I agree with your first statement, but disagree with the rest. I am not their target market. I enjoy playing their games, but primarily because I am spending time with the kids as I do. Not many of their games are targeted to my demographic.

I disagree that they focus only on digital. Every single Nintendo game comes out on a physical chip. And sales on digital copies are rare and minor (30% off maybe). It is often cheaper to get a physical copy on sale cheaper than digital. And you can then sell it / buy it second-hand. I’ve read that with Switch 2, even the digital codes can be transferred to a new owner. Nintendo for all their faults have never forced you to lock in a digital library you can never resell.

The problem is the standard apps are just that - standard. I can hop onto any Redhat, Debian or Solaris 10 box at work and use ls, cat etc.

If I went all-in on some bespoke alternatives on my special snowflake machine, I’d constantly be going nuts entering incorrect commands on remote machines and losing efficiency. Then, I’d go back to just using the standard commands everywhere.

I bought it second hand. Nintendo got $0 from the sale. In fact, two thirds of our physical games have been purchased second hand.

You might be surprised. I came to the Switch party super late when I bought my kid a switch Christmas 2023. He’s all over Zelda now, has BotW, TotK and even Skyward Sword on his Switch. For him, these games are all from the last year. He turned 2 the year BotW was released.

It’ll be the same story with Switch 2. Some kid who might not even be born yet will get a Switch 2 in 8-9 years and come across these games with all his school friends.

I doubt I’ll go the Switch 2 path with the kids. I haven’t seen a reason to upgrade, yet. I’m thinking of the Steam Deck - while the Nintendo had a fairly cheap entry point to get on the platform, I’ve spent enough on games to negate the difference between a Switch and a Steam Deck - where I already have a 500+ game library to play on it.

13 Minutes to the Moon

Season 1 is essential listening. It’s not very long, and takes you through the journey of putting astronauts on the moon with tech far less advanced that what you’re reading this on. It came sooooo close to failure on more than one occasion. When that lander touched down, it had something like 8 seconds of fuel left.

Season 2 is the story in detail of the Apollo 13 mission. If you loved Season 1 and want more, then go right ahead. I liked season 2, but nowhere near as much.

Alice’s Restaurant by Arlo Gurhtie. Actually, just about anything by Arlo Guthrie and his dad, Woody.
Indian Ira Hayes by Johnny Cash. It’s not very long, but a poignant story that shouldn’t be forgotten.

This is all true, but there’s more:

• Our election campaigns are six weeks by definition. No political ads filling the airwaves the rest of the time.
• We have preferential voting. You don’t have to choose only between the shit and shit-lite parties. You can vote for someone else, and still put shit-lite as your preferred option if the independent you voted first for didn’t get in.
• The electoral commission will help pay for your campaigning if you secured 5% of the vote. Evens the field a bit for not-rich people to run.
• Political signs on houses are pretty rare. Maybe a couple of diehard fans.
• Nobody gets real angry at you if you vote for someone different.

Dance. In a troupe full of girls. Honestly, it was me and 15-20 girls.

Other boys literally called me gay for dancing, while they went and played whatever sports they did and then all went into a locker room and showered together etc.

I honestly never understood how they thought dance was gay. I don’t understand it now.

If you are on a diet, this meal has very few kilojoules/calories. Fewer than a single slice of bread.

It feels like everything in All is about an election in the USA, and that’s really not very engaging to the rest of us. So I mostly hang out in Local for the most part.

Oh hey! That’s us!
We’ve known about this issue since March. OP’s post is a very good explanation of the problem. Lemmy wasn’t designed with one huge instance in mind like this and lemmy.world is the only instance I’m aware of being a problem. Our Kiwi sisters and brothers hacked around the problem five months ago: They set up a server in Finland, slurp up bulk lemmy.world content in batches and then insert that content into their local database. They invited us to share their code to do this, but:

1. It required us to spend money on a VM in Finland specifically for lemmy.world content - a precedent that made us hesitate.
2. This is a temporary problem, a new version of Lemmy was meant to come out some months to remedy it. It simply hasn’t been released, yet.

Had we known in May that this would still be an issue in October, we might have chosen differently.

Your point is a good one, though I’d like to point out that electricity is so useful that if I have power and water in the room (and a bit of prep time) I can make oxygen.

I see OPs point. I donate to Wikipedia, because I love what they do and want to support them. If they decided to put up pay walls, my personal feelings on their model would alter. Even if I got access as a doner.

I would no longer be inclined to donate, because I would no longer believe in what they do.

The answer is electricity. It’s so useful, we take it for granted. Your phones, computers and laptops are not useful if you can’t power them.

I’ll give the people on the dunny their due: toilet paper is still useful in a room without electricity.

I just sort of assume my instance gives away my location - I’m in Australia, not the UK. Not that we can talk, we also churned through about 5 prime ministers in five years a while back.

But I could still talk about any number of issues going on around the world, because our news covers topics around the world. Yours doesn’t. It’s too busy talking about your election and recently a hurricane. Which I know about as it was in our news.

That’s not a criticism, I actually sought out world news while I was there, and there just weren’t any local sources of it.

Eggs look like this:

They don’t need to be washed with hot water and soap, they’re perfectly good as they are.

Sorry about the hospital thing. By “for-profit”, I meant you had to pay to go there. That’s completely alien to everyone in the first world. We have private hospitals as well, and yep: lots of them are (or claim to be) non-profit also.

20 years ago, I used to have custom playlists that I’d load onto a 64mb SD card for my commute. A 64kbit wma file is surprisingly listenable. You can fit more than a standard album onto 64mb. I’m trying to remember now how much, probably 20-25 songs?

At that compression rate, I expect you can get a few hundred songs into half a GB. Of course, picking them would be its own challenge! It’d be the most curated playlist in history.

In Australia and New Zealand: we have skim milk, and call 2% milk “Hi-Lo” - sometimes I see it branded “lite milk”. Then there’s regular milk. It has 4% fat, but you need to read the fine print on the side of the bottle to learn that. I’ve heard it called “full cream milk”, but usually in a cafe setting when ordering coffee.

My brother in the USA had something called half-and-half in his fridge. I think that one was 8%? You guys would know better than I. We don’t have whatever it is.

You’re right, of course - I heard the same stuff referred to as “whole milk”. But the only thing you’re correcting about the wider point is the appropriate adjective. Which I find very funny. 😀

It’s interesting that you picked this one out. I thought the money one in particular was going to be a controversial take.

I’ll try to avoid stuff you know is weird.

1. Adjectives. You can’t just have a thing. It has to have an adjective. For example: Milk. I wanted to buy milk. I get to the milk section, and there’s no such thing. There’s x milk and y milk and about a dozen other variants. Where is the basic milk (it turns out, I wanted “4% milk”) in this damned place?
2. Fresh produce. In fairness you’ve gotten loads better on this one after subsequent visits, but beyond some basic staples like potatoes, carrots, corn etc it was really limiting what fruit and vegetables you could get in the supermarket. Also: baby carrots are weird.
3. Your cheese is radioactive yellow. Cheese is not supposed to be that colour - but you seem expect it to be for some reason, so your producers add yellow colouring to their cheese.
4. Your eggs are weird. I’m not sure what yous guys do to to them, but it’s like you blast away half the shell and are left with a porous super-white textured inner shell. They need to be refrigerated and last a fraction of the time they’d last if you just left them alone and sold them as they are laid.
5. Your bread tastes weird. Maybe it’s sugar or preservatives in it, I don’t know. Bread is meant to have a really short ingredients list like flour, water, salt yeast and maybe a touch of oil and sugar. Take a look at the ingredients on your bread and it’s 5 lines long.
6. Portions! Your food portions are ludicrous. I’d much rather pay half the price for half as much food as they offer on the menu.
7. Money. You have this weird unconscious pecking order thing in your culture where you value people more based on their bank balance. You show a weird unconscious level of respect to someone who is rich. And similarly, unconsciously look down on someone poorer than you. Not in a mean way - just as a “I’m better than this person” way that is hard to quantify. You are aware at some level roughly how rich everyone you deal with is. I see this trait far less in people under 20. I hope there’s a cultural shift on this one, because money on its own is a weird way to measure someone’s worth.
8. Your police are run by the local counties. I think your schools also? I know you have state and federal police also, but most places only have police and schools at those levels.
9. I’ll mostly stay clear of health, because you know your health system is weird. But I will say that it’s weird that very few of your hospitals are run by government. They’re mostly run for profit. Health is meant to be a government service.
10. Outside a few cities, you barely have public transport of any sort. LA is a mega metropolis, and it’s train network is a joke for that level of population - something like 100 stations for 18 million people?
11. You have no idea what’s going on. Most of you couldn’t name the UK Prime Minister (this one has been hard to keep track of, in fairness), the German Chancellor or any of the G20 leaders aside from USA and maybe Canada/China. You don’t know about geopolitics beyond whatever you guys are doing. Your world news is literally stuff USA is involved in.
12. I’ll finish on a weird one: you guys are lovely. This may because I’m white and have an exotic accent to you guys, but almost everyone I’ve ever encountered from the USA in or out of the country has been wonderful. You don’t seem to think of your fellow countrymen you meet as ‘good’ by default. There’s a lot less connection and respect to each other than other nations I’ve been to.