Glass manufacturers hate bubbles.

A lot.

Yeah absolutely. I think with a lot of these older games that are considered to be the GOATs of their respective genres you'll run into the same problem: They were so good, that the mechanics/ideas become the minimum requirement for all games thereafter. So, if you played the game on day 1, it was an innovative masterpiece the likes of which you'd never seen before. If you play it 10-15 years later after having played modern games in the same genre, it feels like the same old shit except without the 10-15 years of improvements.

For me personally, the game I'll get crucified for not enjoying is Half Life 2. I played through the entire game. It was ok. I was pretty bored for most of it though. Shooters aren't generally my thing for one, but even that aside the game was very milquetoast to me. I did a lot of reading up on the history of HL2 afterwards because I was astonished that I didn't enjoy such a legendary game and I think I came to the conclusion that some new mechanics such as the cover system and story-driven nature of HL2 were what made it such a hit in 2004. But 15 years later those mechanics weren't new and exciting to me and the story is decent but a far cry from amazing.

The other game that stands out to me is Assassin's Creed 1. I couldn't make it more than a few hours into that game. Just so boring and repetitive, the combat was boring, the collectables were boring, most mechanics didn't actually seem to matter...I just hated the game lol. I do think it's another example of later entries in the series/other games doing the same thing but better so going back to the OG just felt like a slog. But I really hated AC1 hahaha.

Engineer: 2, but 3 to be safe.

Agreed. The author seems like a bummer of a person to me.

Collecting data on users is not inherently bad, there are lots of ways that data collection can be used to the user's benefit.

If course in this day in age that is typically not the case and companies are normally collecting data at the detriment of the user but I really don't see that with what Wrapped shows.

Plus it's fun to see little metrics like how many times I listened to a song this year, or see how my listening habits changed as the year went by.

It's just a fun and cute thing imo.

It's a bummer. This is the district I went to high school in, and it was a fantastic district while I was there. It had its issues but I got a great education.

It's truly depressing to see this kind of mentality take hold in my community. Sadly I live in a different school district now so I couldn't have even voted against these board members, but I definitely had to vote down my fair share of people just like them in my local district.

Man you just really hate to see it. I hope this inspires a reaction that will ultimately oust these people before they can do irreparable damage.

Completely agree, this just promotes silos between cultures/people and more misunderstandings.

If someone tells you they don't want to be bothered then of course leave them alone, but you can't know that without approaching them first.

Don't agree with the message in this comic at all.

Just so you're aware that refutation was also spoofed.

Whole situation remains funny af though. And Walz is adept at twisting the knife.

If you do it 15 times while holding down the B key Mew appears for you to catch too!

Unfortunately Temtem is a terrible game entirely due to Crema's incompetence.

It's actually impressive how consistently they make horrible decisions. If I had to summarize their attitude, it's that you can't criticize them because "Hey, we're human, we make mistakes and when you criticize us it hurts our feelings". And when I say you can't, I mean it literally. They will suspend or ban you from whatever platform it is for saying anything they perceive as negative.

They take an "us vs them" attitude with their player base which results in the equivalent of Crema stuffing their fingers in their ears saying LALALALALA YOU'RE WRONG WE'RE RIGHT.

It's a shame, because the foundation of the game, the battle system, is genius and a huge improvement over Pokémon. The game showed real promise for a long time. But Crema has been dropping the ball with every update for years and it's long since entered its death spiral.

This is very close to how my weekend went actually : ) Just with BG3 instead of Wrestlemania, and the wife was out of town instead of no school. Haha.

I was able to figure out that I needed to light a deku stick on fire and roll over cobwebs to get to the floor below in Ocarina just fine at 7 years old.

And that's not even touching on the Water Temple.

People, especially game devs, underestimate children.

Spotify like many others here. Just haven't had many issues with the program and it does what I want for a reasonable price.

Wanna give a big shout out to Nebula. It's meant to be a YouTube-esque site but solely for educational content. I found it via LegalEagle but it has a ton of documentaries and other educational content creators. I believe my subscription is $5/year or something like that. Just insanely cheap for really high quality content.

I have the Disney+/Hulu bundle. I love Disney movies and with all the franchises they own now I feel it's worthwhile. Hulu happens to have quite a few of my favorite shows and the bundle made it worthwhile to me.

Currently trying out YouTube premium and, I know this won't be a popular opinion, but I think it's worth it to me. I use a lot of YouTube and also chromecast it. While it's possible for me to get ad blocked YouTube for free on mobile and cast it to my TV it's... Cumbersome and unstable. I generally have the opinion that I don't mind paying for services I enjoy using so... For now, gonna stick with YouTube premium. Just so much less of a headache.

AmazonPrime but only for Amazon's services really, the few shows that are on Prime Video for free are a nice bonus though.

And currently I pay for Netflix and share it with my family but the very first second Netflix cracks down on that I'm dropping it and have told my family as such for years. Already started torrenting most shows I kept up with via Netflix in preparation.

The only other one I consider is HBO... But there just hasn't been enough of an allure thus far.

Man the name of the dish is so not the point of this community. I stand by Lemmy in present state is far worse than reddit for pedantic or toxic behavior.

It looks really good OP, nice job! I'd eat it regardless of what you called it.

It's the best I've found, but I wouldn't call it a "good" alternative myself no.

Many others have commented on the small communities/lack of niche communities so I'll simply say I agree with the takes in this thread there.

Personally though, I generally find Lemmy to be far less tolerant of any dissenting opinions across most communities. And man do I mean any. There's a plethora of topics that aren't even worth trying to discuss here because if you introduce the slightest bit of nuance to a hardline take you'll be downvoted, insulted, and ignored.

A quick example that comes to mind are services such as Spotify/Youtube. To make a long story short, I find that I use Youtube often enough that I don't mind paying for Youtube premium. They need to make money somehow to continue providing that service and I can't fucking stand ads so hey sure it's worth the monthly payment to me. I'm a pretty satisfied customer all things considered.

Try offering that perspective in any related thread and you'll be called bootlicker and made to feel like you're propping up Satan himself for daring to pay for Youtube and be happy to do so.

There's other, similar topics. Some are easier to avoid, like the FuckCars community. I was a pretty big fan of that community on reddit but on Lemmy most threads seem to truly believe we need to go 100% no cars at all and there is no middleground damnit. Other topics manage to work their way into damn near any thread. Biden could literally pull a child and puppy from a burning building and there will always be comments about how he's still a genocidal maniac and basically evil. That entire war is basically just not worth talking about here imo.

And then there's little stuff. For example, don't ever say you use Windows here lest a whole horde of people jump in to call you an idiot for not having switched to Linux I mean really what's wrong with you using the most popular OS in the world by a large margin. Stuff like that.

So I guess to summarize my feelings here, I personally believe the echo-chamber is far worse on Lemmy than reddit and that's primarily due to the smaller community. A lot of likeminded people came to Lemmy and we're missing a lot of middleground opinions that come naturally with a larger, more diverse population. Too many people view everything as black and white and if you sit in grey both extremes are against you.

There are absolutely exceptions; I have seen respectful discourse on the site. But the general trend I perceive here is that the echo-chamber is far worse.

I feel people are way too quick to jump down Biden's throat for the rail union.

First off, it's worth noting he continued to work with the railroad to get the employees the sick pay they wanted on the back end.

But in the midst of the situation... I'm not going to pretend this hypothetical is completely correct. But I don't think it's crazy.

Imagine you're Biden and you hear about this railroad strike. Your advisors are telling you if the strike goes through how many rail passengers are stranded in the middle of nowhere, how much food is just going to go to waste and not make it to various towns, which factories manufacturing hospital equipment will be without material and unable to continue production. On top of a gigantic economic impact there could be deaths associated with the strike.

Imagine you're that guy and have to make the call to say nope, I don't care, the strike continues.

I'm super pro labor and anti corporation and even I would struggle to make that call. Especially if someone proposes the idea that on the backside of forcing the railroad workers to work we could pressure the railroad to give into the demands.

I'm not saying he's perfect and I'm not saying there wasn't a better way. But I think that hypothetical is plausible. And I think people are too quick to forget that often times these decisions are which tragic situation would you rather allow to happen, and it's not as clear cut as it sounds.

Edit: Oh yeah, the comparison. This time, cars don't get built and these corporations will see problems to their bottom line. The impact to human life isn't there. The economic impact still may be, but it's not as devastating across the board like shutting down the railroad would be. Much easier decision to make.

I would think most of those applications should be able to use an alumino-silicate based refractory ceramic fiber. Kaowool is one brand, but there are many like it.

It has its own problems in regard to silicosis but that's only after it's been exposed to higher temperatures and are easily mitigated with most particulate respirators. Also, if I remember correctly, the silicosis threat requires very long term exposure. I do know of at least one company developing a silca-free version too, which would eliminate the silicosis threat.

I use it in glass manufacturing with temperatures 2000°F+ so I'm quite confident it'll hold up to any application where asbestos is being used.

EDIT: It will hold up in any application unless there's a problem with certain chemical reactivity I should say*. I don't expect that would be a common problem, but I'm sure it could happen. I'm admittedly not well versed on asbestos since I've never tried speccing it out for anything, haha.

How much I play tends to vary from patch to patch. I have rather limited free time these days and so it can be difficult.

Primarily I play for the story. I absolutely love the story and I truly believe Shadowbringers and Endwalker had an impact on me as a person and gave me new perspectives on life. Just a beautifully told story, great characters, awesome themes, cannot say enough good about it.

However I'd hardly call myself a casual player. I enjoy raiding but haven't managed to finish a full tier on patch yet, primarily due to time. My schedule isn't very conducive to joining a static and I simply don't have the time to prog via PF. I hope that one day I will finally finish a tier though lol. This past tier I got through P7S but it took me so long to finally find a PF that could clear 7 that 8 just wasn't in the cards for me.

Aside from raiding I generally just derp around and relax. Decorating my house, doing my island sanctuary, mount hunting, crafting, nothing is really off limits. Most of the time I just pick some goal (like all tanks to 90) and go for it until I lose interest in the game and then I wait for the next patch.

If I do join back up I'll probably resume my leveling of PRanged via finishing all side quests in the game. That was really fun for me : ) but atm I've been obsessed with learning chess so we'll see when I pick my favorite game back up. If I just won my housing auction it'll be more likely that I return lol. Part of why I lost interest is that during the break before 6.4 I went 60 days without logging in, lost my house, and proceeded to have like no inventory space. To my own surprise not having a house and being so inventory limited really hurt my own motivation to play.

I main Black Mage and I'd like to think I'm pretty decent at it, often parsing in the upper 80's last tier. Been maining BLM since FFXI and it's just comfy for me. FF is the only series that I think gets the idea of black mage correct.

Came to Lemmy from reddit.

Time to check the auction!

I agree with the NDA comment, it's difficult to give a lot of the cool details without breaking NDA.

I feel pretty safe in saying that I'm working to come up with new ways to melt glass for our process in order to be more flexible about what compositions we're able to use. That's a pretty fun one for me.

I'm sure there are people who genuinely find that kind of work to be really cool, but I'm with you. It wasn't enough for me.

I just could not get motivated over my projects being "Maybe we should store the pallets right here in packaging instead of 100ft away on the other side of the building" or "Let's replace the screwdrivers in assembly with drills to increase productivity". Who the fuck needs an engineering degree to tell them that drills are way faster than screwdrivers?

Let alone the bullshittery around monitoring every minute of each employee's day and trying to squeeze every ounce of productivity out of it. One manager gave an entire presentation about how if every operator is 1 minute late coming back to their station from break it adds up to like 2 full weeks for 1 employee by the end of the year.

Like...I saw that manager gossiping with HR for anywhere from like 15-45 minutes every day. But here we're trying to harass our employees for taking ONE EXTRA MINUTE of their 30 minute lunch break.

I just couldn't. Continuous Improvement can be cool but not when it's that kind of stuff, not to me anyway.

Just wanted to say that if you feel similarly and it's making you miserable there are cool engineering jobs out there. Even Continuous Improvement can be really fun if the manufacturing process is complex and requires actual engineering to improve.

Simply put, the attack is shorter and easier to understand than the nuanced defense.

Politicians can put "you're against education!" in a 15 second attack ad on the radio/TV/a poster. It takes a short media appearance to explain the nuance. Which isn't worth the time or money typically, since so few people will see it.

Especially since a huge section of our population gets 100% of its news from Fox, Newsmax, and other right wing media. That interview will never air there. In fact, those sources will repeat the party line of "you're against education!"