drev
I’ve had a chili dark chocolate ice cream before that was obscenely delicious. The cold and creamy chocolate almost completely dampened and soothed the burn from the chili, then the spice would slowly intensify, a little more with every bite. I was helplessly addicted down to the last bite.
If I ever see that available again, I can’t imagine I’d even consider anything else. Unless I maybe saw some sort of chili lime sorbet, but I’ve never come across one.
Cheetos and tabasco flavored ice cream however, are both just so far in the wrong direction. Absolutely foul.
I could see a Wikipedia-style donation model working to keep lots of different servers up. But I can’t see it happening for servers hosting exclusively news + memes + whatever random communities people want to add.
I _could _ see it happening for dedicated broad-topic or semi-niche instances (instances for gaming, investing, Linux, music production, etc.) each hosting a collection of related and maybe more niche communities (for CSGO, Bitcoin, Arch, EDM production).
As they become more popular, server hosting costs increase, and at some point they might need to ask for donations to keep afloat. People are willing to throw a little money towards something they enjoy, especially if it’s their choice to do so. And they feel good about it. And instances that stay around longer gain more users, more usability, more credibility (assuming a non-toxic community).
I could definitely see it leading down a path of growth and prosperity for the platform. However, now that I typed this out, I could see it both working positively, and being abused and exploited, so 🤷
I can practically guarantee that people who say they hate tea haven’t tried brewing any kind of loose leaf tea at the proper temp and time.
I got a 1kg brick of the cheapest loose-leaf black tea I could find for ~$3.50, and it’s delicious. I drink it almost every day, I bought it in June last year, and I’m just now running low. I brewed a bag lipton black tea at work recently, took one sip and I dumped it the fuck out. Absolutely foul, that stuff.
So I can see why people hate tea if they’ve only ever tried cheap bags with boiling water
Huh, we had 7 for our school district (one for each branch, and I think the army and navy had two), but my high school alone did have just under 3000 kids.
We had all 7 of these guys (and one woman) going from class to class every day for a month giving four 90-minute presentations per day to pander and force-feed each individual classroom of ~30-50 students a glorified recruitment ad. They even set up one of the portable classrooms as a recruitment office for that month.
I’m curious, did the recruiters hand out forms to kids under 18 that required parent/guardian signatures?
I’m asking because ours did, and I could swear that these forms were a sort of pre-enlistment contract that needed parent/guardian signature in order to waive the 18+ requirement for agreeing to enlist. So although we wouldn’t actually be enlisted until we turned 18, we could agree to enlist beforehand with a parent’s signature. But, as strong as that memory is, I still can’t help but doubt myself because of how insane and illegal that all sounds.
God I miss Tidal. Their suggestions were so far above and beyond everything else I’ve tried, I just wish it was managed and maintained competently. Their Android and desktop apps are (were? It’s been a while) so chock-full of playback bugs and annoying little quirks, and their customer support is probably not even legally considered customer support at all, considering the fact that it seems to consist entirely of a single email bot that receives support tickets, waits 3 weeks, then closes that ticket.
I was particularly irritated with the fact that albums would become “unavailable” so incredibly often, while a new, identical version of the album was made available, for no apparent reason. Since these replacement albums weren’t automatically migrated into my library, I would have to remove and and re-add the albums individually in order to play them from my library, then update all my playlist containing any songs from that “disabled” version of the album by removing and re-adding each individual song. That shit got old, FAST.
I eventually had to swap to Spotify because of an absolutely baffling bug that acted like a virus and slowly “ate” my library (more info below if anyone’s curious), and Spotify’s music suggestions are just nothing short of horrendous.
My “discover weekly” last week for example was made up of approximately 60% songs either already in my library, or songs that I’ve listened to before and not liked much from artists in my library, plus 7 (!!) 20-30+ minute soundscapes, something I have NEVER listened to before, as well as 2 new Ariana Grande singles (sponsored? I’ve had to block her, those singles were popping up everywhere), and a few songs from totally out-there genres, including a country rap song which just so happens to be the one and only song I’ve ever actually disliked back before Spotify removed and re-introduced that feature, some background music from a random indie game’s soundtrack which was mostly just cave noises, a jazz-fusion album’s interlude, and something that I can only describe as bubblegum cyberpunk black glitch-metal dancecore. A positively psychotic selection of music.
Granted, that was the worst discover weekly I think I’ve ever had, but I still just wish that tidal worked for me, because I’ve never discovered more great music from any other platform’s suggestion algorithm, and nothing since has even come close.
About the weird bug if anyone’s curious:
The bug was pretty fucked up in that it behaved basically like a virus. At random points while listening, Tidal would fail to play a song at master quality, automatically downgrade playback by one level, then apply that inability to play master-quality permanently to each subsequent song I played in that session. These songs were now “infected”. Replaying these songs at a later date would further degrade the playback quality by an additional level, and also add a delay of ~20 seconds per playback quality level it had been downgraded to, as well as infecting any other songs I played after. When a song reached 96kbps (or 160? Whatever the lowest is, I forget) and could not degrade any more, it would either play at minimum quality after a ~60 second delay (which was unskippable because Tidal was unresponsive to playing a new song during the delay), or just fail to play entirely while loading infinitely, absolutely chugging my battery-life, and overheating my phone. I could only stop it by force-closing the app, which would crash my phone, every single time. There was about a 20% chance for one of these songs to fail playback, but if it did play, that chance to fail playback was now applied to each subsequent song played, no matter the song’s “infection level”. Though that at least didn’t seem to be permanently applied like the quality degradation, but I don’t know for sure.
The weirdest part is that the bug would persist, spread, and behave exactly the same way on an old phone that had never had tidal installed before, and also with the desktop app (though without the overheating, and it would throw and error message after some time if a song failed to play). So the bug seemed somehow account-bound?
I researched unsuccessfully for weeks looking for a fix, and I tried everything I could to fix it aside from making a new tidal account, because it was a lot of trouble to migrat. And support… Well, Tidal support apparently just doesn’t exist. I had sent 3 separate support tickets, all of which went unanswered, then marked as “resolved” and closed 2-3 weeks later. Only the 2nd ticket got an automated “thanks for your ticket, staff will help soon” response before being marked resolved and closed.
Eventually, so much of my library became infected (as well as a ton of random songs that would commonly end up playing after albums) that my ability to both listen to the music I loved and discover new music in the styles/genres I loved was crippled. Which obviously rendered the entire platform effectively useless. So after being repeatedly ignored by support with no explanation, and after several software updates that didn’t fix the problem while I was trying to contact support, or even just report the bug… I had to give up and switch to Spotify.