It’s not exactly indie, but on Linux I can’t play Fortnite, so anime knockoff Fate Trigger has been fun to try out. It uses hero shooter abilities, and has a very fast time to kill, while also being third-person, which I suppose is a combination of factors we don’t see much (I guess maybe it’s close to PUBG, but I’ve never played that. One differentiator there is the characters being colorful, and environments low-poly, which makes people easy to spot).

I played Ground Zero on the last nextfest. It’s fun, but hard as far as survival horror goes. It has unique mechanics for shooting and for defending that give a lot of skill expression, but it means if you’re not using them well you may become starved for ammo.

Pragmata, from Capcom, also seems to have some unique shooting mechanics, but you go against slightly slower, more digestible enemies. I enjoyed the demo, short as it was.

Far Far West was fun, but given that it competes in the same spheres as games like Helldivers, it’s a little hard to recommend against more established games.

While I am pessimistic about this Friday, I also try to translate it into meaningful action.

I’ve definitely severely dropped how much “consumerist” spending I go with across the year. This includes lots of different kinds of common luxuries, and instead making use of farmer’s markets and libraries for food and entertainment. From what I have heard on a few anecdotes, the drop in spending around Christmas was significant to retailers, and should hopefully contribute to pessimism towards fascist ideology.

Funny enough, a lot of that ends up feeling similar with the move to Linux (and its many distros). It got a very good shift because of Microsoft voluntarily deciding “This OS will be horrible for everyone now.” but Reddit hasn’t had anything so egregious. Even Linux has a few issues with content/apps from not having enough contributors.

I recently had a long opinion post I made get downvoted. What upset me wasn’t that someone disagreed with me, it was that they didn’t take the time to explain their own contradicting position, because I wanted to figure out if I had something to learn there.

I won’t really fight anyone suggesting “Yarr-harr” approaches, but if you’re just looking for something to watch and legality becomes a hurdle as you describe: Libraries offer a huge backlog of stuff (watched some old Disney stuff I’d targeted, without sending the mouse money) as well as some digital services. It should be pretty easy to rip the DVDs they have on offer too.

I’ve been using CachyOS and impressed by the array of available software, and it was only in the back of my mind, the thought; “Wow, so much of this is so refined and polished. I wonder who has motive to maintain it?”

Joke’s on me, the motive is hardly there - and it’s a shitty time for it with Windows announcing that 10 is the last version and that there are no plans for a new one.

I’m glad Valve has a profit motive towards open source right now, but especially in a world where fewer people can donate at random, I really hoped that the model wasn’t specifically built to rely just on tip jars.

The problem is, I feel like more recent MBA lessons tell people that the “rising tide that lifts all ships” is a business death sentence, for reasons unexplained. Many of them now would rather sink the whole ocean if they believe that their business will sink a little bit less.

I have so many causes on my mind that all need money; some for helping starving children, others for supporting sane politics, GoFundMes for people affected by a warped healthcare system; the request you’re making very much makes sense, but it’s so hard to put it above so many of the other critical needs for donations, when the image of an open source worker is someone who can, and often does, get paid working for a large company.

I’m sure many people could point to hundreds of dangers around open-source programs relying on government funding. Yet, I can’t argue that it seems to be a necessity.

I think it’s fine to use it as a speculation tool if you are living there. If not, then it should be a massive tax liability. Pressure people buying empty homes to either rent them to someone for cheap, live in them, or sell them.

So, as with many other people. this stuff is certainly pushing me into Linux.

That said, is there no chance of the EU restarting their probes towards them with all the dark patterns they’ve been using to push people into Edge?

The world and the internet are so low on trust, I kind of wish there was some entity we trusted.

Some website where you could upload a photo, and people would actually know for sure that all the site is going to do is compare the photo to an ID, verify you’re over a certain age, and send a simple boolean “Yes” to the website that wanted to know if you were over-age. Or, to somehow know that your account is human and not a duplicate.

We could do a lot with that, but as it stands, no person or entity can ever really be trusted with that kind of data; I think most wouldn’t even trust the same governments that issue those IDs.

We definitely see a gross incentive where companies don’t want people to become citizens because it allows their labor to be cheaper.

I think back in Trump’s first term, he had one policy that I genuinely agreed with - that the H1B Visa program should have a very high minimum salary to it, returning it to its intended purpose of being used for rare, high-talent specialized positions. As it stands, HR will just invent overly specific criteria so that they can deny local citizens jobs, claim they can’t find anyone, and then hire cheap H1Bs - and threaten them with deportation anytime they complain.

Needless to say, because it was a good idea and anti-corp, Trump dropped it almost immediately.

Hollywood and the anime industry have done much the same - helping people around the world normalize the feeling of living in their home societies.

I’m from the bike/pedestrian-friendly community of /fuckcars. It’s a far whiter immigrant mentality, but I imagine trends like that wouldn’t have occurred if not for Dutch immigrants; or even American immigrants visiting the Netherlands, most specifically the Not Just Bikes channel.

I’m imagining something like being able to go to a lawyer, or journalist’s office - somewhere they’d have established notaries, and show them a driver’s license or other notable documentation. They wouldn’t be granted rights to record that information permanently, but would grant a cryptographic signature sourced from their office to express that their office has seen them.

This would rely on professional trust - that the people you show your info to will not record it; and, that if they for some reason have to, they won’t turn it over to warrants. By the same token, they’d be trusted that they’re not inventing people from thin air.

You’re right that someone engaging online long enough could be exposed. That would then rely on any effective “Right to be forgotten” laws to erase unnecessary data.

This is the one thing I hoped for out of crypto/blockchain.

You, commenter, don’t need to know that I’m “Brian Brianson, a citizen living at 123 Abenue Avenue”. But, it’s good to know that the person commenting is a real person who has been seen and verified by someone, as a simple true/false flag. If there were good ways of verifying basic conditions of people you interact with online, without exposing personal details, then it could curb botnet opinionation as well as be useful for a lot of things.

I have heard that Obama supports breathing.

I really want a better formalized framework for argument/discussion of a topic that either participant can feel safe in. Currently, we have courtrooms, our old schools have Debate Clubs, but I’d want something far easier to pick up on that allows for time to research/validate discussion points.

Especially since far-right groups have been falling for Musk’s same bullshit in Europe.

There’s been reports that Germany’s AFD party fell out of favor after their news got to see how Trump played out. I seriously hope that ends up being true in their next election.