JoshuaFalken
@JoshuaFalken@lemmy.world
- Comment on A Game Pass for indie games: meet Indie Pass, a $6.99-a-month subscription launching with 70 titles 5 days ago:
To be sure, that’s a decent way to do it. If indie.io had something similar, that might be nice.
Though given it’s all indie games over there, I’d be on board to pay this 6.99 not as a subscription, but as a fee to get a week to try out whatever I’d like for some reasonable amount of time, maybe set by the developer. Then of the games I’ve tried but not purchased the full version of, split the 6.99 between them.
Maybe utopian thinking but it’d be nice.
- Comment on A Game Pass for indie games: meet Indie Pass, a $6.99-a-month subscription launching with 70 titles 6 days ago:
I could see this as useful to get for a month so you can try out a bunch of indie titles to find ones you like before you buy them. Could be helpful for developers that don’t have small demos or anything.
Certainly not useful to have perpetually.
- Comment on Americans be like: 1 week ago:
Not to them it’s not. Proportionally, it’s more than what many can afford. Just like how your fuel prices are dirt cheap to someone living in Hong Kong.
- Comment on Nintendo Lowers Pricepoint For Digital Versions of Switch 2 Games 1 week ago:
Goddamn.
You’re not wrong and Nintendo could go bankrupt tomorrow for all I care, but if this isn’t the precise thing people have been harping on about for a decade now, and here we are with someone doing the thing and there’s a immediate complaint.
Dammed if they do, dammed if they don’t. We should have stopped at arcades. Maybe paying per character life and without save states was the peak.
- Comment on Asked LA Fitness to cancel my membership, they offered to freeze it for $10/month instead 2 weeks ago:
a prorate fee will be billed to reactivate
To my reading, both ‘fee’ and ‘billed’ indicate the customer will be charged an amount to regain access. If it were as you suggest, I think it would have been worded differently, to provide more benefit to the customer. Maybe something along the lines of:
‘When you are ready to come back, your membership reactivation will be prorated to reflect freeze term payments.’
As it is, I can see both interpretations. Which might be on purpose to surprise people who turn up at the gym after a few months break, banking on an eye roll and the fee to be paid so they can get on with their workout.
- Comment on Asked LA Fitness to cancel my membership, they offered to freeze it for $10/month instead 2 weeks ago:
Am I reading this right that to reactivate they’d be charging the difference they ‘lost’ during the freeze term? Wild.
- Comment on Do most comedians invite heclers to their shows? And they go over the bit so it seems sporadic? And get them more views or clicks or whatever? Kind of like a magician does with a plant? 2 weeks ago:
It’s worth noting there’s a difference between a heckler video and a crowd work video. If the performer solicits audience participation, that’s not them being heckled.
That said, many comedians do several shows a week, some even doing multiple spots a night. These days, most of them record their sets - and the audience, to a degree. When they amass so much footage, it’s easy enough to have a video now and then involving a heckler.
Of course, sometimes, some things do get ‘scripted’ with the audience. This is a funny example of a bit Gianmarco Soresi did using the audience to get this clip parodying a Rocket Money ad.
- Comment on The Gang Solves Climate Change 2 weeks ago:
Oh I agree, the ‘Saudi Arabia of natural gas’ I was referring to is the United States.
- Comment on The Gang Solves Climate Change 2 weeks ago:
- Comment on The Gang Solves Climate Change 2 weeks ago:
Most of that isn’t too important. The real failure you neglected to mention is the loss of the negative reinforcement that comes with coal based energy generation. If we keep burning the stuff, the big man can’t give out as many lumps to the bad children, and so they grow up to be criminals running big companies.
- Comment on When people recommend Brave browser. 3 weeks ago:
“Privacy-centric” my elbow.
I will be adding this turn of phrase to my vocabulary, thank you.
- Comment on Why are people so rude on Reddit compared to the Fediverse? 3 weeks ago:
Probably just the law of large userbases. The more people around, the more rude people there are likely to be. Rude people are always a minority, but they tend to be more vocal.
A large portion of fediverse users have abandoned Reddit for moral or ethical reasons. So while occasionally people will be rude here, it tends to skew more towards polite discussion.
- Comment on British children are 3 times more likely than Dutch children to be obese. A British journalist explains why 3 weeks ago:
The priciest bit of rail per mile is in cities because of the stations and land use, but even those are one time costs. If we magically moved two cities in Japan 5x further apart, it wouldn’t cost 5x the amount to install the rail to connect them. When considering maintenance costs, a comparison to highways wouldn’t be close.
Rail infrastructure across America is mostly dedicated to freight, with passenger travel taking a literal back seat. Comparing rail to air isn’t exactly apples to apples considering how artificially cheap domestic air travel is permitted to be.
California’s rail situation is an entire can of worms on its own. My underlying point is that the type of cities shown in this post are possible everywhere. All it really takes is willpower.
- Comment on British children are 3 times more likely than Dutch children to be obese. A British journalist explains why 3 weeks ago:
Given several more developed nations have solved the distance problem using trains, I don’t think space between cities is much more than a talking point. Need somewhere to put the farmlands anyhow.
- Comment on British children are 3 times more likely than Dutch children to be obese. A British journalist explains why 3 weeks ago:
For what it’s worth, dense infrastructure is possible everywhere, even in large spaces like the United States. It just doesn’t get built because the people tasked with making such decisions choose not to for various reasons.
- Comment on FIFA hikes 2026 World Cup parking prices, including for disabled fans 4 weeks ago:
That’s a cool service the restaurants provide, I wouldn’t have thought of that. Wish something like that was available everywhere, even seeing a show would be nice to be picked up and have a table waiting.
- Comment on FIFA hikes 2026 World Cup parking prices, including for disabled fans 4 weeks ago:
I wonder at what point it’s worthwhile to have a group to park at some mall and rent a van to drive to the stadium parking.
If any positive outcome is possible here, I’d be nice if this gets people accustomed to carpooling to such events. Sure would be nice though if these stadiums would be serviced by more effective transportation.
- Comment on Sony is testing dynamic pricing: one game - different prices on the PlayStation Store 4 weeks ago:
What was it that initially sent you down that path?
- Comment on Top DuckDuckGo Image Result for "Morse code chart". It gets worse the longer I look at it. 1 month ago:
Well perhaps you’re right, though if I search for green apples and the first few results are from applecatelogue, I might not think that an ad so much as a search result.
I see your point though, multiple of the same domain can seem questionable.
- Comment on Top DuckDuckGo Image Result for "Morse code chart". It gets worse the longer I look at it. 1 month ago:
I don’t see an ad in there but even so, why quibble on a dead man’s behalf that the communication method is called Vail’s cipher and not Morse code. It’s like taking up arms whenever a guillotine is mentioned.
- Comment on A heart-warming story 1 month ago:
You’re preaching to the choir here.
The chart is for people that have never tried to sing.
- Comment on A heart-warming story 1 month ago:
From the United States perspective, less blood in reserve drives up prices for the population, so it seems to jive with healthcare as a whole there. I know Canada was buying plasma from them as well in the before times, but I’m not sure about that any more.
Several new plasma donation clinics have opened up to collect from people with more common blood types. It’s interesting to hear the UK ships blood in from the west at all. I would have figured there would be closer options available. Unless Brexit also made that more difficult too.
I understand the necessity of shipping blood around, but it sure would be nice if everywhere had enough donors to keep the blood in country. Though I suppose even in such a utopia, gold blood would still be sent around the world when necessary.
- Comment on A heart-warming story 1 month ago:
You’ve reminded me some years ago I donated at a pop up clinic, and it was across the street from a carnival that came to town. They went and got a bunch of ride and games tickets and gave them to blood donors. Big sign over at the carnival, and the clinic was packed.
That’s a random way to get people in, but it worked, and it was fun. Now if only they could take the donation while people wait in line for a ride haha.
- Comment on A heart-warming story 1 month ago:
Most appointments are to have something done to a person’s own benefit. Chiropractic, dental, accountant, that sort of thing. Making an appointment to donate blood to a person you’ll never meet is a type of selflessness that surprises me when I hear of people missing those appointments.
Someone at the clinic I go to once mentioned they had two or three missed appointments every day. I don’t know, I suppose I take it more seriously than most, but it strikes me as an odd thing to miss. Especially when the service here calls two days before an appointment to confirm.
- Comment on A heart-warming story 1 month ago:
To further this, the negative and positive value also matters. Someone with a negative type can only take negative blood, whereas a positive type can accept both.
I wish it were easier to get people to donate. Just this morning I heard a radio advertisement for the blood service that included the line ‘please schedule and attend an appointment’, which seems wild that so many people book a time then don’t show up.
- Comment on I've Hit The Perfect Weight 1 month ago:
Don’t forget morfans!
- Comment on Has Canada's government done anything concrete to reduce dependence on the US since Trump took office? Maybe even since the first term? 2 months ago:
To chime in from the Great White North, I agree with much of what you’ve written, though I haven’t spoken to anyone that thinks Canada has moved too slow.
What’s been done so far has happened as efficiently as government workings can be done, but when I go to a restaurant I don’t skip the entree if the waitstaff brings out the appetizer with haste.
- Comment on Has Canada's government done anything concrete to reduce dependence on the US since Trump took office? Maybe even since the first term? 2 months ago:
For a question as broad as ‘what is this country doing about that other country’, it might be a good idea to drop the editorial names and instead include position descriptors. Canadian politicians don’t have the same name recognition as American counterparts.
Mark Carney is Canada’s Prime Minister, who won the position over Pierre Poilievre.
- Comment on Trying to find a messenger bag at Amazon 3 months ago:
Just a guess but, I wouldn’t consider anything that was an order of magnitude more expensive than what I was looking to spend.
- Comment on Valve's new hardware will NOT be loss leaders 4 months ago:
I’m not sure cost can be set aside from a price discussion when they’ve explicitly stated it won’t be a Costco rotisserie chicken.
With the number of consoles sold this generation, I’m not sure where the limit is for what people will spend to play the games they want. With console pricing has trailing budget gaming PC’s, I could see a number of people getting a Steam Machine in lieu of the next Playstation or Xbox.
What would be interesting to see in the future is the split between units sold to lifelong console players making a change, and pre existing Steam users with stuffed libraries buying one for the couch. If the latter make up the majority of sales, but they priced it like a chicken, that’ll be a problem pretty quick.
Hopefully it shakes out well and indie game developers reap some well deserved rewards.
