I feel similarly. I work in an office that’s heavily invested in Microsoft for everything and when you use Microsoft everything Teams fits in really nicely with great outlook integration, Microsoft Loop integration, etc. and the experience on Teams is fine

Clearly gotta start listening to truecrime podcasts and let some young kids muck up your YouTube algorithm and they won’t know anymore what your gender is

My wife and go on kicks of playing a bunch of Minecraft together which is amazing

As others have said loss of interest can happen and the interest can of course come back with a vengeance. I’d recommend picking up another hobby until gaming suddenly grasps your interest again.

Two types of hobbies that have lasting positive impacts on people are creative hobbies and physical hobbies. Your brain is wired to invent and create and your body is wired to move, so being able to do each for fun is brilliant for your mental and physical health. Hop on a bicycle, go for a walk and enjoy the crisp fall air, stop off at that gym you forgot to cancel your membership for, and start doing it regularly.

For creative hobbies you can get a pack of printer paper for a couple of bucks and a pack of Crayola crayons or colored pencils and just start doodling. If you suck at drawing make wierd geometric shapes to rebuild the fine motor skills that computers have killed. Or if you want something more in-depth model making is always great because it has elements of fantasy while having entry points at any skill level. Personally I’ve been getting back into model railroading which if that seems boring to watch a train go around in circles, consider it has its own table top roleplay scene in the form of operations

At least as far as US law is concerned, a federally hosted and administrated social media platform gets interesting with America’s unusually strong free speech laws, since there’s content which is legal but unethical which they likely would not be allowed to block or moderate, such as bullying, hate speech, misinformation, etc. but also illegal content would be immediately moderated away, which might include content that falls into legal grey areas or ethical but technically illegal content, like someone copy/pasting the contents of a paywalled article, or discussing any kind of DRM or digital security bypass

Honestly I think there’s good reason for governments to host a Mastodon instance for their representatives to use for communications, but inviting the public to use it might get weird for sure

Too big of a map ultimately becomes a deal breaker for me because it will inevitably have too much empty space and get too boring and time consuming to play through.

Smaller more refined maps are better than larger maps where the team can’t sufficiently justify every single corner and make sure every inch truly is fully designed and makes sense.

The upscaling technologies they’ve been building into modern graphics stacks also have benefits for much older games where the performance isn’t necessarily needed. There’s an old game I like to play, Railroad Tycoon 2, which doesn’t run at resolutions higher than 1024x768 and modern upscaling can make that game look absolutely gorgeous despite being 4+ pixels per original pixel. I’m sure it provides similar benefits to emulators and the like too!

On the subject of Matrix parodies, I just want to throw this classic out there

If he’s anything like American conservatives he probably appreciates the comparison more than anything

Manufacturing jobs actually pay pretty well. Like I said, it’s hard to beat the pay and benefits of working in manufacturing if you don’t have a degree.

The reason they struggle to fill these roles is because most people don’t want to work in industrial facilities working physically taxing jobs, often at odd hours filling second or third shifts and risking that the facility doesn’t sufficiently value safety leading to a serious injury or death

My in-laws have some horses on their little hobby farm. They grow and bale their own hay which gives them an excuse to play with their antique tractors and makes it affordable enough to keep the “hay burners” around. I agree the prices anon provides are pretty rediculously low

But there’s also the byproduct of making you swole and potentially making exercise your new hobby, which then further increases your energy consumption and waste output…

A large percentage of US manufacturing is food processing. Manufacturing has been struggling to fill open roles for years,¹ and as a low-skilled job with tons of openings lots of migrants, both citizens and not work in manufacturing since the pay & benefits are hard to beat for not requiring any degrees. Its a similar situation with farm work. If the Trump administration actually performs significant deportations and cancellations of visas like he promised, food availability will be affected as farms and food producers struggle to keep up with demand

¹ Here’s the JOLTS data showing as much as 200k unfilled manufacturing jobs. I can’t easily directly link my query, but here’s a screenshot of the data with enough info to replicate my query

I just accepted a job with a small MSP starting early next year. I kept a close ear out during the interview for signs of the classic MSP hell stuff that would chew through techs but it does look like I got a good one (small 8 or so man shop) but check in in about 3 months and we’ll see how I’m feeling haha

My longer term plan is to use this as a stepping stone to then move onto being in-house then figuring out my exit strategy before burnout takes me, which I’m thinking I’ll either be aiming to move into IT management or possibly moving into a business analytics or cloud administration type role. Technical sales probably wouldn’t be too bad either.

In a similar vein, I absolutely love John Candy’s last film, Canadian Bacon. Every time I rewatch it I go “man I forgot how funny that film is!”

Checking rotten tomatos its not quite as badly panned as Wagons East! (0% critics / 33% audience vs 17% critics / 52% audience) but seems like a good candidate for this thread nonetheless

Brief synopsis:

The president of the United States has successfully ended every war the country is involved in and is facing abysmal odds of re-election, so his team decides to start a second cold war, this time against Canada. John Candy plays a former weapons factory employee now sheriffs deputy in Niagara Falls NY, laid off with his friends due to the plant closure, and seeing the propaganda, they decide sneak across the border to stir trouble in Canada, losing one of their team who’s caught and taken for a free mental health evaluation in Ottawa, so now they must take a trans-canadian road trip to “save” her

I like that this director thinks that there are some people wired different to just never fart

As a fabled never farter I can confirm, I simply do not fart outside of during bowel movements.

I’m trying to convince my kids that “dads don’t fart” because that will be hilarious when they learn the truth

Back when Netflix had everything I watched that one thinking it would be a cool scifi film, but turns out its a kong fu movie and I was not in the mood for a that so I was disappointed. The sound track slapped though!

At first I went “what easter egg?”

Also, kudos for the AI Overview for getting it entirely wrong while the easter egg at least knows what’s up

Honestly I loved both the direction that Rian Johnson clearly wanted to take the sequels and I loved the direction that JJ Abrams clearly wanted to take the sequels and I honestly wish Disney had just stuck with one of them for the entire trilogy and let the other do a trilogy as well. We all know how badly Disney wanted to pump out a Star Wars film every year during that timeframe so that way they could’ve had their cake and eaten it too

I just loved the pacing of Don’t Look Up so much. Just constant subversion of expectations that I really enjoyed