Elements were always just so much inferior to the full versions that you’re better off using free alternatives anyway

There are many animals that are pretty cool; beavers, iguanas, capybaras, kangaroos, crows etc. I find it really hard to pick a favourite.

I’d really like to have a pet iguana one day, though.

Not being completely turned off dating in general by past experiences…

Budget phones aren’t really worth it when you can get a flagship from 3 years ago (with most likely better specs) for about the same price IMO. Sure, updates are a problem but if you’re willing to tinker around a bit it’s doable.

This might be a bit controversial, as Google is obviously also known for their fair share of not so good stuff but I really like their Pixel line of devices. Especially for that stock android experience (doesn’t Samsung even pre-install TikTok nowadays?). Sony phones are also pretty decent from my experience.

As for laptops, the business lines of both Dell (Latitude & Precision) and Lenovo (ThinkPad) are pretty solid. Especially Dell’s support is just amazing, I deal with them regularly at work and they’ve been really great.

As for ASUS; I haven’t had to buy a mainboard in a while but I heard some good things about Gigabyte.

Tidal is a pretty good alternative to Spotify; I think they pay artists the most per stream out of all music streaming services, they offer true Hi-Fi quality for the same price Spotify charges for their base tier and they even upgraded all Hi-Fi members to Hi-Fi Plus for free recently.

Nestlé is a big enough campany that you just have to live with not buying their products I guess… Although there are pretty good alternatives for stuff like frozen pizza (Dr. Oetker is pretty good if that’s available where you live) and chocolate (Tony’s Chocolonely ftw).

Samsung; just a lot of general very anti-consumer behaviour.

LG; a “do not sell my data” option on a TV that’s turned off as standard? No, thanks.

ASUS; has become pretty unreliable in my experience and their RMA shenanigans haven’t helped.

Apple; overpriced and anti-consumer, I wouldn’t mind getting a MacBook as a gift or something, though…

HP; cheap garbage that’s obsolete the moment you buy it and becomes e-waste after the warranty has expired. Their business line is marginally better but there are far better options out there.

Huawei; see above.

Nestlé; do I really have to explain? They’re pretty much the worst company to ever exist.

Spotify; endless price-hikes to enable the CEO to buy more soccer teams and firearm manufacturer shares, pay artists almost nothing per stream, disabled their car thing after two years, lied about Spotify Hi-Fi…

That’s the only complaint I have as well, the cords tend to rub a lot on any jackets I wear. It’s not really a big deal, though.

I splurged for a pair of SR325x recently and they’re awesome; just a great, balanced sound. Pretty easy to drive, too, even with my old iPod mini.

It’s actually quite easy on the Sonys, I was more than surprised.

I bought some Sony WF-1000XM3 a couple of years ago. They were new, although heavily discounted, but the battery life was awful; the box says the buds themselves would last for 6 hours on a single charge, right? I got maybe 1.5 hours out of them.

Sony wouldn’t RMA them because I supposedly bought them at their outlet store (I didn’t). Eventually, I just replaced the batteries in both buds and now they last ~3 hours; I guess that’s due to the battery in the charging case also being weak.

Next time I’ll just buy one of those Fiio bluetooth DACs to use with my Grados…

I guess we just didn’t expect to see this kind of realism from a TV screen until it came out, it was a totally new arguably ground-braking thing. Especially with fictional media, which is why James Cameron’s Avatar was so great in 3D (despite being utterly boring IMO).

Think about it, the first HD television broadcasts started in the early 90s in Japan. How exciting that must’ve been. They even got HD movies in the form of Hi-Vision Laserdiscs.

Our Holy Symbol

Again, I think that you’re focusing way too hard on there being some sort of deeper meaning to people drawing a country flag. Maybe you’re right and those people are nationalists who try to propagate some idea that their country is somehow better than yours by drawing a bigger flag. Why do you care so much?

the actual spirit being to mirror human social interactions in something inconsequential

I guess you could say it like that, although I would disagree that there are no consequences, most people just choose to ignore them because they don’t affect them personally in any way.

I don’t think we’ll find common ground here, but that’s totally fine. It’s been nice talking about it anyway; I just hope everything I said made sense^^

Those drawings are typically more elaborated than “me maeks flag”. As such, their artistic value is (for me) higher.

That might be true, but depending on the flag I’d say that the whole act of adapting it into pixel art bears artistic value enough to say that the people responsible don’t just blindly copy a template.

nationalistic symbol

I believe that most people (I even want to say almost everyone) drawing their country’s flag on the canvas don’t do it because they’re a nationalists or they want to force the flag (as a representation of a country and all the connotations it may have) onto other people.

That goes back to the point I made earlier about the two types of communities; defending the “purity” of the flag and not allowing anyone to draw on it is more akin to forcing the flag onto people I think, while allowing people to more or less “deface” the flag with their own drawings (while still respecting other people’s drawings i.e. the flag itself) is much more inviting and arguably in the spirit of the whole event.

this sort of “you did it and I undid it” is part of the game.

I guess I just want everyone to get along and work together, rather than against each other. Reddit’s r/place was a battlefield where only the biggest communities even had a chance of maintaining their works; I just want Lemmy canvas to be a bit more relaxed, that’s all.

So you want to protect artwork on a flag but not the flag itself? I guess my ultimate question is why do you care so much about defacing any (larger) flags on the canvas if they don’t even take up that much space with just the flag parts alone.

Like, you want to respect people’s drawings that they spend hours working on while defacing other people’s drawings that they spend hours on just because you don’t like the “country-based identity that benefits the government” these latter drawings supposedly represent.

I really don’t mean to offend you, I just want to understand where you’re coming from with this.

Australian flag taking too much space

It was scheduled to be even bigger last year… my point is that there’s basically two types of flag-making communities; those who really do just take up space that could be otherwise used by many for themselves and those who let others’ drawings co-exist on their flags.

I think the latter isn’t all that bad, as long as there are no weird rules in place of what can and cannot be drawn on the flag; although I don’t know what rules the Aussies had for this, aside from keeping the integral parts of the flag mostly intact, as I wasn’t involved in the planning process.

The chat function was quite cumbersome in my experience (as someone without a matrix account); it was pretty slow to load as well.

Maybe such thing could be integrated into Lemmy itself somewhere in the future?

Huge thanks to grant for organising this huge event! This year’s canvas was 100% better than 2023’s.

It was amazing to see all the pretty things people came up with.

Even if you don’t like it because it goes directly against your goal.

As I’ve said, I can understand your point and that’s part of the reason I do not support the German community for example; they tend to have the most flags every year and don’t really allow anything on them from what I can see.

I was more or less helping to maintain the Australian flag, as well as some of the drawings on it. Granted, I also helped to delete a few drawings off it and admittedly, I was just following along in those cases.

Reminds me of that one time someone on some forum linked to a Jeff The Killer screamer site (basically the same thing you’ve described) and I clicked on it.

It initially didn’t even work, because I was using NoScript at the time… So I disabled NoScript temporarily and refreshed the page. It being about 2 in the morning and the speakers being tuned up didn’t help.

I’m not even really disagreeing with you. To be honest, I’m quite sick of seeing large plain flags on the canvas, too. But I fail to see a point in being so angry about it to the point of wanting to “fight back” against the “nationalists”.

At the end of the day, it’s not that important. Just leave them and look for other spots to draw your stuff, maybe ask around in participating communities; they’ll even help you if you ask nicely.