Yeah, show me how to not get into debt and be able to afford both land and a house. People usually don’t have half a million+ lying around burning a hole in their pockets.

I honestly don’t care about the story that much in games. A good story is nice, if the gameplay is there. If the only thing that is actually good about the game is the story… I’ll just read a book instead.

Nah, Diablo 4 is much more fun when leveling from 1 to 70 or so. 70 - 100 is just doing the same things over and over with barely any rewards. It’s the other way around there, leveling is fun, endgame is dogshit.

Usually “game starts at max level” is used for MMOs like WoW. Where all the leveling is seen as annoying bullshit fetch quests and at max level you do dungeons and raids.

The story or the gameplay? Because all I wanted to do was play a fun MMO, get items and do dungeons with other people. Instead I did quests like hit 3 rocks with your basic ability. Great! Hit 3 more rocks with the same ability. Done? Now run between 4 NPCs and talk with each of them. Great, now kill 8 enemies over there. Run back, talk with 2 more NPCs. Run through the city and interact with 8 lamp posts, the interaction takes several seconds each, because why not? …

I really tried to power through this absolute bullshit, but after a few hours I simply gave up. It only got worse, not better.

As you say Heavensward, I still hear that there is a ton of dumb quests then. Like the story is right at a critical point and they send you off on hours of fetch quests before you can continue?

The story or the gameplay? Because all I wanted to do was play a fun MMO, get items and do dungeons with other people. Instead I did quests like hit 3 rocks with your basic ability. Great! Hit 3 more rocks with the same ability. Done? Now run between 4 NPCs and talk with each of them. Great, now kill 8 enemies over there. Run back, talk with 2 more NPCs. Run through the city and interact with 8 lamp posts, the interaction takes several seconds each, because why not? …

I really tried to power through this absolute bullshit, but after a few hours I simply gave up. It only got worse, not better.

Not just for series, this is the same with games.

“The first 50 hours of Final Fantasy 14 suck, but the expansions afterwards are worth it!”

“The game starts at max level!”

I can’t stand it. And it’s not like the game magically gets much better, it just feels pretty okay for someone who just wasted months of their time on the bad parts. Of course you’ll enjoy mediocre parts later on after suffering through that crap.

A game has to start being fun ten minutes after the tutorial tops. Why play it otherwise?

Seriously? Breaking Bad was awesome all things considered. But if you are not hooked by season 1 you won’t like it, period.

The middle part of the series was a drag, too many filler episodes. Strong start, strong end, but if you don’t like the start don’t even bother.

I personally like to keep it on. Most of my messaging is with family and friends and it’s good to know if someone read or hasn’t read my message.

Especially if things are time critical. Picking someone up? Asking if they need anything from the supermarket? If I see that they read the message I know that they are going to reply in a moment. If they didn’t even read the message I won’t have to wait around / can guess that they are currently in the car or wherever.

Sometimes you also have a spotty connection, so the received + read receipt can tell you if they actually got your message.

In general if someone sends me a message and I read it… I’m going to fucking reply to it (if I’m not super busy, and even then I might send a quick message back). I seriously don’t get people who just leave things on read and then forget about it.

But the NAS is in your house… which basically means if it gets flooded/burns down all your data is gone too.

I already have my data on my PC, a second backup inside the same house isn’t worth that much. But instead of relying on a cloud service I just rent a virtual server (for various things) and use Seafile to keep my data in sync.

PC breaks? House burns down? My data is on my own server in a datacenter. My server gets cancelled? My data is on my PCs.

So even with your NAS you are 100% reliant on a cloud backup still, so why did you get the NAS when you already have a copy of your data on your devices?

On the other hand you can lose your email address at any time if you don’t own the domain. So if Google decides they don’t like something you wrote your @gmail.com address could be gone tomorrow. And with it all your accounts you set up (as you need email usually to login or do changes).

The whole e-mail ecosystem sucks :-/

My self-hosted mail server works fine for now, but that could change at any moment.

Having 4 active accounts is anything but leaving the platform. Hell, I thought they had a single account they are giving up (like most companies).

What bullshit.

Just fyi: You’re on lemmy.ml, so part of your comment got caught in the slur filter…

Other instances can write and see ‘bitch’ :-/

You need to actually have sex to catch an STD…

That’s an interesting thought!

Like Asian earwax is super dry and flaky, while European earwax looks like yellow green toxic goop.

So you have different genes and on top of that different diets (I had Indian neighbors once, you could smell the curry in the entire hallway of the building 24/7. But they obviously use a ton of spices when cooking).

As a central European Caucasian guy I personally start to smell really bad without deodorant just after a day or so. No matter how often I shower or what I eat. I also tried to switch to deodorant without aluminum and that didn’t work out at all :-/

Ever left the house? You’ll change your opinion right quick when you’re behind a random guy in the grocery store and you get a strong whiff of sour milk that has been out in the sun for a week.

Thank god for deodorant (and regular showers).

TDD is great when you have a very narrow use case, for example an algorithm. Where you already know beforehand: If I throw A in B should come out. If I throw B in C should come out. If I throw Z in an error should be thrown. And so on.

For that it’s awesome, which is mostly algorithms.

In real CRUD apps though? You have to write the actual implementation before the tests. Because in the tests you have to mock all the dependencies you used. Come up with fake test data. Mock functions from other classes you aren’t currently testing and so on. You could try TDD for this, but then you probably spend ten times longer writing and re-writing tests :-/

After a while it boils down to: Small unit tests where they make sense. Then system wide integration tests for complex use-cases.

But you can easily test this yourself: Go and try to create a new Discord account without a phone number. Then try to use it.

I couldn’t, Discord immediately forces me to add a phone number on login.

Maybe it’s regional? Or they have different behavior based on your email address provider?

I gave up on having a second account.

You don’t get it. Server settings are only one part of it, Discord also has their own account wide policies.

For example I had a second account I used on Discord. Verified email, used it for years on and off every now and then. Last time I tried to login? No longer possible, I need to add a valid phone number and verify it. I couldn’t even get back into the account at all!

No way around it, if Discord flags your account for whatever reason they log you out and force you to add a phone number. All it might take is you pressing logout once and next time you try to login you’re blocked. If even that.

That’s an old account then. New ones don’t work without. And at some point they suddenly force you to add a number out of nowhere.

If you want to use Discord nowadays you need a valid phone number, that’s it.

Either you agree with it and use their service, or you don’t and delete your account with all your data.

They use this to battle spam accounts (with quite some success, been over a year since I’ve been contacted by scammers), there is no good way around it.