With pretty much all of these types of games there’ll be a cheap deck that’s really powerful. You can build that and then spam it to climb the ranks and get more resources to buy another deck. Back when I tried out Master Duel it was the Salad deck. It was pretty fun; I liked it a lot and I had it made on day 1. No idea what it would be currently.

However the games are absolutely designed in a way to entice you to spend money. They will always be slightly frustrating to play without doing that. It’s hard for me to recommend any of them if you’re not wanting to spend money.

Just so you’re aware that refutation was also spoofed.

Whole situation remains funny af though. And Walz is adept at twisting the knife.

Just two unfortunate people honestly.

Nah not anymore, now you spend a day or so building some convoluted excel calculator once so that you never need to do the calcs again.

Then, 3 years later when you go to add or change something in that calculator, you have absolutely no idea how it works and decide the change wasn’t that important anyway.

Engineer: 2, but 3 to be safe.

If you do it 15 times while holding down the B key Mew appears for you to catch too!

Strange that they don’t count comments IMO. My first reaction was that I like the self-promotion rules because the ones I’m familiar with just require posters to interact with the community. i.e. For every post to their Youtube channel/whatever there need to be ~9 comments.

I always liked that because it prevented the subreddits I browsed from becoming giant ad spaces where content creators just dump a link to their video on all related subreddits and move on. If someone is never answering questions asked of them in their own threads and not participating in discussions in any other thread then they’re more of a leech on that community than a contributor IMO. I like the idea that in order to have access to the views of the community, you need to also view other people’s work within the community and interact.

But to count only posts is weird for sure. I don’t feel like the rule really helps anything. For example if I had a channel that was relevant to r/pcgaming to meet the rule criteria I feel like I’d just post my content, then post 9 other inane threads that I didn’t really care about/intend to participate in. “What’s your opinion on Final Fantasy XIV?” “Someone explain to me why Epic Game Store is so much worse than Steam” “What games are you getting from the Steam Summer Sale?!” etc. etc.

My reply was a lot wordier, so I just wanted to say I 100% agree with pelotron here. They have the right of it IMO.

I focused pretty hard on the negatives because many other posters here have already hit a lot of the highlights and I felt they left out the negatives. It’s certainly not all bad. Absolutely try it out.

Just to start off: I would recommend experiencing it for yourself first. A lot of people hold a very different perspective from me, even just in this thread. Maybe it’s the specific communities I frequent that are like this, I dunno. But it certainly is worth giving a chance if nothing else. Costs you nothing more than however much time you decide is worth investing into seeing if the site is a good fit for you. And also, I truly believe Lemmy has the potential to grow into something greater than it is currently. Which is why I’m still here checking it daily. I don’t find it’s a good replacement right now, but I have hope that it has the best shot at becoming a good replacement.

I hate to say it, but generally if I want to see discussion around a new game/TV show/book/whatever I find Reddit to still be the best place to do that. IMO, Reddit’s overall quality has dipped quite a bit (browsing /r/all) but the smaller communities are often still good. Of course, all it takes is one shithead mod to ruin that, but I suppose I’ve gotten lucky.

I took steps to distance myself from reddit with the 3rd party app fiasco. I never bother browsing /r/all anymore, I don’t use reddit on mobile anymore, stuff like that. But I hopped into Old School Runescape recently and, well, just look at the OSRS community on Lemmy. The top posts are 9/10 months old. So I browse r/2007scape in order to discuss the game.

There’s a great silver lining to Lemmy being so small though: one person can make a large difference. I believe with enough effort it’s possible for one person to grow communities on here and that’s pretty cool. I don’t have the time/energy to do that, so I go to where others are already gathered to discuss things But, if you’ve got the mind for it, there’s opportunity to be the change you want to see. It’s just not going to be easy and it’s going to be slow.

It’s the best I’ve found, but I wouldn’t call it a “good” alternative myself no.

Many others have commented on the small communities/lack of niche communities so I’ll simply say I agree with the takes in this thread there.

Personally though, I generally find Lemmy to be far less tolerant of any dissenting opinions across most communities. And man do I mean any. There’s a plethora of topics that aren’t even worth trying to discuss here because if you introduce the slightest bit of nuance to a hardline take you’ll be downvoted, insulted, and ignored.

A quick example that comes to mind are services such as Spotify/Youtube. To make a long story short, I find that I use Youtube often enough that I don’t mind paying for Youtube premium. They need to make money somehow to continue providing that service and I can’t fucking stand ads so hey sure it’s worth the monthly payment to me. I’m a pretty satisfied customer all things considered.

Try offering that perspective in any related thread and you’ll be called bootlicker and made to feel like you’re propping up Satan himself for daring to pay for Youtube and be happy to do so.

There’s other, similar topics. Some are easier to avoid, like the FuckCars community. I was a pretty big fan of that community on reddit but on Lemmy most threads seem to truly believe we need to go 100% no cars at all and there is no middleground damnit. Other topics manage to work their way into damn near any thread. Biden could literally pull a child and puppy from a burning building and there will always be comments about how he’s still a genocidal maniac and basically evil. That entire war is basically just not worth talking about here imo.

And then there’s little stuff. For example, don’t ever say you use Windows here lest a whole horde of people jump in to call you an idiot for not having switched to Linux I mean really what’s wrong with you using the most popular OS in the world by a large margin. Stuff like that.

So I guess to summarize my feelings here, I personally believe the echo-chamber is far worse on Lemmy than reddit and that’s primarily due to the smaller community. A lot of likeminded people came to Lemmy and we’re missing a lot of middleground opinions that come naturally with a larger, more diverse population. Too many people view everything as black and white and if you sit in grey both extremes are against you.

There are absolutely exceptions; I have seen respectful discourse on the site. But the general trend I perceive here is that the echo-chamber is far worse.

Thanks for sharing! This was an amazing read.

I would think most of those applications should be able to use an alumino-silicate based refractory ceramic fiber. Kaowool is one brand, but there are many like it.

It has its own problems in regard to silicosis but that’s only after it’s been exposed to higher temperatures and are easily mitigated with most particulate respirators. Also, if I remember correctly, the silicosis threat requires very long term exposure. I do know of at least one company developing a silca-free version too, which would eliminate the silicosis threat.

I use it in glass manufacturing with temperatures 2000°F+ so I’m quite confident it’ll hold up to any application where asbestos is being used.

EDIT: It will hold up in any application unless there’s a problem with certain chemical reactivity I should say*. I don’t expect that would be a common problem, but I’m sure it could happen. I’m admittedly not well versed on asbestos since I’ve never tried speccing it out for anything, haha.

Man the name of the dish is so not the point of this community. I stand by Lemmy in present state is far worse than reddit for pedantic or toxic behavior.

It looks really good OP, nice job! I’d eat it regardless of what you called it.

Unfortunately Temtem is a terrible game entirely due to Crema’s incompetence.

It’s actually impressive how consistently they make horrible decisions. If I had to summarize their attitude, it’s that you can’t criticize them because “Hey, we’re human, we make mistakes and when you criticize us it hurts our feelings”. And when I say you can’t, I mean it literally. They will suspend or ban you from whatever platform it is for saying anything they perceive as negative.

They take an “us vs them” attitude with their player base which results in the equivalent of Crema stuffing their fingers in their ears saying LALALALALA YOU’RE WRONG WE’RE RIGHT.

It’s a shame, because the foundation of the game, the battle system, is genius and a huge improvement over Pokémon. The game showed real promise for a long time. But Crema has been dropping the ball with every update for years and it’s long since entered its death spiral.

Bb7 looks good after Qc3. Still feels like there’s something here to me but it’s not simple imo.

This is very close to how my weekend went actually : ) Just with BG3 instead of Wrestlemania, and the wife was out of town instead of no school. Haha.

Do you mean Alyx? I actually do own that, but haven’t got around playing it yet.

Yeah absolutely. I think with a lot of these older games that are considered to be the GOATs of their respective genres you’ll run into the same problem: They were so good, that the mechanics/ideas become the minimum requirement for all games thereafter. So, if you played the game on day 1, it was an innovative masterpiece the likes of which you’d never seen before. If you play it 10-15 years later after having played modern games in the same genre, it feels like the same old shit except without the 10-15 years of improvements.

For me personally, the game I’ll get crucified for not enjoying is Half Life 2. I played through the entire game. It was ok. I was pretty bored for most of it though. Shooters aren’t generally my thing for one, but even that aside the game was very milquetoast to me. I did a lot of reading up on the history of HL2 afterwards because I was astonished that I didn’t enjoy such a legendary game and I think I came to the conclusion that some new mechanics such as the cover system and story-driven nature of HL2 were what made it such a hit in 2004. But 15 years later those mechanics weren’t new and exciting to me and the story is decent but a far cry from amazing.

The other game that stands out to me is Assassin’s Creed 1. I couldn’t make it more than a few hours into that game. Just so boring and repetitive, the combat was boring, the collectables were boring, most mechanics didn’t actually seem to matter…I just hated the game lol. I do think it’s another example of later entries in the series/other games doing the same thing but better so going back to the OG just felt like a slog. But I really hated AC1 hahaha.

Spotify like many others here. Just haven’t had many issues with the program and it does what I want for a reasonable price.

Wanna give a big shout out to Nebula. It’s meant to be a YouTube-esque site but solely for educational content. I found it via LegalEagle but it has a ton of documentaries and other educational content creators. I believe my subscription is $5/year or something like that. Just insanely cheap for really high quality content.

I have the Disney+/Hulu bundle. I love Disney movies and with all the franchises they own now I feel it’s worthwhile. Hulu happens to have quite a few of my favorite shows and the bundle made it worthwhile to me.

Currently trying out YouTube premium and, I know this won’t be a popular opinion, but I think it’s worth it to me. I use a lot of YouTube and also chromecast it. While it’s possible for me to get ad blocked YouTube for free on mobile and cast it to my TV it’s… Cumbersome and unstable. I generally have the opinion that I don’t mind paying for services I enjoy using so… For now, gonna stick with YouTube premium. Just so much less of a headache.

AmazonPrime but only for Amazon’s services really, the few shows that are on Prime Video for free are a nice bonus though.

And currently I pay for Netflix and share it with my family but the very first second Netflix cracks down on that I’m dropping it and have told my family as such for years. Already started torrenting most shows I kept up with via Netflix in preparation.

The only other one I consider is HBO… But there just hasn’t been enough of an allure thus far.