cobysev

The common lingo originated from the movie The Matrix, where Neo was given the choice of taking the red pill and waking up in the real world, or taking the blue pill and staying in the fake fantasy that was his life.

4chan adopted the term and started calling themselves “redpilled,” claiming that they were removed from the happy fantasy promoted in popular culture (wife, kids, decent job, etc.) and could see life for the harsh, cruel reality it truly was.

The mindset spread to Reddit where a community popped up (r/theRedPill), espousing sexual strategies for men in a society where they felt sex was highly unattainable for their gender. It turned into a very misogynistic subreddit, hating on women who “could get laid anytime” and didn’t respect the plight of men who struggled for simple affection from the opposite gender.

Being “redpilled” took on a negative connotation, turning into a darker, conservative term to support men’s struggles in life while at the same putting down women. Its original meaning has been corrupted into a warped idealism for men. One could argue it’s promoting the opposite of its origin; fighting to create a fantasy world for men to flourish without effort instead of introducing them to the reality that their struggles are all self-inflicted and needed hard work, patience, and determination to overcome.

The term became well enough recognized that “_____-pilled” started introducing other concepts of being introduced to harsh truths in the world. In this case, blackpilled, meaning to give in to despair and depression in an uncaring, cruel world.

I think it’s great for a ground-floor investment in a YouTube competitor. It draws more people to the platform, gets a chunk of money flowing up front to help boost the service, and they can always sunset the lifetime option if the site gets popular and revenue starts to get tight. As long as they continue to honor it for everyone who paid initially.

Like I said in my original comment, a Nebula subscription is only $6/mo. A lifetime access payment is over 4 years of subscriptions up front. That’s a nice chunk of change to help get them established.

I saw someone’s video about how Nebula works (I think Legal Eagle? He was advertising it hardcore on YouTube for a while) and the subscription service is how they pay content creators. He said it’s a more stable income than YouTube, where your videos earn advertising money based on trends and visibility. If you’re not YouTube famous (and the algorithm doesn’t make you visible), you’re not going to make any money on the platform. But Nebula gives you a more solid income, plus the freedom to make the content you want. No AI moderators flagging videos because it thought it detected the word “suicide” or something. No forcing you to include key words or pushing regular videos on a tight schedule to ensure the algorithm keeps recommending your channel.

Yeah, like I said, it needs more content creators to dump their libraries there. It could be a fantastic competitor to YouTube if only more people knew about it and used it.

Find me a self publishing video platform with the reach of YouTube that doesn’t require self hosting and I’ll happily move my content there.

Nebula is the next best thing to YouTube, but not enough content creators have moved their stuff there, so it’s easy to run out of interesting videos to watch after a while. Some of the bigger folks I follow share their content on both platforms, and the incentive to watch on Nebula instead of YouTube is that content creators have more freedom with their videos on Nebula. They can post bonus/extra footage that would be automatically flagged and blocked by YouTube normally. Don’t need to dance around the censors on Nebula.

Nebula is subscription-based, so they don’t show ads anywhere on their site. But if you don’t want to pay for another subscription service, you can also do a one-time payment to have lifetime access to their site. It’s $300, which is the cost of just over 4 years of their subscription service ($6/mo). Considering I’ve had an account for over 3 years now, it’s almost paid for itself.

I’m terrified of Gabe retiring or passing away. He’s been amazing for the company and I don’t trust anyone else to not want to use Valve for their own greedy purposes. The next president of Valve will likely ruin all the good things about it, thanks to late-stage capitalism.

I firmly believe in voting with your wallet; I normally don’t invest much long-term interest into businesses because you never know how they’ll change over time, but I’ve been so happy with Valve that I’ve gladly given them thousands of dollars over the decades for Steam games. My library is sitting at just over 3,500 games right now. I don’t know what I’m gonna do when Valve crumbles one day. I really hope they give me an option to download and play offline all the games I’ve bought, because that’s a massive library to lose.

I’ve never given a penny to Epic Games, and unless they get on-par with Steam’s functionality, I won’t ever buy or play any of their games. The one thing that might make Epic Games competitive (and could convince me to use their platform) is letting Steam users copy their libraries over, so we’re not just starting over from scratch with a new service.

That’s what got me on Steam in the first place. Back around 2010 or so, I discovered that if you had a physical PC game that was also in Steam’s store, you could type in the serial number on the game box and it would register and add it to your Steam library. That’s how I got my collection of early Call of Duty titles on Steam, as well as Half-Life and some others. I moved my physical game library over to Steam and I’ve been a Steam loyalist ever since.

I almost thought that was Elon Musk for a moment there. I wouldn’t be surprised if that weirdo wore something like that in public.

I tried watching Dragon Ball once. Someone was charging for an attack, and it literally took them 3 episodes to charge it (while cutting to other characters dealing with their own drama elsewhere).

When they finally fired their charged shot, it missed. I turned it off and never went back to that show. What a waste of an hour and a half.

I was actually living in Japan at the time, and I’ve learned why some shows drag on like that. It’s because a manga series is super popular and it gets licensed for animation… but the manga is incomplete and still being made. So eventually, the anime catches up to the latest volumes and then they need filler to keep the series going while waiting for the manga-ka (author/artist) to make more stories. So they stretch out scenes and stories to cover multiple episodes instead of just getting to the point and moving on.

That’s why we get lengthy shows like Dragon Ball, One Piece, Naruto, etc. They’re made before the manga is finished, so they will run out of material and abruptly end unless they stretch their story arcs out over dozens of episodes.

The other route is to find a decent place to end an anime series without a full resolution of the plot. For instance, the '90s Berserk anime just told the story up to the eclipse, which was just about where the manga was when the show aired. The series is still being made now, 2 decades later (even after its manga-ka passed away last year), and there have been a couple attempts to make new anime series telling more of the current plot. But they’re not stretching the story across hundreds of episodes to keep it going.

I bought and played this game on Steam last night. Ended up playing for several hours; I was hooked. It’s kind of like Untitled Goose Game, except you’re a tiny man and you go around slapping everything/everyone until you accomplish your objectives.

I came here for this. I have it on Steam. Excellent game!

My dad was paying an annual subscription for several Ring cameras around his house. I replaced them with Eufy Security cameras, because you can store the video feed locally and not have to pay any subscription at all.

Then my dad passed away in January and I’ve spent this year closing all his accounts and switching bills over to my name. A few days ago, I got a reminder email in his account that he was about to be charged several hundred dollars for another year subscription to Ring. Even though he hasn’t had active cameras with them for almost a year now. Glad I caught it!

AskJeeves and Hotbot! Man, that takes me back. I also enjoyed Excite and Infoseek back in the pre-Google days.

Proton’s top tier service for individuals (Proton Unlimited) is only $7.99/month if you pay for 2 years of service. Gives you full access to all their services.

Proton just announced last month that they’re turning the company into a nonprofit organization, because security is more important to them than making money. That’s why their services are dirt-cheap; they want to ensure it’s affordable for everyone, and the only reason they collect money at all is to keep the servers online.

I’m currently de-Googling my life. Moving all my services over to Proton, testing other search engines, etc. Trying to slowly cut out/replace all services that Google provides me.

Oh, and I’m sticking with Firefox with Ublock Origin, to ensure Google can’t ever advertise to me, even incidentally.

They do that with Legacy IPs because most people say well I bought the first one I wouldn’t be a real fan if I didn’t buy the next one.

I hate how accurate this is. However, it can also hurt them because there have been many franchises I’ve refused to buy because I never played the first games and I don’t want to jump into the middle of a story I’m unfamiliar with. I’m a bit of a completionist like that.

I wonder if this is why a lot of games are no longer numbering their new releases and just giving them unique titles. So people don’t think of them as a series and are more willing to buy the latest releases.

On a related topic, I HATE how Call of Duty just made a totally new game and called it Modem Warfare, then started up a new franchise with MWII, MWII, etc. We already had Modern Warfare 1-3! It’s like they’re trying to erase/overwrite their old franchise so when people look them up, they just find the latest games. Very sneaky!

EDIT:

If I could develop a game where customers get nothing and you are required to pay them money. It would be the top funded game by every AAA publisher. Remember the people at the top and especially the shareholders don’t care about games.

This is where microtransactions and DLC (like useless character/weapon skins) come from. The customer gets practically nothing, but they pay the company so much money for it. There are tons of games that thrive on this model (especially mobile games) because selling microtransactions and extra downloadable content that’s just a recoloring of a skin makes way more money than just selling the base game.

It’s being sold via ConcernedApe on that Steam page I linked in my previous comment. So he’s earning the money from sales.

Uhh… I guess it’s not technically DLC, but ConcernedApe is selling the game soundtrack for $5 on Steam. It’s in the game’s DLC category, but unlike some other soundtracks on Steam, it’s not dependent on owning the base game to purchase.

But it’s also downloadable content, so it is DLC… I guess it depends on how you want to define DLC nowadays.

If one soccer player passes the ball to another and they score is that manipulating the system? It’s playing the game by the rules. What is the alternative to people dropping out of the primary? Should they be forced to keep running even if it’s clear they won’t win?

This is a bad analogy. A better one would be that a soccer player was kicked from the game for a penalty, but as they’re leaving the field - while the game is still active - they kick the ball to one of their own players who then scores the winning goal. That’s totally unfair; the penalized player was already out of the game and shouldn’t be influencing it further, more or less helping to score the winning goal.

A truly democratic election would allow for all voters to be informed and making their own logical choice for president. But instead, we have millions of uninformed voters who are clinging to every word of whatever candidate they happen to associate with first. And when that person doesn’t make the cut, they throw their support behind another specific candidate still in the running. Instead of telling their constituents to make informed, logical decisions on their next choice of candidate, they’re leading their flock of followers to whomever they’re being paid to support after dropping out. And you know these guys are being paid to push certain party-approved candidates. I mean, we just recently learned that the DNC specifically pushed out all their legit candidates so they could throw support behind Biden and crush Bernie.

I don’t think this is very democratic. It’s misleading at best. But until a majority of people actually take the time to properly research candidates, it’s the corrupt system we’re stuck with.

They gave birth at home instead of in a hospital. Which means that there’s probably no record of the child’s birth and they haven’t gone through the process that usually gets you a birth certificate. So they’re deciding whether to go start that process for their newborn or not.

Isn’t that, like, the motto of all Sovereign Citizens?

My name’s Coby. Close enough. People call me Colby all the time.

I knew a guy when I served in the US military who got caught cheating in a semi-related way. He got assigned to a base in a new state and his wife refused to relocate their whole family for the few years he’d be assigned there, so he went by himself, leaving his wife and kids in his home state.

Turns out, he was sexting one of his younger subordinates at work. One of his daughters found out when she tried to use an old tablet and found out his account was still synced to it. She saw all his texts updating in real time.

He was ultra-conservative and didn’t believe in divorce, so he was doing everything he could to save his marriage. His wife forced him to install security cameras in every room of his apartment and banned him from going anywhere after work. She knew his schedule and expected him home immediately after work ended. He was basically on house arrest until his job was done and he could move home.

The last I heard, he told his wife the landlord needed to paint the walls, so he removed all the cameras, dunked them in the bathtub, then played dumb when none of them would work when he set them back up again. He was seen inviting young women over to his apartment after that. So, you know… he didn’t learn his lesson.