Very ‘inspirational’, but as useless as your previous reply.

Finding a romantic partner should come naturally from making friends. Friend may introduce you to a romantic partner, or they could become one.

That’s a lovely idea, unfortunately a lot of us are growing old waiting for this bullshit.

I don’t agree with everything the guy above you said, but my circumstances are very similar to his.

I have friends, but they don’t know anyone they can introduce me to.

Sports are off the table due to both health problems and a lack of interest (do you really want group activities to be full of disinterested guys just there to chat up chicks?), never mind that they’re all heavily male-dominated around here.

Local councils put on events, but they are either for children, for mothers, or for seniors.

Everything has been turned into a product to be sold to you, almost every event costs money, and when you do pony up the events are somewhere between borderline scams and actual scams.

…

This is a recurring issue with this subject. Someone offers advice, someone points out why that advice isn’t very applicable, and the first person makes no attempt to “adapt and overcome” themselves and either a) offer better advice, or b) admit that they don’t have any better suggestions.

Calling it a thirst trap is too innocent. These dating app companies are scum-sucking vampires designed to make most people feel lonely and desperate enough to give them money in perpetuity. People just handed one of the most important and intimate aspects of their lives over to US tech bros, pressured everyone else to do the same, and two whole generations are not just having less sex than their parents, but half of them have never had a long-term relationship as they’re approaching 30.

You search for one thing and it starts showing recommendations.

I fail to see how this is a bad thing. Youtube’s old default homepage would show scam and content mill recommendations.

One of the servers I’m in literally has a How to Make Friends pinned post for people who might need it.

Out of morbid curiosity, could we see it?

We’ve got basic conflict resolution tactics written into our rules… not that anyone reads them.

I’ve found that people on local servers tend to be a mix, including other lonely or socially awkward people.

Give it a few more years and you’ll realise how much deeper that rabbit hole goes. I’m resigned to the fact that discord isn’t even really a gaming platform any more, let alone a social one; most people seem to be trying to use it for scoring drugs or hookups/affairs. Lots of kink stuff, too - it is following the same path as Second Life did. Also goes well beyond lonely and socially awkward; antisocial nutjobs abound.

Thin toilet paper is one thing, just use more layers.

Narrow toilet paper is another. Fuck places that use non-standard width toilet paper.

Ars’ quality dropped badly about 10 years ago, around the same time New Scientist went to shit. A lot of their articles are now uncritical regurgitations of press releases. Even the one guy they had doing really detailed investigative pieces on the videogame industry up and left probably 5 years ago.

Also they never followed through on their promise to give us an everything-but-apple RSS feed.

Take beverages with you from home.

You can fill an entire wardrobe with kmart clothes for $100, it’s cheaper and more practical than even op shops most of the time. Maybe just don’t buy your shoes from there.

Bottle sauces and seasonings can last a long time, and can dramatically improve the diversity and quality of your home cooking. Basic chicken, rice, and greens can be turned into a dozen different dishes depending upon the sauces.

Avoid subscription services like the plague.

There’s always a few exceptions, but name brands are rarely worth it.

They cited their sources and included direct quotations from the bill.

And the direct quotations from the bill were less-than-damning without several paragraphs of editorial leading the reader down the garden path. This is on the same level as the ‘death panel’ hysteria from about 10 years ago.

At some point in the future cars will have to incl. some form of assistance technology as a standard feature, big whoop. It doesn’t say it has to be enabled by default, or always turned on, and with all the assists and autonomous driving features already being added to cars, it’s very likely most manufacturers will end up meeting the requirements of the bill without even trying.

…

If

driver behaving erratic and interfering with safe function of car

Then

pull safely to the side of the road and temporarily disable ignition

…

BuT mUh FrEeDoMs. Something something ‘right to travel’ = right to operate a car whilst intoxicated (sounds like some SovCit bullshit), as opposed to right to a functional public transport system or something…

Is it that hard to read the post? OP is right, almost every TV on the market has the same cheap, shitty plastic feet, and they’re spaced as far apart as possible so you’re unnecessarily size-limited when trying to buy something like a bedroom TV to sit on top of bookshelves or a tallboy.

I’d like something more than 32" for my bedroom too, but I can find one new 40-42" TV on the market with a central stand now, and it is some obscenely expensive 4K OLED thing from Sony. I am keeping an eye out for older, pre-owned TVs as a result, but am yet to find any good deals.

I think the far-more realistic scenario is we create a colony of robots, first for experiments, then (if possible) to build out a colony that can eventually be inhabited by humans.

Hardly just my experiences. Zero quality control when it came to content, the sub was often full of reposted random tweets from bit-part actors from the 90’s, often not even talking about ST, or trashy shit like playing fuck/marry/kill with the cast of DS9, but at a certain point it got turned into unpaid PR for CBS/Paramount, where you couldn’t make even light-hearted jokes about any currently broadcast show. Everything and anything would be struct down with some “be constructive” rule that translated to toxic positivity and users functioning as little more than advertisers for the shows, that sub was basically a test bed for the enshittification of reddit as an advertising platform, and trying to discuss it with the mods just got you a bunch of smarmy smartarsery in return. They’re pretty much every 90’s stereotype of a ST fan running a chatroom.

If you looked at any of the other ST-related subs, you used to find no shortage of people with similar stories. I’m sure many of them were neckbeards in their own right who just raged against any and all new ST stuff, often with weird political bents, but given I’m not one of them and still got bullshit from them, I’m guessing a fair few of them had valid grievances too.

Startrek.website seems to be run by the same people who ran r/startrek, some of the most ridiculous, petty, power-tripping stereotypes of neckbeard reddit mods you could find. Not that familiar with the other two, but lemmy.world seems to be run by reasonable people just trying to do their best.

That’s almost precisely their business model.

Get users, retain users, turn users into recurring paying customers.

Dating apps don’t exist to find you connections, they exist to keep you hooked. They’ll give you the bare minimum of opportunities necessary to make you think they’re viable, drag it out as long as possible, pressure you to pay for premium, and if they ever developed a matching system that worked well, they’d bury it to stop half their userbase from marrying each other and uninstalling the apps.

I needed a new saucepan.

I’ve now replaced half my kitchen.

My TF2 played hours is something like 3990, but that’s misleading as a lot of that was idling on trade servers, or the game client not closing properly and Steam reporting I was still ingame for hours afterwards.

There’s probably 3-4 games I’ve legit broken 1k hours in.

They’re still too much like reddit users.

I already am.

Most of those staff are going to have no trouble finding new jobs. It’s a highly technical and specialised crew, many would already be in demand elsewhere, and a void left by LTT would be quickly filled by other groups producing similar content, who suddenly find themselves in need of more staff. Hell, a lot of former LTT staff would be gobbled up by LTT’s own sponsors.

This is a terrible argument whenever there’s any public controversies within the private sector. It’s not worth thinking about ‘the jobs’ because that’s not how the economy works. If there’s fire behind this smoke, and LTT did fold, those left long-term unemployed are probably fewer in number than those who are currently being exploited and mistreated. It’s almost always a zero-sum game.