Reddit -> Beehaw until I decided I didn’t like older versions of Lemmy (though it seems most things I didn’t like are better now) -> kbin.social (died) -> kbin.run (died) -> fedia.
Japan-based backend software dev and small-scale farmer.
It more accurately happens like every second or third PM and then things swing to another faction of the LDP (or, historically rarely since WWII ended, another party though the last times that happened they faceplanted pretty quickly and it went back to the LDP)
Bought n95 masks, gloves, and sanitizer. Also bought full-body covering (used by care workers and such to avoid being covered in various fluids) though those never got used. I mostly stayed home except for once every two weeks or so (groceries, etc.)
Thing is, my friends and I all think we got it before it was officially in Japan and, indeed, I was a close contact of someone who got it and was immune so it seems plausible.
Ah, also rolling back some labor reforms. For people like me who voluntarily work two jobs (my own small company) it’s not a bad thing on paper but I worry about other things.
More immigration strictness. Things like same-sex marriage and changes or abolishment of the koseki system are dead. Possibly revising the constitution to have real military again and remove or change the defense only clause. Harder lives for the non-wealthy. More corruption and interference with the moonies (allegedly). More stirring shit and nationalism
Research has shown that many readers today greatly value quick overviews of any article, before the reader considers whether to dive into the article’s full text.
I’m in my mid 40s and this is true of me depending upon why I might be reading something. Sometimes, I want to do a deep dive; sometimes I just want to know roughly what thing is.
However, let me say: fuck AI summaries.
There were unpatched issues in the first one (it’s been so long now I don’t remember them all but there was one in a DLC where you’re supposed to be able to give an item to a robot NPC but it was just broken in addition to several others).
Looking at the price and thinking of that, it was a “pass until decent sale” for me.
I do like the setting generally (at least based on the first one). It might be neat to have someone else take over the IP and go somewhere with it.
No, but we’re a village of ~11k people spread out over a fairly large area.
Fuck Pitchford and Take2 – sell the IP to someone who will do something cool and bring back Eddings.
This is very true. It’s very different to what came with things like mass-market smartphones and everything that followed. I knew plenty of people who just had a dial-up connection they used for mail or looking at recipes or stocks well into my 20s.
Can you define when “the internet” starts for you? I’ll go over my own anecdotal experience and what I can remember being the rough progression and milestones.
So, when I was growing up, we could dial into other computer systems with a basic, text-based bulletin board system and send and read messages. A bit later, Compuserve came along where we lived and there were various areas and activities. We didn’t have HTTP yet, but you could connect with other people, check stocks, etc. I think there was some rudimentary shopping, but I might be mis-remembering. There may have been trolls around but I was rather young and don’t remember much.
Somewhere in here, we get things like Archie, Veronica, etc. that could find different things on the pre-web internet. NNTP newsgroups came to be (you can think of these as sort of proto-forums, I guess, but that’s not an exact thing). These were generally fairly unfiltered and could be wild. Trolls, of course, existed here and I think it’s where we get the terms flaming and flame war (which no one seems to use anymore). You could find porn and such with a bunch of message each containing chunks of data you had to stitch together. Downloading a single picture and assembling it could take minutes to hours depending upon what you were working with (rural, slow dial-up in my case).
IRC also comes to be somewhere in here. You would connect to real-time chatrooms. I used this to communicate with coworkers up until ~2013 as we had a work IRC server.
Starting in the early (IIRC) 1990s, we had things like AOL, Prodigy, and other services that kinda built on the Compuserve premise (and indeed AOL would buy Compuserve). AOL would also at least popularize instant messages. Remember at this point, we had no phones to text on still. There were certainly trolls and lots of child predators (and cops trying to catch them, eventually). AOL eventually started adding access to the early web which is mostly how I got there, Universities and such had much better internet and other internal and external systems (when I got into Uni a bit before 2000 we still learnt Archie, Veronica, and the earliest search engines with Yahoo being the best at the time IIRC).
The early web was mostly people posting static pages for other people to load and look at. Amazon would get started as a bookstore in '95 (I think) and there were some other businesses, but a lot of people were a bit scared to try to buy anything online without seeing and handling the product first and over insecure connections. This would change rather rapidly. There were some early forums which could be pretty free-for-all but some were quite moderated. Pages would slowly get comments and guest books.
Commercial interests increased and increased, but we still got things like the iCQ messenger, Friendster, Myspace, etc. as well. Moderation and legal policies evolved. Fan sites were pretty awesome and, as forums evolved, many people could talk about their interests. Myspace blew up into a phenomenon and we start to get web 2.0. You probably grew up with this and as we transitioned into web3. Enshittification really took off in the early 2010s and began getting worse and worse.
People waste their money on all kinds of dumb shit. Posters, pictures, plastic toys that will just end up in some landfill, etc. This is mine and I almost certainly spend a lot less on it (again, $20-$25 a year in USD depending on the exchange rate). I almost never eat out. I have real investments. This is entertainment.
Edit: to clarify, dumb here means not necessary. Support art and artists, but don’t by plastic stuff that’s going to end up in a landfill
Ah but I have won… just not enough to do more than pay for about a year’s worth of tickets. It’s not an investment strategy; it’s entertainment. If I ever get rich (and I don’t expect to), nice bonus.
This could be interesting for another reason. Alienation of affection laws (i.e. breaking up a marriage) are a thing here. In the past, some have gotten out of the fines/penalties because this was clearly a transaction and not love. Not being able to legally pay anymore makes that interesting.
I seem to remember sex as being strictly defined as p-in-v penetrative action very narrowly thus allowing other acts to not count for those purposes. Soaplands aren’t technically that and host clubs don’t do any action on the clock or directly for cash.
Edit: clarity.
I mean, I buy up to a dozen lottery tickets a year next door in Japan. Paying off the house would be first and, were I not already a homeowner, buying one would certainly top the list. Those lottery tickets amount to something like 3600 JPY a year which is probably like 20 USD or so. It’s not a financial plan, but I wouldn’t complain if I won. I used to spend more than that at starbucks in a month.
I don’t think sociopaths/psychopaths with no discernible ability for remorse or self-reflection are my biggest competition.
Being haunted by memories of my own embarrassments and failures that still feel fresh sometimes would make me physically recoil and shudder.
/ Would still probably not win
We were going to destroy it in an oven after printing, but the whole “pre-heating” thing led to a not-yet-resolved argument.
I grew up with US customary units and I still took a long time to get that compared to metric instantly
I don’t think that’s exactly right as someone in Japan for more than a decade now.
Overtourism is a separate problem. With the yen weakening compared to other currencies, it made things more affordable. A lot of the tourist industry also collapsed around Corona and the strict (to those external) lockdowns here. That meant there also were fewer accommodations, tourism staff, etc. here. This compounded the problems.
With Corona also came increased prices of a lot of goods and salaries were largely staying stagnant. Having a bunch of extra people buying things up on the cheap yen also meant those things were harder to get for locals. Add to this the JA (basically an ag cartel) and bad weather causing bad rice harvests and people can’t even get the staple that has defined Japanese life for centuries. There’s a lot of simmering anger there. The additional influx of tourists also means that Japanese can’t even travel domestically as cheaply. Hotel prices in some areas have more than doubled since corona and peoples’ salaries have not.
There’s a whole lot going on. I could add a ton of (often illegal) short-term rentals (think Air BnB or similar) pricing people out, foreign (largely Chinese) investors buying land and buildings pricing out the locals is also causing issues. A lot of this boils over to stronger anti-foreigner sentiment that was a real hit in the last election last year and somewhat carried forward this year.
The LDP’s former coalition partner broke off with their rightward turned and formed a new party combining with the main opposition. This meant the main opposition party shifted to the right and also now had ties to Sokka Gakkai which also made them unpalatable to at least some voters. Allegedly, there’s still Moonie money and involvement in the LDP, but I haven’t followed that news much. The LDP’s rightward shift, though, did pick up those tired of the “foreigner issues” (lovely that they rarely distinguish actual residents from tourists, innit) voters who went to other parties. I’ll certainly shed no tears for the more racist parties losing seats, but this is still worrying overall.
Team Mirai, a new party of young people, did pick up votes. They claim to aim for transparency and come from mostly IT backgrounds. The worry here is they’re a bit too into the Dodge type of thing in the US, that they may be very tech-bro types, and they want to use AI for stuff. I don’t know yet. I am no fan of AI and certainly don’t want Dodge tech-bro bullshit coming in. Who knows.
I can’t vote as a non-citizen anyway. If things get bad, I’ll just have to uproot my whole life and move again, but I certainly hope it never gets there.