The Elden Ring Tiger Electronics LCD game is pretty fun.

I'm no expert, but I've bought and sold two houses in my life. Just finished selling one (and buying it not long before that; long story), so the process is somewhat fresh in my mind.

A counterpoint to @SkepticElliptic@beehaw.org's advice: find a realtor you really trust and then just let them handle everything. Do whatever they tell you to do. Maybe you pay another $10-20k than if you had absolutely optimized everything, but who cares? More likely than not, in trying to figure everything out yourself, you'd screw up something and end up losing way more than that, not to mention your well-being.

I met my last realtor in a Toastmasters group. Fantastic guy. I asked him about everything. I still reasoned about things myself and ultimately made the decisions myself, but it was incredibly reassuring to have his expertise to lean on. I never once got a sense he was working for the highest commission he could get. No decent realtor is going to risk pissing you off and having you tell your friends bad things about them for another $300 commission on top of the $8-15k they're going to make regardless. It's not even worth fighting about it for $300 when they could just get the deal done, lose $300 in potential commissions, and move on to the next deal.

Are there bad realtors? Yes. My advice on that is just not to hire one of them (or fire them if you accidentally do) 😉, but the idea that you're going to be able to cross all your 't's and dot your 'i's (or even figure out enough to know where the 't's and 'i's are) doing it yourself on your first go-round sounds like a bit of a long-shot to me.

Oh, and @wheeville@beehaw.org's advice to start by getting pre-approved is solid. Your realtor will probably want you to do this anyway before you start looking, so you'll be ahead of the game.

Thanks for checking into it. I PMed you.

Yep, I've been watching spam just in case. I have three emails there but nothing from VLemmy.

Yes. Just retried and it tells me my email exists. Email field is required.

Just checked spam. I have three emails there, but none are from VLemmy. I tried to register again in case I mis-typed the email, and it tells me the email exists. 🤔

Here are the apps I used that I'm not seeing.

• FoodNoms for calorie counting
• Waking Up for guided meditation
• Finch for gamified general mental health
• Future for asynchronous virtual training
• Tripsy for travel tracking
• Organic Maps for offline mapping
• Transit for navigating most US cities via public transit
• Fastmail for personal email (Apple Mail for work email)
• 1Password for password management
• Elaho for browsing Gemini
• Tidal for music
• Vellum for cool backgrounds
• SwiftScan for scanning documents
• iPlum for a cheap business phone number
• Kagi Search to set the Kagi search engine as the default in Safari
• Parcel for package tracking
• Mona for Mastodon

And I'll second some others.

• Overcast
• Bookplayer
• Reeder
• AnyList
• Sleep Cycle
• Signal
• Obsidian
• Vinegar
• Noir

I rediscovered Blue's News recently, although the RSS experience leaves something to be desired. I just go to the web site instead.

So far, I've got a cart loaded up with a few, mostly cheap, mostly under-the-radar games:

• Vampire Survivors: Tides of the Foscari
• Spirits of Xanadu
• Fallback
• Breakpoint
• DYSMANTLE
• Kena: Bridge of Spirits
• Beacon
• Halls of Torment

Also looking hard at Weird RPG and TUNIC.

I noticed the news stories link to the same URL that was in the email, so I'm with you. And I've gotten several of these class action lawsuit emails in the past. They always feel like they could be scams, but I've never received one that actually was a scam. I'm sure there will be one that is someday, but my point is that even the legit ones always feel a little off.

I did a quick bit of research and found some news stories about it on reputable outlets. I believe it's legit. That said, it was a very quick bit of research, so be sure to do your own to your satisfaction (aside from just posting here).

Yeah, definitely depends on who I'm recommending to. If it's someone who's pretty familiar with games, I think it would be Elden Ring. Love the sense of exploration and discovery in that game.

Nice! Not sure why I attributed it to Trump. 🤔

Can you recommend any specific resources on either of those topics? Anything you’ve found particularly helpful?

I switched fairly recently. I was on Ting before, and they appear to be quietly sunsetting that service after Dish Network bought them a few years back. Hoping the same doesn't happen to Mint. It's been great so far. Incredible value!

Yeah, come to think of it, I think this is a larger issue I have in life: I always have to be working toward a goal or else I feel guilty. I can see your point of view too though. If there's no beginning and end, there's no minimum amount of time you need to play. The goal is just to enjoy.

My perspective is basically the inverse: if there's no beginning and end, there's no maximum amount of time I need to play. 😅

I don't feel this way about open-world games because they do usually have an end and you can skip a lot of the open-world filler content. I get this anxiety about sandbox games. I hate it because I really enjoy games like Cities Skylines and I'd love to get into Dwarf Fortress, but I can't play them anymore because I could spend 1,000 hours in one of them and never finish. That open-endedness keeps me from playing.

Greater transparency under capitalism is always a good thing. I have to admit, one thing Trump did that I liked was to force hospitals to publish their prices. I can't think of a good reason people buying a thing shouldn't know how much it costs beforehand.

All great points, and you're definitely right that it's not black and white.

I would like to make a distinction between a “content creator” in the literal sense — just a person who creates content — and a “content creator” as the phrase is commonly used today — a person who makes a living by selling content or by giving away content to market something else.

I, for one, would be very interested in seeing more people on the fediverse creating content, but I’m not super interested in the fediverse becoming a marketing channel for professional content creators.

Of course, it’s an open platform, so pro content creators are more than welcome to join. I’m just not super excited about approaching them and saying, “please come hock your wares to us on the fediverse!”

Illucia: the town of Final Fantasy. This was a Final Fantasy fan site, but themed as a town from a Final Fantasy. This isn't a town ripped out of a particular game though. Illucia was an entirely original town with original art created by fan Tatsushi Nakao.

Before the release of FF7, it was themed after a town from the 16-bit era of Final Fantasy. To navigate the town, the user was presented with a clickable server-side image map, where clicking on different buildings in the town would take the user to a page on the site that was thematically appropriate to the building.

Quick aside: a history lesson on image maps. Image maps were a technique that allowed for a single image to be linked to multiple different places based on where the user clicked it. In the later years of image maps, the web site developer ("webmaster" to use the period-appropriate nomenclature 😜) could define the different clickable areas in HTML and the browser would handle requesting the correct URL based on where the user clicked. This is a client-side image map. Before browsers had this capability though, browsers would instead send the clicked coordinates to a server-side script — often written in Perl, I think — which would translate the coordinates and send back the corresponding page.

Anyway, after the release of FF7, Illucia was reworked in that style. I believe in this iteration, the user would interact with it by using the arrow keys to walk an actual character avatar around the town and enter various buildings rather than clicking on a (relatively) simple image map.

Just like the FF series did, the site sorta lost its luster for me at that point. Final Fantasy had gone from an ensemble cast of quirky but warm characters and brightly colored pixel art to a blue and gray mess of blurry, pre-rendered environments and low-poly brooding characters that looked bad at the time and aged even worse. I pretty much stopped visiting, but I still fondly remember those old pixel art days of Illucia.

Sadly, I haven't been able to find any trace of it online anymore aside from one brief mention in another online article. If anyone knows of anything, please send it my way!

Sliced turkey, pear, and feta 🤌

To offer a counterpoint to this:

While it's absolutely true that storing 2FA codes and passwords in the same place is less secure than splitting them up, it's also true that having both and storing them together is more secure than not using 2FA codes at all. A giant SLR with a bevy of lenses will take better photos than your smartphone, but the best camera is the one you have with you. That's because, if it becomes cumbersome to take your camera with you, you will take fewer pictures, which, if your goal is to have and enjoy pictures, is the worse of the two outcomes, even though the smartphone pictures would be of lesser quality.

Your decision on this should balance your personal tolerance for risk with your personal tolerance for being inconvenienced. If you think having to store your 2FA codes in a different application along with having to open that application and run through some additional process (alongside invoking your password locker's login flow) for every 2FA login is likely to inhibit you from using them in the first place, don't worry about maximizing security and store 2FA codes in your password locker. If you split them and then are inhibited from using them, you haven't really accomplished anything.

The important thing is that you're aware of the risk, and I believe this commenter has done a good job illuminating that.

Sounds like you're talking about Home Assistant maybe?

Maybe for future astroturfing?

I believe it's meant to make it easier to find the best posts. Anyone can post anything. The best things get upvoted. You can sort by votes to see the most popular posts first, or you can just look at a post's score to quickly see whether it's popular or not.

The advantage that the new walled-garden internet brought is convenience… but on almost every other metric, my internet experience has suffered. That's gotten worse as these companies have passed out of the "user free lunch" periods and into their "cash-in" periods.

I went looking a few months back for the old web I used to remember back in the '90s and early 2000s. I'm not talking about a particular aesthetic. For me, the defining characteristic of that era was that people made personal web sites and put content up because they loved something and wanted to share it. I was surprised to find that there's still a ton of that kind of stuff out there, but it's entirely overlooked by search engines.

It was empowering both to learn that it was out there and that I could dig deep into my brain and recall how I used to find things back when there was no centralized forum (Reddit) and when search sucked (before Google). I love it when the convenience goes away and we're freed to realize what all we had given up to get it. It's not worth it.

I've installed a bidet attachment as a renter. Make sure you use plumbers tape and, after your install, leave a piece of paper under the installation overnight to make sure it's not leaking. When you leave, uninstalling is pretty easy.

• Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light
• Lara Croft and the Temple of Osirir
• Rayman Oranges (Origins)
• Rayman Lemons (Legends)

I'm sure different communities have different reasons for hating Fortnite. I think the primary reason in the communities I run in is that Fortnite used to be a completely different game that was perpetually in development. Then, PUBG popularized the battle royale formula, and Epic sorta just copied that into Fortnite and gave it away for free to essentially steal the audience that PUBG had built.

I don't really play multiplayer games, so I didn't have a dog in the fight. I can understand the hate though. It must be hard to watch the game you love start to bleed players because a massive corporation copies their product, gives it away for free, and makes it up on the back-end by letting players pay to look like popular characters they have emotional attachments to.

I guess the reason it stopped is because it's just hard to sustain hatred for a product for long.

This is a great tip, but it has one caveat. I believe this will return a 404 (not found) if your instance hasn't pulled the community yet. If I create a brand new community on one instance, go to another, and click a link like the one you've proposed, I will see a 404. Then, if I search for that same community on the instance with the 404, it will find it. I believe at that point, the link will work, although it may require me to click on the search result first before the instance is "aware" of the community.

At least, that's the way it worked for me a couple of days ago. 😅

I had a similar experience with The Witcher, but the first one. Bounced off the game twice. Third time was the charm. I fell in love with it and then ended up playing the other games in the series as they came out. I'm not sure what made me keep trying, but I'm glad I did.

Long before that, when Morrowind was released, I couldn't quite understand it. I had grown up on JRPGs, and the openness of Western RPGs was confusing. I kept trying and eventually fell in love with it too. This opened up a whole new genre for me.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown had a similar effect for turn-based strategy games and Elden Ring for Soulsborne games. I'm still looking for the games that will open my eyes to several genres. I occasionally try games in genres I don't typically like in hopes this will be the one. It's really cool to have that new door opened for you.

I'm @RadDevon@techhub.social. My activity ebbs and flows over there, but my interests are games, urbanism, technology, and various other things.

What's the best way to link to that? I don't think I've done it right.

Not sure if these are actually Stoic, but if not, I think they're at least Stoic-adjacent:

• asking myself, "What's the worst that could happen?"
• when I encounter a difficult challenge, recalling challenges I've overcome in the past to give me strength to tackle the new one

I would add to this community migration, which will be important as instances start going offline. User migration is great, but, whereas on Mastodon, the content lives on the user, I believe here it lives on the community.

The fing-longer is definitely my favorite answer, but the what-if machine has to be the actual answer, right?

I tried it as well, and it's pretty simple if you're comfortable in a terminal or on the command line.

On macOS, I used DB Browser for SQLite to view the data, and that works pretty well. Installed with Homebrew: brew install --cask db-browser-for-sqlite. Then, I just launched the new app and opened the reddit.db file. That file gets created wherever you run reddit-user-to-sqlite.

Yes, many parts of MGS 1, but some that stand out for me:

• Colonel Campbell breaking the fourth wall and telling you to look on the back of the game box
• Psycho Mantis moving the controller with his mind
• Psycho Mantis talking about your other Konami save data

Unnecessary, yes. In error, maybe or maybe not. Some people just may not want to come up with a name apart from the URL and decide to use the URL fragment as the name.

I'm guessing the user who created "/c/showerthoughts" named it "/c/showerthoughts". You're seeing the community names, and that one is named the same as the URL.