- 18 Posts
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1·5 days agoI mean, what do you think of Steve Martin? I don’t know about you, but I think he’s one wild and crazy guy.
3·6 days agoYeah, ok. I’ll concede Betterhelp too.
Firefox, Plex, and VPNs I can understand being surprised about. But the rest of them… I mean of course they were going to milk you for money. Was there ever a time when any of those didn’t?
You’re not wrong.
Definitely one of the scarier creatures in D&D, at least accounting for hit dice.
I kinda want to put it in a D&D campaign. Maybe an evil druid makes a magical device that births an army of evil treants or redcaps or something.
5·13 days agoRoughly in order of how much I enjoy them from most to least. (Not that the later ones are bad. Just that they’re more low-key.)
Mindustry is amazing, but as I mentioned above, really really addictive. (The commercial game it’s most often compared to is Factorio.)
Then there’s Shattered Pixel Dungeon. Amazing dungeon crawler.
Endless Sky is a great space mercantile sim.
Luanti is a Minecraft clone.
Unciv is a turn-based civilization development game.
And if you’re wanting to do emulation, there’s Lemuroid. Also, EasyRPG, an engine for playing RPG Maker games like Yume Nikki. Oh, FreeDoom is a great implementation of Doom for Android.
Those are the ones that’ll keep your attention for a good long time. There are tons of much simpler games that are still fun like Frozen Bubble and Hyper Rogue. And plenty of games that I haven’t really gotten into very much but that people really seem to like Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.
Man. There are a lot now that I’m listing them out. Lol.
Jesus. People get big mad about this stuff.
The problem isn’t mobile games, and it’s not console games, and it’s not PC games. It’s the profit motive and corporations and enshittification. And there’s plenty of that going on in games for mobile, console, and PC. (And, for that matter, TTRPGs. And it’s not like the 300 different collectors editions of Monopoly released every year aren’t enshittification at play.)
Addictive gotcha mechanics are shitty when they’re tied to microtransactions. Even when not tied to microtransactions, I think they can still be shitty depending on the specific circumstances, and it’s definitely wise to responsibly manage your (and/or your children’s) engagement to not cause other problems in your(/their) life. But is addictiveness in a video game inherently a bad thing? I don’t think so. All games cause dopamine squirts whether it’s Pong or a slot machine. That’s kinda the point of games. There are plenty of Open Source games out there that cause big addictive dopamine squirts. (Mindustry, anyone?) And such games aren’t made to milk whales. They’re made because someone wanted to create and play such a game.
Don’t be talking too much smack about shovelware! Low-quality games create their own vibes. Some are accidental masterpieces. Both of my favorite two YouTube gaming content creators do a lot of their content on really low-quality games. This series got me to buy Radiation Island and I had a great time playing it. And here is a great video on all the shitty official games based on the movie Avatar.
“Gaming is as much about socializing as playing” is an awesome outlook to have on gaming! Addictiveness in games can be… concerning. But sometimes particular games are the key by which your kid can be involved in peer group. I’m not saying that automatically trumps any downsides and you should let your kid spend $∞ on Fortnight skins or whatever. But I think probably in most cases a balancing act is superior to a hard “yes” or “no”.
I should probably specify that I’m admittedly an old fart who doesn’t know shit about mobile gaming. (The only mobile games I play are Open Source ones on F-Droid.) And the only modern console I have is a Switch, and I don’t have any plans to get one soon. I’ve played a lot of Breath of the Wild, though. And a fair amount of Tears of the Kingdom.
Some final thoughts:
- Open Source gaming is awesome.
- The way they’re doing anti-cheat on PC is fucked-up.
- But so is the way they lock down consoles and phones.
- Hack your games. Hack your consoles. (If you don’t hack it, you don’t own it.) Get your kids interested in hacking stuff.
- …responsibly, of course.
- Play games with your kids! (And not just the ones you want to play.)
I don’t know anything about Pokemon canon, but you know LoZ has bomb flowers, yeah? In some games there’s no such thing as a “bomb” that’s distinct from a bomb flower.
So, I’ve been using Arch Linux ARM on Raspberry Pis for some “desktop systems” as well as for a janky-ass NAS solution, but that project is kindof dying. They go many months in a row sometimes without any package updates. It’s wild. And when people ask WTF is going on and
offerbeg to be allowed to help in some way, the admins lock the thread.So, I’ve been looking to switch my Raspberry Pi’s to something that doesn’t depend so much on some “project” out there to be able to continue to use.
The main Gentoo project fully supports ARM. And even if it didn’t, it’d be a lot easier to use Gentoo without support than Arch.
Switching my main box (not a Raspberry Pi – it’s an x86_64 system) to Gentoo was basically for the purpose of trying out Gentoo again and evaluating whether I want to take the plunge and switch everything to Gentoo.
Aside from that, there’s SystemD which is yucky. (Yes, I know about Artix, but when last I tried it, it didn’t really feel “ready for prime time”. It depends a lot on the main Arch repos.)
Plus, I do kindof like the idea of “more control over my system(s)”. Configuring/compiling my own kernel (yes, you can do that on Arch, it’s much less “in the spirit of” Arch) to make it as minimal as possible and disable everything I don’t need. And of course USE flags are a plus if you want a light system.
Anyway, those are my main reasons.
Last time I remember getting shit for using it, I was streaming on Twitch and randomly forgot the word “cliff”. Heh.
The viewers (all two of them, lol) responded with "indubitibly"s and the “like a sir” rage faces. Lol.
That was probably… 3 years ago? I’m sure I’ve used it at least a few times since then, but I can’t remember a specific time aside from talking about the aforementioned incident.
Me too!
I used Gentoo almost exlusively from like 2003 to maybe 2012 or 2013. I switched to Arch about then. But quite recently I made the switch back to Gentoo on my primary box and I’m happy I did.
Only thing I still need to do to really make it long-term sustainable for my particular use is to set up a build server on my network. My “primary box” is in the room where I sleep and I need it dark and quiet when I’m sleeping. Can’t have MOBO color-shifting LEDs and fan sounds overnight. And I can’t compile something like Chromium in less than the 15-to-16-ish hours I’m awake in a given day. (And I’d prefer to compile it myself rather than using a binary package.) Hence the need for a build server.
I’m the sort of weirdo who uses all kinds of stilted vocabulary in not-terribly-formal situation. Just a few words that I use regularly that I remember getting shit for using:
- Ostensibly
- Indeed
- Escarpment
- Thrice
I do use “chagrin” not infrequently. I can’t think of a time when I’ve used the word “reify”, but it feels like the sort of word I’d use.
The mention of “cold” makes me think you’re thinking they were prepared food of some sort or at least “wet”. These were shelf-stable, individually-wrapped “candies” (I think the note on the gift box even referred to them as “candies”) that came in a larger, plastic bag with art and text printed on it. Like you might think of bags of, say, these. Except they were a dried meat product, not losenges or caramels or whatever. And they weren’t “sweet” the way you think of candy. They tasted like you might imagine something dipped in perfume (and then dried) might taste. One more detail: I remember them being drier than any jerkey I’d ever eaten. They simply didn’t have enough moisture in them to have any heat conductivity to speak of. (Asking if they were cold is like asking if room-temperature Rice Crispies dry and straight from the box are “cold”.)
I don’t remember it being fishy or cube-shaped. If I had to guess the meat, I’d guess beef or pork. And the shape was roughly spherical, but kindof… lumpy? It looked like it had been maybe torn off of a larger chunk of meat and then formed a bit.
Very likely! What I had was formed and individually wrapped in little wrappers like you might expect Werther’s caramels to come in, bu the texture does sound similar to that. Neat!
At my place of work, one project we worked on involved a lot of contractors from a place based in China. (The project was an absolute cluster-fuck all the way from soup to nuts, but that’s a story for another day.) When the project concluded, they sent our office a thank-you gift box of various Chinese snacks.
One of the snacks was a… dried… meat… “candy”… I guess? The taste wasn’t “sweet” so much. It tasted like it had been dipped in perfume. And the texture of the meat was hard to describe. Not chewy like jerky, and it didn’t have that highly-processed Slim Jim sort of texture to it. Maybe it was sortof freeze-dried or something? I also couldn’t identify what animal the meat might have come from. (And I couldn’t read the text on the packaging.)
I’m not sure whether it was just an acquired taste or rather a practical joke by the folks at the Chinese company. Lol.
I upvoted this before I saw what community it was in. Now I wish I could upvote twice.
For me, early 2000s contemporary Christian music.
I wasn’t allowed to listen to secular music. So I made a lot of emotional connections to contemporary Christian music. Which is pretty cringe in retrospect. Whenever I’m reminded of it, I have a pretty conflicted set of emotions about it.
I usually only listen to that music that I listened to in my early teens when I feel like wallowing in self pity. But I can’t deny that I feel extremely nostalgic about it. It makes me wish I would have made those same emotional connections to music that wasn’t associated with really disturbing fundamentalist Christian ideologies and propaganda.