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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: April 5th, 2024

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  • I tried to replace Twitter by Mastodon but, in the end, I just left Twitter and don’t use Mastodon at all.

    This is me, I left Twitter, Facebook and Reddit. I reduced my online time a lot and it is better for my mental health and I have more time for my hobbies.

    Mastodon made it clear to me how much algorithms steer me and keep me online, when I don’t need that, don’t profit from it. When I had to search for content on Mastodon that was for me it felt not worth the effort while being fed by an algorithm on Twitter /Facebook / Reddit kept me endlessly scrolling.

    So I am very thankful to Mastodon for opening my eyes, but I will not use it anymore. Tchncs (world news, tech news and cat owl pictures) , Grouvee (gaming forum, keeping track of my games) and German Tagesschau ( tv news of my country) is enough to stay up to date and I feel freed from a burden that social media became for me.

    Also my phone stays in my bag now and I am more in the moment wherever I am - I have used it 99% less than before and my next smart phone will be a cheap one with the only must haves being the newest Android version and a replacable battery so it will last me for long.


  • In the first region in the midst of the first small village two neighbors are arguing. They are not giving a quest, they just talk to each other and listening gives such an insight in how war can turn people against each other that have been living peacfully and been friends for years.

    Do the side quests and take your time with the dialogue. Some of these stories are impactful, mostly sad and worth your time. If you are told that you should talk to people to find out more about your contract, do it. Some of these quests can be done with only talking to one person but you want to get the information from everyone and especially their side of the story.

    Do not look up the outcome of decisions. Make your decisions and live with them at least at your first playthrough. Most decisions have impact and seeing the outcome unfold makes this game special and yes often there is no “good choice” - that’s war for you.

    Last: Buy every Gwent card you can get your hands on and play with everyone you can. If you can’t win just come back later with better cards and obliterate them - it will feel goooood!

    The DLC’s are a must.

    Try out difficulty settings - there is a sweet spot for most people somewhere but what it will be for you no one can know, but it would be a shame if you play through the game not having found the difficulty that fits you best because you “always play on <insert difficulty>”.

    Have fun, I wish I could play this game for the first time again.



  • I also love Ryukishi07’s VNs, “When They Cry” series. The art is admittedly ugly, but the stories are very intricate and convoluted in the best sense of the word.

    The first of the “When They Cry” series are the only VNs I have ever played clicked through and it was surprisingly good, even for someone like me who isn’t into anime and kept me hooked through all the episodes. I highly recommend it.












  • What a shit guy who cares more about people who live in thousands of years than people who live today:

    https://netzpolitik.org/2023/longtermism-an-odd-and-peculiar-ideology/

    https://aeon.co/essays/why-longtermism-is-the-worlds-most-dangerous-secular-credo

    Why do I think this ideology is so dangerous? The short answer is that elevating the fulfilment of humanity’s supposed potential above all else could nontrivially increase the probability that actual people – those alive today and in the near future – suffer extreme harms, even death. Consider that, as I noted elsewhere, the longtermist ideology inclines its adherents to take an insouciant attitude towards climate change. Why? Because even if climate change causes island nations to disappear, triggers mass migrations and kills millions of people, it probably isn’t going to compromise our longterm potential over the coming trillions of years. If one takes a cosmic view of the situation, even a climate catastrophe that cuts the human population by 75 per cent for the next two millennia will, in the grand scheme of things, be nothing more than a small blip – the equivalent of a 90-year-old man having stubbed his toe when he was two.

    Bostrom’s argument is that ‘a non-existential disaster causing the breakdown of global civilisation is, from the perspective of humanity as a whole, a potentially recoverable setback.’ It might be ‘a giant massacre for man’, he adds, but so long as humanity bounces back to fulfil its potential, it will ultimately register as little more than ‘a small misstep for mankind’. Elsewhere, he writes that the worst natural disasters and devastating atrocities in history become almost imperceptible trivialities when seen from this grand perspective. Referring to the two world wars, AIDS and the Chernobyl nuclear accident, he declares that ‘tragic as such events are to the people immediately affected, in the big picture of things … even the worst of these catastrophes are mere ripples on the surface of the great sea of life.’

    This way of seeing the world, of assessing the badness of AIDS and the Holocaust, implies that future disasters of the same (non-existential) scope and intensity should also be categorised as ‘mere ripples’. If they don’t pose a direct existential risk, then we ought not to worry much about them, however tragic they might be to individuals. As Bostrom wrote in 2003, ‘priority number one, two, three and four should … be to reduce existential risk.’ He reiterated this several years later in arguing that we mustn’t ‘fritter … away’ our finite resources on ‘feel-good projects of suboptimal efficacy’ such as alleviating global poverty and reducing animal suffering, since neither threatens our longterm potential, and our longterm potential is what really matters.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longtermism

    He does not care about us, why should anyone care about him? Unfortunately other rich people are also into this, because it helps them to ignore the worlds problems and to do whatever they want to the people living now.