bermuda

(Image I used is from the Tempa. record company)

I loved Fallout 4 but one of my least favorite aspects of it was how it forced me into base building when I pretty much wasn't interested in that aspect of the game. I get Bethesda was doing something new and wanted to show it off, but it was so annoying being so prevalent in a lot of the main missions of that game. I'm really hoping they don't make the same mistake with Starfield. I know a lot of people are hyped about the settlement building and the micro managing just as they were in Fallout 4, but personally I'm not super interested in that. I'm more interested in the RPG stuff.

For me it was minesweeper clones. I got frustrated one day and decided to learn how to be good at minesweeper. After beating the medium and large boards a couple times I looked on Steam for minesweeper versions, and turns out there's a whole genre of clones. Some of them are direct clones of the game, while others are very heavily inspired by minesweeper. The two best I played were Hexcells and Tametsi. Hexcells is stylish and is only hexagons (as opposed to the minesweeper squares), while Tametsi has squares, rectangles, and hexagons and is a lot more barebones. However I found Tametsi to be much harder. There were some levels on there that took me an entire day, and I think there's like 500 levels.

I've been using DuckDuckGo for a few months now and to be honest I'm kind of disappointed. I really appreciate the privacy concerns and the lack of tracking software. It got really annoying how Google would "recommend" things that it thought I was interested in when I wasn't interested in them, that kind of thing. But on the other hand, I've been starting to get really frustrated at just how hard it is to search for anything. You have to be really specific, especially if it's something niche or if you don't fully know the right terms to ask for. At least with Google, if you weren't completely correct about a topic, it could at least parse what hobby or activity you were trying to ask about and bring up things related to that. But with DDG, I've found it doesn't even really try in that regard. Plus it's frankly really dumb how it uses Apple Maps as opposed to, I dunno? OSM? I honestly prefer Google Maps despite my dislike of the search engine so the usage of Apple Maps is really offputting.

Now, before you say anything, going in I knew it wouldn't be as easy to search for things as on Google, but I'm pretty experienced with the internet and I didn't think it would be a problem. But even being hyper-specific yields surprisingly little results if it's something niche. Even wording it like you would on a University library search engine doesn't seem to work as good as I might expect.

I'm open to considering more mainstream options too like Bing if it's better than I remember it being.

edit: I should've mentioned, I'm not necessarily saying I want to make a full switch just yet to any daily driver situation, I'd just like some recommendations for when DDG is being DDG and not giving me any relevant results.

I know you all who have been here longer than 3 days are probably sick of the whole "leaving reddit" post trend here, but I figured this would be a good thing to talk about because I didn't really see it mentioned too much. A lot of people have spoken on here about poor moderation, the whole API debacle, a sort of downward cycle in terms of content quality etc. Plus, when I did bring these things up on my now-deleted reddit account, people mostly resorted to the whole "You hate capitalism yet you exist in it" argument. I also wrote a sort of summary for this in my application, so whoever read my application doesn't really need to read this. I basically said the same shit just shorter.

But for me it was just because people got kinda mean? What I mean is that over the past 4 years (probably accentuated by the pandemic), it felt less and less like a place where you could just talk to somebody. With every post I made, it felt like I was in a competition not just in terms of karma but in terms of making something that pleased as many people as possible. Every title needed to be perfect for the grammar people, every fact needed to be perfect for the fact people, everything needed to be as apolitical as possible.

And even with all of these unwritten rules, I came to realize that there really are just two types of posts or comments on reddit. There's jokes, and then there's debates. Jokes ended up being a little more lenient in terms of unwritten rules so I think that's why there's so fucking many of them on reddit and it's almost unavoidable to escape the pit of sarcasm in reddit comment sections. But with debates, it felt like with every comment I made, people came in expecting me to either agree with them or refute a point they made. And if I didn't make "a point," I wasn't contributing. I couldn't just go "Yeah I like Metal Gear Solid V, too," I had to go "Yeah I like Metal Gear Solid V, too, and the guy you're responding to is a fucking moron for not doing so," or "No, you're a dumbass, MGS4 is way better." I remember one time I joined into a conversation and somebody actually replied bullying me for not "contributing" and for posting useless comments, as if I were somehow wasting their time by not trying to argue with them.

And what's even worse is people just don't seem to know how to be nice about it? Obviously with the internet, people are going to bully you at some point but on reddit it was just all. the. time. Every post I made, every comment I made there was somebody who didn't like it and felt the need to tell me about it by insulting me or my family or my cat. Everyone was mean. It felt truly impossible to disagree with a person on reddit without insulting them, because that was the culture that was accepted there.

While I don't use TikTok, I ended up stumbling upon this series of them by way of YouTube Shorts called "Average Redditor..." by The Slappable Jerk and I really think they perfectly encapsulate what it's like to browse reddit, and I hate that it took me so long to realize that's what my experience was like. I kept watching them and going "Nah, nobody's like that," but then the more I used reddit the more I realized "Yeah, it's kind of everybody including myself." As you can see in the video I linked, the guy is either joking or debating and he's not nice about either one, and frankly that's kind of how every single one of my reddit experiences has been so far. I can't really remember the last time anybody has been nice to me on reddit. Maybe that's my fault and my brain is suppressing me from realizing it, but I do think it's a problem inherent in the system if I'm seeing other people doing it to each other also.

I got banned from reddit as a whole a week ago for reporting a guy for calling me a "spastic loser" after getting angry when another guy got angry for me not reading some deeper meanings in his 1 sentence post. I think that whole really weird run-on sentence should tell you all you need to know about my reddit experience these past few years. Funnily enough despite it breaking the subreddit's rules against insults, it was "report abuse."

I ended up hearing about Lemmy while browsing today and I deleted my account just now. I saw probably a couple dozen posts at most. It seems kinda slow here. But you know what I didn't see at all? People fighting. Calling each other names. Insulting each other. I saw debates and arguments but I straight up didn't see the same kind of debates and arguments that I saw on reddit. On Reddit I could probably go 3 or 4 posts without that happening, but even posts of 12 comments will always have rude jerks on them. Now I'm still new here, and I have heard that there are toxic and xenophobic instances of Lemmy that are on massive blocklists, but Beehaw so far has been nothing short of just plain joyful. It's so wonderful to see people online just. talking. to each other. And while I see people swearing (I did it myself in this post), it really just haven't seen it directed at other users on here. On reddit it seems like there's such a big culture of if you're gonna insult somebody you go for the deepest-cut insult possible. On here I just haven't seen that.

TL;DR: People on reddit are mean. Beehaw (and some other instances of Lemmy I signed up for) are far from that.

/rant

can't stop listening to this since I heard it on the radio. such a journey