This is probably not as unpopular opinion as I think it is, but I can’t stand Christmas movies. I do enjoy and celebrate Christmas, but the commercial aspect of it is too shoved down our throats like some kind of Foie Gras nightmare.
Anyway, instead I watch through James Bond movies substituting misogyny and violence for hokey sentimental commercialism.
I have a few kindles, have upgraded over the years and have been able to use them all in the same manner:
With a new device I connect it to the internet and update the firmware to the latest version (the factory installed version has had a lot of missing functionality in my experience). Then I block it from my network, delete the AP entry and put it permanently into airplane mode.
When purchasing an ebook from Amazon you can download it for usb transfer and I organize it on my laptop with Calibre.
Calibre can also strip drm, but if you’re transferring it to the device you downloaded it for it isn’t necessary.
Amazon may at some point in the future change all of this, but the content I have already downloaded can not be revoked and is usable outside the Amazon ecosystem if the drm is removed.
The form of this kind of social media has got the same set of upsides and downsides as it does on Reddit. It won’t be exactly the same because the people are different, but the problems aren’t that different and the people aren’t that different either.
As a mostly lurker I find the experience pretty similar. I scroll through and find some interesting articles, bits of news, memes. It’s a slower pace, but I think in time it’ll grow faster. People migrate over occasionally, but there may be a critical mass moment when it’s big enough that lots of people start flooding over. Or it won’t and it’ll just fizzle out to nothing over time, who knows. For the moment it’s good enough for me to have replaced Reddit entirely.
As for things that are better: you get a lot more control over how you want to experience it. There’s no singular controller always dragging the experience down toward profitability. There are clients a-plenty, the api is open, you can control what parts of the network you see and which you don’t. It does take some effort, of course.
As for worse, because there’s no singular entity controlling the network, there’s going to be some very dark corners. You can block them (many will be blocked by individual server operators already), but they’re still there and they get to carry the Lemmy name and newcomers are most likely to experience it.
Just my thoughts on the subject, it’s been discussed a lot, I’m sure other people have quite different perspectives.
I have a pro that I use with a ps5 controller, sunshine and moonlight, but I connect the controller directly to my pc instead of going through the shield. Using the shield results in a different “feel” to the games and android insists on stealing the ps button input for android menu nonsense without any way (that I could find) to disable that and pass it through to the pc.
There’s lots of options for extending Bluetooth and usb to computers further away if yours isn’t close enough. I wouldn’t recommend this setup if you needed to connect the controller through the shield. I am sensitive to that sort of thing, but I think most people would find it pretty bad, especially if they have any experience using it with a console.
The rest works brilliantly (when connected with wired networking), I rarely use my pc directly for games anymore.
Been following this series since the 90s, but I have a sinking suspicion that GTA 5 will be the last I want to play. I love 5, I keep replaying it, it’s totally my jam. This is despite it checking off all the boxes of things I don’t want games to do: requires its own launcher, requires periodic re-activation, pushes microtransactions and begs me to play an online mode that at this point I clearly am not going to.
Rockstar doesn’t care about its games anymore, they exist solely as money making vehicles, I’m not expecting much from 6.