Think I might be in early stages of a hypomanic episode, but not sure.

Need to chill somehow. Running with assumptions, though. Might just be a bad few days; just haven't had them this suddenly in a while.

Might end up making this comment and by the time next week's thread is started in a day or two, I'll be feeling fine(-ish) again. Wouldn't be the first time.

Could really do with something interesting like the Olympics right now, but that's still almost a month away.

I don't even enjoy most sports, but it's a nice distraction. If I'm being honest, all I'm really interested in is the women's football portion, although there's at least more Euro 2025 qualifiers and a handful of friendlies in a couple of weeks to hold me over until then.

Edit: Lol, never mind, already feel better.

Was getting all set up for another playthrough of New Vegas, mods and all (even made my own, though I ditched it last minute), and then I realised, "Wait, why am I doing this? I don't actually feel like playing this at all right now, even with the new mods."

So, now I've downloaded some stuff in my backlog, but don't know if I'll play any of it at the moment because I'm kind of burned out a little.

Why doesn't he just do it now?

I was under the impression that if you've been president, you have the power to do shit like declassify documents with your mind even after leaving office.

So maybe he should just charge them with treason in his mind, it's the same thing.

The beginning of the "campaign" in Battlefield 1 was really good about this.

SPOILERS AHEAD ^(I know there are spoiler tags, but they don't work on my app.)

Opening begins with the following:

Battlefield 1 is based upon events that unfolded over one hundred years ago.

More than 60 million soldiers fought in "The War to End All Wars".

It ended nothing. Yet it changed the world forever.

What follows is frontline combat.

You are not expected to survive.

You're then thrown into the start of a regular battle. This is the game, right? Cool, let's shoot some bad guys.

Nope. Doesn't matter how good you are, you will die. After you get killed, the name of the soldier and how many years he'd lived are shown on-screen.

Then you switch perspectives to a different kind of battle (eg. artillery, air, tank, etc.). Same thing. This goes on a few times.

Eventually you reach a point where it's just you, face to face with a lone German soldier, your rifles pointed at each other. Both soldiers just lower their guns, realizing the futility of it all.

Intro ends.

The rest of the game is the typical military FPS stuff we're used to, but that intro was pretty great about how war has no winners when it comes to individuals on the battlefield. We all lose in the end, whether we live or not.

I have mixed feelings.

On one hand, it's nice to have something familiar.

On the other hand, Sync was basically reddit for me, and I'm having something of knee-jerk reaction where I feel like I should be using something "fresh" that doesn't remind me of my time on reddit.

Like, I don't actually want Lemmy to feel like a straight up drop-in replacement for reddit. I want it to feel unique.

I like some of the other apps, but none feel "there" yet. Might just stick with the web app for now.

(Also, not open source. I trust the dev, but I just want to be able to install shit from F-Droid or Izzyondroid or whatever instead of relying on the Play Store. I understand the decision and don't hold it against him at all, but it's something I've always disagreed with.)

Don't forget mocap. A lot of actors are doing mocap for games now, which also potentially results in injury.

This also includes stunt workers (who do the more intensive motion capture work) and stunt coordinators, many of whom are in the Screen Actors Guild already.

I get you. Feel similarly.

I feel like !chat@beehaw.org is kind of glossed over by a lot of users, which results in the main feed just being links after links.

Don't really know of a solution, but if we could find a way to encourage more people to submit to that community, there would be more space for regular discussions.

We should also normalize being active in days-old posts. There was a bit of a "no one's posted in three days, this post is dead" culture on reddit. It was only in hobby subs where discussions continued over a longer time.

The problem, obviously, is that the nature of Lemmy and reddit doesn't lend itself to promoting older content, so less people will see it, especially if they're not just browsing the local feed here.

Not an easy problem to solve (and many might not see it as a problem). It's essentially down to how the users of the instance use it. Nothing can really be done about that, other than perhaps encouraging something like posting a bunch of stuff in the chat community to give it some momentum.

Kind of interesting that the vast majority of negative/mixed reviews are regarding gameplay/story rather than complaining about major bugs (although jank has been noted in a few, and I'd honestly be a bit disappointed if there wasn't any).

We'll have to wait until release (Cyberpunk's bugs weren't that prominent in reviews either), but I really hope this "lol Bugthesda" meme can die.

Regardless of how buggy it is, I expect Dunkey to somehow break it as soon as he boots it up, which should be entertaining.

Agree with everyone else. Thanks for shutting it down.

I'll most likely do it anyway, but do you think password changes are necessary at this point?

At least they are financially independent from Google, which you can’t say about Firefox.

I absolutely love it when people bring this up.

It's always funny, mostly because Google is, let's see... A member of the GNOME Advisory Board, a financial supporter of the GNOME Foundation (scroll to the bottom to see their supporters), a supporting member of the KDE e.V., a Gold member of the Linux Foundation, and a major contributor to the Linux Kernel (you'll see some other companies you absolutely hate in that list as well).

Almost nothing in the major open source space is untouched by Google. But sure, Firefox in particular is evil because "Google money".

If you don't want to use something with financial support from Google, feel free to run FreeBSD and browse the web with, I don't know, Lynx or something. Or Apple devices with Safari only. That's a pretty good option, actually, provided you like proprietary software and a super locked down system (except WebKit which is open source and I honestly believe more browsers should be based on it). Lol, edit: Google pays more to Apple than Mozilla to be default on Safari, so nevermind that.

At the very least, they could have added viewable maps at those terminals in the cities, a lot like how some zoos usually have a fairly readable map, often with a "you are here!" marker to help out.

What you've accomplished here is super appreciated.

The approach of this instance, the clear communication, all that and more.

I know some might expect this to replace reddit, but I think more will discover the differences and advantages and disadvantages of using a federated service, especially when instances have their own rules which can be a bit more involved than simple subreddit rules.

Really have to echo some of the other comments, though. Take care of yourselves. You're not beeholden to us. If you need maintenance days or just need to cool shit down so you don't burn out, know that the entitled ones who expect more are in the minority.

I think many of us, at least initially, joined specifically because we wanted a pleasant space to interact with each other and Beehaw is all about that.

It would hopefully be uncharacteristic of the users of this instance to hold your feet to the flames and demand shit en masse.

As far as I'm concerned, we're flowing with the river here. Taking things as they come along. If, sometimes, that means the river slows down for a while, that's okay.

Take your time, let things settle. If it means slowing down the instance a bit while you get your bearings, I see no issue with that. And judging by many of the comments here, I don't think I'm the only one.

I think you guys are doing great with what you've got so far.

/r/all was a fucking nightmare on reddit, and I don't think the equivalent here is that much better either, if I'm being honest.

I find that life is more pleasant when I stick to local and/or my subscriptions, block the communities I'm not interested in, and filter out whatever remains.

Lol, and so GeoCities rises from its grave...

Then again, Neocities has been around for a little while now, so whatevs.

May have something to do with this.

To be honest, ever since that news hit, I've been expecting something like this to happen.

I'm actually surprised it took as long as it has.

Just got my push notification from Sync. "It's been a hell of a ride."

It actually hurt my soul a little to hit that uninstall button. Maybe I'll try the Lemmy version when LJ makes it public. Don't know. Kind of liking the alternatives purely because it feels like a fresh start without the reddit baggage.

For those who care, here's the actual context of that quote, which has everything to do with taxes and nothing to do with privacy or safety from the government.

The "Safety" he's referring to are bribes paid from certain landowners in order to be exempt from having their land be used defensively by the then-British colonies of America during the French and Indian War. So, literally paying for their physical safety.

If anything, it was very pro-government control, and an example of the shit modern politicians do as well because he was speaking about the these actions being for the "greater good" of the people.

But quotes gonna quote, I guess. I assume the tech-libertarians picked it up at some point and it spread from there. Feels very much like something from the "don't tread on me" mid-2000s Tea Party era.

Not that I think the modern sentiment is wrong, to be fair, but the meaning of the quote has changed so much that I think it's kind of pointless to attribute it to Franklin now unless we're talking about taxing private land for military purposes.

Ah, a traditional forum. Makes sense.

Since we're talking about forums, who here is old enough to remember the IMDB message boards?

Yeah, it was the same with reddit. Common complaint.

Quickest way to deal with this is Settings > Backup > Backup now. Log out/sign in into new account, Settings > Backup > Restore from backup.

Since all the backup does is save local user settings, it won't affect any accounts or anything like that.

I don't know that it's much of a reason to panic.

I expect they'll defederate themselves when they move to ActivityPub in order to make it look like it's not "part of some larger network", a lot like how TruthSocial is basically a Mastodon instance.

Obviously, we don't know much about what was said or signed, but I really doubt it's anything super concerning.

This reminds me a bit of when people discover who contributes a significant amount of code to the Linux kernel. Google, Microsoft, Intel, etc.

As much as I hate Facebook, they're not dumb when it comes to software. React has significant adoption and Zstd is a great compression algorithm, which they also developed in-house.

And while they weren't involved, the lead designer of Btrfs worked on a lot of it while he was at Facebook (I think they now also use it as their primary filesystem, I don't remember).

Basically, relax. Everything's going to be fine.

Because, while we know how shitty Reddit as a company has behaved, there are millions who have no idea (despite the popular posts by mods across thousands of subs) and now feel that the mods and subs which went private/restricted are the ones damaging Reddit, rather than Reddit shooting itself.

To be honest, not that many people seem to actually care and I think this would have gone better if they didn't announce their "for 48 hours" bullshit. Imagine if the WGA said they were going on strike for two weeks and then getting back to writing. They would accomplish literally nothing.

Subs saying "for 48 hours" is the equivalent to that. If they just went indefinite from the start, they wouldn't have to be polling people who are now mostly just annoyed that their experience has been unpleasant for two days.

Honestly, as much as I support the whole thing, it went about as well as expected. Mods kind of shot themselves in the foot, now the community blames them.

In a way, those users are right. Either go all in or do nothing. Middle-of-the-road shit doesn't work for things like this.

Also, the constant image with the black background and large white text saying Reddit sucks (that's at least how it appears to general users) is becoming literal spam. Regular users see it, and it becomes one of those things where it's like "we heard you the first dozen times, please shut up". Also, because it's being spammed, it loses impact and people gloss over it or filter it out.

At best, they'll annoy enough people to leave (kind of roundabout way of accomplishing things, but I guess it works). At worst, they've given reddit a reason to declare the mods as promoting and engaging in spam which "doesn't benefit the users of the site, so we're going to step in and get things back on track so everyone can enjoy Reddit" or some corporate shit.

Honestly, Reddit's in a position where they may even have the upper hand now in terms of PR. Users angry, but not at them.

The thing is, the people who don't realize what this is about are going to be having a really rough time in a couple of weeks when moderation slides. Of course, they're going to blame the mods again and say they're doing it on purpose because the "protest failed and now you're just being spiteful and hurting the users".

We know that's not the case. The majority doesn't and won't care.

They'll definitely release the CK.

But it's not for the benefit of modders anymore. It's because of how they can monetize them like they did with Skyrim and Fallout's "Creation Club".

Get modders to make what's essentially some minor DLC for you and offer it at a "small price" or with a "Special Edition upgrade" while those same modders are actually making waaaaay better mods and releasing them for free on Nexus or wherever (this is basically the state of Skyrim AE; some very notable modders did some cool stuff for CC, but their other mods were way fucking beyond those in terms of quality).

It's kind of funny, but also really fucking sad when these people scream about Biden being a far left communist who wants to destroy America with radical socialism or whatever.

I don't know how many actually believe it sincerely. Well, a lot do, but I think there's also an element of just shouting buzzwords without knowing what they mean. Parroting, really.

Like, dude... Please come to where I live and see that our centre-right party has identical policies to the Democrats. Overton Window is extremely fucked in America right now.

Fixed rare crashes that could occur when viewing the credits after completing the game.

This is new.

When was the last time Bethesda had an "end-game" credits roll in one of their RPGs?

Where's Reagan? Can't find him.

I'm in favor of either option, honestly. A whitelist or complete migration to something else.

When I joined, I wasn't looking for a drop-in reddit replacement. I'd actually deleted my reddit account a few weeks before all the craziness went down because reddit and social news in general has a very bad habit of becoming toxic as shit.

Now, I get that I'm in a minority here. People left reddit and wanted something to replace it, but I don't know if Beehaw was ever the right instance for that specifically.

While I don't particularly care one way or the other about federation or the "Fediverse", what does worry me is whether or not the platform Beehaw migrates to is better maintained than Lemmy.

If moving to something new and relatively untested, there's a big risk that other, equally as important, development issues might crop up, especially if the dev team is relatively small.

I'm also curious to find out whether UX will be similar (eg. content aggregation with voting and whatnot) or if it'll be something closer to older forums, though I'm aware you don't want to really say anything until you're decided, so I guess answers to that can wait.

Anyway, I'll be interested to see what happens. Take your time, figure it out, and we'll see what happens over the next few weeks.

Thanks! Was just making sure.

Anyway, really glad you guys took action as soon as you realized what was happening. Super appreciated.

I love Elder Scrolls as well, but I kind of wish people would just give him this for now and stop badgering him about the next game. We know we're getting it, we know it won't be for a while, and yes, that sucks, but let the dude enjoy his passion project.

This has been a decades-long project for him, creatively and conceptually. Something he wanted before he even got a job at Bethesda. Like, there's a significant amount of history with him wanting to make a space RPG, but only when "the tech is advanced enough".

Whether it lives up to expectations is another story. No game ever lives up to every expectation, but even if this lives up to a few, I think he'll consider it a success.

My only concern about post-TES: VI is who takes over for the series. I kind of trust Howard to put someone he believes in to take over, but it's not going to be the same regardless. Maybe someone who works on ESO would be good, but I don't know.

But in the meantime, I'm just going to (hopefully) enjoy his passion project and I can wait a few more years for the next Elder Scrolls. I know it's become kind of a meme that it'll be another decade or two, but I honestly don't think it'll be that long.

Currently testing out thunder (Android) and it's pretty sleek, especially for a side/hobby project.

Much prefer it to Jerboa, though it has quite a few less features.

Going to try out Liftoff later.

Edit: Okay, Liftoff is pretty impressive, but some accessibility issues and certain things are finicky.

I'd try memmy, but it looks like I'd have to build it from source for Android (I don't see an APK in their GitHub releases) and I'm far too tired to do that. It'd be great if it hit F-Droid soon.

So far, Jerboa's been the most "feature rich", but some of the bugs are very annoying. Don't want to try anything not FOSS, so Connect is out for me.

Draaaaaaaiiined the fuck out. Too much shit in one week. For most people, it wouldn't be a lot, but I have significant fatigue issues and it's just been too much.

Need to just have some calm and take this week to recover what little energy I can usually muster up. So a major break it is. Keep things light for a while.

Otherwise, generally fine... ish.

I don't particularly like Arch.

I don't actually have a problem with it in general or its users. Wiki is helpful for almost everyone, regardless of distro (except maybe Nix and some immutables, where some things can be a bit different).

It's actually a tremendously important distro, and it, Debian, and Gentoo are the distros I know that if they disappear, Linux is either dead or very close to it.

Still, I find Arch to be... I don't know. I think this is actually about to be a very unpopular opinion, but I don't like Pacman at all, and that's probably the source of my issues with it. Its syntax annoys me and I use the terminal for package management so I'd have to be using it all the time.

I think maybe I'm just too used to APT. The same way Arch users find Pacman intuitive, that's how I feel about APT. I can use DNF and Zypper fine, but I'll still prefer APT to them as well. It just feels like "home", if that makes sense. (Nala and aptitude are both nice frontends to it as well.)

I also don't like having to rely on AUR for third party packages. That actually goes for every distro. Do not like third party packages or repos. Sometimes it's necessary, but I keep it to absolute minimum and find Debian has most of what I need. If not, Flatpak. If not Flatpak, source.

Another reason is that I think I prefer regular releases to rolling. I can go rolling if I need to, but I like just having something that doesn't surprise me with a shit ton of updates every day. Well, not surprise me as it's expected, but too many can be quite overwhelming sometimes.

Just personal preference, I guess. Nothing at all wrong with rolling, it's fantastic for a lot of purposes, just not mine.

I'll just be playing it on Game Pass and then probably buy it when it goes on sale on Steam in a few months. Probably Winter Holiday sale or whatever.

By that time, maybe the Creation Kit will be released (though, that's more likely to be next year) as well, which makes for much more in-depth mods. Also any script extenders (which will very likely only work on the Steam version) and unofficial patches should be a bit more stable early next year.

Until then, I don't really need it on Steam.

I keep forgetting to preload, though, which I should do when I get a chance, just to get the initial ~120 GB out of the way.

I feel similarly, although I left reddit initially (this was before the API changes) because of its own brand of cynicism, which I found was almost inescapable, even in small subs or posts which shouldn't have ridiculous arguments.

The problem is that, while initially this instance didn't have much of it, it's reaching a similar point.

I think that the people who will migrate with Beehaw are more likely to be the ones who want to get away from that shit, though. (I've also noticed that a lot, but definitely not all, of the more toxic comments seem to be from users on other instances.)

Best we can do here is block communities (it's been a lot more pleasant for me since I blocked the news communities here), but it doesn't solve everything.

I'm finding some old school forums on a couple of my private trackers to be a lot better at times, honestly. (Lol, one of them even completely removed their "Serious Discussion" subforum after Jan 6 and banned political discussion entirely because it resulted in too much toxic bullshit.)

There's a dude who does Linux videos.

Kind of went off the rails one day after one of the really bad mass shootings happened and he got all worked up about gun control.

I think this was actually after Trump was elected. Might have been the Vegas shooting. I remember because it was also when DuckDuckGo was getting shit from these people about not promoting Russian propaganda, which "interferes with free speech" or whatever the fuck one of their talking points is.

Actually, it might not have been after one of the shootings. But it was definitely around the time these people were complaining about DDG (and I think that was a while after the Vegas shooting) and it kind of devolved into complaining about gun control.

I didn't really watch him much, but I haven't bothered since. Can't even remember the channel name. Some bullshit. Dude was obsessed with xmonad.

I mean, kind of...

I use Sync and still have it installed, but now it just aggravates me when I open it. Not because of Sync, but because Reddit is just... bleh.

Maybe I'll uninstall it later, but I'm tired and lazy. Not like I have a longtime account to delete since I coincidentally did that over a month ago for other reasons.

Do need to delete the one a I made a few weeks ago for NSFW shit. I'm sure Reddit will really miss having that 3 karma account.

More stealth games that aren't horror and don't allow you to punch or shoot your way out of the situation, should you get caught.

If you have any weapons, make them underpowered to the point of useless in combat (eg. Thief) or you just have gadgets to use that won't help if you get caught (except maybe something that helps you get away like smoke bombs or some shit).

At the same time, though, I don't want that "get caught, immediate game over" thing. You should still be able to run away and hide or whatever. Just make it exciting enough that you don't feel like you need to load up a quicksave.

Similarly (if not directly related to stealth), more espionage/spy games. Not as many as there used to be.

I'd also like more actual detective games. Zero action and preferably ones that let you fuck up a case by accusing the wrong person or making the wrong conclusions and have it impact the narrative. Like, if you get it wrong, you get it wrong and you have to live with that. There are several currently, but I'd love more.

Welp.

Looks like a lot of mods are caving.

The excuse: "if the mods didn't open the sub, they'll replace them with shills". 'Kay. And now that we know these mods will do what the admins ask when their precious power is threatened?

Well, I guess sabotage is valid approach, so I give the mods who are doing that at least a bit of credit.

/r/pics is making a stand in its own weird way.

/r/Steam just caved without much of a fight, if their sticky is anything to go by. While the mods aren't doing anything, it does seem like there's a bit of a user revolt where a few people are just posting pictures of literal water vapor (ie. "steam").

/r/piracy mods seemed to give them enough of an issue that the admins de-modded the top mod and forced the sub open, but the mods seems to be taking the approach of "only sticking around to give you the coordinates to our new island".

Honestly, though, it's kind of hilarious that reddit considers /r/piracy of all subs to be integral to the site. How many times have they tried to shut it down now?

Everyone on that sub should just spam Nintendo stuff. Like, nothing else. Watching reddit piss off Nintendo and getting C&Ds from them would be oddly cathartic.

One of two things happens if people do that: A) the mods trying to "save" it have to actually keep it restricted to prevent getting DMCAs (lol, the irony), or B) admins just nuke the sub. Either are a win, IMO. Seems like they're giving their users enough time to migrate and they're probably going to jump ship soon.

innovation often falls outside of the existing industry paradigm.

Lol, the fuck is this even supposed to mean? Just say regulations. You know, honesty, with a touch of bullshit at the end.

Something like:

"Regulations are too difficult to deal with when you've got a substandard machine which wouldn't pass any of the requisite safety tests.

If someone happens to die, we've determined this to be acceptable collateral.

This is also known as innovation."

Ah, yes. Nothing like bumping a five year old thread for whatever reason.

Legit funniest necro I saw recently was on one of the forums in a private tracker I'm a member of.

There were about three pages of discussion. One dude is talking back and forth with another.

Thread died down as they all do.

A few weeks ago, five years after the last post, that same dude just randomly pops in to reply to the previous post with the most casual of responses.

He wasn't even inactive on the forums. Somehow he just left that specific thread for five years.

On the topic of forums, I do like them, but I find they can often feel less "casual" than reddit/Lemmy. Different etiquette, I think.

Discord goes the complete opposite direction. It's basically IRC with some more modern features. In other words, there is nothing but the chaos of a conversation that's lasted maybe an hour or so.

How people rely on it for long term stuff, I don't know.

Second rule, subsection B: Arch, btw.