This initiative sure would make things more complicated for the game publishers, yes.

Because they’re currently not doing the bare minimum.

If they weren’t so accustomed to not doing the bare minimum, maybe they would have different opinions! Just saying.

Edit: Just signed the petition. Didn’t think this was necessary before because, as soon as I heard of it, Finland was already top of the list percentage wise. But I did sign it, just for the hell yeah of it.

For me, soulslikes are pretty weird. I’ve loved the art direction and gameplay of Dark Souls and especially Elden Ring, and I get why people like them and I appreciate what they’re trying to do, but something in them doesn’t click the addiction button. It’s not even the core gameplay that is the problem - I get flattened by some enemy and I’m like “oh I’ll get you one day”. But I booted up Elden Ring last time months ago. I’ll be done with the game in 10 years I guess. It’ll happen though!

On the other hand, I think safe-harbour laws are very much necessary if we want the Internet to work for the positive good of the world. We want the companies to take reasonable precautions and act on problematic stuff if it crops up, but that’s probably enough.

But on the other hand, jeez, have you seen what kind of discussion shitholes Facebook and Twitter have cultivated? If your company is being described as an accessory to genocide, maybe something has already gone horribly wrong.

“No HTML club” is kinda going too far on the Web. If you go there you might as well start a No HTTP Club and serve stuff over Gopher and FTP.

But we definitely need an HTML 2.0 Club.

If you’re working, a holiday is not much of a holiday, now is it?

Also, I don’t really trust on Trump knowing what good or bad for business, because we all know he’s not as good at it as he implies. Him not being able to make money on holiday sales sounds like a skill issue.

Dang, I really should write a programming portfolio page about all of the weird hacks I’ve made over the years. Other people link to their GitHub profiles in job applications and gesture non-specifically. I’d just point to my portfolio of weird hacks about weird problems I tried to solve weirdly. Anyway…

An ancient one I made back in the day:

I was listening to music while trying to sleep. I controlled the music player with infrared remote. Some mystery song starts playing and I have no idea what it’s called. Obviously, the monitor was far away and turned off so I couldn’t read.

So I was like, dammit, why can’t I just push a button on the remote and have the computer say the name of the song?

My previous project actually helped with that - I had previously made an extension for XMMS that allows other programs to read the song information via a named pipe. So I just whipped up a script that reads the song name and feeds it to Festival TTS, and hooked that up to the infrared daemon. And that was at like 3 AM, so I quickly got back to trying to sleep

Some more recent ones:

Long ago, I was using Adobe Photoshop Elements Organizer to import my photos from SD cards (etc) to my NAS. It was horrible. It sucked. So much that when I finally snapped and switched over to better software (read: stable version of digiKam for Windows came out), I never trusted the photo organiser to get this thing right. So for a while I used random hacks and a bunch of weird scriptery. Then I decided to turn it into a PowerShell script. That started to kinda suck, so I now have a massive overengineered Python script to import my photos. And it does exactly what I want it to do. And I’m finally happy. (Available here for what it’s worth)

Another thingy: I have to set the clocks on some devices manually. Daylight saving time, clock drift, you name it. One of my recent old-lady whinges was “Why the hell doesn’t Windows even have an analog clock anymore?” I just prefer to have a clock that has both number display (to set the time) and analog clock face with a second hand so I can time the button press better visually. …so I made one. Because I’ve never written an analog clock before. First, I made one in Processing. Then, a second version, because I’m in process of learning Godot.

I’m not exactly opposed to romantasy as a concept. I like that it has brought a lot of women to fantasy genre as readers and authors. Also, maybe this would lead to more interesting takes on romance and sexuality in fantasy literature, because, suffice to say, that could use some improvements.

But I’m kinda worried about the current situation where romantasy is basically just the marketing hype thing. The Popular Thing Right Now. A lot of the stuff doesn’t get written because the authors like to enrich fantasy literature, it gets written because they realised can make money off of the TikTok crowd.

…I mean, I guess it’s not a new problem, the same thing happened with horror when Twilight was big.

Back in the day, you could slap a math coprocessor on your system so it could do floating point maths real gud.

Now, you slap in some card that does floating point maths even guder, but also in parallel in yuge vectors.

So my proposed name is “It’s like an old Cray supercomputer but real tiny”

I’m only on Lemmy (and other Fediverse sites). And I guess I ramble and post photos on Tumblr (but I think they’re working on ActivityPub support too?)

I only occasionally pick up random Reddit threads on web searches (and even those seem few and far between these days), and I’m definitely not posting there anymore.

I’m happy that the news over here has to continually specify “the messaging service X”. Though I wish they would avoid potential confusion and also say “formerly known as Twitter”.

Andrew Tate’s site was based on some OSS software that they didn’t credit (in violation of the license) and was an old version with known vulnerabilities. Which is why it got hacked.

I don’t know if Truth Social is in the same boat, but it’s possible. I think I heard it’s just Mastodon with federation turned off? Or am I thinking of some other crappy alt-right site?

Like all Point-Haired Bosses through the history, Elon has not heard of (or consciously chooses to ignore) one of the fundamental laws of computing: garbage in, garbage out

Wizards of the Coast spent lots of time in meetings with Bioware to make sure every damn detail of D&D 3e was implemented according to the book. And even longer time micromanaging the campaign design. A lot of the scenarios are essentially repeats of the others - “do these four smaller thingies and then go kick the main baddie” - because getting that approved by WotC was easier.

Why are there so few D&D games these days? Why do video game dev houses want to make their own RPG systems instead? Well, they don’t want the headache of dealing with WotC.

Neverwinter Nights is the best PC game I’ve played, all thanks to the custom content the players made.

Bioware made the toolset and modding support a big part of the prerelease interviews and live demos. The message to the tabletop RPG crowd was “hey, you can finally build and run your D&D modules as a real DM-led multiplayer group experience online”. Probably the only problem with that marketing was that making modules from scratch was still an involved process and making usually needed scripting skill, so maybe the TTRPG crowd didn’t end up as enthusiastic as they could. But people still ended up making boatloads of great singleplayer and multiplayer-capable adventure modules! And the multiplayer persistent worlds were essentially like MMOs but in small scale.

I think the built-in campaign was more of a hindrance in retrospect, because if you hadn’t heard this, you probably expected another game like Baldur’s Gate 1/2. A lot of people went in thinking that the official NWN campaign was the main offering. The campaign was incredibly mediocre by Bioware standards because Wizards of the Coast was incredibly needy. They wanted high level of control, and essentially only approved a committee-built pile-of-meh plot, leaving Bioware to build something around that.

This, by the way, led to Bioware swearing they’d not work with needy licensors anymore and ended up designing Dragon Age instead.

(And if anyone is saying “wait, didn’t this just happen again with Baldur’s Gate 3?” Yes. Yes it did. WotC is basically impossible to work with.)

Every Halloween, I play this Xbox 360 (I think it’s also on PC now) game called Bullet Witch.

Basically a third-person shooter with postapocalyptic supernatural horror theme. You play as a witch who shoots zombies and weird creatures with a magic machine gun broom thing. Also you get spells. Some are bloody awesome.

This game is peak Xbox 360 to the core. The distinct memorable thing about it is that I can actually list good and bad things about it. Level design varies between meh and decent. Some of the particular setpieces are pretty awesome though. (You get to fight at an airport, and you get to do a boss fight at the top of the plane mid-flight!) Spells are fun. The mega-spells are hella fun. (Just call up lightning and watch stuff explode.) Shooting is kinda jank but it works. Jank is explained by lore. (Why is friendly fire not a thing? Well, you see, this is a magic machine gun broom thing, so bullets dodge the civilians and allies by ~*~magic~*~.) Enemy designs are nothing to write home about at first glance, but are actually kinda memorable. (You first meet up the zombies and hey, they’re talking zombies. With military helmets and guns. Like, what? You don’t see this every day.) There are some things that seem just not very well designed, like there’s these gigantic enemies that serve as minibosses and they’re a lot less scary when you note the AI is probably bugged and they often just decide to stand at place for a while and eat a lot of bullets.

I got this thing in the bargain bin. It’s a zombie shooty game that’s perfect for Halloween so that’s what I use it for. That’s all it does. That’s all I could ask it for. And it’s fine at it.

I’m sure they spend a lot of time monitoring right wing extremists.

Now, acting to stop them? That’s a matter of debate if they ever do that effectively.

But the monitoring part? That is what they do diligently. Learning as much as possible!

The first Call of Duty game I played was Ghosts, and it may have coloured my perception of what the series is about. Bombastic popcorn munching action that goes in one ear and straight out of the other. I was like “eeeeh it’s okay”. After playing some older ones I was like “well I’m sure it was groundbreaking at the time”. (Hm. Did I ever finish MW2? And I think I put Black Ops 2 on hold after the first mission. Loved Advanced Warfare tho!)

And this is different from the usual YouTube jank how, exactly? I can’t block ads on the YouTube TV app and it’s a buggy mess and I have no idea why one of the major tech companies in the world allowed that to happen.

Organisational inertia. Planes are expensive, and getting them and qualified personnel to fly and maintain them is a long and complicated process for the airline companies (and the governments supporting the airlines).

They get the news about Boeing being crap, but they can’t just reverse a decision in one day, because the decision to go with Boeing was made years or decades ago.

Games, mostly.

Also, I wrote the 2024 NaNoWriMo novel with it (and did the same in 2017). Can easily fit a daily sprint’s worth of text in memory at once, heh.

I use a few modern add-ons: an SD2IEC drive (lets you use floppy images straight off an SD card) and EasyFlash3 (lets you use cartridge images, including the ability to pack random programs into utility carts).