Most recent time I was awestruck by a thunderstorm in a game? Forza Horizon 5. One of the early missions involved heading out in the jungle during a massive thunderstorm and it was just legendary. Visuals, audio, everything.

I can imagine nothing more miserable than having a day out on a massive expensive yacht… on the Baltic Sea.

(Regular rich people might have some fun on the ferries, but billionaires probably don’t, because this involves buying a ticket and sharing the ship with the rabble.)

One day, I wish I had a shitty old fishing boat and go slowly puttering through the rain and gloom. Living the real life.

Kinect 2.0 is the one for Xbox One, right? That one has a proprietary plug and needs an adapter of some kind for PC. Finding one now needs some effort. Would have been neat if it supported the Xbox 360 Kinect because it has a standard USB connector.

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I’m getting old. I get anxiety from phone calls if people don’t text me days in advance that they’re calling. But if they do, I’m fine!

(I used to have this one cheapo phone that worked fine on WiFi but would randomly stop working on cellular and there was no way to tell until I tried to use mobile data or whatever. So if I was expecting a call, I was constantly rebooting the damn thing.)

(Edit: Oh yeah, I have to pay extra for voice mail to the phone company. Yet, the only people who regularly call me for legitimate reasons are, like, the employment office people, and they don’t do voice mail. Dammit, another scam!)

I watched that one CK2 series by Many a True Nerd. The proper title is “Cocking Mercia”.

Reddit’s backend is absolute junk and not designed for efficiency from the ground up, they just keep throwing more servers in and solve the efficiency bottlenecks with a shitload of caching. A site whose meat and potatoes is text comments and links just shouldn’t be this crap at it.

Lemmy has the benefit of hindsight in design and the fact that each server is only really responsible for a subset of all Lemmy users.

When I was a kid, on a trip to Paris, I went to the zoo, and the highlight of the whole trip was seeing an Aldabra giant tortoise (listed as vulnerable by IUCN). Now, even when this was 1990, I was still like “ooooooo cool turt”. I didn’t expect the buddy to jump around and munch pizza. Just a tortoise doing tortoise things slowly.

(The other highlight of the trip was seeing a public Minitel terminal. Holy shit guys, we were only mildly approaching that level in Finland.)

I’m actually fine if the subtitles have to be truncated to communicate the same meaning in less space.

I actually find it harder to comprehend the subtitles when someone tries to be as accurate as possible, especially if the subs transcribe every little stuttering. I’m here to learn the stuff they people on screen are trying to say, I’m not interested in the subtitler’s scholarly digression into the finer points of what they’re hearing.

Some person in reddit once did a hilarious thing where they whipped out a full blown IPA transcript and started analysing the finer dialectual points of a viral video, trying to pinpoint the origin of the speaker. It was hilarious. Probably even more hilarious to linguists. But the point is, that whole thing was not what we were there for, we were just discussing a viral video.

It’s a tale as old as the game industry itself: The company releases an okay game, everyone goes “hell yeah, a solid 7/10”. …except by now everyone expects the company to make nothing but absolute masterpieces.

It’s an okay game with lots of little janky bits I don’t like (surprising in sense that I of course expected there to be some jank, this is Bethesda we’re talking about). The game seems to be amusing enough that I enjoy my time while playing it, but it doesn’t have the magic sauce that would make me eagerly get back to the game the next day.

Fuck, 2020 would have been so much more bearable if our food had been delivered by The Deliverator. You know, a highly qualified professional.

…Instead, in this region at least, the app economy bros employed a bunch of befuddled immigrants and also screwed them over contract-wise. So it’s the sad kind of cyberpunk, not the funny kind of cyberpunk

Moderators will now have to submit a request if they want to switch their subreddit from public to private.

But do they have to submit a request if they tell the audience “fuck it, this is now a sub about X, we’ll remove everything that’s not about X”?

…In fact, fuck any particular topic - if the mods approve of it, every subreddit can actually be about whatever people think it should be about, now that we think about it. If the mods don’t do it, will the admins do it? The answer is: Highly unlikely

I was politically ambivalent as a young voter.

Now, I’m pretty much convinced the rich people (and the parties that represent them) are just out there to screw everyone else over. And every single year just adds more evidence to the pile.

I don’t think there is any conceivable scenario in which anyone can convince me that free market will magically fix all problems. It’s nonsense.

Ah yes. Everyone knows what the Italian-Americans thought about this historic atrocity. But it seems that people rarely ask what did the pineapples think about this. Now this is a new perspective!

Gets even weirder in Finnish, because it’s “kilpikonna”. Someone in ye olde times just straight up translated the Swedish name. Got none of the Indo-European roots in sight, but it still makes sense. Vaguely toady creature that has shields!

(Only problem are the homonyms. “kilpi” also means registration plate, and “konna” also means “villain, thief”. So every time some random person goes around nicking plates off cars, the journalists think they are very clever again, even when the joke has been made before numerous times. Poor turtles! They don’t deserve this!)

The conservative stance on climate change is quite a mystery. On one hand, they believe anthropogenic climate change is not real and it’s impossible for humans to change climate. On the other hand, they believe the US government has done nothing but fuck with climate through HAARP for their own nefarious ends for 30 years. So who knows what the actual policy is, really. Your average voter is probably not interested of this question - they just want the gas price to go down.

Yeah, I was about to say.

Perl 5 is like Esperanto: borrowed neat features from many languages, somehow kinda vaguely making a bit of sense. Enjoyed some popularity back in the day but is kind of niche nowadays.

PHP is like Volapük: same deal, but without the linguistic competence and failing miserably at being consistent.

Raku (Perl 6) is like Esperanto reformation efforts: Noble and interesting scholarly pursuits, with dozens of fans around the multiverse.

I always liked “not the sharpest bulb in the tree”.

(Because it kinda makes sense. Some Christmas lights have pointy bulbs. But nobody picks them for sharpness.)

Yep, as I tried to hint in the last paragraph. 😆

Digg’s biggest sin was that the votes were all that mattered, and the admins just leaned into that by coddling the power users. That’s why Digg got so toxic to random people who just wanted to share something cool they found. The last redesign just made it official that there are those whose votes matter and the unwashed plebs. Everyone already knew people were fucking with the votes, and the admins just said “go right ahead”.

So what Reddit offered was at least some assurance that the algorithm would combat blatant vote manipulation by power blocs and that people could share cool stuff fairly. Digg users promptly voted with their feet.

Now, to Reddit’s credit, the system worked for years. Admins absolutely condemned vote manipulation and actively fought it. People were actively against all sorts of vote brigading, and the admins listened.

Problem is, it all changed. Corporate media influencing came in, under radar. Political memefluencers came in, under radar. It’s all allowed unless it’s blatantly against policy and everyone pretends it’s just organic random users.

Now, you don’t see the Reddit admins talking about what made the site work so well back in the day. I’m not sure they’re interested in maintaining the anti-brigading and anti-manipulation algorithms. They’re this close to saying “fuck it, it’s a free-for-all” and going full Digg publicly.

I played Nethack. I was overwhelmed by my anxiety and depression. I realised I was not good at video games. So I quit playing Nethack and swore to get good at video games before returning. Been, what, at least 15 years? I’ve gotten better I guess. Should I return? Soon, maybe.

(Seriously, though, roguelikes are still a genre I struggle with, so I do need practice!)