Here’s another one, professionally voice acted for maximum effect.

Extremely underrated game, even after it received popular sequels. I’m shocked nobody talks about the original Witcher game. I played it way after it was released in around 2017 and found it refreshing, like a slightly more modern classic RPG with actual classic game design, plus a few quirks (combat stances and so on).

The enhanced edition looks perfectly fine. I think I’ve hit the stage in my life where I care more about graphics looking cohesive and how the art style serves the game’s vibe than I care about garish post-processing and needlessly complex models and textures.

TW1, visually, has a sort of dreamy fantastical blandness with bursts of really cool visual interest. Isn’t that enough? Doesn’t that serve the concept of a video game well?

Once every few months I remember that there’s virtually no chance my name and information aren’t in these databases, especially now that my country has gone through a recent war phase. Even if I didn’t sign up to Instagram and Facebook when I was a teenager, my family, friends, and whole neighborhood use unscrupulous online services that can be used to map out communities like that. I live far from the border with Palestine but let’s not pretend that makes a difference.

I’m now thinking of that classic post from the old site that shows someone’s painstakingly cursive-written note of the entire text of a bluescreen (the old bluescreen with a lot of characters on screen) for tech support.

And thinking of a slightly more tech inclined grandma who doesn’t quite get all of it having a problem with a torrent and just reading the infohash/magnet link to the ISP’s support call center.

Punchline Situation is Diabolical

@SomeDude • 8 hours ago

2.8M Views

Been thinking of getting a used Switch Mini exclusively to solder in a chip and use it as a nice emulation handheld. As long as it doesn’t rat itself out over Bluetooth or something to its older brother gathering dust behind the tv (which has never been touched by the light of piracy), I should still be good I guess.

It’s unfortunate, but what I’m actually worried about is that world where different devices will report on each other.

My favorite is the one of him uh hanging out with his friend Mussolini but I’m not sure .world is willing to host that one lol

I think the Raspberry Pi 4 -> Pi 5 is a very clear demonstration of this.

The power requirements went way up, and therefore the needed cooling, after years of the 1->2->3->4 being pretty similar. And most importantly, the prices for those were similar (35 USD MSRP I think, or usually around 60 USD here). The new one is much more expensive than that and that hasn’t gone down without controversy.

Maybe consoles are more visible to most people but the different versions of Pis are much more apples to apples and are designed to be drop-in upgrades.

I think I’ll still be using Pi 4s for a long time personally.

Huh. The image was very weird to me, but I’ve played some version of this as a kid. Team one makes this structure against a wall, team two send people to jump and crawl forward, the goal being to break the “bridge”. I can’t even remember what we fucking called this game, this was in Lebanon in the late aughts/early tens.

There’s something about how most teenage boys are wired that made it feel exceptionally badass when your team was on the bottom and you didn’t crumple when it was the turn of one of the large gentlemen on the other team to jump.

These were no less atrocious than current Wojak format comics.

FWIW I liked that people scribbled out their shitty ideas, often with zero artfulness in MS Paint, giving it just enough effort to get the idea across. I’m seeing a lot of lazy AI images being passed around using the Twitter image generator and it’s like there’s no threshold for something to actually be funny before being posted.

I don’t see the humor in it anymore. Whenever it comes to even admitting the crimes happening to/in Palestine, it’s always decent people getting the entire book thrown at them, while others who actually do something evil get off scott free.

You can’t just ask for accountability for crimes. You have to kiss the ring and you have to be made an example of. What we are seeing with the response to student action is actually unprecedented and it’s genuinely unhinged. And it’s not just the US, it’s most of Europe too.

It’s not enough that our brothers and sisters in Palestine are getting rounded up and massacred. You have to support it with every fiber of your being or you’re a terrorist. After planing my whole life to move to the West I’m now genuinely scared I’ll be jailed for thought crime if it keeps getting crazier.

It’s because the latest Reddit refugee wave have been exposed to uncensored news for more than five days, breaking a personal best.

When one side unironically complains that the other has kidnapped a soldier from his tank… We’ve been conditioned to ignore atrocities I think, as humans, because those of us who survive still have to live. And further out, people have no sympathy for people they’ve never been shown are people too. But the tank soldier kidnapping thing is just making fun of their own sympathizers to their face. I’m sure there’s a kind of person who picks up on these things and goes from being a “reasonable” “centrist” to looking at both sides and understanding what they’re really looking at. It’s really not complicated

Proud of you, new joiners, I see you.

I learned it maybe this week and I’m now upset that I can’t remember from where.

Edit: I have bikeshedded my way into finding where I heard it instead of doing something else. It’s this Zack Freedman video, and here’s a transcript screenshot.

On one hand, nice to have my country mentioned in a context where we’re not being warcrimed, on the other, I’m somewhat disappointed that our government actually lifted a finger in the investigation of a foreign intellectual property case.

Gregorz Brzeczyszczykiewicz would like a word

I thought about that as I was writing but it would be a little contrived to a general audience, maybe.

I’ve commented about this link before. The gym bro thing is what made me wrap my mind around some things myself.

Honestly that could actually be interesting. Would probably be able to discuss some nuances and make the mainstream a bit more comfortable with some currently uncomfortable conversations. People can remember complicated things if they’re invested in the narrative.

I’m a cis-het potato. If any of this sounds insensitive, I can fix it:

Guy who doesn’t meet the stereotype of a “drug guy” has to cook up drugs to make ends meet. <Narrative device> makes him start making <common drug> for <uncontroversial illness>, which turns out to also be used by <some queer people> for <hormoney things>. At first he sees them as nothing more than the users he was profiting from in an hour of desperation, people who twist their sad lives around acquiring and consuming a substance, but over time as he gets further down this path he begins to understand them in a way that he (and most people) has never had to. “Upstanding-man-who-is-a-secret-chemical-man ally” can go in so many directions.

With all its many many faults, I remember seeing Dallas Buyers Club as a judgmental kid, and it was successfully able to split “queer identity” from “sexual perversion” for me. I think this understanding was beginning to spread before a tipping point in the past decade. Personally I think people saw a lot of (Western) companies really go all in on rainbow marketing, going directly from “queer identities exist” to “these are being celebrated openly” without the critical middle “this isn’t a sex thing”.

If you think it’s bad in the US or Europe (and it’s not always great, it’s not a competition) let me assure you the heightened negative attention has also made people who were able to be themselves under the radar here in the Middle East face more bullshit. The average person around me has gone from “This person gives me the ick but it has no effect on my life really, just stay away from me and my kids, it’s between them and God” to “This person should be fixed immediately before they shove their perversion down everyone’s throats.” The former is abysmal, but at that point they weren’t really seen as an active, growing threat. Unfortunately it’s not just “this isn’t a sex thing” that’s missing here, historically most people have thought “queer” = “perversion” = “pedophilia”, and this was fading slowly before being supercharged by all this torrent of negative attention.

One day I’ll get around to playing Nomifactory CE. I’ve somehow played the base one twice over the past five years.

I’ve been so alienated from friends playing the most popular game on the planet in multiplayer because I can’t play Vanilla for shit. Not since 1.2.5 probably.

I’ll play no Minecraft for two years and then immediately nolife a modpack for two months.

Good shit. The best value game I have ever bought, no question about it.

I’ve always been curious about this stuff and I know I need to make some effort soon, ever since we moved our home recordings from VHS to DVD some 15-20 years ago.

My understanding is that SSDs are also likely to lose data when unpowered for a long time, which is why they haven’t been recommended to me for external backup drives.

“Spinning rust” is much cheaper than I thought, even if I have to pay 200$ in shipping to get a bunch of massive used server drives here. And it seems to not have that problem, with the downside of either needing to be completely powered off or wasting a bit of power when it’s not active. I’m still not sure where the HDD parking technology is at.

Of course ripping all the physical media would also be nice. A lot of the original discs I have (most of my discs are straight shitty copies with one file, yay third world) have things like special features and multiple audio tracks, things like that. I wonder how those should be organized.

It’s so ubiquitous that for about a second I thought wait what I thought that was the good one until I remembered that I’ve been using qBittorrent for a decade.

For a time, it just was the client.