I put this much on because I can’t smell it anymore! They weakened it!

Uhhhhh noooooo, no they did not

K. You asked why your sound was bad, I gave an answer. Your opinions on if it should or shouldn’t be that way are not relevant, this is the way it is. If you want good sound, you have to buy it. I can’t change society or manufacturers for you, I am only a guy explaining how you can get good sound.

K, like I said your personal finances are your own, but that’s why you don’t have good sound. Asked and answered.

Your personal finances are your business. I am here saying why you can’t hear anything. If the audio is bad, the invest in better audio, simple as that.

Yes. TV speakers have gotten incredibly cheap and low quality. It’s audio/visual. You’ve invested a fair chunk into half of the experience with a TV, but ignored the other half.

So, you haven’t invested in your audio. You have a TV, great, but tv speakers are basically phone speakers.

You don’t need a big surround sound system, but you need something. Even the cheapest sound bars will likely solve this problem for you.

Pay for better audio people. TV companies make big shiny displays but out smartphone sized speakers in them. Gone are the days where you can get good audio from your TV. Even the cheapest sound bars will make a difference.

It’s not your ears. It’s your sound equipment.

What does your audio system look like for your TV?

I told him he could either have his racist and hateful views of people, people that include my friends and mentors, or he could have a relationship with his son.

So it’s been 9 years now, I’ll let you know when I hear back on his answer.

Yes you see while you were under care they administered 2 aspirin to you, you can see that under the line item for $300

Exactamundo. OP expected this guy to be a criminal, and noticed when he did criminal things. How many people has OP assumed weren’t criminals based on the way they dressed who got away with whatever scam they were pulling?

All it takes is one asshole to ruin a whole production. The funniest bit is that the church could have told him “hey Dave, they’re working hard, and they have a point. Take your kid to the back or something until they’re done”, but couldn’t be bothered. Great story.

I’ll bite. (Note I do notice you do have a 12 day old history, and we have had a wave of spammers trying to incite bullshit, so we’ll see how this goes)

So, why play long games? Why read long books? Why watch long movies?

For me, I like a good well-told story. A game like Red Dead Redemption 2 has such a good story that it is worth investing 120 hours into. It’s protagonist, Arthur Morgan, is so well written that he is arguably the most well-written fictional character of all time. Over the course of 120 hours you get to know him so intimately that you truly feel like you know and understand him, and over the story that will both make you laugh and cry, it culminates in an amazing climax, truly a story that could only be told over 100 hours.

To answer your other points:

For me personally, I tend to look at things in terms of costs and benefits. Through that lens, most games seem like a bad deal

This goes counter to what you said at the beginning, they are actually ridiculously cheap compared to other forms of media. Going to see a 2 hour movie now costs about $18 in the states, that’s $9/hour. RDR2 was $60 and for only the first playthrough of 120 hours that’s $0.50/hour of entertainment value. Now, take playing it multiple times and it’s one of the cheapest forms of entertainment. (arguably the hardware to run it needs to be calculated in, but it depends on preferences etc etc etc)

When I was in HS, I had a band. Has that type of interaction simply been replaced by video games?

No. Apples and Oranges.

I really want to understand the interplay between video games and psychology.

I like good story telling. I like being enveloped in my media, and feeling truly immersed. Gaming does that in spades.

Cuz it seems like FPSes are dominant whereas not too long ago they were a single niche among many niches.

Maybe in your friend group they are, but in the circles I’m in it’s simply not true. Everyone is different. Everyone has different preferences. I just played Dispatch over the weekend, a fun 8ish hour romp that also made me both laugh out loud and well up with tears, it was an adorable game. I see 98% positive ratings on it with almost 100k reviews, so I don’t think we need to jump to “FPS is dominant”.

Yes that’s what I don’t like about Stoat. No one is going to create logins for 7 different Stoat servers, they need to have a single place to access, and then join others from that one. Average users don’t want to know about servers or DNS names or anything, they want to click a button and start talking

I was always disappointed that Stoat (terrible rename btw) pushed federation out of their roadmap. If that would have taken a front seat it could have been a real discord clone. Anyone could spin up a server, and it’d be simple enough for users to understand. It honestly could have been the next IRC.

I sleep in a big bed with my wife

And neither are supposed to be punishable by death.

Exactly, they join d the main networks and instances, who hate the Al right trolling, anger, and hatred, and have defederated all of them. They’re still out there, isolated and alone, b cause we all chose we didn’t want to sit here and listen to their drivel.

Yeah was worried I went to my state’s university at first instead of a “good” school. No one in companies care, the only ones who care are those in academia. Now I hire people and you’re exactly right, I look for a degree, I don’t care about from where.

As an engineer who spent most of my life coding fintech services… You do NOT want to meet finra, finsen, or any of those agencies. Best case you are sued for millions. The step after that is immediate arrest.