Comment on It’s Surprisingly Easy to Live Without an Amazon Prime Subscription
abraxas@sh.itjust.works 5 months agoa game i actually played on epic.
Here’s a few of mine (not sure if any come from Amazon): Control (this was awesome!), shapez (almost bought it, then it was in my inbox), loop hero, Guardians of the Galaxy (Christmas free games), Outer Worlds (ditto), Evil WIthin 1 and 2, most of the fallout games, Death Stranding, Gloomhaven… I’m only on page 5 of 20 lol. Only 1 out of 5 of their free games are any good, but between big giveaways and the like, that’s still ~15 good free games a year lol.
It just never occurred as a prime (no pun intended) reason to pay… Errr… Prime
Perhaps THE problem with Prime right now is that none of their services except maybe TV is worth $11/mo on its own. Their free games aren’t Humble Monthly, but HM is just games. Their TV isn’t Netflix, but it’s $4/mo cheaper. You can get free shipping without Prime now (that wasn’t true before), but next day is phenomenal. As for books, there’s not really any replacement I know of. It’s not perfect (has this annoying thing about having books 2 on in some series, without book 1), but if you read a book a month, it pays for itself.
Warez were never convenient. Just “free”. Yet, with a tiny amount of “work”
For sure. It’s always been a baseline of convenience. I remember the old days of curating my mp3 collection every 6 months, removing dupes and fixing organizational shifting. But if I do that stuff for apps, I have to maintain freaking sandbox environments for each app, make sure my computer is backed up in case I have to wipe it, make sure nothing auto-logins so a remote attack doesn’t happen, etc. About 1 in 2 cracked apps show up as a virus and you can never know whether it’s a false positive, so you have to use a computer condom and then STILL get tested.
Dishing out 100 bucks would need a lot of benefits to convince me. Though i get you. Trading money for tinkering-time. All depends on our preference and skill and nerdiness 😂
I’m in an ok place right now. And Amazon is still the cheapest place to buy anything, for me. If I spend over $1000/yr there on everything, a lot more if you count the holidays, then Prime has already justified itself. And slower or not, Amazon with Prime is STILL the fastest Christmas shipper.
Anecdote… We bought Ring cameras from the Ring site for a family member in November. By mid-December, they still hadn’t shipped because Christmas orders were so backlogged. So we bought them again on Amazon and they were on our doorstep 2 days later, just a couple days before Christmas. Was it next day? No. Was it worth it? YEAH.
Then we had to fight with Ring for 2 weeks because they wouldn’t cancel the order. We got the Cameras the 2nd week of January and my wife was on the phone with them 6 or 7 times before they finally approved a return. Amazon has this thing called “Free Returns” on most items. You can literally write in “I was drunk shopping” for your return reason and nobody bats an eyelash.
Dyskolos@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
Aye, i’d second that list! Yet I usually have them on steam before they ever show on epic. So most of my epic-freebies i have twice in my library now. The tool “play-nite” is great for multi-library-gaming btw. includes gog, amazon, itch, ubi, steam, epic etc.
Still do that. For over 25yrs I nourish my library. Just the MP3s made room for FLACs.
Yeah ok, I get that. I’ve got 2 servers running 24/7 with proxmox/hyper-v, so those tools all run in seperate VMs. But especially in this case, it’s practically no maintenance. I’m still wondering why it works so flawlessly :-) As to the viral issue…I must say that i’m in the warez-scene since the early 90s and I never had a virus-problem. Ever. Though the majority is pure media, so no problem at all. And even if there should be a problem, I’ve got daily backups of everything. So I just go back to yesterday :-)
Totally worth it in that case. I spend like 600 bucks for a ton of stuff for wifey this xmas, and even though it took them a day longer than usual they all came on point. And prime paid itself quickly. Rest of the year it’s not that much, so I just surf on the usual trial or just use free shipping or just pay 3,99 if need be.
Aye, that’s totally my reason to shop at this fucking monster called amazon. No hassles, no worries, you get your crap the day they tell you, if you have ANY problem, you’re helped in 5 minutes at max. Dunno where you’re from, but we call our country “service-desert”. Some might be cheaper than amazon and it’s often tempting (my GPU was 2000,- elsewhere and 3000 on amazon…and i regret not using amazon), but if anything happens, you’re screwed and everything takes forever. Or they charge you extra fees, usage-fees, “this item isn’t defective and will be returned to you at your cost plus fee” etc. You just never have to worry. One gift we needed to return (glass broken), but as it classified as “food-item”, they told us to keep it and it will be refunded. Now we have 2 glass decanter for free instead of 3 for full-price. You won’t see that elsewhere here. No way. First you gotta prove it wasn’t YOU that broke it at home. I could on for hours…
abraxas@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
I’ve used playnite a few times. I always forget about it for some reason or another. Gog has a built-in tool like playnite and I fail to use that, too.
I still have it somewhere I’m sure, but I really gave up on it, for the convenience of youtube music of all things. Literally every song I ever had including a couple super-obscure albums I’d lost. And it’s SO convenient. It just works for me everywhere I want it.
Every time I mean to start setting up servers, some reason (or my wife) talk me out of it. I’m jealous. It’s on my bucket list. I’m the only guy I know who has run server clusters professionally who has never had his own.
I have had a couple over the years; usually use the “nuke and restart” solution. Only one was REALLY major and I was never sure whether it was software or a dumb family member. My password-protected screenshare app went live one day and started buying Chinese gift cards with a clearly automated script. Thank god someone was in the office when it happened and they only got through a couple hundred dollars before we pulled the plug and called our bank.
I know resellers hate Amazon returns, but they agree to them. I will literally make buying decisions based on the presence or lack of the “Free Returns” flag. I would literally pay for “return insurance” if AllState started to do that, too. I hate return hassles.
Dyskolos@lemmy.zip 4 months ago
Can’t complain about convenience. I use MediaMonkey since v0.1. It actually replaced my self-made music-archiver because it was simply superior and I couldn’t match it. And for mobile we just sync our favourite playlists and be completely mobile even when there’s no net. It’s the only serious tool for serious collectors :-)
lol. Sorry :) My wife actually talks me into it while I try to talk myself out of it (i’m a horrible cheap fuck). I actually managed to hook her on the smart-home, as she runs into walls now when the system is down because there is no light. We forgot how to use switches :-) Seriously though: You should. If you have some kind of passion for it, just do it. I don’t need it professionally anymore (long retired) but just love to keep up and tinker. And nothing beats a working self-hosted something.
Oucchhh. That could’ve gone bad. Ok, granted, with family members working on the same machine/network, danger rises. We have a global firewall and a global ad-/tracker/malware-blocker. Wifey often nags that some sites won’t work, and then it’s manual-fix-time for me, but so she can surf freely without fear. I don’t even have any virus-/malware-scanner-crap installed anymore for decades. I occasionally check manually if something’s hooked somewhere and that’s it. And when I’m really really really suspicious of something, there’s a sandbox. Honestly more “normal” software phone home and do shit i don’t want than warez ever did. Every effing software wants to phone home, install 3 services no-one needs and what not.
And don’t get me started on the “purchase software and own it” to “rent it for extortionate prices and never have anything”. It so became the standard everywhere. Wait…what were we originally even talking about? :-)
abraxas@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
I think that’s one of the ones I tried. It’s just more convenient to have unlimited access to music, whether I own it or not.
What do you do for lights? Like motion/position detection into each room? Or voice control?
I’ve wanted to get into automation several times, and I’m never settled enough in a house to spend the money. There’s always some reason we want to move and I don’t want to do all that permanent work to move. I even worked at an IoT company for a few years on backend and embedded code, so I have literally no excuse…
Not sure where that is. That would be nice (except that they could reduce the cashback anyway). Consumer Protections these days have been eroding in the US. Even our so-called consumer protection laws have landmines to protect the businesses.