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Enshittificiation, or in my own words, "how everything starts to suck on purpose", has somewhat come to rule my life, and thus, ruin my life.
An example I'm thinking about right now is socks. I bought a certain pair of socks probably ten years ago now. I liked them and took for granted that I would be able to purchase this sock or type of sock at any given time. Fast-forward ten years, and the sock is gone. And it feels like no other sock compares.
What's really going on in my mind is, "I know there is better out there, and this is just a choice of the manufacturer to be greedy". Except in this circumstance, the "there" is my fantasy land of the past.
So I ask you all, how do you move on from this? Because what happens for me is I just don't buy new socks, and instead hold on to my tatters (most of them still work decently, but nowhere near as well as they used to). I have tried randomly buying socks to get over my fear of failure (choosing the wrong socks and wasting money and contributing to global waste and contributing to materialism and general clutter in my house, etc.); But this just furthers the issue because I confirm that the other socks are shit and this seems like a fruitless endeavor, as such, in addition to going against my morals and values I listed above.
Thank you for any advice or help!
*EDIT
Thank you all for a rousing discussion, as usual.
Here are some of my Major Takeaways:
Lastly, one clarification, I'd like to add that on the subject of clothing or other comforts in particular, it is extra painful to lose something you love, like a clothing item, when you are not an "average" person. Sensory issues, body shapes, and fashion tastes can be so limiting when you are not within the bell curve, and so it is not a trivial subject to mourn the loss of something you once had, and fear that you will never find something like it again.
This will include a shameless plug as I need someone to help analyse what I can do to improve it, pretty please. I am out of ideas.
So, Https://thunderlizard.co.uk is my wife's website. It is a personalised clothing and gifts store based in the UK. It's hosted on 20i, and uses their CDN and caching, which isn't that great but it works okay.
It's Wordpress and Woocommerce and is store only, no blog at this time. Even with Rankmath installed, using SEO heavy product descriptions (and short descriptions), tags, categories, etc, and using both Index Now and Google Products plugin, it's not scoring well or showing up much in product or general searches.
I've read plenty of guides and put into practice as much as I can. The next thing to try is backlinks from quality sources, which Google are supposed to be phasing out. The issue is, what am I backlinking to if it's not simply the products? Can anyone advise me on what I can do to help?
A lot of her sales come via her Etsy store, but they absolutely destroy your profit margin with taxes and service costs. When she's making only a couple of quid here and there, profit margins matter. We're trying hard to push people towards the website, hence needing advice to allow people to find it. Is it simply that it's a hugely flooded market and it's like swimming in the Pacific and trying to stand out?
Rebuilt - please review - 2024/11/14
Crypto has always been an odd one for me.
Considering I'm in the IT field and generally techy, I've always remained skeptical. That didn't stop me throwing about £100 into some DOGE, XRP and ETH awhile back. They peaked around $880 and I almost cashed out. I wish I had because they fell back and were worth around $140 for the longest while.
Suddenly it's sitting at around $400 and I'm wondering whether to hold my nerve or cash out.
Anyone big into crypto and have any advice?
I was thinking about one of the threads here about missing the specific subcultures on Reddit. Maybe we just aren't in the habit of sharing our interests or want to know who else is interested in the subculture.
If absolutely forced to, I could probably blog about:
Recently I just came across this channel Ilya Varlamov , great quality video content related to travel. Thought I should share this channel.
I also watch Not Just Bikes , it's more related to Urban planning, but you get to explore a lot about the countries.
Then is series called Scam City , It gives great info about native people trying to scam tourist's.
Series called Deadliest Roads , Shows the tough life of the native people with bad Road networks.
What all Youtube channels/Series you watch related to travel?
I hate TODO lists. Even when they're for a single day.
I inevitably put more in my TODO list than I can accomplish in a day. When the new day begins, and I see the tasks I did not accomplish before, I feel anxious, sad, and even ashamed. Then I find some of that anxiety is for how my partner will judge me for the unfinished tasks on my list that she tells herself she expected me to accomplish.
While I have worked on self-compassion for years, occasionally it is not there. I have worked on having boundaries between my partner's own issues and my mental health.
I wonder how others with ADHD, particular those with partners, cope.
EDIT: I started using an allegedly ADHD-friendly planner yesterday. These feelings came pouring out of me this morning, hence the post. Yet I've had these similar difficulties for years.
Here’s a topic that I would like to hear some opinions (advice) on. I work in a pretty demanding software role. The positives: I am well compensated and I like the work I do. It also helps that I work on a genuinely useful product whose sole purpose is not only to extract profits from the consumer base. I also do not work overtime.
Therefore I am covered on all bases: moral, financial and personal interest. However, for the past year or so my responsibilities have grown, and I have to juggle more and more (both in number of tasks, their complexity & deadlines) during the same period of time (remember, no overtime).
So now I find myself periodically stressed for longer & longer periods of time. I don’t have energy and motivation for my hobbies, and I dread having to engage in anything more intensive than the occasional walk. But I can tell that this state of being is not sustainable for the long term.
To whoever can relate: what are your thoughts?
Edit: some good things that I have going for myself, that help a little; I have a good sleep schedule, I rarely drink, I don’t stay connected to work outside working hours and I have a very supportive partner.
I'm completely hooked on this game.
My buddy and I have been sneaking in some Satisfactory at night when our families are in bed. If it makes it funnier, you can picture it like a secret love affair. Late night messages, slipping in and out bed trying not to wake the wives, and mid-day texts about our big plans (with our factories). Friends, I literally play this game in my head when I'm not able to play for real. And it's just as good since most of it based around planning.
Anyway, I'm surprised by the depth. A lot of it is intentional while a lot of the rest is the natural result of players kind of hacking the build mode to do things you can't normally do such as curves and 1 meter vertical conveyers.
What are your favorite tips and tricks for this game?
Given the current state of things, I have been trying to avoid internet sites that could trigger anxiety. This is harder to do that I thought it would be. So I'm reaching out to the fine and resourceful Tildes collective for links to sites that are less known, and may provide, if not joy, at least interest, uniqueness maybe, fun, or education? Stuff that may be comforting, engrossing, or diverting to give some respite to those of us who are feeling pretty crushed.
Here are two sites I can offer, but I don't want to limit anyone's idea of what might be a good suggestion.
Futility Closet "is a collection of entertaining curiosities in history, literature, language, art, philosophy, and mathematics, designed to help you waste time as enjoyably as possible." (description from their about page)
Strange Company bills itself as "a Walk of the Weird Side of History"
(edited to add links)
A loose definition of a “chore” game would be:
A game in which you repeatedly do relatively unexciting tasks to work towards a larger goal. The fun often comes from:
A perfect example would be PowerWash Simulator. In fact, these games are often called “simulator” games or have the word in their title (though not always, and not all “simulator” games are specifically “chore” games).
Which ones are your favorites? What do you enjoy about them?
Live broadcast just ended, but it's available to watch in full here. And here is the full article about the Warcraft Direct broadcast - I have not read it though as it is very long and in depth.
So here are the highlights and headlines:
Warcraft III Reforged to be updated with a patch 2.0
Warcraft II: Reforged announced
Warcraft I: Reforged announced
Warcraft Battle Chest available right now.
WoW: Classic to receive fresh start servers
These servers will follow the same release pattern as the 2019 WoW: Classic release, including expansions. Burning Crusade expansion will also follow.
WoW: Classic Hardcore fresh start servers will launch at the same time as the above
WoW: Cataclysm Classic to continue its releases with Firelands and Dragon Soul raids.
WoW: Mists of Pandaria Classic announced.
WoW: The War Within
Patch 11.0.7 "The Siren Isle" now available on PTR.
Features a small island zone with the mysterious Harranir race.
Adds some main campaign quests/storyline content.
Patch 11.1 "Undermined" revealed, to launch in early 2025.
At the end was a small teaser about the upcoming Midnight expansion about player housing but more news will come next year.
Here is the full roadmap for WoW: Classic.
Here is the full roadmap for retail WoW.
Most of this was going by memory from the broadcast so I'd recommend the links above for more details and whatever I forgot. Also, there was a ton of corporate nonsense fluff but I think nobody here really care about that.
There was also news about Hearthstone but I hope someone in the comments can expand on this as I don't know enough about it and also didn't really listen lol, so I can't properly write anything about it - same goes for news about Warcraft Rumble.
I've handed out a bunch of invites, I hope you find your way into here. Just a heads-up to read the guide, and you'll probably want to post in ~comp for anything self-hosting related. Enjoy!
On another platform a female journalist warned other women not to use menstrual tracking apps.
I worked in a co-op during college that sold very nice paper journals for tracking menstrual cycles. I replied to that thread mentioning that very nice specialized paper journals still exist.
Someone ( a man ) replied back to tell me that ADHD women have enough to deal with these days and proceeded to list all the ways something like that could fail.
I suggested sending emails to one's self along the lines of "update your diary" which someone could then read at home and take care of things.
Since I don't have ADHD my question is if people who do have ADHD really do find it to be that incapacitating?
I know it is an Internet thing to keep replying without a reason, even if it is only out of momentum. I'm wondering if that was the deal in that thread.
The quick summary and important info first:
I've just added a new group to the site named ~society, which will encompass politics as well as some other similar subjects. Over the next few hours, I'll be moving many existing topics into it, and then based on those topics I'll be automatically subscribing users who have a history of regularly participating in them (based on commenting, voting, labeling, etc.). Feel free to subscribe manually now if you already know you'll be interested, and if you'd like to ensure that you're not automatically subscribed to it by me, go to your topic tag filters page, add politics on a line by itself, and click the save button (I'll be excluding anyone that has politics ignored). I'll edit a note into the bottom of this post later today when I've finished doing the automatic subscriptions.
Adding a group like this is something that I've been thinking about doing for a long time, but I didn't want to make any major changes as it got closer to the US election, and then I've considered the last week to be a bit of a "blowing off steam" period, where I've been more lenient on the number and quality of political topics than I normally would have. However, I think now will be a good time to add it, since we're probably going to have a lull in significant political news for a short while until it kicks up again, and this will allow the group to get established.
I've never wanted to have a group devoted to politics on Tildes, and I'm sure that a lot of the older users will be able to remember my explanations about why and find our old discussions about it. I don't think a lot of those reasons have actually borne out over the years. ~misc has effectively ended up as ~politics-in-all-but-name, and political topics are also spread over a lot of other groups (politics-but-with-a-financial-angle ends up in ~finance, politics-but-with-a-healthcare-angle in ~health, politics-but-based-on-a-study in ~science or ~humanities, and so on).
The default topic sorting on Tildes being activity-based has also ended up making these types of topics feel too prominent. In terms of number, they're a small portion of the total topics posted to the site, but there's a set of highly-active users (who are also a very small portion of the active commenters on the site overall) that comment heavily and quickly in them, which keeps them being constantly bumped back up in the activity listings.
And on the opposite side, many users clearly want to avoid these topics. "politics" is by far the most common tag that people filter out, with about four times as many users putting it in their filter list as the second most common one (to nobody's surprise, "elon musk"). In theory, tag filtering is a good solution for this, but it's not a visible enough feature and the large majority of users don't use it (or even seem to know it exists). The group system is far more intuitive for this purpose.
I could continue with other reasons for a while, but the upshot is that I believe it's time to accept that the existing approach hasn't worked out and it's worth trying something different. There are also a few other similar subjects/tags that are generally spread across other groups for lack of an obvious relevant place, so I think going with ~society as a little broader of an umbrella will be able to give those ones more of a home as well. I'd appreciate input about which other subjects you think might fit (but to be clear, I don't intend for this to subsume or replace any of the other existing groups, and especially not ones like ~lgbt, ~life.men, and ~life.women).
I expect to be busy for quite a while today figuring out which topics to move into the group and experimenting with some different possibilities for choosing which users to auto-subscribe to it, so I probably won't be replying much, but I'll definitely read through the discussion here later. I'd also like to take the opportunity to thank @mycketforvirrad again for their tireless devotion to keeping topics well-tagged across the site—it's a mostly-invisible and mostly-thankless task, but it makes doing a major reorganization like this so much more feasible than it otherwise would have been.
Edit: Auto-subscriptions should be mostly done now, hopefully I managed to select a decent set of users (and didn't subscribe many people that don't actually want to be—please unsubscribe if you'd like)
I haven't seen anything about this topic online yet, but to be fair I have been avoiding the news a bit for my own sanity.
One of the disasters of the recent presidential election is the damage to the "soft power" of the United States. By this I mean, the ability of the country to affect the behavior of other countries through cooperation and attraction. You can't have soft power if you don't have reliability, trustworthiness, and honor. Soft power takes years and decades to build. During the first Trump presidency, he did tremendous damage by siding with dictators, criticizing his own advisors, complaining about NATO countries not paying their share.. Like all of his ideas, it is based on the claim that he understands everything, I'll just do this simple thing and it fixes everything. So let's cut the deficit by cutting spending everywhere. When Biden was elected, some of this damage was undone, but the trust needs more than four years to recover. Well, now Trump is back before the trust was really regained. There is no ally in the world that can fully trust the United States. If we all survive the next four years, and there is a fair election, and then the best president of all time is elected, it will hardly help. The whole world knows that we are a country that is stupid and selfish enough to elect another trump in the near future. There is no way to unring this horrible bell.
Yes, I know that the US has done terrible things with it's power in the past, including invasions of other countries. But there has never been a leader in charge that openly antagonizes allies and embraces adversaries, and is so obviously corrupt and easily manipulated through bribery and favors. That so clearly works to weaken the United States in every possible way, including sowing division internally, flaunting ethics, and all the other "unamerican" things we have seen him do.
About Trump's complaints in his first term that we have bases all over the world and we are paying for it: Yes, we are. And it pays back in dividends. Besides the projection of power that serves our interests, it also gives us a reason to build equipment (in the US) using labor in the US and technology studied and implemented in the US. Complaining to NATO that they aren't paying their fair share makes them think "oh shit, the US won't protect us anymore. We better make more nukes". Now we are drastically increasing nuclear and military proliferation problems that are way more likely to have conflicts.
About Trump simplistic solutions such as cutting spending on programs: Remember how trump cut the staff by two-thirds of a key US health agency operating in China? Right before the coronavirus outbreak. For all we know, the global pandemic could have been almost averted.
Most voters apparently don't understand this type of thing of course. This is a problem of education, especially in civic responsibility. But I am sure that there are people in the Republican party, and working for Fox News, and on talk radio, that understand the things I said, and to a much better extent than some random guy on the internet. But for some reason they don't seem to give a shit. Something is more important to them so they allowed Trump to continue and they constantly help spread lies to give him more power. I find this very curious and suspicious.
Last night I posted a video that came across my YouTube feed. I had never seen this particular creator before, but I found the video entertaining and thought provoking in isolation. I hadn't seen any videos like this anywhere else on Tildes, so I decided to post a new Topic. I wasn't sure how to word the description. I knew I wanted to hear other points of view, so I hinted at wanting a discussion and didn't really get into my own thoughts.
I hit submit and went to bed, thinking that in the morning I might be able to clarify my thoughts, and add to the discussion without dominating it.
But I woke up to a mess! A mess that I made. The post had been locked and deleted. Apparently this particular YouTuber is very controversial, and posting without any context turned out to be problematic. I was hoping for discussion and boy howdy did I get discussion.
But since I never really voiced my original intent for posting, it all left me feeling like I had spilled some milk and then someone else had cleaned it up for me. The problem is that I never got to apologize for spilling the milk, and never got to thank the people who cleaned up for me while I was sleeping.
So I suppose this is sort of a meta post. Has anyone else here had something locked/deleted before being able to "make it right"? Should I have provided more context up front? Vetted the creator better by researching their other videos or other online activity? Am I doing the wrong thing by talking about it post-mortem? I definitely don't want to make things any worse, and super duper do not want to be kicked from Tildes! I really enjoy interacting with people here, and want to make sure I'm adding rather than taking away.
Also, I just want to say that I'm sorry if this reignites any problems related to the original (now deleted) Topic, and I will happily accept if this Topic also needs to be removed. Please excuse my mess. :)
