regalia

Something like Proton Cloud, or a self hosted Nextcloud instance. If it's encrypted, it's nobody's business.

To be fair, a pity system should definitely be a thing if there's any sort of gamba. That way there's at least a hard limit on what you can waste your money on until it's guaranteed. I at least find GI characters not to be too predatory, you mostly pull them for fun. In fact some of the best characters are the starting 4 stars lol, and you pull cuz you like the character a lot. They really develop the characters a lot, and if you've seen any comic cons or anime conventions, you'll see an insane amount of Genshin cosplays cuz they suck you in by really loving the characters. The gameplay is honestly so easy you absolutely don't need a good character, and it's actually incredibly balanced. The earliest characters released are actually still S tier because they fucked up the balance a bit with them so the new characters are still good but more niche focused, so everything is still relevant.

The only hard content is what's called the spiral abyss, which is a completely optional dungeon that rotates every 2 weeks and 100% clearing it gives you like 5 free gacha rolls, so people really just use it to bench mark characters since nothing else in the game is remotely challenging, nor is there any pvp aspect or anything.

But yeah, also Gacha and live service games tend to be a drug, once they have you hooked it's hard to quit. Sunk cost fallacy is real hard to overcome in gacha games.

Probably Linux. It took me a couple of attempts, but at a certain point I got more motivated to stick with it and research how to fix problems instead of quitting it. That gave me a lot of general Linux knowledge to where it's much comfier now.

Nah last few years have released some of the best games of all time. Just this year alone we got TOTK and Baulders Gate 3. Gaming is in really good shape right now.

he just ate something super sour

Yeah it's a legitimately a really good game and still has a huge amount of permanent content, but that's the nature of live service games. They need that constant engagement to survive. A game like Baulders gate, you buy it and the devs are paid regardless of how much or how little you play, not really the case with live service.

Oh and GI is gacha which isn't good either. But then they do cool stuff like make a really good card game in game that's completely free with zero paid stuff, and even hold irl tourneys with big prize pools.

How do I block this whole instance

That's dumb as hell and can be a simple phone case. You definitely don't need to design an entire phone around a gimmick of having a simple chain on the side.

That's not what fomo means. I have a bad case of FOMO right now with Genshin Impact. I genuinely like the game, but it forces me to login twice a day with the resin system (basically energy that accumulates over time), otherwise it caps and I lose progress. Also a lot of their content is in the form of limited time events. They do this for the obvious reason of it being extremely profitable. This is why you should be very cautious about getting into live service games.

it's actually a blue collar job where they do quite a bit of physical labor, at least the good ones. I have more respect for that then a lot of white collar jobs.

Start by changing your most important services to your new email, and set your gmail to forward everything to your new email. From then, sign up to new sites with your new email and change emails of old accounts if you have time, it's not a huge rush.

As long as you set up the email forwarding, you've done most of the important work right there.

You're paying to reserve some space in their cloud to store your encrypted bits. If you exchange money for that space, then you're entitled for it to be encrypted and private.