would be sufficient to cover a home. Not that one should if they can co-live with family or friends, but seeing as op desires their own home the most (the thread), I would assume they’d choose not to. Which comes back to usually being able to “just get one” if one really wants that. Unless they have no income. But almost always that’s a problem that can be solved with enough resolve, disabilities and such notwithstanding.

All to say, if one’s own home is the dearest wish one has, that’s, in vast majority of cases, entirely doable. Which is to say, the dream will come true in this case, with some work and resolve. Unlike some of the other dreams here. Which is an amazing thing, and a hopeful one for the op, which I was trying to highlight to them