I’m not sure if you meant literally no free time to play video games, or just not willing to make time for a perceived steep learning curve, but if it’s the latter then maybe you could reconsider. The basics can be learnt very quickly via YouTube and it’s possible to have quite a bit of fun casually playing an hour here or there as the Rifleman class simply treating it like a milsim Battlefield without ever diving into the deeper mechanics.

Yeah it’s one of the reasons I prefer Proton. Not many VPNs offer that functionality now, unfortunately.

That’s rarely how donations work, though. Ultimately you need to have some level of trust that the people at the organisation you are donating to know a lot more about where, when and how your money can be effectively used than you do. Your pre-donation requirements/demands are extremely unrealistic and I’m not sure if people like yourself are genuinely delusional about this fact or if you just use it as some sort of moral bargaining tactic to never feel bad about the fact that you don’t donate any of your money to the causes you supposedly really want to.

Mullvad. Its only real downside is its lack of port forwarding and it passes all the Lemmy purity tests. You will never be downvoted for recommending it.

It’s way less egregious than the Brave co-founder making donations in support anti-gay marriage amendments, and even that has been massively overblown (the real reasons to avoid Brave are a) Chromium, b) shady crypto stuff and c) its financial incentives as a for-profit company with investor backing to compromise on its claimed ethical principles). I’m getting so sick of these purity tests on completely irrelevant and unrelated issues standing in the way of genuine alternatives to big tech. People are so eager to let perfect be the enemy of good.

One of the more recent examples from last year was Mozilla’s announcement of PPA (Privacy-Preserving Attribution). Essentially the organisation is trying to create a new system for click-based advertising where an advertiser can be notified that you clicked on their ad, helping them and the websites which host their ads, without compromising your personal privacy. The way it has historically worked is you click on an ad and give away a ton of your personal data, or you straight up block all these ads and their trackers which makes a lot of the web unsustainable (because it is funded by advertising). Anyway, like with this latest controversy a lot of people didn’t bother to read any of Mozilla’s statements and instead based their entire opinion off clickbait headlines like ‘Firefox’s New ‘Privacy’ Feature Actually Gives Your Data to Advertisers’ which made PPA sound like a reduction of consumer privacy, which it isn’t. And again, like this current controversy, you also had a lot of privacy activists who do not live in reality claiming that anything other than a 100$ rejection of all advertising online equaled 100% complicity and that Mozilla had sold out on one of its core principles.

Each game tells you where they are in the timeline in relation to the other games

They setup the new world in preparation for the main theme, sure. At its deepest level that was always just (up until Skyward Sword when Nintendo began monetising fan-created lore) the echo of a myth throughout time and reality. The fans so desperate to make a direct linear connection between the conclusion of one game and the traditional introductory cut-scene of the next are so far down their rabbit hole they seem completely unable to accept the much more logical explanation that it’s just a convenient way for Nintendo to recycle the same basic narrative structure that has been used in almost every single game.

I find reading books quite meditative and I like the initial challenge of maintaining my concentration for the first 10 minutes or so before I can relax and sink into it a bit. I sympathise with everyone else struggling to read as much as an adult though, it was so much easier for me during childhood. Sometimes I feel a bit embarrassed about how little I read now given how advanced I was as a kid. It feels like I’ve been wasting a skill/hobby that could have provided me with a lot of happiness and growth as an adult.

It would be amazing of course, and my entire attitude towards Firefox would change overnight if we had that kind of guaranteed security. At the moment I just look at it as the best least-worst option for the short to medium term future. I recently learned about Ladybird but that is still a fair way off, so for now my priority is to continue supporting Firefox and trying to avoid a future where Google has theoretical control over everything.

You’ve just explained that to make Firefox secure you need to watch some video of someone that you hope knows what they’re talking about.

No actually, I didn’t. I suggested that anyone who is not confident/literate enough to work this out for themselves through self-research online can access extremely beginner-friendly guides on YouTube that step-by-step walk them through the setup. Everyone knows how to use YouTube, please don’t insult my intelligence by implying it’s some kind of semi-mythical resource known only to the the biggest “nerds”.

I agree, I think the whole “official timeline” thing was 100% a fan created mythos which Nintendo saw was gaining traction and played into to make more money. It’s pretty clear that most of the games had very little connection to one another beyond the basic concept of the core theme (the hero saving the world from a great evil) repeating itself.

Removed by mod

In that case your entire argument for LibreWolf is a complete waste of time, because this theoretical user you’re referring to also wouldn’t bother to download an unknown niche privacy browser. LibreWolf is essentially just hardened Firefox for people who are too lazy to do it themselves. The crossover between completely tech illiterate but also privacy-focused is an insanely small market.

Removed by mod

There is, just not in relation to piracy. The concerns are more over its financial incentives/ownership and privacy.

It’s not too complicated for a nerd whose hobby is computers or someone who has studied computers, but for the layperson it’s too much.

I’m not sure I buy this argument when there are videos visually walking you through every single step involved in hardening Firefox. Is that still too complex for your elderly parents or grandparents? Maybe. Is it too complex for Millenials and younger generations? Definitely not. The core problem here is just laziness. People are not willing to give up 10 minutes of their day to setup their browser for years of future use because “I don’t have time for that”.

and predictions saying Firefox is going downhill fast and that their forks won’t be maintained for much longer.

Possibly true, but abandoning ship is only bringing us closer to that timeline. People seem to be completely ignorant/delusional about how much work these forks will require to maintain if Mozilla’s full time employees stop working on Firefox. If you have a practical reason to use another fork (like maybe a feature Firefox doesn’t have) then I totally understand using that instead, but if you are simply making some kind of ethical protest change like all the new LibreWolf users who are so loudly virtue signalling at the moment then you need to think seriously about whether this course of action will ultimately end up hurting your ideals. Mozilla definitely has a big communication problem and I understand the desire to distance oneself from an organisation that repeatedly disrespects its supporters and never learns from its mistakes, as it is very fatiguing to endure their constant failures and the massive fall-outs from them, but ultimately I feel like switching away from Firefox is still an emotional decision rather than a rational one.

The Legend of Zelda: The Monkey’s Paw

GOTTEM

Spotube’s Android client had a lot of performance issues last time I tried it (which was a while ago, to be fair) and seemed to be pulling everything from YouTube Music despite the name. I think RiMusic and InnerTune are a lot better, personally. InnerTune if you want a simpler, more traditional UI, RiMusic if you don’t mind something a bit more convoluted but also fun and different. RiMusic has some more traditional UI options now as well but I like the older one with the menu on the side - it feels like an app on an early smartphone, back when everything was weird and fun.