Without getting into the nitty gritty I have had challenges with general anxiety disorder / agoraphobia for a while and the combination of telecommuting / computer-based hobbies I don't leave my house very often. And by "very often" I can probably count on my hands the number of hours I've been outside in the last 2-3 months.
Social media gives me a distraction I can pull up at any time and people to talk to, which is great for the ol' depression (sort of, I'll get into that later) it connects me in ways I never thought were possible before. Whether or not the kind of interactions I have are more or less healthy I can't say but I do know there are a couple things that I see in others that are damaging.
The main things I find actively damaging about having a life through social media as I see them:
1. If somebody is being a jerk you can passive-aggressively remove them from your life, I mean this happens in IRL but sometimes you can't escape people like this (work, family) so there's a tendency to craft the people you follow / interact with socially online. I think this becomes a problem because you get into a group-think type situation where you bury yourself in only one side of anything. If I ONLY loved Star Trek I wouldn't follow a Star Wars person, that makes sense, but when I bury myself solely in Star Trek people it can warp me. I try to be careful about it and ensure I have a good variety of people / communities I take part in but there are some people who are so super-focused they only expose themselves to a narrow world and it really is surprising how it changes their thinking over time.
2. Social media is gamified, that fact is NOT obvious to most people who use it. There are a lot of people who really stress about how many notes, likes, reblogs, +s, thumbs up, etc they are or aren't getting. They associate their personal value to these metrics. I'm aware of this and yet it still invades my thoughts, it's potent and it adds stress to the activity, this kind of stress leads to more depression, you have a social circle and you can now "measure yourself" by these gamified metrics. It's really bad and in general it makes depressed people even more depressed.
The good side is I feel connected and sociable the bad side is it manipulates me into using it more. I think ultimately it's bad for me because it has become a total replacement for going out, it gives me tools that make it easier to not want to go out, which is not good if you're agoraphobic.
On the flipside I have met local people online that have forced me to go out and do things I would not have done otherwise, like attending a comic convention for four days straight / going out to celebrate friends' birthdays / going out for coffee (who does that?). When things are bad though its always there for me, which I don't think is particularly healthy.
A few years ago Razer changed it's driver software that gives you configuration options you can save to their cloud
Why anybody would ever use this is beyond me, but it's par for the course for a lot of gamer-marketed hardware support (see: nVidia's GeForce Experience)
I think the big error Facebook made early on was making it too easy to post links and to share other such posts. This diluted the content from "stupid shit my friends say and do" to "clickbait social media shares" with no original content from friends.
I remember when I got started on Facebook, not a high volume of posts from people, still some semblance of decency. With alarming speed that started changing, people began putting every thought into words. On twitter if somebody is being an asshat you just unfollow, when it's a family member or a close friend it becomes awkward.
So for years I just kinda... didn't GO to Facebook anymore. When I finally came back the feed is mostly dusty memes, dad jokes and links to things "of interest". I'm pretty sure this is FBs plan because it keeps people scrolling, reading stupid trash. Sure the crazy rantings are still there but it's really no different than Twitter or Tumblr now, just you may be related to or be close friends with some very troll-like entities.
The only place that seems focused and cordial is G+ but the population density there is so low I'm not surprised, not that I use G+, nobody does
Oh you can turn it off after you log into the XBox app, don't have an XBox account? Well then I guess you are creating one or hacking the registry to break it so it stops running.
Most mobile games you either pay up front or you get free with micro-transactions. Mario Run is more like 90s shareware, if you like the demo you buy the rest
We've known for some time that the guts would be Tegra based and we saw the promotional video that sells us the idea that this is meant to be mobile first. Looking at the list of partners they have on board at least one is a telecom provider (Web Technology Corp, aka Vodafone) another is a well known mobile eCommerce portal (DeNA). This is Nintendo creeping into the smartphone market.
What we have here is a 6" gaming tablet, how much of the mobile parts will make it intact to North American / European markets who can say, but at the end of the day this is a gaming tablet first, the game library will likely reflect this.
I barely go to the theatre anymore because of a lot of reasons, if you let me pay to have Day 1 access to the digital copy to either stream or outright buy DRM free I'd never set foot in an overpriced auditorium ever again.
The model would become more like digitally distributed video games, Launch day sees a big spike in sales (hell, pre-orders?) and then it kind of tapers off after a month or so, then you got a back catalogue you can keep old movies on. Things that normally wouldn't get distribution have a cheap option now... hell the more I think about it the better it sounds.
I mean, do for movies with what Steam did for games and you're gonna win
In a previous life as a subcontractor I got used to a lot of paper flying around at client sites however they were generally government in nature and in some instances paper was an actual output. Moving on to where I currently work was a bit of a shock at first, no paper, no timesheets, no desk phones (well, we HAD ip phones but nobody used them), telecommuting (if you want to) everyone actively maintaining the company CMS / wiki, everyone using IM...
There are a variety of tools you can use to annotate PDFs (as well as tools for redlining / change tracking), however we don't use PDF for much, we use a CMS and an internal Wiki and keep digital documents.
The only thing that is analogous to loose paper flying around with change notes are emails
Well, I hope so to but currently the "wisdom of the masses" is generally trusted among internet cranks, Facebook moms and social crusaders over rationality.
I mean, "this image of a tweet went viral - it HAS to be true!" is startling to me because of how such diverse groups all seem to be manipulated by this sort of pre-packaged confirmation bias (I don't know if that's the right term).
Even after junk like Kony 2012 people still don't stop themselves and think first, particularly if it fits their own personal outlook and in the case of most cranks/crusaders if it comes from a "non-authoritarian" source.
I'm not saying I'm superior either, god knows I've been fooled by seemingly legitimate "news" the difference is like you say, I've grown skeptical of things I hear... from all sources.
I've been working in a paperless office for 6 years now. I don't even bother with scratch notes anymore, just OneNote and/or a whiteboard + phone camera
Our fax/printer has been out of toner for 2 years... and so far nobody has needed it (out of ~20 people)
The only paper product we get anymore is the crap that comes in the mail slot we throw out... I don't even think about it anymore. Which is odd really, place I worked at before generated mountains of paper (even for scrum, we were using cardstock and pins on a cube wall rather than an app, g'gah, how did we even generate reports back then???)
Anyway, the only thing I miss is doodling I guess.
First of all, how dare you sir! I am Canadian and we have vastly inferior coffee chains that make Starbucks appear to be some form of caffeinated nirvana. I mean if you want to wait in an unfathomably long line for a cup of Hot Brown liquid you can go to Tim Hortons (also you can get a freshly thawed donut that was made over 3,000 km away.) I don't dare mention rolling up the rim or Tim Bits
Secondly don't you Aussies intentionally eat Vegemite?
I'm not even gonna talk about Burger Rings or Pie Floaters - I've lost my appetite for seal flippers already
I mostly work from home and I brew a 6 cup pot of coffee almost every day, I put in two scoops (which are roughly equivalent to 1 heaping tablespoon) and it got me thinking about a month ago what the actual coffee to water ratio was supposed to be.
Tried it out and my god, if that's the actual ratio I'm surprised most people can't see through time. I'll stick with my weak brew... if anything to ensure my particles don't vibrate through the fabric of reality
I mean I just expect him to be terrorizing the world from a giant mechanical spider to which our weapons are useless...the only way to stop it is to install the latest Java security update -- something-something hubris etc
DISCLAIMER: I'm Canadian, Best Buy bought up Futureshop so I don't know how much of "Canadian Style" Best Buy is actually Futureshop and vice versa
I went into Best Buy on Saturday with my mom (she wanted a composite extension cable, spoiler alert they suggested Amazon much to my amusement) anyway, I saw that they have a HUGE sections devoted to appliances, phones (and phone accessories yikes), laptops and LCD TVs but that was about it. They did have a shriveled, vestigial section for "movies" and "games" (and "cables" apparently) but I'm guessing that most people go directly to Amazon for that stuff
So is the plan for these stores to be some kind of brick and mortar AV shops, like the ones they systematically decimated? Or are they distributed warehouses for faster delivery / drone mustering points with front doors (like those old SEARS catalogue shops)
Slashdot Mirror
Reroute forward proton torpedoes through the main deflector shields, to boldly go where it's a trap!
Without getting into the nitty gritty I have had challenges with general anxiety disorder / agoraphobia for a while and the combination of telecommuting / computer-based hobbies I don't leave my house very often. And by "very often" I can probably count on my hands the number of hours I've been outside in the last 2-3 months.
Social media gives me a distraction I can pull up at any time and people to talk to, which is great for the ol' depression (sort of, I'll get into that later) it connects me in ways I never thought were possible before. Whether or not the kind of interactions I have are more or less healthy I can't say but I do know there are a couple things that I see in others that are damaging.
The main things I find actively damaging about having a life through social media as I see them:
1. If somebody is being a jerk you can passive-aggressively remove them from your life, I mean this happens in IRL but sometimes you can't escape people like this (work, family) so there's a tendency to craft the people you follow / interact with socially online. I think this becomes a problem because you get into a group-think type situation where you bury yourself in only one side of anything. If I ONLY loved Star Trek I wouldn't follow a Star Wars person, that makes sense, but when I bury myself solely in Star Trek people it can warp me. I try to be careful about it and ensure I have a good variety of people / communities I take part in but there are some people who are so super-focused they only expose themselves to a narrow world and it really is surprising how it changes their thinking over time.
2. Social media is gamified, that fact is NOT obvious to most people who use it. There are a lot of people who really stress about how many notes, likes, reblogs, +s, thumbs up, etc they are or aren't getting. They associate their personal value to these metrics. I'm aware of this and yet it still invades my thoughts, it's potent and it adds stress to the activity, this kind of stress leads to more depression, you have a social circle and you can now "measure yourself" by these gamified metrics. It's really bad and in general it makes depressed people even more depressed.
The good side is I feel connected and sociable the bad side is it manipulates me into using it more. I think ultimately it's bad for me because it has become a total replacement for going out, it gives me tools that make it easier to not want to go out, which is not good if you're agoraphobic.
On the flipside I have met local people online that have forced me to go out and do things I would not have done otherwise, like attending a comic convention for four days straight / going out to celebrate friends' birthdays / going out for coffee (who does that?). When things are bad though its always there for me, which I don't think is particularly healthy.
As always YMMV
I mean, sure some people don't go for the so-called "hard sell" approach but then again you can kiss my ass:
https://youtu.be/X637dAm2hHM
I'm sure you could gravity assist a package to the moon...
...the resulting crater would be much smaller than the average terrestrial FedEx delivery
If you get nausea simply focus on the pain
A few years ago Razer changed it's driver software that gives you configuration options you can save to their cloud
Why anybody would ever use this is beyond me, but it's par for the course for a lot of gamer-marketed hardware support (see: nVidia's GeForce Experience)
Thank you
I remember when I got started on Facebook, not a high volume of posts from people, still some semblance of decency. With alarming speed that started changing, people began putting every thought into words. On twitter if somebody is being an asshat you just unfollow, when it's a family member or a close friend it becomes awkward.
So for years I just kinda ... didn't GO to Facebook anymore. When I finally came back the feed is mostly dusty memes, dad jokes and links to things "of interest". I'm pretty sure this is FBs plan because it keeps people scrolling, reading stupid trash. Sure the crazy rantings are still there but it's really no different than Twitter or Tumblr now, just you may be related to or be close friends with some very troll-like entities.
The only place that seems focused and cordial is G+ but the population density there is so low I'm not surprised, not that I use G+, nobody does
Android is my mobile OS of choice, the hardware it runs on may not be Samsung on the next purchase
Oh you can turn it off after you log into the XBox app, don't have an XBox account? Well then I guess you are creating one or hacking the registry to break it so it stops running.
Most mobile games you either pay up front or you get free with micro-transactions. Mario Run is more like 90s shareware, if you like the demo you buy the rest
To my knowledge NOBODY else does it this way
We've known for some time that the guts would be Tegra based and we saw the promotional video that sells us the idea that this is meant to be mobile first. Looking at the list of partners they have on board at least one is a telecom provider (Web Technology Corp, aka Vodafone) another is a well known mobile eCommerce portal (DeNA). This is Nintendo creeping into the smartphone market.
What we have here is a 6" gaming tablet, how much of the mobile parts will make it intact to North American / European markets who can say, but at the end of the day this is a gaming tablet first, the game library will likely reflect this.
I barely go to the theatre anymore because of a lot of reasons, if you let me pay to have Day 1 access to the digital copy to either stream or outright buy DRM free I'd never set foot in an overpriced auditorium ever again.
The model would become more like digitally distributed video games, Launch day sees a big spike in sales (hell, pre-orders?) and then it kind of tapers off after a month or so, then you got a back catalogue you can keep old movies on. Things that normally wouldn't get distribution have a cheap option now... hell the more I think about it the better it sounds.
I mean, do for movies with what Steam did for games and you're gonna win
Service hosting / app development.
In a previous life as a subcontractor I got used to a lot of paper flying around at client sites however they were generally government in nature and in some instances paper was an actual output. Moving on to where I currently work was a bit of a shock at first, no paper, no timesheets, no desk phones (well, we HAD ip phones but nobody used them), telecommuting (if you want to) everyone actively maintaining the company CMS / wiki, everyone using IM...
I love it
There are a variety of tools you can use to annotate PDFs (as well as tools for redlining / change tracking), however we don't use PDF for much, we use a CMS and an internal Wiki and keep digital documents.
The only thing that is analogous to loose paper flying around with change notes are emails
Well, I hope so to but currently the "wisdom of the masses" is generally trusted among internet cranks, Facebook moms and social crusaders over rationality.
I mean, "this image of a tweet went viral - it HAS to be true!" is startling to me because of how such diverse groups all seem to be manipulated by this sort of pre-packaged confirmation bias (I don't know if that's the right term).
Even after junk like Kony 2012 people still don't stop themselves and think first, particularly if it fits their own personal outlook and in the case of most cranks/crusaders if it comes from a "non-authoritarian" source.
I'm not saying I'm superior either, god knows I've been fooled by seemingly legitimate "news" the difference is like you say, I've grown skeptical of things I hear... from all sources.
Like you say, let's hope
I've been working in a paperless office for 6 years now. I don't even bother with scratch notes anymore, just OneNote and/or a whiteboard + phone camera
Our fax/printer has been out of toner for 2 years... and so far nobody has needed it (out of ~20 people)
The only paper product we get anymore is the crap that comes in the mail slot we throw out... I don't even think about it anymore. Which is odd really, place I worked at before generated mountains of paper (even for scrum, we were using cardstock and pins on a cube wall rather than an app, g'gah, how did we even generate reports back then???)
Anyway, the only thing I miss is doodling I guess.
First of all, how dare you sir! I am Canadian and we have vastly inferior coffee chains that make Starbucks appear to be some form of caffeinated nirvana. I mean if you want to wait in an unfathomably long line for a cup of Hot Brown liquid you can go to Tim Hortons (also you can get a freshly thawed donut that was made over 3,000 km away.) I don't dare mention rolling up the rim or Tim Bits
Secondly don't you Aussies intentionally eat Vegemite?
I'm not even gonna talk about Burger Rings or Pie Floaters - I've lost my appetite for seal flippers already
Celebrate the differences ... or whatever
I mostly work from home and I brew a 6 cup pot of coffee almost every day, I put in two scoops (which are roughly equivalent to 1 heaping tablespoon) and it got me thinking about a month ago what the actual coffee to water ratio was supposed to be.
I found this chart (or one like it) https://blackbearcoffee.com/re...
Tried it out and my god, if that's the actual ratio I'm surprised most people can't see through time. I'll stick with my weak brew... if anything to ensure my particles don't vibrate through the fabric of reality
MS Paint is perfect as is, just some people know how to use it better than others https://youtu.be/v2g5qbvb7F4 :-)
Required Facebook login
It's like if McDonalds reached out to the government to start a "free lunch" program...
For faster internet DUH
The number of VEVO channels are in the Top 100 says everything
http://socialblade.com/youtube...
He does kinda have a supervillain beard
I mean I just expect him to be terrorizing the world from a giant mechanical spider to which our weapons are useless ...the only way to stop it is to install the latest Java security update -- something-something hubris etc
DISCLAIMER: I'm Canadian, Best Buy bought up Futureshop so I don't know how much of "Canadian Style" Best Buy is actually Futureshop and vice versa
I went into Best Buy on Saturday with my mom (she wanted a composite extension cable, spoiler alert they suggested Amazon much to my amusement) anyway, I saw that they have a HUGE sections devoted to appliances, phones (and phone accessories yikes), laptops and LCD TVs but that was about it. They did have a shriveled, vestigial section for "movies" and "games" (and "cables" apparently) but I'm guessing that most people go directly to Amazon for that stuff
So is the plan for these stores to be some kind of brick and mortar AV shops, like the ones they systematically decimated? Or are they distributed warehouses for faster delivery / drone mustering points with front doors (like those old SEARS catalogue shops)