Idk man you’re making it out to be a lot bigger problem than it is. There isn’t a single “buy once” game out there that is even remotely close to beating WoW or even XIV in terms of playtime or playtime:cost. As long as you’re having fun playing them and have stuff that you want to do in them, they are essentially an unbeatable value.

Even terraria and FNV don’t come anywhere close to matching the playtime I have in those MMOs, although terraria is so cheap that it probably beats everything on cost value.

Touch grass.

Get off the fucking Internet, stop immersing yourself in anxiety and misery, and exist in the real world for a while.

Shit’s okay.

Touch grass, dude.

That seems like a pretty useful tool. Thanks!

But why is its website written like it’s trying to sell me something?

I haven’t needed a single tool to turn off the junk in w11 that’s annoying, replace the dumb icon-based UI with the previous text, and so on.

W11 is fine. It’s not good, but it’s fine.

You can just… cancel the sub…

I’ll take years off between playing for a couple months here or there.

Alright well I’m going to continue surviving. You have fun doing whatever I guess.

Yeah, MMOs are a special case. Realistically WoW or XIV are a better deal than most games. I’m probably in the tens of thousands of hours in WoW since 2004. Pretty crazy value for money.

I agree paying for online in consoles is dumb but that’s always been their strategy - cheaper and easier to get into than computers and they’ll nickel and dime you since you don’t know any better.

Ohhh. I’ve never, ever used that except when I accidentally fatfinger my way to it. I forget it exists.

Monthly subscription? You mean like PS+ or something?

I haven’t bought one in probably like 12 years. Are the new ones all greebled up with “smart” shit? Even the store brand models?

I drive them until the cost of fixing them significantly exceeds the cost of getting a new used car. Accounting for it being a pain in the ass to shop for cars etc.

But yeah every 3-5 years sounds about right for typical middle/upper class families. My parents did pretty well when I was little and I remember them doing 2 or 3 year leases.

Yeah. Find a Honda or Toyota from the latter half of the 00’s with a reliable service history and they’ll last another 10-20 years if you take them to a decent imports mechanic.

Ideally you just look for a Honda or Toyota from like 20 years ago, assuming you want gas powered. Look for only like 1-3 owners, regular service history. Those things will last into 600k+ miles if they received regular service and parts are dirt cheap.

Infotainment ain’t justified, at least not up front. Put all that shit in the back if you gotta have it, but the driver should have as few distractions as possible. A simple radio, climate control, and the instrument panel. That’s it.

Utterly insane that we ever allowed glorified tablets to become standard equipment in dashboards.

Windows is fine. But it’s a lot harder to justify when “for brainless morons like me!” distros like Bazzite are so readily available and robust and SteamOS is right there too.

But like. It’s fine. You can turn most of the annoying stupid shit like copilot off.

Where are you seeing ads in Android? I have a pixel and I’ve never had ads shoved in my face. Well, not by Google. The producers or providers of apps, sure, but that’s not on Google is it?

I guess I’d have to check my habits but I bet 300 searches would easily last me a month. Half of my “searches” are me just going to look up the thing on Wikipedia anyhow. If you’re using web search professionally though, I can see 300 barely lasting a couple days.

I’m not sure how to feel about an AI heavy service talking about privacy. They feel mutually exclusive to me.

Project Farm is highly reliable on YouTube. If the exact model Todd tested is no longer available, use your best judgement.

The collapse is already in process. So I guess that’s one nice thing - it’s already here, you don’t have to be worried about it beginning. Trump 1 destabilized a lot of things combined with COVID and Trump 2 following a limp Biden admin has finished the job. Pax americana is dead, and the world as we knew it relied on that status quo.

I don’t know what’ll follow, whether in America or abroad, but we’ll all still be here and life will keep going. Don’t let it keep you down. If reading the news keeps getting you down, then stop reading the news for a while. Filter your feeds to show only happy things, or just disengage from social media entirely. Algorithms are designed to drive engagement and anger is proven to be the most reliable form of engagement, so social media is just an anger factory anymore. Disconnecting from it for a while can be good for your mental well-being.

There’s still plenty of joy and hope and happiness to be found in life. Sometimes you might need to turn down the volume on other things to find it, though.