Yes, this is what I meant. The Red Cross said my blood type is rarely needed in my area so they don’t care about me donating blood. But they’re always needing plasma donations, and you can donate them more frequently than blood, so they recommend I do that instead.
People are getting paid to donate plasma?! The only scam here is that I’ve been giving it away for free!
I donate to the Red Cross here in America. Honestly, I’m happy to donate. I get to sit and relax for a couple hours, the Red Cross I go to has TVs attached to the chairs so I can watch a movie while I donate, and I get free drinks and snacks afterward.
They’re always hurting for plasma donations and you can donate every 28 days, so I visit frequently. I don’t really see how it could be a scam. They always tell me plasma is more important than blood donations. Blood goes bad quickly, but they can keep plasma for a long time. And pretty much everyone can use it. Unlike blood, which you need a compatible type to use.
I donate because I enjoy helping others. I’m not looking for a way to personally benefit from it, so I don’t really care if they offer to pay or not. I feel like that should be the default mindset going in. But I understand there are people who are hurting financially, and donating blood or plasma is an easy way to make a buck. So I’m fine with them offering to pay for donations.
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.
I got into Pokémon when the card game and anime first came to America. I was in jr high school at the time and collected so many of the original cards. Never finished my collection, though.
I got into the Pokémon craze at first, but stopped following it in my later years of high school. I was too busy preparing to be an adult, so I set it aside and forgot about it for years. I didn’t even know there were more than 151 Pokémon until over a decade later.
I learned some of the newer generations with Pokémon Go, but I still remember all of the original 151 Pokémon. The newer stuff is just weird to me.
EDIT: I never got into the games, even though they started releasing when I was a teenager. Pokémon Go was actually my first game in the franchise; although I watched my friends play the classic Red and Blue games back in the day.
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 worked at an Arby’s back in high school (over 20 years ago). They told me free refills were a thing because most customers don’t refill more than once, if at all. Also, the soda water costs pennies and the bags of concentrated soda syrup were only like $10 (at the time). A single bag of syrup, mixed with soda water, could fill customer’s soda cups for maybe 2-3 days before it needed to be replaced. Fast food restaurants make insane profits on soda, so they don’t care if customers refilled multiple times during their visit.
The US owns a bunch of Caribbean “territories” that they still won’t make into US states. Their citizens are US citizens, but can’t vote.
EDIT: The current US itself was carved out of territories owned by Mexico, France, and England (which took them from Native American tribes). Back in the day, we conquered and stole a bunch of land, both from natives and from other invading countries.
But we’ve been more interested in foreign politics since WWII and less about expanding our own land. Besides, why own a bunch of foreign soil when we can just set up outposts around the globe and have a military frontline anywhere? I served in the US military and we have so many bases scattered around every region of the globe. We can literally involve ourselves in any global conflict we want to within a day or two. Meanwhile, our actual homeland is isolated on the other side of the planet, where it’s difficult for foreign invaders to touch us.
There was a big deal about Ubisoft removing Assassin’s Creed 1 and 2 last year, and I remember it because I was in the middle of a replay of the first game, and I quit as soon as they announced they were pulling it. Honestly, I haven’t checked to see if they actually removed them; they may have reneged on that decision over the backlash. I’ll try to reinstall it tonight and see if I can still access it.
But that announcement was when people really started to hate on Ubisoft for their poor business practices, which led to the comment mentioned in this meme. It started because they talked about removing access to paid-for games.
Ubisoft removed Assassin’s Creed 1 and 2 from their online game library, claiming some BS like they want to focus their attention on newer games. The original games had no online services; it shouldn’t take any effort to provide access to them online.
Everyone who owns them through Steam or Ubisoft Connect can’t play them anymore, unless they still have a physical disc for the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 consoles. If you bought a digital copy, you paid for a game that you can no longer play.
THAT is why this quote is especially evil. Not because of some choice of subscription vs. buying, but because Ubisoft has the ability to make our fully-paid for games unplayable.
Nope, he did this one himself. The reason? His employees spent so much time at the factory, they didn’t have time to actually buy his cars.
Yes, he improved working conditions to make a profit on his cars. A selfish reason, but it inadvertently helped us all.
Mine is video games.
I’m 40 and I’m gaming now more than I ever have before!
Granted, part of that is because I’m retired young and have all the time in the world. But another part of that is because I made a small Discord server with a few close friends from my high school days. It’s how we stay in touch, since we’ve all moved away since childhood.
We game online every Monday and/or Tuesday evening. It gives us time to talk and catch up through Discord while also playing some fun online multiplayer games together. The rest of the week, we share news, memes, videos, and other text discussion through various channels I’ve set up in Discord.
I’ve never heard of anyone losing their love for video games as they get older. If anything, continuing to play games later in life will help keep your cognitive functions strong. Remember the Skyrim grandma? She’s still going strong in her late 80s. It’s never too late to get into gaming again.
Calling her princess but as degradation
That looks like vocal chords. The white part, it’s what vibrates and changes shape to make sound and pitch when you speak.
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 would’ve gone with:
Crocodiles! Do not swim here
I feel like this is more accurate:
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.
Fluently? Only English. But I spent 20 years in the US military, nearly 8 of them living full-time in foreign countries. So I did my best to learn at least a little of the languages I was exposed to in my travels.
I was stationed in Japan for 3 years. I learned how to get around and order food in Japanese, plus some limited conversation. I’m actually studying to read the language now. I could read Hirigana and Katakana (the Japanese alphabets) when I lived there. But it takes their students their entire school lives to learn how to read Kanji (the complex Chinese-borrowed symbols that represent entire words), so that one will keep me busy for a while.
When I was stationed in Germany, I learned some basic German, thanks to having friendly neighbors who spoke nearly fluent English. They helped me correct and improve my German language skills. But I was only in the country for a couple years, so I didn’t get very advanced with it.
I took 4 years of French in high school. I thought I was pretty decent at it, but every time I attempted to speak the language in France, the locals immediately switched over to English to converse with me.
Random related tangent: my wife and I took a vacation to Berlin once, and my wife, like me, spent several years studying French in high school. She decided to test her German language skills with the locals, and when she spoke, they immediately switched to French for her. Turns out, she speaks German with a heavy French accent. She was able to finish her conversation in French.
I’m currently studying Norwegian. My 3x great grandfather immigrated to America from Norway, and I still have living descendants of my ancestors over there. My dad and I went to visit them once, and I would like to be able to speak their native language the next time I go back. It used to be a rule that everyone in my family line learned English and Norwegian, but my grandfather died when my dad was only 2, so my dad never learned Norwegian, and thus neither did I.
I learned some extremely limited Korean. I was assigned to South Korea twice, for a year each time, and the military wouldn’t let me live off-base amongst the locals, so I didn’t get much free time to explore the country and learn the language. But I made an effort to learn some phrases so I could be polite in public, order food, and find my way back to the military base if I got lost.
Other languages that I’ve been exposed to and picked up a handful of words/phrases, but never seriously attempted to study: Italian, Arabic, Spanish, and Hawaiian.
Metal Gear Solid 4 is the only MGS game I’ve had an itch to play for years now. But my PS3 broke years ago and that game has never been ported anywhere else. I was sad to learn that the first Master Collection didn’t include it, so I’m hopeful this second collection makes it playable on Steam.