This is it, but it’s been long enough it’s likely worth repeating the exercise: https://lemmy.world/post/19056210

I’d say a big part of that is that no major player in the video game industry is still interested in investing long-term into building something. Games like FFXIV started out with huge losses, and they kept with it. Any worthwhile MMO is going to have falterings like that at some point in its life, and they’d need investors that can actually stay calm about that. In today’s markets, where they expect development time to be something like 1-2 years for something that must follow every monetizing trend (battle pass, loot boxes, etc) it’s extremely unlikely. It’s probably not consumer expectations making it impossible.

I think Valve does get some say in the amount and timing of sales. It’s something they need to control to arrange the big seasonal sales, and something publishers must agree to, or set an acceptable range, when first signing up.

What I’d really like to pull off is Kangatarianism. Based off Australia, the idea is you can eat meat, but only of “pest animals” we have too much of.

It would be hard to set up, and may face regulatory scrutiny by USDA. I imagine a lot of deer/pig/turkey hunters would like having a way to sell their catch on. We’d also need to watch for “rat catcher” problems where people see the animal as suddenly lucrative and grow its population intentionally.

ICE serves Israel. Rumeysa Ozturk was also abducted through “anti-Israel” trackers, and that was long ago now.

Sure, you could say that, but Windows is also a general distribution. Much as people say they’d like a “Gaming OS”, it should be usable for everything else too. Bazzite wasn’t necessarily “incapable” of the other things I tried to do with it, but the UI remained a bit obtuse.

Disney’s Zootopia.

Genuinely a pretty good family movie about stereotypes and prejudice.

Four options:

One is Nick for the polite external reaction, Judy for the internal one.

The other is Judy for the polite external reaction, Nick for the internal one.

One time a very large, very important word file had a phantom page break that couldn’t be selected, and didn’t go away with backspace/delete.

I ended up opening the raw content of the docs to rip out the offender. Docx files are zip files with lots of XML data inside; I was eventually able to find the bit between the two paragraphs where the break was happening, and deleted it in notepad.

Pretty much done doing that type of task in Word now. Heck, I’ll do large documents in Markdown editors.

I feel I should make a video about this. Online social media has made it very easy to find the 500 people across the whole world who think our frog picture is funny. It’s a lot harder to find 3 people in your town to have a drink with.

One simple idea; something I joined instead of initiating, is to make a WhatsApp group, put its QR code on a page (print at the library if you don’t have one) then put up the link anywhere you think people tend to walk. Explain it’s a social group for your given age demographic, but suggest it’s open to anyone. From there, suggest outings, get to know people, ask or offer small favors, etc.

If I understand right, the usefulness of basic questions like “Hey ChatGPT, how long do I boil pasta” is offset by the vast resources needed to answer that question. We just see it as simple and convenient as it tries to invest in its “build up interest” phase and runs at a loss. If the effort to sell the product that way fails, it’s going to fund itself by harvesting data.

I recently published my novel, and at the last minute I had this panic about what was appropriate. There’s one bigoted character who calls gay people “f***ot” multiple times, as well as many characters that drop F-bombs on numerous occasions. There’s a (semi-magical) event similar to a mass shooting, many references to torture, and someone’s hand is chopped off. To be really safe, I put a content warning on the first page just to make some of that clear. Surely, that puts it a level beyond the Young Adult region, right? But…possibly not, given what I tend to hear offhand of some series.

While I am pessimistic about this Friday, I also try to translate it into meaningful action.

I’ve definitely severely dropped how much “consumerist” spending I go with across the year. This includes lots of different kinds of common luxuries, and instead making use of farmer’s markets and libraries for food and entertainment. From what I have heard on a few anecdotes, the drop in spending around Christmas was significant to retailers, and should hopefully contribute to pessimism towards fascist ideology.

Other cases that have happened relate to failure to upkeep services needed to access content. Companies stop supporting devices, close down servers, etc. Many consumer rights orgs fail to protect in those cases, but they could easily defeat any measure to introduce a conscious, intentional, mandatory monthly fee.

On Linux, running an exe isn’t often as simple as “wine frog-fracker.exe”. It’s usually “proton PREFIX=~/steam-proton-10/ TRICKS=b DXIMPL=1.7.8 blah blah … frog-fracker.exe”

As a result, Linux gamers tend to have launchers even for hobby games they downloaded. Arcade launchers for emulated games are especially common now.

In the last Ace Attorney game, they do this in a tricky way.

“Yes, all of you could see this villain coming right in front of your eyes. But did you see the tapdancing bear?”

I remember that, and its failure, and it’s why I didn’t even bring it up as an option; but the reminder on history is appreciated.

GOG offers them, but they’re inconsistent and only work with their launcher. While I have some GOG games on my Steam Deck, they don’t transfer saves over to my PC.

For anyone looking for new alternatives, I’m sure most Lemmy users can suggest more open-source pubfed options, but for anyone trying to generate a bit more presence (not that there’s much) I did find a YouTube video highlighting some “indie social media” sites, mostly focusing on nostalgia of simpler versions of the historically popular ones.

Having the whole world operate off of publically-owned shared systems is probably an ideal, but having them at least in tight competition, with easy destinations to abandon off to, is still quite a bit better.

Going past single-panel rhetoric, does anyone know any great media to showcase this dichotomy of feeling between what police should be, and what they are?

Something like: Highlighting the life and pride of a police officer that loves the force and sees himself as a hero protecting people - then slowly getting sickened by all the protestors insisting police are horrible - before eventually being exposed to the terrible actions of other police before breaking down and doubting their own life’s mission.