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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)DU
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2 yr. ago

  • Imagine if JK Rowling had even a 1/1000th the artistry and intuitive empathy Pratchett had for the world, there would be millions upon millions of people out there with a life long love of a series who didn’t feel betrayed and forced to make a choice between being part of a community that textually hates them or continuing to love their childhood nostalgia.

    <3 trans people <3 granny weatherwax and I really wanna get drunk with nanny og.

  • I have been espousing its merits so much that I surely look like a shill but check out Motor Town as a low poly open world driving game that centers on supply chains of deliveries and basically GTA side job driving quests fleshed out to an entire genre with pizza delivery on mopeds, box vans delivering packages, garbage trucks, taxi drivers delivering urgent passengers as fast as possible, tow truck jobs and tractor trailer jobs etc….

    The physics and driving feel are superb (very realistic unlike GTA V not that GTA V’s driving isn’t a blast), and there is a diversity of vehicles from a wide variety of sports cars to pretty much any type of work vehicle you can think of. You can tweak, tune and engine swap to turn basically any of them into a fire breathing metal box that transports you as fast as possible to utter ruin. You can play multiplayer collaborating with others on deliveries or just play singleplayer.

    It’s early access but it’s got a demo so check it out! If you are anything like me you will throw your fists in the air and angrily shout why nobody has made a game like this for you before lol when you try it. I know it doesn’t look like a racing game but you can absolutely play everything in the game except bus driving like a racing game (and you can just have AI do the bus driving if you want to do bus stuff).

    Tooling along in a semi with a trailer at 80mph on a windy country road and plowing cars out of the way like soccer balls for fun has never felt so good in a video game.

    https://store.steampowered.com/app/1369670/Motor_Town_Behind_The_Wheel/

  • It’s 2024 can we stop pretending headlines like these are some kind of potential indicator of good rather than just putting pins in a map for the sake of records where billion dollar companies ravage mile wide swathes through forests of smaller functional companies and destroy everything good about them?

    Yes I know in this particular case Epic is already a dysfunctional massive trashfire but this will just accelerate the enshittification into more of a drag race.

  • Also Gaza is NOT a war while Ukraine is, Gaza is a genocide.

    In Ukraine organized military forces clash over territory with both sides fielding artillery, tanks, aircraft and other sophisticated military systems. Russia is seeking to control Ukraine and annex most of it, but it literally has to roll tanks all the way through contested territory to do this.

    Israel already controls and surrounds all of Gaza, it controls all administrative and infrastructural aspects of Gaza so much so that Israel was able to build a wall straight through the heart of Gaza just to fuck with Palestinians. There is no ground war in Gaza with infantry divisions fighting over territory, there is just Israel repeatedly dropping an absolutely absurd amount of bombs (dropping in several weeks on the tiny footprint of Gaza what the bomb happy US only managed to drop in a year in the Iraq War) on a civilian population that has no means to leave even if they wanted to.

    You don’t need to fight a war when you can just shut the water, lights and internet off to an entire city, you can shutter the hospitals with a lift of a finger. If there was a war, it was over long ago and what people call a “war” now is mere symbolic violent resistance meant to attract the attention of someone powerful enough to help (or stop). The thing that should make every one of us want to scream is the only problems the Israeli government sees with cut off water and let ‘em starve solution is that 1. it doesn’t kill Palestinians fast enough to sweep under the rug out of international scrutiny and 2. it doesn’t magically bulldoze the houses of the Palestinians killed and erased like a bomb does all in one go.

    Hamas is not a terrorist organization because it chose to be one instead of a traditional army, it is a terrorist organization because a war with large armies is simply impossible for Hamas to even begin to fight against the combined military industrial complex of the U.S. and Israel. I say “begin” specifically because in order to fight a war with a military you have to first bring together all your soldiers and the minute Hamas did that Israel would carpet bomb the map square of that gathering place out of existence. War over before it even started.

    I am not defending Hamas (I am so tired of saying this, of course they are awful) but simply pointing out Israel’s main justification for their genocide is that Hamas chooses to be a terrorist organization because they are evil and not because it is an organization of people who feel armed resistance is necessary (a sentiment Israeli’s should understand) and terrorism is literally the only armed resistance option on the table. It’s not like Hamas makes tunnels because they love digging and just don’t feel like fielding columns upon columns of 120mm main battle tanks they have in storage…

    What is happening in Gaza is collective punishment for the actions of a few, it is genocide, it is horrific slaughter and land theft, it is a disgusting rightwing fantasy of violence but It is NOT a war that makes the IDF look way too honorable here. Gaza is what happens after a war ends and one side has complete power over the other. It is closer to soldiers raping and pillaging a civilian population en masse in the wake of an invasion than a war.

  • food for thought, feel free to totally toss away and ignore

    Personally I don't recommend finding some random simple notes app because you will likely use it for awhile, run up into a limitation and eventually abandon it.

    I recommend you invest your time in a software or system that can grow and shrink with the amount of spoons/degree of hyperfocus you have to spare on the system. It should be brutally simple to open a note and start writing and not make you feel like haphazardly tossing a couple of bullet points onto a page is using the tool wrong (like a barely used planner with weeks and weeks of empty days staring you down with shame).

    On the other hand ideally it should be capable of expanding along any direction your mind wants to go without shackling you to a system that won't satisfy whatever ridiculous and capricious bullshit system you come up with whenever your hyperfocus-eye-of-sauron turns for a brief but glorious hot second onto the topic of organizing yourself. Your tool needs to be able to instantaneously fold up from a gargantuan all encompassing idea processing machine to a glorified digital post it note in the snap of a finger, otherwise if you are like me than you will just abandon the byzantine complexity of it whenever you go through an "organizational winter" (and you will never stick with a more limited tool in the first place).

    I also recommend you to try to find a tool that is open source, organizational tools are too long lived and vital to be entrusted in the whims of whatever company gobbles up the company that originally made your organizational app of choice.... that maybe you accidentally balanced your ability to live a functional life on somehow when you weren't paying attention....

    I recommend:

    Joplin https://joplinapp.org/

    Logseq https://logseq.com/

    I recommend these tools because you can trust that you can develop a long term relationship with them (HABITS), that you can have control over the details of so you can tweak something to fit your needs if you really need to (if you are like me and hate organizing yourself, the smallest detail in an app can ruin it like a menu bar that I can't get out of the way and hide when I am focusing) and that your system and associated habits will never be lost, locked up in a proprietary data format/app that becomes abandoned when the company goes out of business. Learn to use Joplin or Logseq as a dumb simple notetaking app, keep your use of it extremely straightforward and simple and then as the years go by if you feel like it, learn little by little how broader uses of the tools are possible and let them slot naturally into your life.

    That is just my advice though!

    (edit I use emacs org-mode which is like these but I wouldn't call it simple necessarily, but I wouldn't hesitate to use joplin or logseq as an alternative they are both mature tools with deep functionality that also let you use them like a simple dumb notepad to jot ideas down in)

  • Do better

    I mean I have thought about it but honestly my sex life with my wife is totally dead and passionless and the only thing that gets me going anymore is being condescending towards progressives who have the nerve to try to change the world for better.

    I don’t mean to be such a wet blanket, but you have to understand I don’t have anything else. Plus if I admitted progressives were right that would put my entire world view into question and honestly I am too old to be an evolving person with views that change and grow. Why do I, ME, have to KEEP changing my views, can’t the world just settle on a status quo and just keep it that way? It stresses me out and I don’t think minorities are thinking about that stress when they push for progressive societal change that benefits all.

    In the same way that you would find it hard to jump into a cold lake, a world where other people are treated as equal to white men (me) is like jumping into a cold lake. You can judge me for endorsing structural violence and racism but the water is just so cold and no one cares about my feelings. I’m not used to having feelings, I am a man stranded in a terrifying and strange landscape and I need desperate people fighting for their lives and their loved one’s lives to just slowwww down and be more patient while I tip toe in.

    I am not racist but

  • Tell that to metafilter, or hackernews? Or a multitude of other smaller niche communities that chug along perfectly happy (Yes there are less now than there used to be but that is mainly because of the insanely aggressive way Discord is being pushed on communities all over the internet and destroying their foundations). Sometimes a nice little garden with a wall to help transport you away from the hustle and bustle of life is exactly what you need.

    We shouldn’t aim to build the Fediverse into a walled garden but there is nothing wrong with small walled gardens interspersed along the periphery of the Fediverse. It is a good thing. Let them be their own place!

  • I think the reason younger people are upset at boomers about this isn’t that their generation caused it directly as a generation of people, it is that (at least in the US) the general complete lack of awareness about how austerity, deregulation of everything and trickle down economics is utter nonsense coupled with a deep distrust of any kind of unions that in general defines the (US at least) boomer generation created a huge space for corporations to eat away at the foundations of the society that made boomers able to live relatively high quality lives.

    Yes it is the rich that are ruining everything, but boomers still bought the bullshit the rich were selling hook line and sinker and most refuse to interface with that at all even as they watch their kids clearly growing up into adults with much less quality of life than they had.

    So yes, let’s keep this focused on the rich but that doesn’t mean boomers don’t deserve shit, especially middle class and wealthier boomers in the US.

  • Don’t be so naive, we need to spend all that money to protect Americans from global threats such as lack of affordable healthcare and affordable housing.

    Wait

    checks notes

    Sorry we need to spend all that money to protect Americans from looks closer… there is something scribbled here does it say “axis of evil”? Next to it someone wrote “Iran” then scribbled it out and wrote “Iraq” and then it looks like it was scribbled out a second time to write “Iran” again?…

    …Oh ok there we go it also says “Islamic Extremists”, well that is a good reason! Jeez after Bin Laden it has just been one ground invasion after another of jihadi ground troops on American shores. Thank goodness we didn’t spend that money on stupid government handouts. Remember when San Francisco didn’t build enough shore cannons to blow up ISIS landing boats and now that whole part of the country is gone? sigh and the liberals were SURE painting the cannons with LGTBQ colors was going to save them..

    You know what really pisses me off as a conservative though? No one in this country respects veterans. Every time I go to get on a plane and the airline invites veterans to come on first, I clap beaming like the proud patriotic American that I am. When I look around though people around me are sometimes just on their phones and ignoring this opportunity to honor our veterans. Kids these days don’t even care about veterans and if you start honoring the service of our veterans with empty platitudes around millennials they don’t even respond they just want to talk about dumb shit like how we should at least give veterans free healthcare or affordable housing or childcare support.

    Why does that shit matter? What do you think veterans want the government to just give them healthcare for free after they have fought so hard for the privilege of having to buy healthcare from corporations hellbent on cutting every single cost they can, quality of health services be damned? I feel like millennials just want to live in a communist hellscape where even the hospitals and schools are government run.

    Those veterans fought for our country, don’t spit in their face by offering a hand to them, this is the proud and free land of the bootstraps where anybody can make it so long as they can make it. If you see a homeless veteran on the street, share a smile with them knowing that they not only fought for the freedom of you to succeed but also for them to fail and thus balance is preserved in this wonderful land of god.

  • But I can’t help but think PvE anti cheat is more about locking people out of skins/events/dlc/things than actually being to prevent cheating. Else you could just have a button that invalidated the gains of the cheated match.

    Absolutely, the original sin of computers is that the concept of scarcity is totally foreign to the way computers work and it is nauseating how much work is put into trying introduce scarcity into software and games.

  • Hey as a US mainstream news anchor that sounds like good enough justification for me, I might use that!

    Maybe I can spin it as “advanced military simulations in a security software known as Counter Strike show that just because a military killed its own hostages in the attempt to rescue hostages doesn’t mean it isn’t winning according to complex AI military intelligence analysis, I have on IDF spokesman to comment”. Then I could have the IDF person point at the scoreboard clearly showing the counter terrorists winning even though they murdered all the hostages on the way to getting the bad guys. I just need to find an IDF spokesperson who doesn’t repeatedly look into the camera and say “killing all the Palestinians and taking their land IS LITERALLY THE POINT” because it just doesn’t sell well with US audiences seeing the IDF as the good guys in focus groups.

    My boss said it really didn’t matter what I said on air so long as Israel are the good guys and I am finding it really hard and exhausting to manage to find things that makes Israel look like the good guys while committing genocide in Gaza, sigh.

  • It isn’t a war, you can’t consider this a war when one side utterly controls all of the infrastructure including water, electricity, internet and the ability of aid to reach the other side while ALSO having one of the most advanced militaries in the world and the other side has… tunnels and shitty rockets?

    This is genocide, not war, it is frankly absurd to frame this like a war instead of a mass scale societal punishment for a terrorist attack by a small subset of that population and also an attempt to wipe Palestinians off the map so settlers can take their land.

  • Like seriously, the Israeli hostages got naked and wrote things on their body because they knew how murderous the IDF was and wanted to take every precaution not to get executed on sight and they still got executed on sight.

  • I don’t think you understand how just because you can’t comprehend a state without a rightwing security apparatus that engages in disastrous manipulation of the sovereignty of other nations with literally zero oversight from voters doesn’t magically justify the incredible amount of suffering and hardship caused by giving those rightwing, ignorant nutjobs the power to wreck and overthrow democratically elected (or not) governments of countries because they felt it was a slippery slope for them to be talking about socializing healthcare or whatever…

    I don’t care that you can’t visualize it, that doesn’t justify the awful impact the CIA has had on the world.