• 46 Posts
  • 53 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 8th, 2023

help-circle







  • Clbull@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldClose call
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    17
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    29 days ago

    It’s honesty pretty bleak to see companies like Electronic Arts and Activision consistently top the sales charts by releasing the same game every year.

    Said this before on Reddit in the past, but there are lots of consumers who have no taste in video games whatsoever. They don’t give a shit about anything but FIFA/Madden, Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto, and that is the reason why we have predatory shit like Ultimate Team and Shark Cards in $70 AAA titles.



  • Disclaimer: I work in accountancy (Commercial Finance) but my advice should be taken with a pinch of salt.

    1. Diversify your investments. Have savings across multiple bank accounts so that the unlikely event where one bank fails doesn’t wipe out your financial wealth., and overall don’t put your eggs in one basket.

    2. Currently, the best ROI/passive income you’ll get is from corporate bonds. A cursory glance at the Hargreaves Lansdown website shows me quite a few corporate bonds and gilts that have a voucher rate (% return each year) of over 8 percent. Do bear in mind that a bond is a loan instrument where the ROI is based on both the maturity date (the date you get paid back plus interest) and the overall risk of the debt.

    3. Another good option is to invest in high dividend yield shares or ETFs. These can offer superior returns on investment to the interest you’d get from a savings account.

    4. Avoid day trading or swing trading unless you 100% absolutely know what the fuck you’re doing. Unlike what many YouTube ‘gurus’ claim, making a living off the stock market requires a high amount of starting capital to see any kind of tangible ROI, plus sophisticated stock trading software and knowledge on how to exploit trends.

    5. Same goes for penny stocks (i.e. the FTSE AIM All Share market.) You can make some rookie gains from it. Many of the companies listed on this index are oil/gas/mineral exploratory firms that are likely not going to see any kind of profit unless they strike it big, find a new oil well, lithium mine, etc and get the necessary contracts and investment to extract those resources. They’re penny stocks for a reason.

    6. Side hustles. For example, I have two friends that are karaoke DJs and they get gigs where bars pay them to host nights. Bookkeeping is another one, but you really are going to have a lot of competition in that respect, and you will probably need the right qualifications to do it.

    7. Screw crypto. At best cryptocurrencies are speculative assets that are scarce and expensive because the very nature of how their blockchains were designed make it take exponentially more effort to mine a new coin. At worst, they’re used to launder criminal proceeds (Monero is a good example of one where the blockchain is encrypted.) NFTs are even worse.



  • A couple of years ago i would say that a month of tinder gold or whatever isn’t the worst idea ever. Right now it totally is. It still probably maybe helps, but it’s just not worth the money. You can swipe more and get seen more and that might still be true, but your subscription doesn’t change the fact that the women you like get thousands of likes and you just go under or are lucky as fuck

    I think it’s more like the online dating space has been enshittified by one company buying out most of its competition and then jacking up prices. Hinge are owned by Match Group, who also own Match.com, Tinder, POF, Okcupid, The League and a few others. All of these are now overglorified Tinder clones that adopted the same ‘swipe left/right to match’ formula.

    Also I suspect there may be some kind of shadowban on my account. Apparently this is a thing frequently mentioned on /r/SwipeHelper, /r/HingeApp and /r/OnlineDating, and the only way people have gotten past it is fully deleting their accounts, waiting a few months and then registering afresh. If that is the case and my profile is being obfuscated for whatever reason (maybe because I recently reactivated it after going dormant), then that would make Hinge X blatant false advertising.

    If i were you i would shoot my shot at karaoke, and just do dating apps on the side

    I mean… I would, but I don’t really approach women that I find attractive (mainly fear of rejection, or worse, or I know for a fact that they’re not single), and the only attention I seem to get is from gay guys and the occasional lady old enough to be my grandma. As I’m not into either, it can make me uncomfortable at times.

    The main group chat I’m in mainly consists of middle-aged men and women. I’m also friends with two DJs who host evenings at various pubs which I often attend. Some of our regulars either already are professional singers, or have the talent to be.

    I wouldn’t exactly say I’m a good singer and when people say I’ve got a good voice, I feel like they’re either being nice, or they’re drunk and easily impressed. I’ve definitely improved compared to when I first started doing this, to the point where I don’t quite hate the sound of my own voice anymore and there are some go-to songs that I can sing somewhat well. I really do want to take professional singing lessons and improve my voice to the point where I could be like a siren. Maybe that would have been a better investment than a dating app.

    Probably the best compliment I got was when I went to a Central Bristol pub for a Christmas karaoke eve. The place was packed and about half the pub was cordoned off for a pre-booked work Christmas party. I sung Poison Arrow by ABC (one of my go-to songs) and on a part of the second verse which I legitimately belted out loudly, I audibly heard one of the guys in the work crowd go “Fuck me…” in astonishment. I left that place soon after, both because they were inundated with requests, and to get away from an Aussie lady who I met previously, she was living in a homeless shelter and was spending her eves scrounging off other guys in that place.


  • I have Asperger’s, so it’s a big struggle for me in general.

    A few days ago, I spent £89.99 on a three month subscription to Hinge X. This is something I’ve been contemplating for a while because I’m a 32-year-old virgin, have been single for the past two years (my previous ex basically led me on and used me for my money in what I can best describe as a 2.5 year on/off intimacy-free relationship), and I thought that in desperate enough to actually pay for a dating app.

    Lo and behold, after sending well over a hundred likes with written prompts which I put genuine thought into, no new matches. And I’ve been keeping a mostly intricate log of this shit because if you’re blowing the equivalent of 3 WoW subscriptions on a rejection simulator, you may as well keep tabs on whether it works.

    I’m about 80% convinced that I either overwhelmingly give women the ick, or Hinge is a scam.

    My social life is only a bit better. Work is quite solitary for me, and I mainly hang out with a friend group on Thursday evenings and weekends that do pub karaoke.




  • For the record, this was for a customer service outsourcer I used to work for. I wasn’t directly employed by Associated Newspapers and I’d say a good deal of the internal managerial and pay issues I had were down to my employer, not the client. Only thing I miss about that place were my colleagues. I had made some life-long friends in that place and there were a lot of great people who came and went.

    As for management, one or two team leaders aside, they were a clique of nepotistic assholes.

    I was fired from that job nearly three years into my employment (long after we lost the AN contract and I moved to a different campaign) for ‘capability’ reasons, after they dragged me through a month-long PIP and disciplinary process for failing to hit targets. Our whole email team was failing to hit performance targets and I was effectively scapegoated and bullied out of the company by a team leader who didn’t like me. In retrospect it was the best thing to ever happen to me, because had I not been sacked, I’d probably still be there on min wage and not working in commercial finance today.


  • Boo is the best dating app I’ve used outside of Facebook Dating. It’s still pretty shitty though, and I wholly agree with your criticism about the discussion threads.

    Actually gamifying the use of their app as a social media platform to gain further privileges on the dating side of the app is a genius idea though, but it’s executed so poorly. If it had the high quality discussions of Lemmy/Reddit, or the plethora of edgy memes you find on 9GAG, Facebook, iFunny, etc, then it could be a game changer.

    I could go on a massive rant about how Tinder is dogshit and every other dating app has been bought out and transformed into yet another Tinder clone by greedy monopolistic cunts who the Federal Trade Commission should have shut down years ago, but I’ve already wasted a lot of my energy ranting about my shitty experiences before.

    Maybe we wouldn’t have an incel epidemic if the modern dating experience wasn’t so awful for men.

    As I’ve said before, Facebook Dating is the best experience I’ve had, and that’s primarily because Mark Zuckerberg is more motivated by harvesting all your personal information, not by suckering you into paying 4 times the price of a WoW subscription just to see who liked your profile.

    Kippo is even more hilarious. Nearly every profile is just trying to recruit you to watch their E girl twitch stream or onlyfans and is not interested in dating.

    Sounds like Okcupid to me. I get a lot of matches on there, but they’re all either:

    • Scammers trying to lull me into a crypto investment scheme.
    • E-girls using the platform to plug their OnlyFans
    • African and South-East Asian ladies who discovered GPS spoofing and are on the prowl for a Western husband and the means to a green card.



  • It’s absolutely the same mindset as boomers complaining about technology these days because they don’t want to learn how to download a mobile app.

    I’m really not too sure about that.

    Used to work in customer service for a major right wing (Daily Mail) newspaper, and that included tech support for their rewards club website, their newspaper reading Android/iOS/Kindle Fire app, and their bookshop website.

    Pensioners struggle with technology and I really don’t think it’s just stubbornness and ignorance. I genuinely think that your ability to learn and remember things diminishes greatly as you grow older.

    It was one of the worst jobs I worked in, not just because trying to explain how to do basic things like open a web browser, type in a URL or force stop and clear the cache on an Android app to a 90+ year old is like pulling teeth, but because we were paid like crap, treated like children by management, treated like shit by a lot of customers, and because we used to get a lot of editorial calls from people thinking we could put them through to a journalist so they could spout their often bigoted views. So glad I work in accountancy now. The worst customer support jobs are the ones where callers frequently go full Karen on you.


  • He could alternatively go to…

    Stackoverflow or Superuser, where the answer will be “use the search bar you imbecile, locked.”

    Quora, where every question is blatant rage bait like “my 14 year old son got a B in his test. I took away his PS5 and chained him in the basement as punishment but his grades aren’t improving. How can I make him better at math?”

    Yahoo Answers which is dead, and was basically Quora before Quora was a thing.

    Or Reddit, where you can’t even post on 95% of subs without hitting a minimum karma threshold and where some basement dwelling mod will likely ban you for breaking hidden rule #263, then modmail mute you for 28 days without reply if you try to appeal.

    I think any Q&A site is absolute dog water now.