Random Dent

Yeah my Kobo is great. Plays nicely with Calibre and DeDRM, reads pretty much every eBook format, and doesn’t seem to be sketchy about privacy as far as I can tell.

Well, 50% of young people asked were willing to admit to their piracy lol

Disco Elysium is 90% off. $54.49 $4.54 (that’s in Canadian, not sure about the US price exactly.)

I honestly couldn’t even tell you what it’s about, but it’s one of my favourite games ever. You can die from reading a book that’s too sad and if you do it right, you can smell communism.

A game that’s like a combination of all the “…Simulator” type games like Car Mechanic Simulator, PC Building Simulator, House Flipper and so on, where you can scavenge parts and build anything in your base. Build a base & decorate it from scratch, build & repair vehicles, build electronic stuff like PCs and so on. I always thought each of those games felt like kind of like a fun sub-game for a larger overarching thing.

It’s funny how as soon as two competing projects (Life By You and Paralives) start to get closer to release they suddenly care about improving stuff they’ve ignored for 10 years lol

Yeah I had the same experience. Tried it out, found it way too fiddly to set up, had to pay for stuff at every turn (and managing a bunch of subscriptions is a big part of why I hate using streaming platforms in the first place) and I really didn’t find it to be worth it just to cover the tiny fraction of things I can’t find on torrents (and which TBH I didn’t even find there anyway.) Went back to torrents as it’s like 2 clicks to download something and it covers 95% of what I need anyway.

To be fair, it’s entirely possible that I was just doing it wrong and not getting optimal results, but also I don’t want to start over and pay for a bunch of other stuff to find out.

Unlimited scams and Jesus stuff for everyone!

Or… hear me out… we use AI to make social media even more insufferable than it was before.

Hmm, I have a soldering iron and a 3D printer. You might be right. Thanks for the link!

I had a go on a VR helmet and thought it was kind of fun, but at the moment the options seem to be an affordable one that’s infested with Facebook nonsense, or the Valve/Apple ones which are presumably less intrusive but cost a fortune. So I’m fine to just do without until someone figures out how to do it in a cheap, open-source kind of way, like the raspberry pi of VR helmets.

That might not even be possible, but in that case I’m also fine to just do without TBH.

Reddit has started getting a bit fucky with VPNs lately so maybe that’s the cause? I mean you could obviously go there without the VPN on, but also fuck them lol.

As much as I don’t like recommending people go to reddit, tbh r/panelshow and r/tv_bunny tend to cover most of it pretty well, and quickly too. TV Bunny has been a good source for old British sitcoms like Bottom and Blackadder as well.

I do worry about what might happen when he gets too old/decides to step down though.

If Microsoft did somehow end up buying them I might have to just nope out of gaming altogether. Or just take to the high seas I guess.

I think it would depend on how confident I am that I’d be able to beat the kidnappers.

If it’s like inept comedy movie kidnappers and I feel like I’m on my way to deliver an ass kicking, then yes I’d play pump-up music.

If it’s scary KGB/ISIS kidnappers and I’m probably on my way to perform a well-intentioned yet ultimately futile gesture where I’ll likely get killed before I even get through the door, then probably no tunes for that one.

Also from what I’ve been reading, it sounds like nobody knows how their measuring system works, they just kind of tell you how many installs you had and you have to take their word for it.

It’s always fun for revenge stories too!

I had one game in I think Civ V where Dido was just being an asshole to me the entire game, and in the sort of mid-late game she did her big move and invaded. I lost maybe 3 cities, then the defenses started to hold and I pushed back. Took my cities back and then just kept going, and absolutely refused all offers on peace (which were becoming increasingly elaborate.) Even when every other civilization started denouncing me as a warmonger even though I didn’t start it, I kept going. Eventually got her down to two cities. I took the one closest to me, renamed it to Fart City, then offered it back to her in exchange for peace which she gladly took.

Then I waited a few turns until it had cooled off, then declared war on her again. This time I took the city on the other side, leaving her with Fart City and about three workable tiles, completely surrounded within my territory. I stayed at war for the entire rest of the game, with troops completely surrounding her. Every time she built an improvement I instantly pillaged it, ever worker was instantly captured, every troop immediately blasted. She just got to live out the next thousand years or so in squalor in Fart City, while every other country denounced me for my crimes lol.

I don’t put it on my router because there are certain things it would kind of mess with (for example: Netflix on the TV would get all weird and restrict content if it goes through a VPN, I assume it’d slow down online gaming on the Playstation and I don’t really care if that’s anonymous or not and so on.) I could probably split tunnel that stuff, but for me it’s just easier to run it locally on the things I think need it (my laptop, phone etc.) than figure all that out.

That’s just me though, it really all depends on your preferences/threat model I guess.

Yeah I was gonna say, there’s nothing wrong with the technology itself per se, just the way it’s being used/exploited.

The fact that things like Netflix/Uber/AirBnB are useful and good value when they first come out and then turn to shit later shows that they can work and be successful, they just get greedy and go sideways.

Bit of a weird thought, but I wonder also if they see Mozilla as a sort of controlled opposition too? As in, keep Firefox around so they don’t get in trouble over antitrust or something like that?