In my experience, the longer you type, the faster you get at typing.

That’s like getting into the rhythm. If you do it a little and then stop, then you never become proficient as you never got into that flow.

Try learning a guitar by pulling a few strings a day. Try learning to read in a different language by reading a few letters each time. Try running by taking a few steps.

Doesn’t it sound ridiculous?

Have you ever tried learning a different language? You don’t become proficient by reading one sentence, then stopping and then another one. You do it by struggling through many, and the more you do it, the faster you learn.

Note, I’m not writing this because “boohoo, bad parenting.” It’s the first essay, who cares. (although her being 13 does make me raise a brow. I’d expect it with a 7 y.o., but 13? w/e, you do you). I just think you have a misunderstanding in how learning core-level skills work. Continuous repetition is the key.

Another glaring example is how toddlers learn languages. In a span of a couple of years, they are capable of learning a language to native level with absolutely no prior knowledge, just by listening and trying to repeat the sounds day in and day out. Just think about it.

They guy did his research, and he did it right. Even mentioning the “social contract”, that’s not something you hear from an average youtuber.

There’s only a few things I’ve noted

Although the monthly rate can be calculated as yearly÷12 and is acceptable, it is inaccurate. Doesn’t change much, but still. ( (1+monthly rate)^12 = 1+yearly rate <= this is the accurate conversion)

Next is “failed pension reform.” It’s failed in political sense. The intent of it was to temporarily lessen the depletion of pension fund, which it technically did do. But, yeah, it was absolutely not popular. Not to mention that it didn’t solve the root of the problem, which was obvious from the start. Back during his first or second presidency period, he promised not to raise the age for retirement, yet in 2018, he did exactly that. Needless to say that his ratings have been falling ever since then and up till February of 2022.

The one thing I would’ve liked him to also mention is “quality of foreign exchange earnings,” which is a relatively new term. Essentially, companies now need to pay attention to wether or not they can exchange earned currency for something that they can trade with other countries or within Russia. Previously, they traded in dollars, so it was never an issue.

An economics student from Russia here, here’s my perspective.

First, is that a country’s economy is a lot less volatile than we expected. There is also another factor that played into it. During covid, Russian companies amassed a sizable amount of inventory that was already inflated compared to European companies due to how volatile our economy is. This has given them enough time to reroute supply chains once sanctions hit.

Basically, the so-called “grey import” plays a major role in assuring the stability of our economy. Companies either route their import/export through neighboring countries or through affiliated companies.

Second is the competency of our central bank. After most of the major banks were cut off from SWIFT (used for international transactions), they raised the key rate, limited the amount of money you can cash out at one time, and did some other stuff. Higher key rate = higher deposit interest rate, but at the same time, credit became more expensive. All of this was needed for preventing banks from defaulting. Once panic died down, the changes were reverted. Now, they’re dealing with inflation.

Lastly, the majority of our budget comes from oil and gas. Since Europe didn’t want to buy it, Russia started selling it to Asia at discounted prices. Quantity of oil/gas sold drastically increased, which mitigated reduced prices and led to a surplus budget. Not to mention that they started pushing on large companies to reduce the amount of dividends and instead re-invest the money.

I wouldn’t call it “thriving,” however. All of this has definitely led to a slowdown in growth, which, as time goes by, will only get worse. But for now it’s fine.

I’d also add Beyond: Two Souls to the list

Maybe it’s just me, but I’d play the hell out of BG3 when I was 12.

The amount of time I spent on TES 4 and 5 back then, and BG3 hits just the right spot with the variety of ways it allows you to play it.

Minecraft is also in my top favorites.

What I’m saying is, don’t count BG3 out completely. Not to mention that it’s very saturated, so a shorter attention span shouldn’t really be a problem, but you never know.

As for suggestions. Definitely Terraria, as others mentioned. There was also Lego Fortnite, which looks like it would fit the tastes. Maybe also party games?

Some windows-specific professional software that cannot run on Linux.

Also, work-related stuff. I may be able to make a custom setup of Linux if I try hard enough, but when it comes to dealing with servers and VPNs it’s a bit beyond me. Not to mention the time it takes to figure it out and set up.

Although, the more I hear about subscriptions from Microsoft the more I want to switch.

Another way that I became quite fond of using is Rufus.

When creating a distro it allows you to customize it. Set up language beforehand, a local account, remove hardware requirements and data collection by simply checking some boxes.

It’s a very handy tool, saves a lot of headache with this bloody install.

So, it’s the same idea, but not necessarily related to money? Understandable.

I’m missing one key detail here.

What are your criteria for a mechanic being predatory?

Heed to my long explanation of what I would consider predatory or not:

In my opinion, a predatory mechanic is one that is set to make you spend more money by means of obfuscation.

So, obstacles to progression, purchases with no affirmation, currency obscuring and etc.

In this way, for example, if an item can only be bought with non-tradable premium currency, the currency is predatory. However, if the currency is tradable then it isn’t predatory because it’s main purpose lies in trading and not obfuscation.

Same way gacha is also a predatory mechanic, gambling is predatory, and loot boxes. Because you don’t explicitly know what you’re getting and how much it costs you to get the thing you want.

Therefore to me a free battlepass cannot be considered predatory, as it’s main purpose is to increase level of player engagement.

I would agree, however, that making BP permanent would make it a much nicer feature. As in, you can work towards completing previous BPs you’ve missed. Otherwise it’s kinda meh. I don’t particularly like them anyways, it’s a pretty lazy way of achieving that goal.

Warframe’s “BP” system is the most non-intrusive out of all games with BP that I’ve played.

I was disappointed when saw it initially as well. But on closer inspection, it is completely free, you’re not being locked to playing on a certain week to get the missions done and, what I recently found out after years of not playing the game, is that old rewards return to BP on low levels.

This essentially makes it very easy to catch up should you choose to.

About player interactions, toxicity happens, but it happens in every online game. You can’t really expect an MMO game to not have player interactions.

I too am a little anxious when dealing with people I don’t know, but it really is not that big of a deal. If you’re actually having problems with it, consider seeking advice from a specialist.

Having an auction house, although is nice from a convenience point of view, could be going against the design of the game. A bazaar type of trading has it’s own charms, and some people may prefer it. Either one is fine with me, personally.

Most of what you’ve listed don’t sound like problems with the game itself, but rather the game being just not for you. And it is normal.

And trust me, there are quite a few problems with warframe, especially for newer players. Like the story not being explicit, you being thrown into the game with no real set goal, game mechanics not being explained properly and so on, which makes you have wiki open on the side to play the game without issues.

If we’re being completely honest, all of those are in rotation and although some items cannot be grinded for during that time, it can still be traded for, so it is not an issue.

Dailies and weeklies are here to keep you engaged. They provide some rewards, but I wouldn’t call them mandatory to progression. They’re more of a side-bonus.

Personally, whenever I’m bored of warframe I just leave. After a while new quests appear, new guns and all of the other stuff to work toward.

The best part is that whenever you return you’re pretty much at the same place as you left it off.

Hence I personally see no rush in getting all of the stuff I want. I’ve been playing this game on and off since 2013 and have yet to experience fomo with it, because of the things listed above.

Destiny, for example, is much much worse. Especially after they decided that it’s a good idea to vault planets and remove quests. Made me leave the game, I just can’t deal with it and have life stuff to do. Mind you, D2 is easily one of my most most favourite games.

Same with gacha games like Genshin or Honkai 3rd. It’s exhausting.

Didn’t have that experience with Warframe.

The thing about hoops is that they do prevent a lot of things.

Not all of them, but a lot.

“Ah, that’s too much to bother” is surprisingly a good deterrent.

A lot, actually

In Russia change org was one of very few channels to bring change into politics.

For some reason our politicians actually listened to those. So it was a very useful tool.

Unfortunately, I don’t have much idea how effective it is since Feb of 2022. Imagine our gov as an armodillo. It has a sturdy shell, so it is very hard to get good changes through it’s head. Now that armodillo closed up in a ball, it lives in it’s own bubble, its being fed by it’s own lies. Nothing good can come out of that head. And it doesn’t.

Russia trying to ban Telegram is a whole epopeya that produced a lot of memes and animated videos back in the days.

Now it’s a piece of history.

A story about what heppened (it’s hilarious, read it):

Essentially, there’s a gov agency called Roscomnadzor (from Russian communication surveillance) that is responsible for “keeping the internet a safe space”, so to say.

After another law, wanted by nobody, was passed, it allowed for Roscomnadzor to request the encryption keys from all social media. Since Telegram “doesn’t have those”, Roscomnadzor took it to court for non-complience.

Telegram lost the case and was ordered to pay 1mil rub (about 17000USD at the time I believe) and to provide the keys. The society started joking about how that’s the cheapest PR a company could get for such outreach. Overall sentiment was “Not only do they get so many people to hear about Telegram for pennies, but they also make Telegram look like a safe place to chat” (which is debatable, but w/e, that’s what people thought, mind you Telegram was a very new product then)

It’s also important to note that Telegram’s creator, Pavel Durov, is also the creator of largest Russian social medial called VKontakte (tl. InContact) which he was robbed of and forced to leave the country.

And so, once Roscomnadzor started trying to block Telegram for, yet again, non-complience, people started beeing dissatisfied and set up a date to let paper planes out of their windows to show their support for Telegram.

Now starts the fun part.

Just in one week over 18mil IP adresses were blocked. Whilst trying to block Telegram, Roscomnadzor managed to accidentially block: Viber, some paying services, some services for selling airplane tickets, a service selling OSAGO (mandatory car insurance), ResearchGate, central repository of Java, Skolkovo Tech websited (aka Russian Silver Valley), a lot of universities’ websited (including the biggest ones), some scientific archives.

They even managed to block some of Google’s services, like YouTube or it’s main page, Twitter, Facebook, VKontakte, Odnoklassniki (Russian social media for boomers and country bumkins, tld as “Classmates”), Yahoo, Some Russian gov sites and I believe even it’s own website.

What did you not see on that list? That’s right! Telegram is still fully operational.

This has caused a massive surge of memes and videos portraying Roscomnadzor as an anime character Roscomnadzor-chan trying to block all of the wicked stuff off the net, but ultimately failing all the time. She has goons, which look kinda like those half life solders, which are all secretly into all that stuff they block.

Roscomandzor also acquired a new nickname, “Roscompozor”, where “pozor” means “disgraceful”, think “I"m ashamed of you” kind of meaning.

Since then Telegram was finally blocked, but through use of VPN many people still accessed it. Including government officials (a lot of them). In fact, it was used so much that some years after they striked a deal (involving giving users’ data to Russia ofc) where Telegram was fully unblocked and still is to this day.

Just a couple years ago Meduza was a very prominent news outlet in Russia.

There weren’t that many and they weren’t allowed on TV, but you could always see their presence on the Internet.

Since adoption of a law about foreign agents in 2017 many if not most of such news outlets were deemed as “foreign agents” and faced problems with funding. And yet persisted.

2022 was the breaking point. In February all of the remaining oppositional news started to get blocked. One by one.

By 2023 all of them ceased operation as Russian media and migrated abroad due to de facto being outlawed.

Taking control over media is how Putin started his presidency. This is what came out of it.

If there is nobody to speak, then there’s nobody who’ll listen.