Darren

Go fuck yourself, San Diego.

You joke, but staring at the shitty LG LED TV I bought a year ago, I get mad at how much research we have to do these days just to make sure we get the best <PRODUCT> possible for the budget we have.

Not that long ago you could walk into a TV show room, pick the best one they had that you could afford and that was that. We’d have our brand preferences, but by and large we could buy a TV that would last us ten years.

Now, in order to stand a chance of getting five years out of a product we have to do weeks of research, scour a bunch of forums, mentally having to vet out replies that feel like they’re shill accounts. We have to become miniature experts in every field where we need to spend money, and it’s just fucking exhausting.

In my case, I was labouring under the belief that LG make really good TVs. Turns out they make really good OLED TVs, but their LED panels suck balls. So within nine months of buying this panel, the backlight has become patchy as shit, and now I’m having to go through the bullshit of returning it in order to get a better one.

See, I don’t understand why anyone would need to immediately follow that many randoms. And I don’t get the need to speedrun social media.

But hey, it takes all sorts.

You can follow hashtags on Mastodon. So if you want music recommendations you can follow #NowPlaying, (for example) and every time someone uses that tag it’ll appear in your timeline as if you follow that person. It’s nice for follow discovery too, because if the same people keep posting links to tunes you dig, then it’s a fair bet that you’ll have similar interests.

I’ve not tried it myself, but I guess that in theory, you could follow a bunch of hashtags without ever following an actual account.

I dunno. I joined Mastodon back in 2022 and just…followed people.

They weren’t the same people as on Twitter, but it didn’t really matter in the end. I now follow almost 600 people and never feel like my feed is empty.

One social media site doesn’t have to be better than another, it just has to be sufficient for your needs.

As someone who has recently moved away from an iPhone, while still having much of the rest of the Apple ecosystem in place: for me it’s things like AirPlay and AirDrop. There are alternatives to AirDrop, but as I have an Apple TV, it would super handy to be able to AirPlay to it from my Pixel. As it stands, there appears to be literally no way to achieve this.

I have a Vivoactive 4 that I picked up used from Facebook a couple of months back. Its a few years old now, and the regular LCD screen looks pretty bank once you’ve got used to OLED. But it cost me £50, works perfectly well with GrapheneOS, and Tue battery still lasts a week.

It’s left me pondering upgrading it to a new one with an OLED screen.

We use Moonlight instead of Steam Link. It requires a little more setting up at the PC end, but overall seems to be a more smooth result.

The Norm McDonald version is a dog house.

He doesn’t have a dog house.