Stovetop

Give me the outcome of The Good Place as well where you can choose oblivion after there’s nothing left to do.

San Junipero was one of the few “happy” episodes of Black Mirror but it didn’t ask the question of “where are we in 10,000 years?” like The Good Place considered.

Facebook/Instagram (Meta) is one I am not sure how to get a read on. They are branching out a lot, but I have no idea what they’re doing to remain profitable. It seems like they’re in “Throw everything at the wall and see what sticks” mode, hoping that they find a new niche before their sizable warchest from the 2010’s runs dry.

They severely downsized once this year already and I have a feeling that won’t be the end of the story. Wouldn’t surprise me if they sell off/shut down Oculus in the near future.

Tiktok, meanwhile…well it’s already undergoing enshittification (it is the subject of that original essay) and old people are starting to use it, so I feel like it’s only a matter of time before it’s no longer cool with kids and they lose a sizable chunk of their revenue stream and content.

A feature similar to RES, maybe one that pulls from your subscriptions, would be nice. Start typing the name of a community and it suggests some autofill options formatted in a way that folks from other instances can click on it easily.

Just to add onto this good answer, you are really only expected to tip for sit-down restaurants with service and bars.

For takeout, cafes, fast food, etc., you don’t need to tip. A lot of places these have payment machines that just ask if you want to tip by default. You can safely hit “No tip” on these if you don’t want to.

Ostensibly it’s just to replace the tip jar for those who don’t use cash, but the prompt appearing every time you pay by card has convinced a lot of people that tipping is what you’re supposed to do in those situations, when in reality you have no obligation to.

Probably close to 20 years ago at this point, when visiting the official forums for a game I loved, my computer was infected by malware delivered by a malicious ad. This was not some seedy part of the internet, but a website hosted by a major game publisher whose product I enjoyed.

Try as I might, I could not revert the damage caused by the virus, so the only recourse I had was to just blank slate wipe it clean and start over.

Today, I acknowledge that most websites more tightly control the ads they host, but the trust is forever broken. As soon as the option became available to me, I installed the best adblocker I could find and never looked back. No exceptions.

The truth is that every ad is malicious, to small degrees. They want to commodify your eyeballs and take up space in your mind. They’re trying to create a need where one does not exist, and will use whatever tactic they can to try to part you from your hard-earned money. They’re a barrier between you and the content you want to enjoy—in many cases content that you paid to enjoy.

Even if it’s in the name of supporting a website/service I enjoy, I can’t confidently turn off my ad blocker anymore. It only takes one malicious ad to sneak through the cracks to cause disaster.

There has got to be a better way of running an online business without having to completely fill the space with ads.

Baseless speculation here, but my gut tells me that Microsoft is going to put a remaster-focused studio to task on a current-gen Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim triple pack, a la the Master Chief Collection, to tide people over.

Remastering Skyrim is the easy way out, but Oblivion is still trapped on the 360 (if you don’t have a PC) and Morrowind is the darling title of the franchise that people would love to see remastered (and was recently used as an example by Nvidia on “how to remaster a game”). Remaster the earlier two and then just shove the Xbox One copy of Skyrim Anniversary Edition in there for funsies is something people would get behind, more than just another port of Skyrim alone.

Consoles are by far the best bang for your buck right now in terms of performance vs cost. A decent GPU alone today costs as much as a PS5/Series X. Unless you need a powerful desktop for other purposes, it’s cheaper to buy a console and a decent laptop separately than it is to build a gaming PC.

It’s almost like they never considered that moderators use the same third party apps as the rest of their users, either.

Though based on the leaked internal memo, it looks like Reddit doesn’t think very much of their users at all.