Perhaps lousy might be a suitable replacement?

I don’t think someone heavily opposed to gaming would be considered a normie, they would be in their own separate extremist camp also apart from the average person.

I’ve usually just walked into a local pharmacy and asked if they have the booster. My local pharmacy just has a standard paper form for all vaccination (flu, shingles, covid, etc) walk ins, there is no website or arbitration clause or even specific covid form. You might want to try a different pharmacy if that has been your experience.

I just hope they don’t cost an exorbitant price now that the national health emergency has ended here. It was really nice being able to get them for free because I am poor.

I like Levar Burton Reads. His voice is so soothing. You can pick a story with a topic you are less interested in for nighttime listening since there are plenty to choose from.

Russia has a reputation for suspicious deaths by defenestration.

Example: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/12/russian-tycoon-pavel-antov-dies-putin-ukraine/672601/

They had a lot of weird stuff in Enterprise. I would love if they did a show in that era that was actually about that era instead of time travel shenanigans. It would be fun to learn about how the alliances and rivalries built up, the successes and blunders and cultural clashes. From what I recall, season 4 was when they finally started looking at that stuff and by then it was too late.

Yes, let’s see all those fired Twitter employees get their legal bills covered for daring to criticize him in their tweets.

Well, on the plus side, one of the admins of firefish.social (not the one at the center of this art drama) has been very public about his belief that there need to be lobby servers that do federate with Threads to help provide a path for Threads users to escape the Facebook ecosystem and transition over to the fediverse. He thinks some Threads users will find other servers more appealing in the end. He picked up a second domain, notmeta.social, to eventually set up as a separate fedipact option, but that hasn’t even been upgraded from Calckey to Firefish yet so I don’t know how seriously they take it.

You won’t have access to mastodon.art from firefish.social, but you can access the threads-welcoming side of the fediverse.

Honestly, I was hoping to find a fedipact firefish server that doesn’t have meta in the name (why would I want to advertise for them in my server name?), but the information on which servers are in the fedipact is so poorly organized that I gave up on that entirely for now.

I listen to things in my car a lot where the only forward button on that interface is a skip to the next episode button. I’d have to pull out my phone and open the app on my phone to find the skip forward 15s button.

My local library is 25 miles away and only open 4 days a week, plus it’s about 40 miles away from the city where I do all my shopping so it is really out of the way. There is a different library in the city where I run my errands, but they charge a hefty fee for non-residents.

For reading news, I recommend getting a tablet and a case with a stand to prop it up at a comfortable reading angle. It’s easier to read with aging eyes than a smartphone. It will still have the accidental long press problem, but icons need to be dragged a longer distance to be rearranged so there is a better chance it will snap back into the right spot after an accidental long press. Someone needs to make an elderly-proof launcher that has a way to lock things in place on the home screen and disable that long press there. Maybe someone already has? I haven’t played with alternative launchers in years.

I use Blokada 5 on my android phone which is a free, phone-wide ad blocker that runs as a local VPN based DNS service that blocks spam address DNS requests. They do have a newer version, 6, that’s cloud based instead of a local VPN and requires a subscription and I haven’t tried that out. Maybe that one is easier to reconfigure remotely if something important inadvertently gets blocked. The only reason I never tried it is I have a very limited income right now as a full-time caregiver. I have used Blokada 4 and then 5 for several years now.

My pi-hole on my home network is also pretty set it and forget it and protects all of my mother-in-law’s devices while she is connected to the Wi-Fi, which is most of the time since she only ever wants to leave the house for doctor’s appointments or occasionally to eat out. I bought a cheap orange pi zero to set the pi-hole up on and it lives next to the router. My MIL is a 70+ year old gamer so she is a little bit more tech savvy than your average elderly person, but she constantly falls for ads and terrible tabloid clickbait that shows up in her news app.

I kind of want to try setting up an RSS app for her with more curated news sources and see if that will give her a satisfactory news feed without all the junk. I used to use Google News, but it has become nothing but spammy tabloid links with no relevance to me. I mostly got my news through Reddit in recent years, but Lemmy reintroduced me to RSS and I’ve been working on collecting good news sources like back in the good old days before the social media firehose of info.

Unfortunately (for the purpose of offering advice), I have no experience with remote tech support. My dad is a retired computer engineer so he’s got a handle on things at his place. I live with the tech-challenged person in my family.

Wow, the half off student price ten years ago was $50/year in the US. You get it incredibly cheap!

Now you are supposed to sacrifice your sleep for Amazon? No thanks!

I live in a rural area and gave up Amazon shortly before the pandemic. I switched to ordering items directly from the manufacturers’ websites. Giving up Amazon doesn’t mean giving up the rest of the internet, though admittedly some manufacturers link you right back to Amazon instead of running their own separate storefront, so I have to look for another.

Blizzard also has Overwatch, StarCraft, Heroes of the Storm, and Hearthstone.

I don’t really know the Activision side. I was a big Blizzard fan before learning about the Cosby room and their treatment of women in the workplace.

Microsoft lost an antitrust lawsuit a long time ago regarding making internet explorer a required part of Windows, so they had to allow other browsers in Windows for competition’s sake, but they didn’t get broken up. That might be what you are thinking of. I can’t think of anything Intel related though.

Wouldn’t cumulative user-seconds of screen time per day be plummeting if you can only see 500 tweets per day or whatever that limit was that he rolled out? I’d be doubting any company’s claims of record high viewership at a time when most of their users were reportedly being locked out of the site due to a new policy, even if their metric didn’t have such an oddly specific name.

I have a new internet connection that is vastly better than my old one. I live in a rural area that was still on dial up until 2012, then got DSL. It was archaic, to say the least. Mostly it was more reliable to use my phone’s LTE hotspot than to use the house internet. Starlink had a waiting list when I looked into them (not that I really wanted to give Elon any money), a local internet provider required us to install an 80 foot tower to get line of sight to them, and so far up until now all the cell phone companies that offer home internet plans have always had “not available in your area” when I put in my address.

On a whim, I checked one of our cell phone providers’ websites last week because they recently installed a new tower nearby and 5G home internet was finally available! The speed varies wildly, sometimes it is 20 Mbps and others it’s 100 Mbps, but the DSL varied from less than 1 Mbps up to 4 Mbps download speed. We can download games in minutes instead of hours now, it’s so exciting. It also costs $50 per month instead of $160, the old internet was a total rip off!

I am cis, but my given name was very aged for my generation and grandmotherly which made me self-conscious as a kid.

When I decided to ditch my name, first I tried using my middle name, but that starts with a different letter and it turns out my brain tunes that out entirely if someone that I wasn’t already listening to calls it out. I had to already be engaged in conversation with someone to respond to it, which doesn’t work great if someone across the room calls out your name to try to show you something cool. My parents never did the full name scolding so I literally almost never have heard my middle name spoken aloud. My dad even thought I had my deceased sister’s middle name the last time I can remember middle names coming up in discussion.

I gave up on the name change for a couple of years, but in high school I decided to give something else a shot. I started using my first initial, but spelled phonetically, for example: K spelled as Kay or L as Elle. That was the solution I needed. If someone shouts it from across the room, my brain alerts just like with my full first name. It’s simple, but it works. I’ve stuck with it for 23 years now.

I highly recommend picking something that has a starting sound similar to your current name so your subconscious brain will still pick up on it, otherwise your friends and family will be shouting your new name over and over to get your attention while you are completely oblivious. My kid is trans and I am going through this now from the opposite end of calling the new name out repeatedly with no response because he also picked a name with no similarity to his given name.

Breaks are good, I hope you find peace and refreshment off site. I enjoy reading your posts so I hope at some point you are able to return, but I also can understand if it turns out to be too overwhelming in the end. Thanks for all the work you have done.