I have a surface pro 8 and love it for school work in grad school. I love the stylus for note-taking and load it up with pirated textbooks. Saved $670 - $780 (used vs new) on next semester’s books.
I can’t see myself buying a new one tho once I finish school.
Enshittification had already been largely discussed here.
I saw users minimizing the aberrant business practices of Meta and doubting their role in assisting in genocide.
My point was to highlight how unethical and horrendous Meta itself is.
For the Meta apologists, I have a reality check for you:
Threads was immediately subject to mass amounts of radicalizing, extremist content, and there have also been instances of users having personal information doxxed on Threads due to Meta’s information-harvesting practices. [1]
Threads was marketed to be open to ‘free speech’ (read: hate speech and misinformation) and encouraged the Far-Right movement to join, who have spread extremism, hate, and harassment on Threads already. [2] Threads has been a hotbed of Israel-Palestine misinformation/propaganda. [3] They also fired fact-checkers just prior to Threads’ launch. [1]
As already established, Meta also assisted in genocide! [4]
Meta/FB/Instagram also have a strong history of facilitating the spread of misinformation and extremism, which contributed to the January 6th insurrection attempt. [5], [6]
This really should be obvious by now… but Meta mines and sells their user’s information.[7] Just look at the permissions you have to grant them for Threads…
FB users have to agree to all sorts of unethical things in the TOS, including giving Meta permission to run unethical experiments on their users without informed consent. [8] Their first published research was where they manipulated users’ feeds with positive or negative information, in order to see if it affected their mood. It did, and they successfully induced depression in many of their users!
I will now turn to an article that surmises well the core practices of Meta as a company:
Elevates disinformation campaigns and conspiracy theories from the extremist fringes into the mainstream, fostering, among other effects, the resurgent anti-vaccination movement, broad-based questioning of basic public health measures in response to COVID-19, and the proliferation of the Big Lie of 2020—that the presidential election was stolen through voter fraud [16];
Empowers bullies of every size, from cyber-bullying in schools, to dictators who use the platform to spread disinformation, censor their critics, perpetuate violence, and instigate genocide;
Defrauds both advertisers and newsrooms, systematically and globally, with falsified video engagement and user activity statistics;
Reflects an apparent political agenda espoused by a small core of corporate leaders, who actively impede or overrule the adoption of good governance;
Brandishes its monopolistic power to preserve a social media landscape absent meaningful regulatory oversight, privacy protections, safety measures, or corporate citizenship; and
Disrupts intellectual and civil discourse, at scale and by design. [9]
Starfield was very bland and had very limited dialogue/storyline in comparison to skyrim, but skyrim was so repetitive and boring with so much of the game being spent in similar looking dungeons fighting drauger…
Even with mods, I never made it through a second playthrough because the gameplay just fizzled with the boring dungeon-crawling required for so many questlines/words of power.
At least in oblivion, most of the caves/oblivion gates were totally optional. So much of skyrim is spent in boring ass dungeons…
This isn’t an argument for Starfield replayability tho. Starfield doesn’t have enough storyline for much replayability. Felt so bare bones in comparison to skyrim or any other Bethesda game.
Yeah I never valued skyrim for replayability… I replayed oblivion a lot (maybe because I was younger), and replayed FO3/NV a bit. But even with mods, I could never get myself to replay skyrim more than a couple hours in.
Just felt so repetitive with boring dungeons and drauger. Stumbling into Blackreach was one of my favorite Bethesda experiences tho. But the gameplay felt stale halfway through my first playthrough. Felt like a chore to finish the story.
Using them as background entertainment makes way more sense to me than the people closely watching/commening on them. I like to put things on YouTube while I do the dishes or something.
Totally random, but lately I’ve been watching Craigslist hunter when doing chores or eating something. It’s like pawn stars but not scripted reality TV. See some neat stuff and it’s oddly wholesome.
Influencers and streamers make me feel old and out of touch… the appeal is totally lost on me.
Super Mario 64 on my switch. Reminds me of great childhood memories.