i am sorry if i sounded patronizing, i promise you that’s not even remotely what i intended. i was just trying to give you a non-american perspective in a neutral tone, but i must have failed that

i think you’re misunderstanding how cards on phones work in the EU. if the card reader that you’re interacting with accepts wireless cards, it will also accept your phone. i’ve never visited the US so i don’t know how it works over there, but here in europe, there are no “apple pay” or “google wallet” stickers/requirements on the terminals. it just shows a universal “wireless cards” symbol, which means that anything NFC will work

in europe, you can use your phone to pay on all of the same machines that take cards. your phone just mimics being a physical card

also, in some countries, you can have your ID on your phone through government apps. i never need to carry anything other than my phone where i live

edit: also, just for the record, i want you to know that having your cards locked digitally in your phone is more secure than having a wireless card in your physical wallet

yes, absolutely, as long as we don’t become ignorant to the huge ethical issues with steam like their decade of running an underage gambling surrogate. sorry, i just take issue with the article pointing out flaws of xbox and playstation without counter-balancing those criticisms with something about valve. valve is certainly better than both sony and microsoft in every regard, but they are not innocent at all

gonna kiss myself with a cement brick if they let zuckerberg buy it and turn it into the same UX nightmare that reels is

this only makes sense to me if your laptop screen is like 480p

first skyrim run in like a decade, really makes it obvious how technically shitty the game is. so many immersion-ruining moments all the time, like people talking over each other. also the world map screen might be the most ugly and least useful of its kind. if i was on pc i’d install the mod that displays roads on the map.

but the atmosphere is nice :)

sad that twitter users will jump to literally anything except mastodon. wake me up in 15 years when bluesky finishes its twitter elon musk cycle and it’ll be like i took a 12 second nap

that sounds better than my prejudice made me guess :) i’ll watch more streams of it to get a better feel for it. thank you

i stand with you, my very downvoted brother. granted i’ve seen like 7 minutes total of gameplay, but it just seems like another “build base, do resource chores” game with some very reddit “dude what if you could SHOOT pokémon⁉️” sprinkled on top

very simple, i just host files on an external hdd on my macbook (which i use all day anyway) over plex, then watch through apple tv. i tried Infuse in the past, but their library and metadata handling is just atrocious (and there is like a 5+ year old active forum thread of people repeatedly begging the devs to allow “custom shows” through manually created .nfo files, but i guess the devs care more about superficial UI changes and abandoning their previous one-time purchase option in favor of subscriptions)

i choose to opt for the most convenient service (currently spotify even though ceo daniel ek is a lunatic who invests in AI military tech), and then i buy vinyls/merch/tickets/bandcamp copies directly from the artists to actually support them. if you’re not into spotify then apple music and tidal both work fine with some caveats