I believe the “grow your own” suggestion is intended to be supplemental, rather than a fully developed subsistence farm in your back yard.

The beauty of growing your own is that you can decide what you want to grow! There are some things which are very easy and cheap to grow (such as fresh herbs) that are actually quite expensive and inconvenient to buy! Other things, such as potatoes, are very cheap in any grocery store (when purchased in bulk) such that growing your own is more of a hobby/curiosity than a budget saver.

Tomatoes happen to be one thing you can grow at home that are simply far more delicious than anything you can get at a store. Sometimes you might be able to get nice heirloom tomatoes at a store but they tend to be very expensive and usually seasonal.

If you get some experience growing tomatoes then you can produce a pretty large crop in a relatively small yard. With home water bath canning you can then outfit yourself with up to a year’s supply of home made pasta sauce (or even simply peeled and blanched tomatoes with basil leaf in the jar).

Brutal? The male bites her in order to merge with her! He connects to her circulatory system and takes all his sustenance from her.

He has found his sugar momma and he’s never gonna give her up!

Slop falls to the bottom but I bet a lot of hidden gems do too. The greater volume of games coming out, the harder it’ll be for individual developers to get recognized!

Old school indie developer Jeff Vogel has a whole talk about how difficult it is.

I think a lot of them find their way onto eBay where they get sold to unwitting gamers.

A lot of that hardware is junk pretty soon anyway. Graphics cards run at full load 24/7 don’t last very long.

Not possible. Cats are incapable of feeling shame!

Valve doesn’t set the prices but they provide the venue. Just like how Vegas provides the venue but doesn’t run the casinos.

Lots of other places have casinos but Vegas is the one everyone blames for the epidemic of gambling addictions. Vegas creates the conditions for problematic gambling that are much more powerful than a single casino.

It’s not sales specifically that I have an issue with, it’s a business model based on selling people tons of games they don’t play. Is GOG doing that too? Well I don’t like that either, but at least I can take my games with me when I leave GOG because they’re DRM free downloads from a web browser.

I don’t think Steam is unreasonable, I just think they get way more goodwill from their customers than they probably deserve. It’s like with Apple or the Catholic Church. A lot of people love them but they do have ugly sides.

I think convincing people to buy games they never play is a scuzzy thing to do. Is it as scuzzy as gambling? No. But it’s not up there with something like a co-op bakery or coffee shop that sells products (and a cozy environment) at a reasonable price that people actually enjoy.

People have been saying “well they support indie game developers” and sure, yes indie game developers sell a lot of games during Steam sales. But there’s a problem there too: if loads of people are buying indie games but not playing them then that distorts the indie game market. It takes revenue away from less-well-known developers and gives it to popular/viral flash sale developers whose games people aren’t playing. That’s bad for anyone who wants to reward developers for making better games that we actually want to play but otherwise haven’t heard about.

No, it’s not the same as gambling, but it does exploit weaknesses in human psychology to get people to buy things they don’t need.

If you’re buying a game that you’ll never play just because it’s on sale, you’re not saving money.

Proton is built on the open source project Wine and private products from CodeWeavers. Yes, Valve has contributed a tremendous amount to the project but they aren’t deserving of sole credit for it.

I own neither an Xbox nor a PlayStation (nor a Switch, for that matter).

There are LOADS of other options besides AAA games on the big platforms. There are countless vintage games, freeware, shareware, and abandonware that can all be played on the Internet Archive. There are countless indie developers out there to support, including some that have been in business for more than 30 years.

It really bothers me when gamers act like the big publishers are the only game in town (while also complaining about how bad AAA games are now). I mean if you like AAA games, fine, no argument there from me. But if you also like games for their stories and gameplay and don’t need AAA graphics to have a good time then there are thousands and thousands of options out there. I just think most people are unaware of them.

I didn’t give my position.

I don’t participate in steam sales anymore. I don’t buy anything on steam because I’ve already got way more games than I’ll ever be able to play. If there’s a new game that I really want to play I’ll try to get it from outside steam if I can, or at the very least make sure it’s DRM-free so I can play it without launching the steam client (I hate the steam client but that’s just my opinion and I won’t tell anyone else what to feel about it).

Do I think they should be banned from having sales? No. I also don’t think gambling should be made illegal even though I’ll continue trying to warn people away from gambling.

I mean you can blame gamblers for losing all their money to Las Vegas too but that’s not a common opinion on Lemmy!

Done about what? I stopped using steam. I buy games directly from developers or from GOG or humble bundle as well as just supporting open source games.

Nothing I can do about GabeN’s yachts though!

It isn’t better though? GOG is a better service. DRM-free, web based downloads (galaxy is completely optional). They even invest development resources to get old games working better.

Steam is mostly the dominant platform due to first-mover advantage. They aren’t the best and most of the games on Steam aren’t even exclusives.

To get YouTube to work you need to curate your watch history. Any video you regret watching should be deleted from history so that it won’t be used for recommendations.

If your history is filled with these bad videos then you’re better off wiping your history entirely. Then start from scratch watching only videos that really interest you and your recommendations will all be based on those.

Like the internet itself, there is a TON of great content on YouTube. The trouble is finding it! For me, the internet has been gradually reverting to the situation I remember from the mid-90s (before Google existed). There were lots of search engines but they were pretty much all bad. I relied a lot on word of mouth (and site-to-site links) to find things.

Never thought I’d see the day when Lemmy has nice things to say about a billionaire who owns multiple yachts!

There’s a story recently about how a huge percentage of people’s steam libraries are never played. People just spending money on steam sales and amassing huge backlogs of games they’ll never get to. Valve has mastered the art of using sales to create FOMO and drive unnecessary spending!

I find the usefulness of a subreddit is inversely proportional to its size (popularity). There are still some good ones but they are quite small.

I had hoped Lemmy would fill this void for me but it’s still too small overall such that the smallest communities are barely active at all. Thus I tend to just scroll the feed of everything and see what catches my eye, admittedly a much less useful way to spend my time since I get sucked into ragebait instead of discussing cool hobbies.

So if I just pour enough water on my salad it becomes a broth? Awesome!

You could say this about most standup comedians. The sober ones are the weird ones!