Ahh, the maps were so good. I remember using the extremely detailed hand drawn map to help me locate the Cavern of the Incarnate, and other cool locations. I am sad that I didn’t keep them.

I loved reading through the manual for Morrowind with the copy we got on the original XBox. I read all the class descriptions, details about the schools of magic, and had a whole character planned out before starting the game. I didn’t get into tabletop gaming until much later, but looking back, that manual really captured the same feeling of reading through the D&D players handbook and picking out a race, class, background, etc.

I think that feeling is why it’s still my favorite PC game.

Some still are. Bigelow I think.

But loose leaf tea is much better quality anyway and avoids the issue of what’s in the bag entirely. They also have ceramic filters so you can completely avoid having plastic in contact with hot water

Similar situation here. I was raised home schooled for all of my education. Got a GED, good score on the ACT, got a 4.0 in the community college where I got an associates degree. The problem is parents who homeschool because they don’t want their kids to turn “woke” or be “converted” by exposure to the fact that non-straight, non-cis people exist. A lot of the time, the emphasis is only on indoctrination, and there is little or no actual education involved.

I have been to homeschool conferences - there are some good resources there, and a LOT of really pretty awful stuff like this article mentioned. People like the author are so incredibly impactful, even if they don’t realize it. They may never see results but those seeds matter. Even if the parents don’t get it, the kids will.

At a conference last year, there was a speaker talking about parenting difficult children (Kirk Martin with Celebrate Calm). He was presenting very much a solid gentle parenting approach (though he didn’t call it that) that is very contrary to the culture of a lot of homeschool groups. He spent a lot of time unpacking his experiences as someone who grew up with really strict physical discipline, the impact it had on him, his experience being a parent - kind of leading people on a journey from where they might be to where they should be as parents.

He also spent a bit of his talk on how the Bible doesn’t teach us to raise our kids to fight in a culture war and just really pretty clearly calling out a lot of the toxic far right christian-nationalist talking points. Sure he made a lot of people uncomfortable, but those thoughts will stick with them.

After his talk he was spent over an hour talking with people outside of the conference room answering questions. His next talk was packed as well.

Anyway, all that to say - I know it can take a lot out of someone to deal with people in those environments, but it is absolutely impactful and so desperately needed.

I have issues with FireFox running YouTube on windows 10 - it gets super laggy - the issue is nonexistent if I used the Piped frontend. I think it depends a lot on what website you are using - some don’t play well with FireFox.

That being said, I did not have issues with FireFox on Mac when I used that, or on Linux, though I don’t use my Linux laptop a lot for web heavy stuff

Yeah it doesn’t seem too difficult to me to see when reviews seem fishy. I have never tried fakespot myself.

Another thing to check is that the reviews match what the product is for - I have seen a lot of Amazon listings where the seller will have a product up for a long time, get a lot of positive reviews, then change the listing to something else. So it looks like the listing has been up for a long time with good reviews but it’s really a different item. Then note the seller and don’t buy anything from them lol.

Per the article, they are integrating Fakespot into Firefox, so it won’t be different. Hopefully the tool can be improved

No, it’s not excuses, it’s just reality. It’s hard. Does that mean people shouldn’t try to do better and make things better? Of course not. Being better and doing better is hard, and we should do it anyway. That kind of personal growth is central to the human experience, or it ought to be.

The thing is, just because people aren’t doing better in the area that you understand and care about doesn’t mean that they aren’t in other areas that you may not know about.

For example, someone who is stressed out and overburdened with work may be using all of their available energy to be a better parent and make sure that their child is raised in a healthy and emotionally stable home. If that doesn’t leave room for people to support FOSS and privacy friendly browsers that’s ok.

Just be the best human you can be every day and don’t beat yourself (or others) up for not being perfect.

It’s not really the time. It’s more about the mental effort it takes to find out what to switch to.

Sure, it’s easy to install Firefox or sign up for Lemmy once you know that it’s there, but most people just have a sense that things suck with no idea of what they can do to fix it.

Finding out what to do to have a better experience takes a non-trivial amount of mental energy that scrolling reddit and instagram do not require.

The constant hustle, multiple jobs, or jobs with a high mental load, rising prices and stagnant wages all work together to create a lot of decision fatigue and stress. It often takes something major to get people out of that and get them active at changing things.

You download them directly from thr Humble bundle website. They appear to be DRM free.

They are all available in PDF but only some are available in all formats, and the rest are either only PDF and MOBI or PDF and ePUB, if that matters to you

I love getting paid to learn new stuff. Favorite part about my job

Good article. I have worked as a dev for over 10 years and have seen a LOT of really complicated spaghetti code that was only maintained by individuals in silos. Some used to joke about “job security” but I would rather my life not be a living nightmare unable to take vacation without keeping my work phone on me at all times because I’m the single person that knows how to fix a mission critical system. I’ve been there. It sucks for new people but it also sucks for the keepers of the tribal knowledge. It’s exhausting.

Training, documenting, refactoring and replacing to eliminate that is good for everyone. If you are a good dev you won’t have to keep tribal knowledge to stay employed.

I got a friend with that in Destiny 2 just a couple years ago. I guess when you’ve been playing for hours and you ask how to take a screenshot, you don’t put 2 and 2 together quick enough