experbia

I went through a Second Life land trading phase quite a few years back. Properties like this were very valuable to advertisers. Because of advertisers, it was possible to be a niche real estate mogul for weird useless little virtual properties like this that could earn you an actual meaningful real-world income. Second Life had (may still have, I’ve not been back in a while) its own advertising industry and multiple adtech networks. A despicable inevitability of having completely free content creation tools and also an economy that can trade with real money. People trying to sell their creations want people to pay in game currency to get their things, so they can extract the value to real money. They want people to know about their products, so they turn to people who will accept in game currency to blast awareness of their products everywhere. Those advertisers want land, which they need to buy. Probably from another player.

So, the first thing I thought of when I saw this plot was “BILLBOARDS!!!” and I hate it.

Take me to the Internet.

I’ve been working through my first playthrough of Cyberpunk 2077 - it’s fairly enjoyable, I’m glad I ignored it outright until well after big patches rolled out. There’s something very satisfying about blowing up enemies through a camera.

I’ve also picked up Dwarf Fortress (Steam) for the first time. It has a lot of depth but has been fun to learn and try and figure out. I just flooded a section of my fortress by digging into an underground river.

My chill-out puzzle game has been Can of Wormholes and it’s pretty fun! It’s weird for sure… but definitely fun.

I’m glad to hear Wargroove 2 is worth it! I really enjoyed the first and I was worried when I heard about a sequel.

everybody on Earth will know

hahaha holy shit, he believes. he really believes his own shit. he really views “X” as being of planetary importance. he’s actually living in his daydream, where Mars (by his hand) and Earth are networked (by him) and his “X” has somehow supplanted the Internet and spans between planets. his principal operating perspective is a delusion. wow. like, all the time.

Nope 😂 though, despite their decision obviously having nothing to do with me, I did find it to be somewhat flattering and a bit reassuring that the fine Valve engineers seemed to make similar decisions to me.

I use Arch for all my computers, including my “critical” systems. I only do full upgrades when I know I have the time to troubleshoot something broken, but rarely need to do so.

More than this, I actually use Arch as the OS for thousands of computers for my work that end up in customer hands, who expect stability. I’m not sure at what point it stops being Arch, though - I pin the package repositories to internal mirrors with fixed package distributions from specific dates to control the software that goes to them, so it’s not really rolling release anymore I guess - I control the releases and when updates go out.

Arch is what you make of it. My Arch project desktop pc is constantly shifting and breaking and needing attention as I continually improve it and play with things. My Arch laptop that runs my life and work and is the most important computer I own is a paragon of stability and perfect functioning.

as though they knew him from his brief period as a vorlon or whatever.

vorlon

wait a sec…

I’ve always said that Starfleet is, first and foremost, a jobs program.

It gives purpose to people who can’t find their own, in a time where your needs are provided-for by default, and seeking personal fulfillment is the purpose for most people’s lives.

Drones would cut out the human driving a shuttle over to inspect an anomaly or object themselves, robbing them of a sense of accomplishment and achievement. Starfleet is about that stuff, so that’s a no-go unless nobody wants to do it and it needs to be done anyway. We see that a lot, too. They do have probes and sensor stations and stuff, after all, usually in really boring and unfulfilling locations.

They have excessive, ridiculous redundancy. They have people doing jobs the ship computers could (and often, in times of need, DOES) perform very well on its own. There are several recorded instances of entire starships being successfully maintained for extended periods of time by a single individual (who does go insane due to isolation every time, because plot).

Janeway is my favorite captain for sure. The others are all remarkable, because of course they are, but whenever I watch Voyager, I am reminded of how much more I like her over the others.

She had (and used) this great guile to serve her and her crew’s needs. She didn’t readily break her principles, but would intelligently question them when they didn’t appear to align with the greater good or her responsibilities.

She was both flexible and reliable. I feel that some viewers saw that as unpredictability, but I don’t think so. She actively did more to help her crew in every way than any other captain we’ve seen.

I agree and disagree. I feel if a school - especially a publicly funded school - has any responsibility to teach children anything, it should be how to navigate society’s requirements. I would much rather have been taught basic finance and taxation and career planning and political systems and stuff than the same exact span of World War 2 history 4+ years in a row (this was my high school). Parents should absolutely have a responsibility in teaching their children too, yes, but that’s assuming ideal parents. In reality, today’s parents are struggling too much (in part due to never having been taught how to navigate society properly) to impart actual beneficial lessons to their children on these topics, then our schools are neglecting to fill in the gaps before ejecting the kids into adult life with demands and expectations that were never communicated to them.

this is a wake-up call to this industry and any other industry enjoying a glut of “free” (as in beer) proprietary tools owned entirely by private (or worse: public!) organizations.

this will always be the result. every single time. if you think you and your industry are immune to getting bait & switched, you are very wrong.

chaining your livelihood to a for-profit organization is begging to eventually be extorted in this manner. greed is inevitable.

it never ceases to amaze me how stupid we all are as a civilization.

we’re opting out of it, but nature will continue. this will be a very curious and fairly hospitable world full of interesting xenoarcheological mysteries… in the distant future, to a visiting spacefaring civilization.

Developers were right to be in fear of Baldur’s Gate 3 resetting expectations. This isn’t close to all of the reason for this backlash, but for me it’s a notable part.

Here we all have for contrast suddenly an expansive, complete, player-respecting game that isn’t trying to squeeze money out of you at every turn… it reminds me of old PC games, before the enshittification of the industry began, before the corporate rot set in. When I bought my copy of Heroes of Might and Magic 3, it was complete. It was expansive. It was before micro-transactions were really a thing, so it was a finished product. BG3 makes me think of those games, but with modern technology. My gaze shifts back to the allegedly “modern” games we have now, to Overwatch 2, and it just feels cheap and disgusting. A minimum-viable pile of gameified gambling covered in greasy MBA penny-pincher fingerprints, shrouded by half-truths from marketers trying to puff it up to look like a complete experience. It is still possible to deliver the better experience. It’s clearly just a matter of “want”.

I feel like I’ve just come from a family-owned restaurant on the beach in Cabo and came back home to a McDonald’s in a roadside casino, and I’ve just realized how genuinely shitty it all is.

I think I would actually rather just go outside or start a new hobby than touch “games” like this ever again.

And it would never have gotten completely out of control, if people didn’t use ad-block.

“I wouldn’t get so carried away beating you if you didn’t make me so much angrier by trying to run when I smack you.”

We should never have tried to fund the web with ads in the first place.

I agree. But here we are. And until it’s illegal to do so (and, honestly, afterwards too), when a website I’m viewing politely asks me to download toxic ad content filled with psychological manipulation and malware, my computer will politely whisper “no.” I might revisit this policy in the future if the entire advertising industry takes a huge step back to tone down their abusive shit, but in the meanwhile, I have no problem blocking malignant content from my presence. No means no.

A business plan that requires psychological abuse and exploitation of your customers is not an ethical, sustainable, or valid plan and the people who push it are not worthy of my consideration.

Wells Fargo are simply criminal, it has been demonstrated again and again. It would not surprise me in the slightest if I were to learn that this was an intentional test to see how many people would notice a missing deposit or two and gauge how often they can simply swipe some deposits “accidentally”.

Like, what is wrong with reading something? Is it really that hard?

Half of US adults cannot read a book written at an 8th grade level.
Video is easier and faster for most people, as much as I dislike it. It’s a way for a clueless board of MBAs to circumvent the “literacy” problem of more widespread adoption of their service. Lowest-common-denominator corner-shaving ruins everything, as usual.

I live in Oregon. These people are a total joke around here. It’s just funny as hell to think that Idaho would want them - their whole counties are net liabilities in the state economy. Yet they stomp around “threatening” to run away from home and go to Idaho like a teenager mad over having to go to summer school. Might want to actually check with Idaho first, idiots.

Of course they are. Citizens can be conscripted.

Firstly, they’re classifying the term “grooming” as hate speech. That’s not factual.

I couldn’t agree more, I’m glad you said this. See, I personally think all conservatives (presumably such as yourself, but if you’re not, you’re obviously close enough) are pedophilic sexual predators by nature, which is why they so readily jump to the false conclusion that everyone wants to fuck kids all the time. Normally I wouldn’t say this because when I’ve said so in the past, conservatives have been real mad about it and viewed it as hateful to be associated with something so repulsive merely by way of having a certain political identity, but it’s nice to be in a safe space you’ve created that allows for me to share this decidedly non-hateful speech targeted at conservatives (and you!) that expresses my complete and utter contempt for you and your gross, clearly unsafe way with children. I mean, you willingly force them into churches (a.k.a ‘rape factories’) all the time. Tells you all you need to know about any conservative. You’re obviously complicit.