What PURCHASES are you RESISTING?

For nearly twenty years I carried around a Nokia 5500. Had to replace the battery and the outer shell a couple times, but crikey that thing was indestructible and did everything anyone ever needs a phone to do. Everyone took the piss out of me as they spent thousands churning iPhones with huge contract bills but my line rental was less than a tenner with zero device costs and I still don’t give a shit about what apps you have. When it died I finally got a smart phone, which I hate owning despite using it right now to type this. Damn things seem to be programmed to expire after just a couple of years. I have also recently started yelling at clouds.

Nodens wrote: I come from a different angle: I want a phone with a socket for a real headphone (Sennheiser) and the lowest radiation emission possible. Sturdiness is a plus because I drop it often. Cheapness is also nice because then I don't mind as much when I lose the thing.
I do not care about state-of-the art cameras since a 5-year old phone camera still is pretty great in comparison to, you know.
So, I have been very happy with Motorola G phones for the last ten years.

I have a 2020 Moto G Power. The battery life is good and I bought it for about $200. The screen is better than the newer model. Periodically I wipe it and just reinstall the apps I really want, so it stays fast enough to use. I recently bought my daughter a rebuilt (new battery and screen) iPhone 8+ for about $200-ish and it is faster than this Moto G. The camera on this thing is kind of a potato. A $60 Canon s95 point and shoot looks better.

We use Ting which has unlimited calls and texts but limited data for about $65/month for the five family members on this plan.

Cranberries wrote: We use Ting which has unlimited calls and texts but limited data for about $65/month for the five family members on this plan.

Hey, cool. I'm on Ting as well. There are times when I think I'm the only person who's ever heard of it.

$65 month AT&T using whatever free phone they sent me when they stopped supporting my old phone.

Ting is great, Mint Mobile is a good alternative if you can’t get Ting.

Gregarius wrote:

Cranberries wrote: We use Ting which has unlimited calls and texts but limited data for about $65/month for the five family members on this plan.

Hey, cool. I'm on Ting as well. There are times when I think I'm the only person who's ever heard of it.

Their customer support is really good but because they lease lines from T-mobile sometimes text messages get delayed.

Sans Il Defanso makes me want to get an iPhone now.

Edit: periodically removing our sims and rebooting our phones seems to help with the text message delay problem. It feels kind of Green Acres (a really old scene where they can't plug in all of their appliances at once)

dysjunct wrote: Ting is great, Mint Mobile is a good alternative if you can’t get Ting.

We used Mint Mobile when we were in the US last year, it was pretty good. I definitely didn't feel like I was getting fleeced or anything, and the coverage was solid. I don't think we had any problems that other major carriers weren't also dealing with.

There are a lot of irritating things about living in the US compared to other countries (and it cuts the other way too), but the most regularly inconvenient is how difficult it is to just get a prepaid SIM card. Mint Mobile made that pretty simple, relatively speaking.

It’s been a while now, but we used Walmart’s prepaid service for a long time and had no complaints until my wife switched jobs and there was oddly no coverage where she works.
Not sure if they still offer it.

Just because no one mentioned it, I use Google Fi and haven't had any problems, my bill is generally 35 dollars if I'm not paying off a phone. But I use almost no data unless I'm on vacation, so it's a great fit for me. And it works seamlessly overseas, transitioning to most local networks, with no change in pricing structure. If you're going to do it I'd recommend getting a Pixel, Samsung and Google have a low level pissing match about their respectively app suites that makes some things annoying to work with.

A local guy is selling Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower + Shadows Over Hammerhal + Cursed City (names slightly wrong I'm sure) with the minis put together for $300 and that feels like a hell of a good price. I can't justify $300 on dungeon crawls atm but it's certainly tempting.

That is a hell of a deal. I still wouldn't do it, but it's a hell of a deal.

Successfully resisted the urge to back the WALKING DEAD RPG on Kickstarter. I don't care about TWD per se, but the publisher (Free League) is hands down my favorite in the RPG space right now. The game looks like a combination of hexcrawls plus basebuilding (done to amazing effect in Mutant: Year Zero) plus character-centric mechanics for drama, betrayals, sacrifice, and screwage. It uses the stress dice mechanic from their ALIENS RPG, where a little bit of stress helps you, but a lot of stress makes it increasingly likely that you'll flip out and crack under pressure.

The problem, I think, is that

- (a) the Walking Dead license is a net negative for me at this point. I liked the series at first, but it got increasingly tedious and stupid and cruel for the sake of cruelty.

- (b) zombies in general are played out.

- (c) I already have ALIENS for the core mechanics, and MYZ for the base-building, and Twilight: 2000 4e if I need a bunch of stats for modern weaponry. Not sure that whatever else TWD will provide will be worth it.

- (d) I already have the stellar ZOMBIE WORLD, which has the advantage of being a zero-prep, super portable game for one-shots. I feel pretty set for zombie RPGs; it can do base upgrades and longer campaigns if you want, but I generally think zombies (and horror generally) shine best in small doses, or maybe anthologies showing different aspects of the world.

Ah_Pook wrote: A local guy is selling Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower + Shadows Over Hammerhal + Cursed City (names slightly wrong I'm sure) with the minis put together for $300 and that feels like a hell of a good price. I can't justify $300 on dungeon crawls atm but it's certainly tempting.

I have all three games, and got plenty of play out of Silver Tower and Hammerhal. Cursed City did not benefit from review by any sort of editor, so the rule book has some layout problems. But it's still a good game, and offers a neat setting. If you plan to paint the minis, $300 is a bargain. But I paid less than half that for all three games, because I picked up stripped copies (no minis) on eBay. I swiped art from the GW site and from the other components so I could paste them on wooden discs that I use instead of minis.

I will try to resist all the purchases for the rest of this year. A DIY floor project took a bad turn when I thought to get the old floor tiles tested for asbestos. So I just spent $4,100 to get all of the tiles removed, along with the asbestos-laden adhesive that attached the tiles to the subfloor. The next stage will be to get a carpenter to deal with subfloor issues that prompted this project, and then I will finally get to do some DIY at the end when I lay down new vinyl floor sheeting or tiles.

That sounds like the world's most expensive vinyl floor. I have been really impressed with fake wood vinyl flooring that you lay down in strips. It's surprisingly lifelike and easier to install than laminate.

I am resisting buying Blood Rage because the price went up and because several of you have talked me down.