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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: April 5th, 2024

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  • My e-book reader (Tolino).

    As I got older and had problems with my eyes, this was a game changer. I had basically stopped reading books and now I do it daily. I can choose the font and letter size, background color, and backlighting based on what works best for my eyes that day and the light where I am.

    Being able to hold a very light device with a big screen when I would have to balance a heavy weight as a paper book is also great, and I take the reader with me everywhere, whereas a big book would stay at home most of the time.

    The reader has a bigger screen than my phone and the battery lasts longer.

    The reader works flawlessly with my library, so I don’t have to buy books, which keeps costs down, and I don’t have to leave the house to get a new book.

    Calibre helps us share books in our family, which is one reason we’ve stayed away from Amazon’s Kindle, so we’ve all gone to “.epub”.


  • Indy games are art. Find an artist(s), pay them a living wage, and let them do their art largely undisturbed, guided by a vision of what the game should be, so they keep working towards the same goal. Let them learn from their mistakes and make their next game better. That leads to Baldur’s Gate 3.

    CEO of an AAAAAAA+ game developer/publisher: “No games are a product. The most important thing is that the line goes up, so we check what the user feedback is and listen to the loudest crowd that wants the same old shit, only to complain that they always get the same old shit. Also, hire cheap, treat people terribly and get everyone out of the industry as quickly as possible, and none of that art nonsense - I mean, how am I going to sell that to the shareholders, they just want an estimate of how many skins we will sell in 2025 so they will agree to my pay rise?”


  • I tried to replace Twitter by Mastodon but, in the end, I just left Twitter and don’t use Mastodon at all.

    This is me, I left Twitter, Facebook and Reddit. I reduced my online time a lot and it is better for my mental health and I have more time for my hobbies.

    Mastodon made it clear to me how much algorithms steer me and keep me online, when I don’t need that, don’t profit from it. When I had to search for content on Mastodon that was for me it felt not worth the effort while being fed by an algorithm on Twitter /Facebook / Reddit kept me endlessly scrolling.

    So I am very thankful to Mastodon for opening my eyes, but I will not use it anymore. Tchncs (world news, tech news and cat owl pictures) , Grouvee (gaming forum, keeping track of my games) and German Tagesschau ( tv news of my country) is enough to stay up to date and I feel freed from a burden that social media became for me.

    Also my phone stays in my bag now and I am more in the moment wherever I am - I have used it 99% less than before and my next smart phone will be a cheap one with the only must haves being the newest Android version and a replacable battery so it will last me for long.


  • Years ago I had fun with “what if the US never actually went to the moon”. I did not believe it, it was just a nice plot idea, we even made a pen & paper oneshot about it. Nowadays I have no whatsoever fun in thought experiments like this, because the real threat of someone believing it to be true. I want to enjoy “birds aren’t real” or “giraffes do not exist” or … the worst is flat earth. It started out as a joke and now idiots try to proof the earth is flat, proof by accident it isn’t and then question rather their methods than their belief system. We just can’t have nice things.