I’m not surprised.

The name of the game here is to destroy America, not build it up. (Russia wants a USSR-style fall of America. The Cold War never ended for them.) And Trump wants to stay out of jail. Everything you see Trump or his admin doing can be attributed to those two things. Destroying America, or keeping himself out of Jail.

I’m just curious if spaces such as that even exist, and if they do, what they lead to.

I don’t know about lemmy since I’m old enough to not care to go looking for that, but I can speak in generalities from a few decades back.

So, I ran an old-school forum in the late 1990s/early 2000s. I found that a complete lack of moderation leads to bad actors essentially ruining the vibe. Basically, there are human beings (and bots plied by state actors in this day and age) that will happily exploit a fully-unmoderated forum and fill it full of awful stuff.

Now, bad mods are awful, power-tripping and all, and lots of regular people who have never run a community of any sort have had run-ins with mods that have the HOA Karen mentality and come to the not-entirely-correct conclusion that ALL moderation is bad, but having no mods can ALSO kill a community if it gets big or noticed enough to draw in outsiders, because you end up with the bullies running roughshod over everyone else, and changing the vibe. And if the vibe gets too gross, you lose the decent, cool members because they’ll fuck off elsewhere and do their thing elsewhere because your community is too full of bullshit and crap.

So are you like…16 or 60?

Some have speculated it’s complying in advance with stealth editing of books to remove whatever content has been decided to be censored. If you can’t download the original copy and keep it, they can change the one you have and make it seem like the original text never existed.

Arcane.

I missed the hype for Arcane season 1, mostly because it didn’t really seem up my alley. I figured it’d be boring to me because I wasn’t into that specific game, or too juvenile for me, or something.

I was really wrong. Really, really wrong. It stands on its own and season 1 has the strongest storytelling I’ve seen in anything in a good, long time. You don’t need to care about or play League of Legends to watch the show. And it’s very much NOT a kid’s show even if it starts with kid characters…it touches a lot on crime, poverty, mental illness, etc. It’s very honest and truthful and complex and nuanced on these things.

And every aspect of storytelling was strong. EVERY ONE.

What I mean by that is this…in most TV shows, animated or live, you usually have one form of strong(ish) storytelling carrying the entire thing and compensating for other things that are weaker. So a show will have one or two stand-out aspects, and others that are okish to bad, but able to be overlooked because of the other awesome things going on.

Like, you might have a poor script but really good actors who can elevate the poor script with their spoken intonation or physical acting. Or you might have a good script and really good soundtrack but mediocre acting and bland costume/set design. Basically, script, art/costume design, music, and actor ability all play together to deliver a story, and usually you have one or two of those that are strong, and the rest are being carried by the strong parts and ranging from competent-but-not-awesome to mediocre to bad.

Arcane’s not like that.

Arcane has top-tier storytelling on the writing level, AND on the art and animation level, and in the choice of songs for the soundtrack. Like, the script itself is fantastic, but then you watch the animation and see they decided not to use common animation shorthand. Instead, they went back to actually LOOK at how humans display emotion and move their bodies and translated THAT into their animation. So you have a strong script AND strong “physical acting”. How they frame shots is fantastic too. And if that wasn’t enough, all the music is stellar and pertinent to the scenes it’s used in. And if THAT wasn’t enough, even the design of the characters BEFORE they even move or speak is top-notch. And if THAT isn’t enough the voice actors are phenomenal too.

For Season 1, nothing’s carrying anything else, everything is strong. And that’s EXTREMELY rare in ANY show. So, so, SO rare.

Season 2 is not as good–but that’s really just in comparison to how outrageously and unusually good Season 1 was. I’d say in Season 2, the script is not as tight, but all the other things are still as good as Season 1. So the animation/art design/music/etc. carry the script a little in the second season. The script isn’t HORRIBLE though…it’s mostly the pacing is off and it’s missing some appropriate build-up in some parts. I’ve read they had to cut some scenes, and if that’s true it would completely explain the flaws. The second season also suffers a bit in comparison to Season 1…Season 1 did everything right, so anything that’s not perfect in Season 2 naturally sticks out. It doesn’t make it bad though.

Anyway, yeah. Watch Arcane, if you missed that boat previously.

I’m curious about two things. Will nesting birds or animals find this material tasty or good to gnaw on?

I always ask that ever since I learned vehicles using a more organic plastic for wiring harnesses suffer from shorts due to animals like mice nibbling the plastic because it smells tasty.

Not from a video game exactly, but in the early days of the internet, I had urges to delete things instead of putting them into the trash.

Just so anyone reading knows…some games with Linux binaries sometimes run better using proton and the windows binaries.

Crusader Kings 3 is buggy with Linux binaries but fine using proton, while Stellaris is the reverse for me. Ymmv.

I’ve been trying to move to Linux for about 20 years, but gaming issues always sent me back to Windows.

I tried again after hearing about how proton and steamdeck have made it so much easier for most games and it’s true. Been exclusively on Linux on my gaming rig since about September. The only one I couldn’t get working was oddly a little simple indie game, it lagged badly while stuff like No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk ran fine.

Microsoft is pushing this at a very bad time, because you CAN game on Linux now.

Yeah, I’ve had such an easy time of it that I’m actually surprised when a game doesn’t work in Linux now too. Which is a reverse of how it used to be.

I switched from Windows to Linux in the last year.

There are sometimes odd things to configure, but it’s no more difficult than the windows XP era was.

It is much much easier than Linux used to be due to Steam, and I find I more often have problems with smaller indie games than big ones.

I’ve been playing Cyberpunk, Baldurs Gate 3, Stellaris, No Man’s Sky, Crusader Kings 3 no problem. Plus many others.

I tried to game on Linux for many years with wine, but it was Steam that actually made it feasible for me .

I was raised Catholic in a deeply Evengelical town. The little girls were saying out of the blue that I wasn’t Christian. I was like 8, they were like 6. They were absolutely parroting what their parents said, there’s no way the little girls I played with daily came up with that shit on their own, and since then I’ve noticed that’s one of the “protestant culture” things that gets passed around in those circles and occasionally escapes. That Catholics aren’t Christian because saints or whatever.

They get all wound up about the “pagan” elements of Catholicism then turn around and worship their dollar bill golden idols. Hypocrites!

But basically, Catholics get crapped on when there’s no other minority around and they are tired of talking about Jewish folks.

I don’t practice, I’m atheist, but in the USA from a culture perspective Catholics aren’t in the WASP good old boy group, even if you are otherwise white. And WASP types are happy to let you know it, although its less common than it was a few decades back.

Biden being Catholic, and JFK before him, is basically a dog whistle to certain rightwing groups to make them lose their shit, it’s just less obvious than, say, Obama being black esp if you don’t have a family background that would expose you to that stuff.

Like in a file?

Bitwarden already syncs between PC and phone.

Is this a nostalgia thing? Like how people who grew up without records now get vinyl for the looks or nostalgia of a time that was better or something?

The downside of optical disks for me was how easily they got scratched, plus you have to store them somehow (a big physical library takes up actual physical space, like the wall of a room), plus you have to get up and physically move something to play it. If you’re a super-neat person, perhaps this won’t be downside (I am not, and still have rips of a CD that used to be in my car and got scratched, so the rip has a part marred by skipping).

Also, are ordinary blu-rays kept in ordinary home conditions (that is to say, not archival and not climate-controlled or pitch-black) going to hang onto their data for 20+ years? Or is continually moving it to new SSDs and thinking about raid setups a better defense against data loss for an ordinary home media user? I remember vividly having old CDs and floppies that would not run years later due to becoming corrupted by physical media decay.

Anyway, I have no answers, just want to put some thoughts out there.

Aren’t there, in blind cave species where there’s no pressure to select for coloring to protect from the sun or to camouflage or display for mates?

I ran into something like this from a company named Botrista who was supposedly hiring remote positions. I got suspicious before they got my personal info, dug deeper and found their site ran on wix, tried to contact them by other methods to see if I could get a real person, and concluded it was all a scam to collect the typical prehire personal info like bank accounts, ss number, home address, etc.

It legitimately surprised me back when Russia first attacked Ukraine how parts of the internet suddenly reverted in tone to how the early 2000s internet used to be. The posts pushing subtle division in random message forums just stopped for a few days.

Really made me realize how pervasive the social engineering of English speakers by outside agencies has become online. I think about it much more, using that brief cessation as a touchstone. Like, my memories of forums being saner weren’t false, heh.

Uh, well…I grew up in a technologically-backward household. So the tech I grew up with was behind the times, even then.

Examples: in the 1980s/1990s, my household didn’t have a basic answering machine, when everyone else did. And our telephone was still the old rented-from-ma-bell rotary phone where you stuck your fingers in the holes and rotated the dial. Modern landline phones in the 90s were NOT rotary, and some were even wireless (the handset talking to the wired receiver on the wall attached to the landline). I think the rotary one we had probably dated to somewhere between the 50s-70s. Everyone else I knew had ordinary buttons on their (landline) phones, we were the only ones I knew with a rotary phone.

We absolutely didn’t have a computer. We didn’t even use the TV we had, it was banned.

My very first exposure to COMPUTERS was therefore at school. School had the big-floppy (that were actually floppy) type, the 5.25" ones OP mentions, and school also had the ones that used the smaller floppy disks.

But my first exposure to computers-for-fun were neighbor’s computers. One neighbor, a grandpa like guy who I think at some point worked trades but was retired (maybe disability), showed me how to make holiday cards on his computer. Like, dot matrix printer type of graphics, very very basic. Thinking back, I vaguely remember the command line, so I think it was a Windows DOS computer we used.

And another friend, a boy 5 years younger than me, had DOS computer at home, so we’d play things like Commander Keen and Lemmings. Since there was no Windows GUI yet, we had to use the command line to launch the game executable. This was like 1993, I think?

I also had a different friend and she had an Apple computer, and I remember King’s Quest.

The town library had computers too, and I played Oregon Trail and the first Sim City on it, before these computers had internet on them.

Later, by middle/high school though, the internet was taking off. And I was an ‘early adopter’ of that because I was a nerd and used it to find other nerds, and I would go to the library and basically do the then-equivalent of social media–individual niche message boards and email groups for my fandoms and interests–before I had a computer of my own. Those were usually Windows 98 or Windows 95 machines. I was even running a message board and website before I had a home computer or my own home internet, using library and the local community college computers to teach myself. It just sucked I couldn’t do it at home.

Oh, and most teens used AOL to chat, although MSN and Yahoo messenger apps also had their crowds. And ICQ existed too and was very popular, although more with the nerdy niche-topic crowd.

Finally, at 18 in 2001, I got my own computer, and that was Windows ME (a SONY VAIO) with one of the early flat-screen LCD monitors which was super fancy for the time. A few years later I upgraded it to Windows XP.

But I didn’t like that it was a propitiatory type that wasn’t easy to upgrade. I was trying to play WoW with friends and doing Wrath-era Naxx would cause my FPS to become utter dogshit because the integrated graphics and the shitty amount of RAM couldn’t handle it. It was a joke in the guild, me disconnecting in fights and my DPS being so spiky. So I eventually did away with that first computer because its poor performance would make me gamer-rage, haha. The first computer I BUILT myself in the early 2000s to replace it had an AMD cpu. I don’t remember what video card I chose, but ANYTHING was an upgrade over the previous computer, lol. And I got a lot more RAM, upgraded from MBs to GBs.

But anyway, since then I’ve mainly had desktops I’ve built myself, although recently I got a backup laptop. It came in unexpectedly useful when I broke my foot and couldn’t sit at my desktop without it swelling to high heaven, so while I still prefer a desktop, I give that laptop some grudging respect, lol. It saved my sanity.

The rate of improvement in computers has massively slowed down, it’s stabilized, so I’m not as interested in continually upgrading as I used to be. Phones and tablets are the thing that took over in the “rapidly changing” niche…but I have something of a phone-phobia, and as a writer can’t write effectively on a tablet, so I’m not much interested in phones and tablets from a tech perspective. They’re underpowered and/or expose me to phone convos which I hate and avoid whenever possible.

Utility locators.

Everytime someone digs a hole, whether to install a fence post or dig a basement, existing utilities have to be located so they don’t get hit. Its needed literally everywhere rural or city, and very understaffed.

But its long hours and outdoors. Less taxing than other trades though, and women can do it as it doesn’t require much physical strength.

The one big benefit I enjoyed with Twitter was following artists and scientists I would never have had such casual access to learn from in any other way. Being able to watch pros in their fields talk about their topics was something I never would have had access to. And because it’s short form folks were more likely to post than on a blog or something.

Without social media the shop talk goes entirely behind closed doors, which is a loss for my ability to casually learn.