This was in Altspace VR which unfortunately got axed by Microsoft IIRC, but on there you kinda looked like a less shitty version of one of those Nintendo avatars customized however you wanted.

The craziest anybody looked on there would be to have like rainbow or blue hair or something along those lines. It was pretty tame compared to like the furry anime cat sex doll looking things some people run around in VR Chat with. It also wasn’t overrun with screaming children which I think is VR Chat’s biggest overall problem.

Anyway, that support group thing I think has since moved to another platform, I forget which.

There were no insane avatars, everyone looked pretty normal. Sorry to burst your bubble.

I’ll be honest I think their watch and AirPods both look kinda dumb, but they seem to be quite popular. And I distinctly remember that when both came out people were taking shots at how they looked, myself included.

And IIRC those are all PCVR sets and not standalone.

Some people call VR dystopian, but it’s got great potential too.

During COVID while I was living alone and we were under lockdown…

I used a Quest to watch movies in a virtual theater with a bunch of people from around the world. I remember being in a theater watching an absolutely ridiculous Nicolas Cage movie laughing my ass off with a bunch of dudes from Australia. Another time I watched a cricket game with some people who explained the rules to me and kinda gave me some play by play on what was happening.

I’ve also attended a few support group meetings in VR for coping with loss that had quite a lot of attendants. The meeting was run by a licensed group therapist and we took turns sharing and then reflecting on each others stories. It was frankly amazing.

I also played mini golf with friends of mine as well as had a couple meetings over a round of mini golf with the other guy on my design team during lockdown. Honestly the best virtual meetings I ever had.

All of the above were very social and very positive experience. I didn’t feel far away from people, I felt connected to them.

Same way a smartphone can be a useful tool that enhances your life or a screen you stare at for hours consuming bullshit TikTok videos. You’re in control of what you make of it. You can also stick to a dumb phone and not participate at all.

lol same

I got into scratch/trash building and kit bash modeling crazy mechs and stuff last year and it’s been a blast.

Lol my regional instance has some interesting upcoming events…

https://i.imgur.com/71tZ7fL.png

It sounds annoying as fuck. I hate when my friends send audio messages in messaging apps.

Funny thing is that the mainstream threads audience would probably do more harm to the mastodon ecosystem by orders of magnitude.

There is a big cultural disconnect. I’m active in both and they are very different communities by and large.

Absolutely spot on teardown of this joke article.

Yep I remember this pattern of behavior distinctly from last time.

One of the big ones that sticks out is you start seeing a lot of people claiming to be democrats or left aligned showing up all of a sudden and being big time concern trolls and talking about sitting out the election and/or claiming that there’s no difference between voting democrat or republican, which is demonstrably absolute horse shit.

And just a lot of added vitriol. It seems like even politically unrelated discussions get meaner and more argumentative. I expect it’s just gonna get worse as we get closer to November. It’s only the beginning February. Ugh.

Yeah I’ve encountered a few accounts lately who either have mental health issues or are bots designs to stir discord. Their entire posting history is divisive shit stirring.

Funny how every 4 years the internet gets markedly nastier. I wonder why???

Yeah that’s why I’ve held off on buying one of these. I would love a color e-ink display for art/design books but the tech just isn’t there yet. I’d be ok with the colors just being so-so, but the darkness and lack of contrast is a big issue.

They have an expiration date of 4-5 years, so not really an issue. I just think it’s a waste of my time to go to the store to get a 10-20 pack and also a waste of space and a waste of packaging.

Small annoyance overall I know, but it’s one of my gripes about over the counter medicine here.

Edit: more annoying is that more hardcore cold medicine is not sold over the counter here at all. Anything with pseudoephedrine is prescription only. Also the sort of actually effective decongestants and antihistimes are all prescription only if they’re even legal at all here.

But what’s funny is despite that, I can literally walk into the grocery store and buy codeine cough syrup right off the shelf without asking anybody or showing ID. It seems ridiculous to me.

In the US you can get a bottle of 500 ibuprofen 200mg pills for about $10.

So for your case that’s 8000mg for 3 euros or .0375 cents a mg

In the US that would be 100,000mg for $10 or .01 cents a mg.

So 3.75x more expensive not factoring in the Euro being higher on the dollar.

But it’s not even about the price, it’s the fact that it’s just hard to find a large bottle of it here in the EU at all (at least the Netherlands where I am now). I’ve never really seen it in stores. I much prefer buying a bulk bottle that lasts a year or two easily.

Honestly it doesn’t really matter what it is, if it’s something you are going to rely on, don’t cheap out on it if you can afford not to.

But that’s the whole point of this post. Pointing out situations where this logic doesn’t hold up. And there are for sure situations where it doesn’t. The expensive version of some things really aren’t worth the extra money at all.

There’s a price to quality/value/utility bell curve to be identified for everything basically and even if some expensive (for example 3x priced) thing is higher quality than the cheap version that costs 1/3 the price, it very well may not at all by any measure be 3x as good/reliable/etc.

Over the counter stuff in the EU does tend to be more expensive here than the US in my experience. Definitely here in the Netherlands but also noticed this in Spain and Germany.

One thing the US is good about is selling you a huge fucking bottle of something like Ibuprofen for basically nothing. Here in the NL they really like only selling you a 12 pack of it for the same price. It’s annoying as shit.

One of the big ones for me is non denim pants. I went through a phase where I got into somewhat more expensive clothes for a bit. Not like flashy stuff, but like just like presumably high quality stuff that wasn’t so mass produced and in many cases, specifically made in the the US.

Well for some reason or another a bunch of the pants I bought in that period of time just did not hold up at all. Lots of various problems including buttons falling off, seams splitting, holes in pockets. And not just from one brand either.

Well I buy pants from places like H&M now and they all last me a long time. I’ve got pants I’ve owned for 5+ years and worn quite a lot and they’re still in great condition. And I paid like $30 for them.

Maybe I had bad luck with the nice pants back then, idk. But the price/value equation does not work out for me whatsoever. I’ve had somewhat similar experiences with casual button down shirts. My Uniqlo shirts have held up a lot longer than shirts I’ve spent like 3-5x the money for. But it hasn’t been as extreme as my experience with nicer pants.

Stuff like shoes and jackets on the other hand, I prefer to spend a little more for quality.

Yeah agreed on the trending problem on Mastodon. In fact, as a whole it does a pretty poor job of serving interesting content without putting in some work. The only way I’ve been able to get a stream of stuff I actually want to see is by filtering a lot of stuff out and following a lot of specific hashtags.

I think the problem they’re wrestling with is definitely technical but also partly philosophical. Because when you start doing trending content, you start looking at some amount of algorithmic aggregation and that can get messy when you’re positioning yourself as a network that specifically doesn’t play the algorithmic BS game like the Metas and Twitters of the world.