You and you being so nice made me switch to ad hominem faster than usual! How the person like you can be so terribly pleasant? Treat yourself, you fellow lemming.
edit: bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zone found it after I forgot to save the link: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/unable-to-install-updates-unless-battery-is/99bb073a-948e-4ccf-b14f-46e192fac457
This debate is so, sooo old, but after all these times I've wroten arguments for having a dedicated player, I feel I singled out the most important ones to me.
It is not my phone. I enter a different headspace when I use an e-book or a mp3 player, I mentally dedicate myself to use it and enjoy it. I don't switch between apps, see notifications popping up, for if I'm using it, I can turn the beeping fucker off and just have a good time with my tired old Walkman and Sleep's Holy Mountain album undistracted. And I know I can put on the plane mode on, but it feels like an important switch to my brains when I leave my phone for a dumb player. My intent to use it, leaving everything else behind, somehow makes me enjoy my time with music more. We're all wired differently, but maybe you can feel it too.
And I'm left amused by the impressions of W. Gibson, the cyberpunk daddy, when he had his first Walkman and took a walk. Him, having a personal music headspace for the first time, seeing all these huge banner adds for early tech wonders on the streets, gave him a lot of inspiration, made him feel like he is detached from this era and brought into some distant future. For some time, he felt like a character of his novels. In some sense, it was like carving your own room from out of nowhere with a click of a button while leaving in human hives of metropolitan areas. And the romantic vibes of it make me take it as another reason pro dumb players.
It's irrational, but I choose to like it.
Valve made it super convinient for their customers and they also took steps to encourage content creation with SFM, Source Engine, sharing their own assets. They created working cloud saving and mod sharing solutions, greenlighting a bunch of indies based on votes and being on the side of the customer in disputes over refunds with 2hr rule becomingthe new norm. For years, they provided and improved their service, so it's rare to see anyone complaining about that.
Ah, and Epic killed UT4 in beta when they found their initial zombie game mode that became Fortnite gave them that much cash they could start their own marketplace with regular giveaways and exclusives going on for years. I'm fucking pissed at them for that even now. It is irrational and personal, but Valve didn't kill my favorite game series, it's the opposite, since they kept slowly releasing and constantly updating Dota, CS, create Alyx, keep TF2 alive, and I'm only sad Alien Swarm would never see new content. In game studios and game marketplaces, Valve are golden.
But coming back to your initial displeasment with them, the funny thing is a lot of Steam games don't need Steam to launch. Unless devs implement some hooks and DRMs themselves, you can just launch their EXE file. Nobody really checks that, but that's the truth, and I've seen some lists of games that don't do that. On top of that, 99% offline games can be launched without internet with Steam only, you can even backup and then install some game on your PC offline if your client knows you own it. And don't forget family sharing - although they promised to rework it, I, my partner and our friends used it a lot, and although you can't use a game from a shared library when you are offline, if the owner plays it offline you can play it too at the same time without messing with each others' gameplay. This lazy implementation of DRM with many workarounds and general respect to even the sleakiest, cheating customer is why I still buy games there.
Fishing?
Normal people are very adaptive to the boring routine, may it be counting inventory or counting skulls. I'm pretty much afraid not of psycos who do evil things intentionally, but of normal people who do them 9to5 without a thought, and then go back to shopping, care for their children and elderly, and resting like that.
I think the whole greentext is written to edge on incest but never providing on purpose. Too many nods at that scenario.
(Sorry if it's a miss, this community looked the most fitting)
After mentioning them somewhere in comments, I actually bought Shokz after years of sitting curious. There are a few brands that do them, so it doesn't matter what's the brand is. I bought what I've heard of and the cheapest model I could find at that.
So, what's the trick? As I'm cycling, walking and running a lot, I needed a headphone solution to be aware of my surroundings. They don't cover ears and don't actually emmit sound - they vibrate and make your bones serve as a membrane.
The obvious minus is that in a bus or other loud setting you can't hear shit. That's by design. And, logically but somehow absurdly, by shutting your ear with a finger, you can make yourself hear it okay. I did a full circle here, returning to the old headphones isolation problem, heh.
But what impressed me more, they do feel like some kind of a cyberpunk prosthetic. You can wear them all day and even the cheapest one that promises 6hr of activity lasts days on the idle. But as you call someone or watch a vid – here they are, with a little to no latency. Honestly, I feel like if there'd be implants, that's one of the basic ones we can try first. It's hands-free device with a bonus of being more stealthy and not isolating you from the world.
As a cheapskate audiophile who stayed with cords for a long time, I can say that the sound is okay. Keeping in mind that producers can't control the skull of a wearer, they can't nail the ideal sound, but I'm impressed with how nice IDM and metal plays on them - something akin to budget Senh, AKG and Audiotechnica. And unlike cheap Sony, they don't put up low freqs, that's a plus. BUT when I shared it with others, people in body reported less effectiveness due to thickness of skin and under-dermal stuff, so it's better to test it if you aren't skinny as a skeleton.
After being so open about plus sides, I'm to talk minuses. Since the software is proprietary, it doesn't have many controls and is very weird sometimes. As I bought a model that was for internal chinese market originally, it talked to me in Chinese, and it can only be switched to another language before any pairing, so only after unpairing I could've chosen English – and the same combination of button presses when paired was reserved to calling the last called number, so I fucked up a lazy weekend morning for a friend of mine calling them 4-5 times, damn it. Ah, and it supports dual pairing with a PC and a smartphone, but as I tested it this function worked weird and I sometimes manually disconnected them. Walking&working distance from a source device is around the second or third room, that fits most office and home listening cases. I could've probably wished for it to have an option to pick lesser distance since I don't usually have even a meter between my smartphones and them.
Ah, and going back to the bus problem - the obvious downside that you want to turn them to 100% volume that you don't feel, but your ears do. After the first day when I needed to move a lot in loud contexts and thus put them on max, I had a headache, because although I didn't register the volume, my head had a first row concert experience. So if you use these, keep that in mind too.
Have you tried them, is there a topic I haven't covered? As you can tell, I'm happy with them, so I would be biased. It's just with VR stuff, even from Apple, I feel like we underlook existing tech that already serves us as expander of our life experiences and powers.
Others provided many explanations, but in Epstein island's case I think it was a sick rite of a passage for those feeling they are the new elite. By doing something so wrong together, like mafia, they enter a circle where everyone is silent about others' crime as they all share the same dirt and would all be discovered after one of them starts to speak. They are expected not to talk about that, or other morbid deals they discussed there in private, and it keeps them alert. Some of visitors could be into that being dangerous pervs and power addicts, and Epstein shared trafficked children like wine with premium guests, but the more important aspect is that child abuse was a glue that cemented that sect, shut their mouths for life and led to a perfectly timed murder of an organizer in a guarded cell.
Indians are present in big numbers on reddit and other websites due to how populated India is, how english is popular there and that they aren't contained in national platforms like their chinese neighbors. It makes them noticeable for bigots to single them out and target. Just because they want someone to hate and laugh at to up their self-esteem.
It's me venting. And providing a place for venting and advices. Things people do sometimes.
While you are sounding like some chatgpt. You do a paragraph on me mentioning bitcoin with obvious sarcasm. And it's all messed up.
It feels basic but it gets the work done. As long as you don't need a complex array of effects and graphics, it fits. Most of simple amateur video needs are easily covered.