I moved from Google Podcasts (which is pretty good) to AntennaPod, which is FOSS and honestly, pretty damn solid

By Odin’s beard!!! That’s an absolute LIST of impressive and impactful enhancements!
I feel like I owe you several drinks after reading all of that!

I feel a bit of both ways, on one hand, I love having a familiar universe that I can throws hours into and making it my sort of gaming home base (FFXIV). But when I play something else, I get nervous about them being huge or time demanding. I’ve been enjoying finding and binging through shorter games that I can knock out in a couple days, experiencing other worlds and stories, but not having to commit substantial life to them.

There’s an amazing amount of trying to make games “worth it” by adding tons of side content, and my ADHD ass can’t ignore it…So when a game doesn’t do that, like Singularity, Remember Me, or even Alan Wake, I love it. A nice, linear, intentional story with none of the “help my farm from the rats” bs.

One issue is that Microsoft makes so much on data collection, that they actually pay manufacturers to put Windows on there, it’s one of the methods used to try to keep stock computer prices low. While this is scummy and anticompetitive, it helps the consumer and gives me a chuckle that installing Windows inherently decreased the worth of a computer.

Infinity was my absolute favorite, I shall watch this app with great interest 😁 lemme (Lemmy?) know if you need any additional testers

Likewise, you gave an amazing response and I want to dedicate some time to properly reading and responding to it, so I’ll be responding when I have a good opportunity to commit :) Thank you so much for such a thoughtful and thorough response, I really look forward to going over it

That’s so kind of you!
I started by aiming for front-end web dev. I learned HTML & CSS (I know, we’re not PROGRAMMING yet). At the time, that’s all I was hearing it’d take to get into the role. Then it was “you should probably know some Javascript,” and I wasn’t ready for how big of a jump that was. By the time I started understanding it, it became “learn jQuery,” which I learned and used for a couple of small websites, then came the libraries…
“AngularJS is the future” well now I need to learn Git, compiling, CMD…
ReactJS starts becoming a thing and I say “seriously? I’ve learned enough of these things, quit moving the goalpost, React isn’t going to stick around”
Yeah…it definitely stuck around…but as an Open Source nerd, I got super excited by VueJS and started learning that. No jobs in that apparently, aaaand I no longer want to do web dev, especially since I never reached the point of enjoying coding, it was always a means to an end.

So there were two major issues for me: \

1. I never focused on one language enough to truly LEARN to code, it was a constant sense of “I’m not keeping up”. I may be able to write the syntax, I might know the basics about functions, vars, and looping, but never really got using it in a super practical sense other than to try a couple of personal challenging projects that my ADHD arse couldn’t ever stick with. \
2. Me and coding speak and think very differently. Stick with me here, I know, it’s a language, but the way something should be written and formatted are different from how I think it should be, and this is a very hard one to explain to folks. The best example I can give is that I might say like (and this is a poor example because remember, I don’t code and I’m not doing any active coding projects) \

var person = { userInput }
var num;

function findNumberOfLetters (person) {
    num = length(person);
}
function response(person, num) {
    findNumberOfLetters(person);
    console.log("Hello " + person + "! Did you know that your name has " + num + " letters in it? Numbers are rad!");
}

I’m sure I did things wrong, but again, this is just for the sake of example. So, I write something like this thinking that it’s nicely structured and easy to read, and inevitably won’t work. I pass this to a friend, and the answer seems to always be a less structured, more nested code. So for this example, something like \

(function response(userInput) {
    console.log("Hello " + userInput + "! Did you know that your name has " + length(userInput) + " letters in it? Numbers are rad!");
})

Obviously their answer is shorter and this isn’t exactly a complicated program, but for some reason, making the thing that provides a response to the user to do any of the logic feels wrong and messy to me. It’s a really hard thing to explain, I hope this makes some amount of sense, but I just process things very differently than code does, and it just ends up really incompatible. I’ll beat my head for weeks over-complicating something because I want it to “be clean” only for someone I know to come up with something that actually works within seconds.
This isn’t to compare my skills against them, it’s to say that I’m thinking about it wrong, I’m organizing it wrong.
That said, knowing how code functions has helped me to know enough to be dangerous and apply it in other ways, such as building Azure Logic Apps to manage ticket intake, or building alert monitoring. So it’s come in very handy in its own way, I just don’t have to competency to actually make any contributions to Open Source projects, especially since I don’t write in two of the coolest languages that I wish I could learn: Python and Rust.

No pity party here, I love what I do and I don’t intend to change careers to coding, but I do end up feeling helpless in the face of instances like this where I wish so badly to contribute to a project that I care so strongly about and want to see thrive. I know there’s other ways to contribute, such as providing graphics, UI, documentation, financial, hosting, etc. but coding always seems to be the most in need to keep up with demand, and with more and more projects coming out all the time, the more programmers are in need to see them through.

Yessss, honestly, it really helps to have that knowledge, I’ve been surprised at how often it comes in handy

I wish so badly I could code, I spent 8 years trying to understand it and get into the industry, but it never quite clicked in my brain. Soooo I do IT infrastructure. I wish so badly to contribute code

Aaaah, I love that idea, I wonder if there are any good controller configs for it that might help for that

I’ll just leave this here ;) https://store.steampowered.com/app/2330750/Cataclysm_Dark_Days_Ahead/

I’m so freaking happy about this, I’m so tired of electron apps taking ridiculous amounts of space and ram for minimal functions

Turns out, you can tap and hold toward the top of a comment to hide those comments, just gotta find the new sweet spot and build that muscle memory ^_^

I hate that “Games as a Service” are preventing the longevity of games. I worry about all of the incredible stories and experiences that these games provide being very quickly lost to time.

I mean…Reddit was taken offline by subs going private, and they had forewarning this was going to happen. Lemmy is handling a veritable monsoon of new users

Bless you, kind stranger

I want to like SearX, but I just haven’t gotten any great results from it so far, and I’m not really impressed by anything that just spits out Bing results (looking at you DDG).
you.com gives excellent results, but I’m not sure how much I should be trusting them.
Brave search has gotten MUCH better and I use that pretty on the daily now. I keep seeing good things about Kagi from our Lemmy friends here, thinking I should give that a shot

I pretty much spend all of my time on FFXIV, but lately, been going through Last of Us again with my partner on PC

I’ve been into hosting party games on TV with the Steam Deck, so we’ve been doing a lot of

• Stick Fight The Game
• Rivals of Aether
• Lovers in a Dangerous Space Time
• Jackbox
• Broforce
• Scott Pilgrim vs the World
  
  I know they’re not exactly split screen, but great games for multiple players

I think that’s the cool thing about it though is if we don’t like the host of an instance, we move on to a better one. That will especially apply if they implement importing/exporting accounts like you can in Mastodon. Then you’re REALLY not locked into any one server. I understand what you’re saying, it’s no small deal, but we can let them sit in their own echo chamber, and we go where we feel more comfortable.