While I loved PropertyCity while I lived there, my early years in RuralTown showed that’s where the real Country really is. We had a herd of FarmAnimals and would always go down to the WaterBody on the weekends where the LargeMammals roamed free and wild!
I had a little chuckle-up myself
The first thing I played when I bought mine was Losing My Religion - so much fun to jam out to some REM on these beautiful lutes. Looks like you’ve got yourself one sexy sounding songmaker right there!
Such an interesting perspective, thanks for your contribution! I guess our ‘shopping centres’ are essentially the first condition you’ve described that also have grocery stores attached, and it’s likely the grocery store (in Australia this basically means one of 3-4 companies) that are keeping these structures going in the modern age. Our shopping centres tend to be built ‘up’ rather than ‘out’, with 3-5 storey shopping centres (with up to 7 storey parking lots) being fairly common within city limits that are closely accessible to more than 50% of the population.
That being said though, I live fairly equidistant between two of the largest shopping centres in Sydney and still choose to go to my local, smaller, single-storey shopping centre which is very small by Australian standards (<40 stores) which feels much more like a ‘mall’.
Do you guys have a lot of standalone grocery stores that you can drive right up to, park, shop and leave? Because that’s definitely the minority here!
That’s really interesting! In the Australian content, we would only ever call a strip of shops a ‘mall’ if they weren’t connected by some interior structure. In fact, our ‘malls’ are almost all outdoor connections of shops. So interesting how our vocabularies vary!
Out of curiosity; where are your grocery stores, pharmacies and post offices? Because here in Australia, most of them are in shopping centres (Aussie for ‘mall’). The vast majority of us go to do our weekly shop, grab medication, send back returns from our online shopping etc. so they’re still very much alive and well.
Speaking from an outside perspective; malls (what we call shopping centres) in Australia didn’t die anywhere near what has happened in the US. We have a very different geographic landscape (hyper-concentration of population in city centres) and definitely don’t have the same level of penetration that companies like Amazon do, but we have shared a lot of the same economic headwinds that the US has. From my armchair perspective, this would generally suggest that it’s less to do with economic position and more to do with idiosyncrasies of the US, but I have absolutely no data to back that up.
And it’s also only banned on work devices. There’s no ban on government employees having TikTok on their personal phones, although I personally don’t.
If this Biden feeling ‘jacked up’, I shudder to think what he’s like when he’s not. He’s not doing a great job of spruiking his own achievements and his answers are devoid of stats or figures - likely because they weren’t able to bring notes in. He’s sadly making trump look more coherent and lively by comparison.
Blood and Wine was honestly amazing. I haven’t enjoyed a DLC or xpac that much since Diablo II: Lord of Destruction. I think maybe the Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind’s expansion Bloodmoon was a great contender as well, but Blood and Wine just took Witcher 3 to a new level. It truly deserved its spot at the top of the heap.
As a child protection caseworker, I’m right here with you. The amount of children and young people I’m working with who are self-harming and experiencing suicidal ideation over this stuff is quite prevalent. Sadly, it’s almost all girls who are targeted by this and it’s just another way to push misogyny into the next generation. Desensitisation isn’t the way; it will absolutely cause too much harm before it equalises.
Conversations on a public platform aren’t just for those who speak; they’re also for those who listen. Many people are simply reading these exchanges without engaging in them. I think this discourse is most valuable for them, far more valuable than for someone whose opinion is so ingrained that they’re the one arguing about it.
If Bethesda created a paid mod market where creators could charge for access and Bethesda only took a super nominal amount of those payments to cover transaction fees (say, 2-3%) I would so be in favour of that. I love the idea of passionate creators being rewarded for their work, and frankly it could (and should) create a new employee pipeline for them.
Sadly though, then Bethesda might make 0.01875% less profit this quarter than they did last quarter, which these days is the death knell of the capitalistic venture.
They definitely did learn. They learned that they could charge for mods and people, sadly, will pay. They’ve learned that they can make more money by paywalling what should be essential patches and bugfixes. They learned that the average gamer is willing to be fleeced. They learned that they can run an IP into the ground and still extract maximum cash from it.
They’ve learned. They just didn’t learn the lesson that we here on Lemmy wanted them to learn. That’s a sad fact of being part of a minority community.
I would love for more of this work to be done in my country too - Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have so much lore, history and knowledge that we’ve been losing with each passing generation due to the ongoing effects of colonialism. I agree that video is the most appropriate way to preserve oral traditions and knowledge, and that we should be creating massive publicly-accessible databases to store and view them.
I always used to use a 3PA that had no ads or recommendations, just my own curated sub list, and I honestly loved that. There were definitely echo chambers but things worked well for me as long as I stayed conscious to that. Then when the APIpocalypse happened I browsed reddit on the web and in their official app for the first time in almost ten years and just noped right the fuck off.
At one point in my feed it went:
Like, only 1/6 items were things I had actually asked to see. It was atrocious. Default reddit is absolutely cancer now, and I really struggle to empathise with people who are still using it vanilla without any extensions or domain changes.
I wouldn’t necessarily say never. Truthfully, I’ve pirated a few games and once I found out I loved them I’ve bought copies. I had the capacity to buy, but didn’t want to sink the money in for a potentially low return. I definitely would never have had the money to buy all of the games I pirated over the years though.
I also don’t consider sharing of ROMs of outdated games that are no longer available for sale in order to use in an emulator as piracy, and I’d say the vast majority of my fee-free game downloads were focussed there. How can I be depriving the creators of anything if I literally have no way to pay them to access the content?
It’s really sad to me that Americans get put in the awful position of choosing between tipping, which supports the low wages, and taking responsibility for ensuring another human being has a living wage. It’s just such a terrible position for a consumer to be placed in, having to make ethical and moral choices about how much money to pay for goods and services.