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.
Same here. I was diagnosed at 38 and it was a relief. My whole life, I just thought I was quirky or something. I couldn’t understand why no one else thought the same way I do, bouncing between 5-6 independent discussions constantly rattling around in my brain at any given moment. Or why people didn’t have to mentally prepare and practice for routines in advance before everything they did. Or why they couldn’t focus solely on a task until it was 100% complete. (I have the hyperfocus type of ADHD, where nothing else appears to exist around me until my main task is completed)
Being able to put a definitive label to my “personality” helped me to understand my quirks and odd behaviors, and adjust to make myself more productive in my life and better at communicating with others. It was a relief to be able to finally know what’s going on with me and have options to improve myself.
In the end, I chose not to be medicated because my type of ADHD makes me highly productive. I’m afraid medication will just cloud my mind and make me only focus on one thing at a time instead of mentally multitasking. But knowing that I have ADHD makes me hypervigilant to my quirks and helps to ground me and pull me back when I notice I’m starting to lose myself in a project or discussion.
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.
Back when my wife and I were still dating, she found a cheap ring she loved. It was just a normal jewelry ring with her favorite stones in it, not a fancy engagement ring or anything. But she loved it so much, she told me that if I ever proposed to her, she gave me permission to steal it from her and re-present it as an engagement ring. Which I did.
I felt bad about it though. I took the ring to propose, but my plans fell through and it took me a few more days to arrange a new proposal plan. She had forgotten all about our conversation, so the whole time she was tearing the house apart, looking for her favorite ring. She loved that I “found” it and gave it back to her with a proposal.
Otherwise known as shrinkflation. Selling a product for the same (or higher) price, but adding less of the product. By cutting small, barely noticeable portions out a little at a time, the company saves money in materials, but continues charging the same price. Basically, min-maxing profits.
My birth year is the same as the title of a dystopian future novel by George Orwell.
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.
I LOVED books as a kid. I was reading at a high school level by the time I started kindergarten, and I just absorbed every book I could get my hands on. I would bring a 100-200 page book to school every day and would finish it before I got home in the afternoon.
I also enjoyed writing and would write my own stories. I was part of an organization in elementary school called Young Authors that encouraged kids to write, and I wrote 3 books through that group. It was my dream to be an author one day.
Then the Internet became a thing.
Suddenly, I didn’t need to spend hours in a library reading through dozens of books to find information I needed. I could just do a quick search on Infoseek, or Excite, or AskJeeves, and have a repository of knowledge at my fingertips. It was life-changing!
As the Internet evolved and more data got dumped on it, I started spending more time perusing its depths and less time reading physical books. I ended up getting a job in IT because computers fascinated me so much. Eventually, I realized I hadn’t picked up a book in years. Everything I wanted to read, I could find online.
Now here I am at 40 years old and my dream of being an author is gone. In our modern age, most people don’t read physical books anymore and authors don’t make enough to survive, unless they make it on a best-seller list or something. Even Stephen King is more well known today for his political commentary on Twitter/X. I haven’t heard much about any books he’s been writing in a long time.
I once wanted a library room in my dream home. I still kind of do, for the aesthetic. But I don’t really read physical books anymore, and I could only fill maybe a single wall with the books I currently own; mostly treasured classics from my childhood that have been stored away in boxes for years. I’d be better off having a PC gaming/theater room in my dream home, as that’s more where my modern interests lie.
I love the Internet age. It revolutionized my childhood and brought us into a wonderful age of information. But I can’t help but think about how completely different my life would’ve been if it hadn’t been invented. I sometimes wonder if I would’ve been more happy and/or successful in a world without the Internet.
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.
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.