There’s a lot of AAA that isn’t slop. That sounds like coping.

Honestly this. I really need people to start defining what they think a AAA game is, because I feel like my definition is different. In my mind, a AAA game is any game made by a large well-known company that either has a series/brandname for itself (i.e. Mario, Resident Evil, CoD) or one that has poured a shit ton of money into it (usually due to employee count). Usually a mainline game, not side or spin-off.

And so going off of that, I truly struggle to think of a AAA game I have played in the last 3 years that could truly be called slop. The only game in that timeline that makes me go “eh”, was FFXV, but I don’t think the game is pure slop, it’s just obviously incomplete without the DLC story. There are people still crying about this game and saying they miss the characters, and it’s more than a decade old now, so I feel it’s hard to call it slop.

Maybe it’s because I mostly enjoy single player games over multi and I play more Japanese than western games, but I don’t know why people buy the latest CoD or Madden and expect it to be significantly different from the last game. Like we know EA does microtransactions, stop buying their fucking games! Why do we expect 95% of SaaS games to be remotely good?

And not that I think indies suck, because I think they’re great too! But people make it sound like every indie game is going to change your life, when there are thousands of indies out there that are just okay. Hell, some big name “indies” aren’t even indies, they’re AA games like CO:E33. And some indies have unfortunately felt lackluster for me, like Cassette Beasts.

In the past my mom pirated anime while still paying for Funimation, because they had a quality service that got simuldubs and had a lot of content. Then CR bought them oit and now were stuck with this “pay for the highest tier to get all the content and no ads” and “oh it’s only on our platform until March!” and “Oops we didn’t even port over all the shows on Funimation, sorry lol!” and “Oh, like the AI generated subtitles?”

We will not be giving CR a single fucking penny. I’m close to finishing my home/media server and we’ll just watch that way or with Kodi.

Just curious, what about a secondary (burner I guess) smartphone? I have an old phone I stopped using years ago that I flashed LineageOS onto, it has no SIM card, I keep it fully shut down until I leave my house, and it only has Signal on it for messaging purposes and ProtonVPN. Is that also a big enough threat? I used it while at a No Kings protest.

Are dummy phones the only way to go?

Ugh, I’m so tired of this. I never had twitter in the first place, but I did used to have Instagram and I loved it for all the artists I’d follow on there. But I dropped that a year or two ago (officially deleted my accounts 😤) and just stuck with Tumblr ever since. But so many of my favorite former fanartists just REFUSE to let either service go, despite them very openly stating their new AI policies or worsening ToS policies.

I know Bluesky will turn out the same way as the others, but I’ve been trying to encourage artists to move to BS and use bridgy fed so I can still see them on Mastodon. Like you’d literally get the visibility of TWO platforms by using bridgy fed rather than sticking with just Insta or just Twitter. And yes, Instagram and Twitter have bigger numbers than BS or the Fediverse, but one day the AI issues will grow too big and you’ll lose those numbers anyway when you leave the platform. Plus how many of those numbers are bots anyway?

But it just sucks man. I only have Tumblr and the occasional visit to Pixiv as my source of fanart. Mastodon and Pixelfed are just lacking, or make it very hard to find the artists I’m looking for (and I literally joined Pixelfed.art!). I’ve tried following hashtags but it’s a little dry…

You say that, but there are plenty of posts on the Linux mint forums where solutions requured using the terminal for basic troubleshooting (especially WiFi and bluetooth).

Every day I get more thankful for my hand-me-down car. It has no heated seats or anything fancy, but that also means no subscriptions, no wifi tracking/stalking, no digital touch screen over physical buttons, etc. All I’ve ever done is use a clip holder on my AC vent for my phone, so I’m used to it. It’s given me time to see how others feel about Android Auto and features in newer cars, and I can make an informed decision whenever my baby decides to kick the bucket. Hopefully I can get something not too stalkerish nor with subscriptions.

Well, this is the INDIAN Supreme Court, but I will certainly use that line when the US government decides to parrot “if you have nothing to hide”

Okay, but people still need emails for basic services and accounts, so would you rather them use Gmail or Proton?

Like duh don’t email your mom with a detailed plan on how you’re gonna do a terrorist attack. Crazy idea, I know.

I use Zotero and Bitwarden with no issues on Librewolf, and I also use Bitwarden on mobile, but the app instead of the extension. I have use Bitwarden as an extension on mobile and it worked fine, but I can’t remember if that was when I still used FF or a fork.

Librewolf and IronFox (android) both work like a charm! Well, in IronFox’s case you might have to tweak JIT and WASM to ensure some niche extensions work, but I’m pretty sure it’s a me thing.

I also used Fennec (android) for a hot second, and that has extensions too.

I already know and have used CoMaps (switched from Organic due to the transparency issues), but CoMaps doesn’t have traffic data, and I want that.

Magic Earth wasn’t fully FOSS, but it was better than Google and Waze for privacy at least…

Unfortunately it comes down to luck, you can check this crowd-sourced list to see if your banking app works. Users report whether or not they had (sandboxed) play services installed and what settings they toggled.

You won’t be able to use GPay/Wallet at all due to lack of SafetyNet.

On browser view you can’t, but I switched to desktop view and it came up. The settings page on browser is fucking embarrassing.