character creator, shove a RobCo Reflectron in the newborns face so they can generate their preferred potato look

yes, for sure. I think we all do.

I think it requires a reframing of the mind. The ‘smart-dumb’ scale is an oversimplification of human intellect. It was never entirely accurate. Ignoring intellectual disabilities, every human is equally as capable as being as smart as any other human. We’re the same kind of animal.

The true factor in intellect is your curiosity. Some people are naturally curious of different subjects and will learn more about those subjects. Some people are incurious about most subjects and won’t learn much at all. Most of the traditionally ‘smart’ people you think of were just sufficiently curious in whatever field they’re qualified in. None of the traditionally ‘smart’ people you think of were born smart.

Foster your curiosity. If you know what excites you, you’re already half way to intelligence.

I don’t think it’s going to happen over any single event. I think Federated platforms will remain small scale but very active, and that’s all they have to do as mainstream social medias spring up, monetize, and collapse, over and over and over again.

Then one day in the future, the latest generation of cool kids will just realize that it’s way cooler to be on the Federated platforms than it is to be on the mainstream sites.

Hook my number up and I’ll be the voice assistant. I promise I’ll be extremely private and secure.

In all seriousness just posting to boost, good luck on this project. It seems really promising and wish I could contribute.

that amount of money is simply not able to be accrued quickly, ethically, legally, and safely. a loan is the only thing that comes to my mind other than crime time. you could try visiting mutual aid communities and crowdfunding. you’ll get something from your comrades, at least, but probably not 24k

asking the real questions

i don’t have an answer but im here for the question

If you’re part of the global south, there’s a decent chance NATO opposes you or someone you’re closely affiliated with. Is your suggestion to those countries for them to just not be part of the global south?

Because that’s incredibly hard to do.

NATO is a purely defensive alliance, not a battering ram.

You can definitely see how this isn’t true, right? It’d be incredibly problematic to be opposed by NATO and to have NATO creep up to your borders. Superpowers flipped their shit over stuff like this in the cold war all the time. It’s not any different today.

I ordered my Steam Deck through Dick Smith (Kogan.) I have no complaints. I had to use the warranty about two weeks after I received it due to bad pixels. I had a new Steam Deck within a week. They won’t repair it because they can’t, only replace it. Good enough for me.

Apart from the price we have a pretty good deal - our warranty covers a lot more defects that Valve themselves won’t.

in a few hundred years historians will look back at this time of the internet and feel extremely frustrated that we had perfect record keeping systems that would retain all this knowledge and culture forever but we for some reason let companies blackhole it

Sweet, time to finish some of the horrible projects 14 year old me started

Ah yes, in-game currency is fiction. That’s why it costs real money, and publishers mandate developers lock down the game as much as possible to ensure no one circumvents the ‘fiction.’ The mind boggling profits they bring must also be fictional.

Fuck, I hate GaaS.

Haha, online games licensing sucks. It’s almost as if, when we discovered we could distribute media freely and infinitely by digital means, we should have restructured how media and licensing works for these products. but we didn’t, and now we have bizarre situations where publishers try to delete their own games from existence rather than spend some upkeep for music licensing

‘Cuz you ain’t been doin nothin’, if you ain’t been called a red, if you’ve marched or agitated, then you’re bound to hear it said…

Yup, and in the re-release for the gamecube, you could pop the chao in your copy of Sonic Advance 1/2 or the GBA to emulate the effect.

blessed image, i loved raising chao, but i never had access to online guides as a kid so i never bred the rare ones. hell i never really saw a chao die to begin with to know they reincarnated

also, just to be a dick, my sister told me they were pronounced “k-o” and not “chow,” so I spent a lot of my childhood being confidently wrong

HogLeg’s success is pretty crazy if you think about it. Ignoring the sales we’ve looking at today, take yourself back to the launch of HogLeg. It kept up pace with Fallout 4 in terms of active players and achievement completion rates. This is huge to me. They’re both singleplayer RPGs, so they’re both vying for the same type of audience.

But.

Fallout 4 was a hugely anticipated sequel to one of the most renowned series in all of gaming. Harry Potter had almost no presence in gaming beyond nostalgic shovel ware titles.

Fallout 4 was developed by gaming darlings, a company known for producing huge open worlds with strong volumes of content. HogLeg was developed by shovelware developers with no major releases in their history.

Fallout 4 is a first person looter shooter, one of the most ubiquitous and successful genres out there. HogLeg is an action roleplaying game, still admittedly a safe genre but doesn’t have the genre conventions that makes it possible for anyone with FPS experience to pick up a Fallout.

And finally, Fallout 4 targeted gamers. It’s a gamer’s game, you know? It’s for lore nerds and RPG fans and tacticool nuts and all the rest. HogLeg was for Harry Potter fans. It needed to drag fans across media types to secure a big enough audience.

I truly, truly did not expect HogLeg to find the success it has. And to be honest, it’s quite a mid game! It’s a visual accomplishment and adherence to the universe means that it’s a treat for any Harry Potter nerds, but the rest of the game is as close as generic as it could get.

I never really ‘clicked’ with working until I worked from home. Like, this entire huge part of me, my connection to my labor, was just not present. When I started working from home I got it. Like yeah, I’m still doing mindless corpo shit tasks and I’m completely alienated from the results of my labor, but I at least know how it feels to sit down, work hard, and feel satisfied after.

In the office, I was just coping with too much anxiety, dread, and frustration.

We put ourselves down the path of endless speculation and jumping at shadows if we just automatically assume any and all data provided by China is outright falsehoods. There are people in China employed to track these statistics and there is material benefits to having these statistics available to the public. There’s even incentive for this information to be true.

If the information simply coming from China is enough to dismiss them as China spreading their agenda, then the same could earnestly be argued for any other country on Earth. This kind of logic is the same logic QAnon types use to immediately dismiss evidence.

“The vaccine is causing people to die in huge numbers. What do you mean you disagree? I’ve seen it, and my family has seen it. Those statistics saying otherwise? Let me guess, they’re provided by the vaccine companies?”

At the time, I think I had uncommon hardware. I was trying to get Linux going on the cheapest little notebook you can imagine. I also got the same retort from support forums at the time, so my problem obviously wasn’t widespread. It was just the most definitive effort into Linux I had made, and I was just getting rebuffed by what I saw as silly little problems.

That was close to a decade ago now, though. After so much faffing around on the Steam Deck I think I’m ready to give Linux another stab.