Khrux

I can't picture a service which beats Spotify in what they offer which isn't just the same business model but more ethical.

Discovering music for free is an enormous benefit, and the fact that Spotify has practically all mainstream music is nice. People often cite that one quote by Gabe Newell that is "Piracy is not an economic problem. It is a service problem", as a highlight for steam, but largely Spotify offers what consumers want in a way Netflix or Audible can't. They have everything you want and guide your discovery in even more, and as long as their encroaching enshittification doesn't undercut this service, they will continue to underpay artists and fund immoral activities.

The developer of Ultrakill, Hakita, said something which I've often thought about. "You should support indies if you can, but culture shouldn't exist only for those who can afford it. ULTRAKILL wouldn't exist if I hadn't had easy access to movies, music and games growing up. If you don't have money, you can support via word of mouth". There are plenty of independent things I financially support, particularly things I attend in person in the city I live in. I may spend £100 per month paying for art and entertainment all said and done, and when that's spent, I will pirate everything else.

I split a Spotify family plan between 6 friends, I think that's about £3.50 per month, and I pay for no other media services. With video, I run a jellyfin server with a "parent friendly" interface, so they can have "netflix with everything", which I have at my place too. I don't read that much any more, if it's physical I just go to the library and if it's an audiobook I'll just pirate it. The benefit here is that even if I'm on a reading binge, that's not even a book a week. With Spotify, I often pick something and play it via song radio, which is probably 50/50 music I know and new music. Sometimes I just stick albums on, but it's not like that's harder. If I had a locally hosted music repository that I'd "paid for", I could enjoy albums, but not as easily have a radio like discovery experience.

One day, a pirate tool may appear that rivals Spotify, but until that day, I can't see myself moving away from it.

Go to your local live music, drag shows, theatres, independent cinemas and libraries. Don't feel obligated to pay for any internet service.

Coronation chickpea is fine as it's royally forbidden.

I forgot it was commemorative, let's ban coronation chickpea and coronation chicken.

Yeah, he looked like he did on the left through the entire 2010s without changing appearance much, from Narnia 3 to Midsommar. This is absolutely styling above just growing up.

Without arguing politics, the world is sliding very quickly towards facism and being on guard against it is incredibly important. I'm not buying a laptop and putting money in the pockets of someone who may then donate to or fund facism. None of that applies to a developer of a free open source software whose political ideal world is not rapidly approaching.

Also worth adding it sadly doesn't really exist anymore, the iconic look here is gone, although game mechanics still begin getting weird.

Also although people have teleported to it, Minecraft is so big that I assumed nobody would ever reach it in survival. I'm not surprised it took 14 years.

He was actually just there in the water for the reference images, and got left in by mistake.

Funnily enough, when I do ask an LLM to rephrase anything I write, it changes any sentence with a semicolon to one with an em dash. I've probably always overused the semicolon because of its availability on a keyboard, but it appears a lot in my normal work.

Now I trust the semicolon, it's an identifier of me.

Thank god I display my status amongst my peers by rejecting mainstream status symbols. Yay for counterculture being part of the system!

I'm in the UK too and the gradual shift to WhatsApp has been a relief considering it used to be WhatsApp, Snapchat, messenger, Instagram, iMessage and twitter about ten years ago, not that anyone did all of them.

It's a shame it's meta but it's so nice that it's not a huge pile of useless features, just a few.

I don't even understand the purpose. Who the hell cares what colour your texts are?

I've never made the link between that and gender before (linguistically), it seems obvious in hindsight.