Believe me, it’s possible to divorce god too.

Staaaaaaahp

Yeah, 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?

One could make a community named “Anon Posting” or something, lock it so only a mod can post, and then make the sole mod a bot that would post anything it got via DM (probably after automoding, rate limiting, etc) to said community.

I do think it’s a good idea for the bot to keep a log in case it gets abused for sufficiently evil purposes. One could add some extra functionality to the bot that would give identifying information about the poster to instance admins on demand (via DM), but I think instance admins would have pretty easy access to all DMs made to the bot, along with identifying information anyway. (Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong on that.)

Also, the bot could totally delete its logs and with them the identities of all posters after a while. Maybe a month?

And, of course, this wouldn’t be ironclad anonymity. But it would keep identities secret from anyone but the bot maintainer and instance admins.

Yeah, sounds like a pretty cool concept. Not volunteering to write such a bot (at least any time soon) or anything, but I support it.

Roughly 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.)

It’s a vibe.

Disney is no stranger to hypocracy of that sort. Look at them making their billions off of the public domain (Snow White, Cinderella, Aladin, The Little Mermaid, need I go on?) while lobbying heavily for longer copyright terms to keep works they made from being similarly adapted.

Thank you.

Makes note in game master secret ideas list

I haven’t watched the video yet, but just because it’s relevant to the topic…

I used to stream to Twitch with just ffmpeg. No OBS or anything.

I mostly did speedruns, and I needed a timer, so I wrote my own. I had ffmpeg read the current time to display from a file in /tmp/ and had a Go program that would write to that file at the same rate as the framerate at which I was streaming. Worked really well, actually.

I also made some videos (mostly tutorials for pulling off certain glitches in The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild) and put them on YouTube. I edited those entirely with ffmpeg and a pretty simple Bash script.

I’m definitely not going to claim they were what you might generally recognize as “well-edited” videos, but they did the job. And I definitely wasn’t really looking to “make it big” on YouTube or anything, so I wasn’t looking to polish my videos.

Here is one of my videos for reference. And here is a clip of a VOD from one of my streams that demonstrates the timer I mentioned.

Elon’s pet LLM chat bot. The one that he recently tweaked temporarily(?) to spread South African “white genocide” conspiracy theories on Twitter because… well because what else would you expect Elon to spend his time doing?

Also, I’d really like to know who made the art.

I choose to believe the person on the other end of that text conversation fired up Gimp and made the image when they got the request for “funny shit”.

Then make the “one true frontpage” for Lemmy or whatever (implement ActivityPub, maybe borrowing some code from the Lemmy codebase itself, or kindof making a fork of Lemmy), and if it’s good, it’ll be used. If not, it won’t.

But then, it might well fall victim to this phenomenon:

Lemmy has lots of competing “front pages.” How will one more change anything? A more generic domain name or something?

as it gets better

Bold assumption.

ChatGPT

Arm yourself with knowledge

Bruh

Reddit: “Nobody gets to secretly experiment on Reddit users with AI-generated comments but us!”

Yeah, it seems like the U.S. 2nd federal circuit ruled in 2001 in Universal City Studios v. Corley that the DeCSS algorithm itself could not be “trafficked in” without running afoul of the DMCA’s anti-trafficking measures. Not just the DVD private keys. (Which I guess DeCSS doesn’t strictly need in order to remove DVD DRM? I’m not sure I fully understand exactly how DeCSS works. But anyway.)

Let’s be real. Reddit has had AI integration for a good while now.