I would love to be able to gift my unplayed games to others.

I guess you do get into a problem where a group of people might swap the game back and forth to avoid ever having to pay for the game. But people will abuse any system, so I guess that would just be a cost of it

If a game is still within the refund window, then maybe it should have an option to gift it. The devs / publishers could keep their money and Steam doesn’t have to process a refund. Seems like a win-win

Calling someone an idiot after having your opinion refuted in a thread about people having thin skin is either some high level satire or proof you have thin skin

I suppose it could be some third thing, but I don’t want to make baseless assumptions

In my experience, the fries are great for five whole minutes before they turn into soggy cardboard and broken dreams

It’s a pretty good five minutes though

That’s the plan, yup

Honestly, that’s tough, but fair. No therapeutic tool is going to be a magic bullet solution for everyone.

My wife struggles with something similar. When we try to walk through an exercise together she thinks it’s about saying that her problems are “all in her head.” For my own outlook, I liken it to thinking that although my thoughts might be faulty, my feelings are valid. But hey, I’m not an authority, I’m just another struggling human trying to make sense of it all.

For what it’s worth, one stranger to another, I think that whatever you’re going through you’re totally valid. I hope you find or have found some relief - goodness knows we’re still looking

I highly recommend Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. CBT is the best medicine I can afford, because all you need is pen and paper.

If you don’t think you can change your circumstance, then you can try to change how you react to it. The core model of the therapy is to analyze your thoughts and look for patterns in which your brain tries to fuck with you. Identifying distortions and fallacies helps to replace your automatic thoughts with more positive ones.

Example:

Thought: I hate my job, everything about it sucks

Distortions: Overgeneralization, All-or-Nothing Thinking, Feelings as Facts

New Thought: I hate certain parts of my job, but I like X part of it

The whole thing only works if you believe in it, and the important thing is that you’re not just putting a sunny face on things that make you feel terrible. You’re working to restructure your thought based on objective truth.

I’ve struggled for a long time with the Sunday Scaries. Sometimes it feels like it’s never going to get easier, and I’m going through it right now, but I know if I take the time to untangle my feelings then things end up easier in the long run.

Good luck out there, partner

Say what you will about the woke gaming agenda, I love to see a company brave enough to take this stance. It’s refreshing to see a publisher wear its beliefs on its sleeve because now I know that I don’t have to spend money on their trash games

A saw a graphic the other day that was comparing the number of frames generated between the 4x and 5x, and people in the comments were saying that the 5x uses AI frame generation to speed things up

People in the know would know that AI is largely hype, and the generated frames probably don’t look as good as if they had been properly rendered

I’d like minimum wage to be able to support my family, so that a job flipping burgers could actually feed us

Failing that, to live as a bunny in a cottagecore tree stump, spending my days slicing up strawberries like they’re roasts, and baking pies with my neighbours

I paid a dollar for this two weeks ago

Worth it

Since this is advice given to a monarch by a person who otherwise has no impact on the rich and powerful, I’d argue you could call this a case of Jester’s Privilege

We should bring that back. If nothing I do matters, then nothing I say matters, right?

Banana peels take up to two years to decompose, unless they’re in the right environment such as a compost heap where the process speeds to 6-9 months

That’s still lightyears ahead of cigarette butts and plastic bottles, but a lot of people don’t realize how long their trash lasts for

I’m not in healthcare, so I’m not sure how valuable my opinion is

If I had to guess, I’d say that there’s a cost associated with a patient refusing care, particularly if the condition is going to be aggravated.

This cost might be financial. It might also mean that the patient returns to the healthcare system and requires more intense care. It probably also means that the patient will suffer more while outside the system.

I don’t know what your healthcare system looks like, but mine is stretched to the breaking point. If someone discharged themselves against the advice of doctors and then later worsened and returned to the hospital, they might die waiting for triage. It’s an extremely bad look for the hospital and erodes the public’s opinion of healthcare. And while the hospital is being raked over the coals for allowing someone to die in the waiting room, the media will conveniently ignore that the patient previously discharged themselves against the advice of their doctor.

Another scenario to think about: just because a patient is cognizant doesn’t mean they’re behaving rationally. While the patient is in care they could be heavily medicated and not realize how bad their situation would be without care: until the meds wear off and their suffering returns. If they got a particularly bad prognosis, then the panicky ape brain could take over and they just want to get out of their, damn the consequences.

Does all that add up to being more important than the patient’s autonomy? Opinions will probably be divided. I don’t personally think so, if I was restrained against my will I’d be pretty angry about it. But I understand the rationale behind the people who want to keep their patient in the system.

Does that mean YOU have to care? Probably not. People should be free to make their own decisions, and you can’t and shouldn’t take responsibility for the decisions that they make.

As other people have said, there are definitely bots on the fediverse

In fact, the coolest thing about lemmy for me is that there’s a checkbox in settings to disable viewing any bot users

Although as I understand, users have to self-identify as a bot, so the actually harmful bots probably don’t do that. But I can dream

angry upvote

But honestly, fair. Alien is a 50-year-old movie, so when viewed with a modern lens it might not seem to be anything special.

Part of the legendary status of Alien is just how influential it has been. Before Alien, a horror-scifi movie would be some schlock about flying saucers piloted by men in gorilla masks terrorizing Hollywood. Audiences certainly weren’t expecting a psychosexual thriller about forced oral insemination and mpreg.

And the android! Robots in movies were walking vending machines, and yet the robot in Alien is just some guy until he starts to malfunction. Plus in the context of the franchise, it makes you distrust every single android in each subsequent movie, and might even leave you guessing who else in the cast could be a robot in disguise.

Other movies have done it better since then. We all stand on the shoulders of giants after all. And the funny thing is, a lot of the time when you look back at the movies that spawn the tropes, they don’t seem that impressive because they haven’t been totally refined yet.

I have a soft spot for Alien, it’s my favorite in the franchise. It relies so heavily on practical effects, it’s got those retro-futuristic computers which I adore, and the smart woman saves the day (sort of) after all the dumb men tell her she’s wrong. And yet despite what I just said, I don’t think anyone is actually very dumb, the characters are all quite human and I understand and relate to their motivations.

It’s a movie that feels far more modern than it is. You might even forget that it’s fifty years old until you see that explosive finale in gloriously bad 70’s CGI

I also liked Prometheus. It’s not the best in the franchise but it’s certainly not the worst, and it doesn’t deserve as much hate as it gets in the community

Personally, I like to supplement my knowledge with the occasional book. Like shit, that’s sort of the whole point of books.

I don’t think a book has ever got me started on something new while programming. Like if I want to pick up a new language or framework, I have better luck going directly to the documentation. If I have a specific problem, then I can search online or find a tutorial or something.

Another risk of using a book as the entry point is when those books go out of date and no longer become relevant. Always make sure they’re using the right version of whatever tool you’re using, lest you pick up a book vaguely titled “Learn Python” and discover it’s for 2.7 when you’ve installed 3.11

But as you’ve kind of surmised here, books are great for filling in the gaps in knowledge. They’re also generally speaking written by authors with tons of experience (and perhaps biases) which might tell you why things are done a certain way.

Of particular interest - and caution - are opinion-based books. For example, Clean Code is full of examples that sound good on paper, and then when taken to their extreme are shown to be brittle and cumbersome. I still think the book has some good points, but at the end of the day it’s opinion, and opposing opinions exist for a reason.

So I guess what I’m saying there is books are great, but you shouldn’t follow them dogmatically

The film isn’t a cash grab, the script does a really good job of grabbing my cash - I mean, attention!

Whoa, what a weird Freudian slip

That must be in case he needs to stop for lunch on the way to delivering that sandwich

Did you get the secret ending where

I did on my first playthrough, thought the game ended far too early before I realized I had gone down an alternate route.

It’s still pretty short though

About two weeks after I moved out of my parents’ place, my apartment was broken into while I was at work.

I had a pretty bitchin’ video game collection and a basement apartment. They broke in through a window and cleaned me out.

Kind of a funny story, I had worked a double shift and was pretty exhausted when I came home. Went straight to the kitchen to make some mac n’ cheese. Came back out to the living room to watch TV with dinner and there was no TV. That was my first clue something was amiss.

I couldn’t stay in that apartment, ended up moving elsewhere before my first month’s rent was up. I felt a bit better when I was in a different apartment, but I guess that feeling of my nest being violated stuck around a bit longer. I kept a bat by the door for a long time, and I still end up triple checking the locks because of something that happened like fifteen years ago.