I have started buying vinyl with the digital downloads when I find a great album. I feel better doing it this way. Most of my music is not super big name artists.

I know this does not make me look good - but I am a YouTube Premium subscriber. I had Spotify, but they jacked up their family plan rate, and it was only a few bucks cheaper than Premium, then I got the ad-free (without adblockers). I mostly did it to help my kids avoid the toxic ads that are littered into the kid content. The main reason I stick with some of this stuff is for the discovery. Pandora was great, Spotify is ok.

Regardless - the smart playlists, and AI stuff on YouTube music is AWFUL. I cannot put into words how bad it is. Spotify got it right about 1/4-1/2 of the time. YouTube, maybe 1/100. Constantly recommending a country, which I cannot stand. When it isn't doing country, it recommends hard rock/metal which I also do not listen to. I feel like I need a new way to find music, then I could sever ties with all these trashy subscriptions.

So...something like 3d printing...

Worked in retail many moons ago. Back when organic was just becoming a thing. I can tell you one thing.: A lot of people were getting a deal on organic food -because cashiers would just key in the code for non-organic. The lines were too long, and you look foolish looking things up in the "book" haha.

When I first started working with 3d modelling (for 3d printed parts), I followed everyone's advice and got a trial of Fusion. Luckily, I didn't use it much and when I came back to it, my trial was over. I did not want to use a hobbyist license, just to have things change - so went looking for FOSS alternatives. OpenScad made my brain hurt, but then I found FreeCAD. Definately hard to learn, and for someone new to CAD design - I am learning very slowly.

I watched a ton of videos, but still struggle. My saving grace was that I found the official discord. The users on the discord server can be super helpful with learing the nuance of the platform. Several times I posted a file and askded for help and had an answer within an hour. In fact, I just submitted a screenshot of my sketch with dimensions and someone went ot the trouble of recreating it and fixing my problem...so I recommend you join the server if you are struggling. Link below:

https://discord.gg/uh85ZRNcfk

I gotta be honest...I am hanging on by a threat. The communities that I was engaged with on Reddit before the Snoopacolypse were pretty niche. I wasn't there for r/funny or r/videos, etc. I found similar communities on Lemmy, but they have soooooo little activity. I have to modify my sort just to see content, as its so old. When there are posts, they typically get very little discussion.

I am on Lem.ee, and I have the hardest time posting anything from mobile. It looks like it fails, and if I sort by new, it isn't there and never shows up - HOWEVER, I start getting replies, so someone is seeing it somehow.

I detest what reddit did and is still doing - but Lemmy is not filling that void for me, and its frustrating.

We (Payday 2 Players) also racked up hours upon hours (I think I am around 1000 total) and they didn't really give us anything for all that work. We got a underwhelming skin. A bare bones weapon, and some weapon charms ...do they realize how hard it was to beat every heist on Deathwish without a hacker in the lobby? A Charm? For Real? Give me my deathwish mask back and I will play your new game

Would have been nice if they decided to give that option during the early days when they made the decision to start mining data and selling it off. I totally would have been up for a reasonable fee to keep my data felt bad for Julian from being sold.

I live in a blue state, MN. Our Governor accomplished a ton of great things in his previous term. He was reelected last fall. During that campaign, we had our state fair. His conservative challenger was running on the campaign "Walz Failed" and literally had a plane with that flying behind it on a banner all day, each day of the fair. They had people right inside each gate handing out bags that said it. Felt very ridiculous.

Great summary on this Episode of Darker Diaries from last week

I truly detest the "review bombing" culture, but in the same breath - Blizzard has really screwed up on OW2.

OW was honestly one of my two most played games of all time - and I loved it. The loot boxes were annoying, but hey...if I wanted to, or chose to - I could buy more and got a decent chance of getting what I wanted. The issue was that I had nearly everything by the end, and rarely bought loot boxes. The content wasn't there to keep people buying cosmetics.

The new shop/token/battle pass stuff is really really toxic to gaming. I will admit that I have bought a few battle passes. When the content is there, I will pay. I would totally buy skins if they were in the vein of $5-7usd, and were for a hero I liked... but there is no way in the world that they are getting me to pay 20-25 on a skin. Its honestly so disgusting.

I really was unaffected by the single player stuff, because I only enjoy multiplayer games - but the way it was done showed disregard for the loyal players so it makes me lose trust in the company. I am honestly just sad about what happened to the OW universe. The only way for people to voice that feeling/emotion is to vent and move on. I guess the reviews serve as a good warning to potential new players.

Along the same lines, but not to this level:

A few years back, we had a family member who is at a very extreme end of the political spectrum give my kids a book set that they "saw in a facebook ad" that said it was all about wholesome family values. It was called the "Tuttle Twins."

Not knowing what it was, we started reading them with our kids. The first book we read was fantastic(we read out of order). It talked about pencils, and followed the entire supply chain. Very informational, entertaining, and educational. It wasn't until the 2nd book, and on that the agenda crept in. Funny how when they talked about crime, all of the cartoons of criminals were diverse. When they talked about landscapers and gardeners, they were all depicted as hispanic. It kept getting worse and worse. Talking about education being corrupt, about how much immigration impacted people, and tried to justify a lot of things. We stopped reading early on, but I browsed them all to make sure I wasn't imagining it. Then I googled them, and I realized how bad the propaganda was.