I’ve posted this a few times but here it is again for you:

I have managed to nearly eliminate Amazon entirely from our lives for the past two years. I usually find things by searching what I want to buy on DuckDuckGo and then adding “-amazon”, “-etsy”, “-walmart”, “-temu” and “-pinterest” as search modifiers.

A lot of little shops are perfectly legit, but watch out for:

Things being ridiculous bargains. Small shops will almost always be more expensive due to higher overheads and less bulk

Too much variety in product (unless they’re a marketplace with 3rd party vendors). A legit shop will have inventory that makes sense together in its theme. If they sell everything from bubblebath to uranium they’re either probably not actually selling it or drop shipping it.

Pictures that look like they come from lots of different sources, or no consistency in images. If they don’t have their own pictures of products or standards of presentation that’s suspicious

Some general recs:

For anything electronic or computer related: B&H Photo or Microcenter

For music stuff: Sweetwater, but there’s a lot of great small music stores, or you can use a marketplace like Reverb

For clothes: if you have any clothes you already enjoy, go directly to their brand website. If you don’t, go to local secondhand shops and touch, handle and try on some clothes to see them in person. I’ve discovered some brands I like by finding something in a thrift store that was well made but not my size or preferred color.

For house repair and DIY stuff: we order from a local building supply store, but there’s also hardwareandtools.com, 1stoplighting, Waysource, Lightbulbs.com, Timothy’s Toolbox etc.

For food items, local grocery stores often offer online shopping and delivery. If it’s a specialty item or imported the import companies sometimes have their own websites.

For cosmetics, skin care and some home cleaning things, here’s Hive or GroveCo, which try to prioritize sustainability

For tea, coffee and spices, Adagio and its sister websites

For something hard to find you can’t find another site for, try Ebay.

I do business with all sorts of independent retailers and have only had good experiences with them. These are sites that I’ve personally bought from but there are a lot of smaller sites just trying to make a place for themselves on the internet

This reminds me of Althea Chrome, the artist who made all of the knit accessories for Coraline.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NQCf8fjgoJQ&pp=0gcJCRsBo7VqN5tD

Sounds great, Photuris for supreme dictator!

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I don’t think that’s a fair assessment of Guild Wars 2. It was not a true sequel to Guild Wars 1 but it’s a decent game in its own right. I can see that if you’re playing a great city builder game and they announced a sequel, you would be thrown if that sequel was a 4x instead. But in this analogy, it’s a damn good 4x and maybe even the best amongst its contemporaries. Plus the original game is still there in all of its charm and originality, they’ve kept the servers running this long and seem to plan on keeping on doing so until no one is playing.

Yep absolutely seconding this one. Everything is very much a play-as-you-want playground, with many ways to level and a low stress, community based world. Pretty much everything that causes friction against other players in other MMOs (kill stealing, limited resource mining, open world pvp etc) just isn’t in the game or in its own place you don’t have to go.

I will say that it has a lot of complexity and systems on systems that have built up over time that can be opaque and overwhelming. But again, you have the choice not to engage, and can do perfectly well running your character around maps exploring and picking cabbages and pumpkins and doing whatever you think looks interesting. Just remember to change out your armor and weapons every few levels on your way to 80.

Kolanaki linked it above. It’s a disgusting crusty gamer den implying the game is so addictive you’ll live in filth. I remember that image being on the first couple of pages of a PC Gamer issue from the late 90s or early 00’s.

I remember seeing these ads as an impressionable young gamer and getting the idea that Playstations had games that were scary and weird, and Nintendo games and handhelds were for boys. Generally the ads told me “this is not for you”. Because I only ever saw ads for specific PC games and never for PCs themselves, (they were aimed at adults, not in the kind of magazines and comics young me was perusing) even though I was still not the target market it clicked more with me. I think that might be a part of why I’ve only ever really gotten into PC games over the years. I knew there were games I’d like and games I wouldn’t, and never got the same platform level messaging.

I remember seeing an ad for Thief and thought it looked cool, and I remember being super grossed out by that Quake 3 ad, but I never felt unwelcome or out of place playing PC games. In contrast, the focus on marketing to young males is really obvious in those console ads.

Examples of some PC game ads I remember working for me and led to me getting them:

https://cdn.mobygames.com/promos/18308445-thief-the-dark-project-magazine-advertisement-pc-gamer-usa-issue.jpg

https://www.retromags.com/rmg_fs/gallery_imgs/monthly_2022_06/large.1061174590_LordsofMagic02(December1997).jpg.82c9c4e56622e154a87711d93647ccc3.jpg

https://cdn.mobygames.com/promos/6568546-the-elder-scrolls-iii-morrowind-magazine-advertisement-pc-gamer-.jpg

A humble farm boy’s guardians and village are burned, leading to him leaving his home and finding refuge with a wise old man who has special powers. He tells him he knew his father, that he was a knight and they fought together. He gives him his father’s sword, and teaches him to use his own special powers. They receive a message from a princess in distress, who tells them she’s being held hostage by the evil emperor. They travel to save her with the help of a roguish anti-hero and free the princess. Once freed, they learn of a crucial weakness in the emperor’s fortress, and together they lead a raid to siege it. They succeed with the help of a rag tag bunch of rebels and the princess awards them with medals in her throne room.

That doesn’t sound like a story about how technology, science or knowledge effects people or society to me.

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Yes, because context matters. Exceptions don’t make the rule, and speaking generally about things is allowed when they are related.

So what is the exception here? You said, and I quote, “science is by nature unethical”. So you’re saying any experimental methodology in any school of science exploring any number of completely benign things is somehow unethical.

This isn’t debate club.

I see you’re new to the internet.

Ah yes, everyone knows how famously unethical astronomers are, they should respect the privacy and consent of supernovas. Filthy perverts peeping on those innocent stars!

You said “science”, not any specific type or category of study, so if you mean a specific school of science is unethical you should make that distinction.

Why do you think that asking questions, making a hypothesis, testing that hypothesis and writing down the results is unethical?

I’ve been tinkering with my Linux machine for the past 8 months or so, and having random issues like the ones I listed and more besides that I’ve already solved. Meanwhile my old Windows 7 machine has been working flawlessly for about 8 years, no regedits or crap software issues. I think I had a driver issue with my mouse a couple years ago that I clicked a button and it fixed it. My laptop running Windows 7 also has been working flawlessly since about 2016 beyond prompting me to format media that I connect to it, but I press a button and that goes away. Recently I’ve been having compatibility issues with software because it’s such an old OS but as you said, that’s a 3rd party software issue, not a problem with Windows 7.

Glad your Linux experience is so smooth though. Must be nice!

I think there’s a difference in personal interpretation of what a “Linux issue” is, here. It sounds like you might be interpreting “Linux issue” as problems with the software itself, or its capabilities, features and processes etc. Personally, I am using “issues with Linux” to mean the entire user experience from start up to using the GUI and whether or not I can do the things I want and need to do on a daily basis easily and intuitively. Certainly, Linux as a software plays into it, but the things you are brushing off as 3rd party incompatibilities are absolutely part of the Linux experience in my opinion. I’m not trying to throw blame, but when introducing new people to Linux it’s best to acknowledge there may be some tinkering and adaptation needed to get things working as they should.

Stuff breaks? What breaks? I don’t have stuff that breaks. Windows has been far more breaky to me over the last decade than Linux has ever been. What have you been doing? This may have been true 20 years ago, but not today.

I’ve been trying to adapt to Linux Mint/Cinnamon as my daily driver and yes, stuff breaks. My sata and nvme connected drives kept disappearing every time I started my computer so I had to learn about mounting and auto mount (they are just there on Windows). My game and program installs on Bottles and Lutris kept going “missing” and losing their .exe’s. I downloaded 70gb of Guild Wars 2 files at least 8 times because I thought each time I had fixed the “files missing” problem only to have them disappear on reboot. I still didn’t figure out what was happening and am only able to play now because I found out how to use the provider portal on Steam. I can’t make launcher short cuts from the actual executable, I have to go to the desktop and do it and when I do, it won’t let me drag it to my panel for some reason. When I thought I had found a solution, I reactivated some launcher applets and ended up with three different instances of my panel launcher icons and still no ability to add new ones. My systems connected to the same ethernet used to show up in my network panel and I was able to access my shared folders and media files but they all stopped showing up a few days ago and I had to learn all about Samba share and minimum and maximum server protocols and still am trying to find a solution.

Yes, Windows breaks stuff too, but Linux is NOT a perfect product that works flawlessly for everyone and [@cRazi_man@europe.pub is right. All of their points are things I’ve been struggling with and would warn a Linux noob about. I personally would rather trust those random forum posts than LLM summaries (and have solved some issues that way) but otherwise I agree with each of their bullet points.

I’ve personally only seen kids on leashes in the context I mentioned above, of a large, crowded event where a few bodies moving in the way of your kid will break line of sight entirely. Outdoor festivals, concerts, fairs, amusement parks etc. I have never seen a kid on a leash at a playground or park or bank or grocery store etc. Toddlers are small and if there’s a lot of bodies around it would be VERY easy to lose sight of them. If my kid ran off and broke my line of sight of him in a crowd I absolutely would have a moment of panic. Again, I’m not going to judge other parents for finding solutions to problems that don’t harm the child.

I got away from my mother at a large event, and left her panicking and organizing other parents to search for me. When they found me she spanked me and yelled at me for running off. It wasn’t the first time and wouldn’t be the last. Obviously hitting me was wrong, but she was terrified of what could have happened to me. If she had just used a tether it would never have happened.

Something’s lack of representation in media is not exactly a reliable metric of commonality, if it was, gay people sprang into being in the late 90s.

It’s normal enough. I saw a couple of kids on wrist leashes just this weekend at a very crowded outdoor event. The kids were probably about 2 and 3. I have a 3 year old as well, and didn’t have him on a leash because he’s responsive to my voice calling him and has decent (for his age) impulse control. I didn’t judge or have negative impressions of those parents. They were present and just trying to enjoy the event with their kids. It’s HIGHLY kid dependent. When I was a toddler, I was the type to just run off in a crowd and I could have saved my mother a lot of grief and panic if she had a leash for me. It’s just another tool available to parents.

It’s important not to project your feelings as an adult, because you have different assumptions, associations and contexts tied to leashes than a toddler does. Generally, toddlers are taught to have shame or be embarrassed about things, their default sentiment to most things is extremely pragmatic. A toddler on a leash will be focused on the tactile sensation of it on their wrist or body, the effect it has of limiting their movement, and not much else. Think about when you saw those kids on leashes… were they upset about the leash? Were they trying to get out of it? Were they asking their guardians to please take it off? Or were they just kinda being silly kids running around exploring?

Also to this:

If you are taking them to a place where it’s dangerous for them to act like children…*then why the fuck are you taking them there in the first place?!*

Sometimes you just have no other option. A fair price for babysitting is $20+ USD an hour. Not every toddler is in or has access to daycare. Not every family has grandparents close enough to drop them off with. Sometimes bringing them along to a place with you is the only way they’ll have supervision.

They ARE evolving. My kid was born with a taste for spicy food. When he was about one he used to try to swig the spicy mayo bottle. When he was two he was doing the “more” gesture for more Sriracha on his burrito meat. He’s three now and regularly eats off his Dad’s plate when he has food that makes my nose run and eyes tear up. He will probably be snorting Pepper X by his teens.