My point though is that you talk about all of that as if it’s some sort of chore.

To me, it’s a lot of the fun.

I rarely even get to the point of having to stop and weigh choices in my inventory, since every time I come across something new, I have to stop and check it out and try to figure out what it is and what it does and what sort of advantages or disadvantages it might have. I enjoy that. So all along the way, I’m figuring out what I want to or think I should keep and what I want to or think I can get rid of, and not because a finite inventory demands it, but because that’s part of the point of playing in the first place.

Broadly, you’re asking if other people actually invest the time and energy to sort out how to play complex games. I’m saying that we not only can and do, but that that’s a lot of the point. That whole process of sorting things out is a lot of the reason that we play in the first place.

Yeah - I just jump in and wing it.

At the risk of inviting the internet’s wrath, when people talk about the difference between serious gamers and casuals, this is the sort of thing they’re talking about.

“Serious” gaming involves a particular set of skills and interests, such that the person is willing and able to just jump into some complicated new game and figure it out. And it’s not just that “serious” gamers can do that - the point is that they want to. They enjoy it. They enjoy being lost, then slowly putting the pieces together and figuring out how things work and getting better because they’ve figured it out. And they enjoy the details - learning which skills do what and which items do what, and how it all interrelates. All that stuff isn’t some chore to be avoided - it’s a lot of the point - a lot of the reason that they (we) play games.

You talk about your inventory filling up and then just selling everything, and I can’t even imagine doing that. To me, that’s not just obviously bad strategy, but entirely missing the point - like buying ingredients to make delicious food, then bringing them home and throwing them in the garbage.

The way it made me really think about how truly expansive space and time are really made me think that “that’s not impossible to think that there is a 11th dimension being that has some agenda that we cannot understand.”

Absolutely.

But that’s not what I’m talking about.

I’m talking about making the leap from recognizing that such a being could exist to believing that such a being does exist. That, to me, is so bizarrely irrational that I can’t even work out how it is that people apparently actually do it.

Yeah - I don’t even really understand how all of that works. I see that people apparently sincerely believe, but I have no idea how - what it is that goes on inside their brains that allows them to make that leap to actually believing.

I don’t know that it does, but I can see how it could.

One way that neurodivergence can manifest is as a relative inability to simply assume things - a relatively outsized need for clear evidence on which to base a conclusion. And religion is notably devoid of actual evidence.

I don’t spend any time on Mastodon.

Why? Are there anarchists on Mastodon? Or is this some kind of sarcasm I’m not getting?

I do have a Mastodon account, but I never use it. I much prefer forums over microblogs.

The implication here is that anarchists are relatively common on the fediverse, and if so, it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve seen this idea expressed.

But the thing is that I am an anarchist, and I’ve been keeping my eyes open, and I haven’t seen any other anarchists here. LOTS of authoritarian leftists, ranging from naive social democrats to full-blown “submit or die” tankies, but not one single other anarchist.

So are you actually trying to say that anarchists are common here? And if so, where are they?

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Sorry - I thought it was self-evident that I was talking about accessing it on a phone. On which it’s fine in a browser.

In fact, I’d say that kbin in mobile Firefox has a UI that all of the Lemmy apps can still only aspire to.

I won’t even try kbin without a mobile app.

Why not?

It’s a website. It works perfectly fine in a browser.

And for that matter, so does Lemmy, which is why I still access it that way. The apps are getting there, but IMO none of them have yet managed to even match the Firefox experience, much less surpass it.

Seriously - this is a thing that just doesn’t even begin to make sense to me. What drives this obsessive need for an app? And especially for a website, which of necessity has already been designed to work in a browser?

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Undoubtedly.

To paraphrase Lily Tomlin, no matter how cynical I get, it’s still not enough.

I don’t bother with the right-wing propaganda networks so I don’t know, but I can’t imagine how they might spin this to blame Biden when his administration hasn’t even been involved in the process.

The whole thing hinges on a purely internal conflict not just within Congress, but in the House specifically. How does that even colorably come to be blamed on an entirely separate branch?

I don’t doubt that the propaganda outlets and the grifters will simply lie, and conjure up some entirely different account of things that won’t match up at all with the plain objective reality of the whole thing stalling because a group of hard right House members are demanding concessions and refusing to vote in favor of a budget that doesn’t include them, but I can’t even imagine what it will be, since it will have to be essentially completely false, from start to finish.

Unfortunately, I also don’t doubt that some significant part of the Republican base will believe whatever it is, since they’ve been so thoroughly indoctrinated and made so subject to their emotions that they literally can no longer distinguish between reality and fantasy.

Still though, even with as confused and misled and blinded by emotion as much of the Republican base is, and as brazenly dishonest as the propagandists and grifters that are profiting off of them are, I can’t imagine how it might be the case that Biden will get the blame for this. It’s not just that it’s not narrowly true, but that there isn’t even a colorable basis, as far as I can see, to even pretend that it is.

I sincerely believe that if any aliens are observing us, they’ve concluded that we actually value and reward insanity and loathe and punish sanity.

And they wouldn’t be entirely wrong…

I doubt it, particularly because it’s almost certainly the case that the people who deride it when others do it do it themselves in other situations.

It’s far and away most common in partisan politics, and it happens because the simple fact of the matter is that most professional politicians and political parties are loathsome slimeballs, and the only thing a partisan can dependably say in support of their preferences is that they’re (purportedly) better than the alternative. So it’s nearly always the case that in attempting to defend or advocate for their preference, they’ll bring up the alternative and shift focus to them.

And then they’ll potentially turn right around and deride their opponents for doing the same.

I think it was a two-stage thing: first, he got off the leash, then second, he spiraled off into a fantasy world.

There’s evidence that Musk has always been volatile and capricious and short-sighted, and that he’s had handlers at his companies who specifically acted to limit the things he was told to try to keep him somewhat rational and to filter and recast the drivel that spilled out of his mouth anyway into policies that were at least not obviously harmful.

When he took over Twitter though, there were no handlers already in place, he didn’t take any with him, snd they didn’t have the opportunity to appoint any. So he was off the leash, and we got the first clear look at unfiltered Elon.

And it’s just been in a self-reinforcing loop since then. He undoubtedly always believed that he was making nothing but sound decisions, but that was an easier belief to maintain when he was surrounded by handlers that filtered out his dumbassery. Now that he’s off the leash, his dumbassery is front and center, but he still believes that he’s making sound decisions. The disconnect between his fantasy and the reality is thus growing all the time, so he has a progressively poorer chance of making sound decisions, but grows ever more convinced that he is, and 'round and 'round it goes.

I expect that it’s going to end in the complete collapse of his sanity.

Really.

Well… no and yes.

No - I don’t feel like I’ve wasted my life. I feel like I’m supposed to feel that way, and I know that many (most?) people looking from the outside in would believe that I have, but I just don’t feel that way. I’m content, and as far as i can tell, that’s the only thing that matters.

Ah, but there’s the rub - I’m content. It sounds as if you’re not.

Unfortunately, the only thing I can definitely recommend is to try to assess your own feelings and figure out if you really are discontented or if you’re just going along with the idea that you should be.

But if you really are discontented… I guess I could say to try to look at what it is that you really value (which is likely not coincidentally what you’ve mostly done with your time) and try to actually feel the value in it.

But I have no idea how that’s done, since its apparently just something that I do naturally.

Sorry if that doesn’t heip…

Meta can already scrape everything from every fediverse instance. Hell - if you wanted to and were willing to invest the time and effort, you could scrape everything from every fediverse instance.

By definition, everything that you post online is accessible to other people. The devices through which those other people view the content you posted are able to make copies of whatever they view. So literally anyone with a computer and an internet connection can already “take” whatever you post.

There’s only one way in all the world to protect your information, and that’s to not post it in the first place. The instant you post it, anyone who cares enough to do it can “take” it, and there’s NOTHING you can do to stop them.

If Meta cares about your information, they’ll go ahead and collect it anyway, with or without Threads or federation with Threads.

I sure as hell hope not.

To me, that’s like looking around a great little cafe with terrific food and saying, “Do you think this could ever become McDonalds?”

Why would I want that?