For all the issues with the lemmy developers (and they're completely valid, though I'm not as familiar with the ins and outs of the discourse given how new I am to the fediverse) I appreciate their candor. I guess part of it is just that I'm used to corporate speak when receiving website updates and what not, but as long as they're receptive to changes that the platform needs and continue to make the platform more stable, safer, and more feature-rich, it's nice having a home on the fediverse run by genuine people, even if they're people I'm not the most aligned with ideally -- to be charitable

This is a false equivalence. Most of the rhetoric I've seen about Hamas is that it's an inevitable consequence of Israel's treatment of restricting the Palestinian people to an open-air prison. Saying "We can't support either Hamas or Israel" ignores the fact that most people in favor of Palestine are in favor of the civilians, the people who did nothing and are still bombed and tortured and executed. Not to say that Hamas deserves to be bombed and tortured, they're citizens as well that shouldn't be in this situation in the first place, but the large majority of support is in favor of the Palestinian people more broadly that are just unfortunate enough to be adjacent to the conflict and are forced to deal with the consequences of Israel's bloodlust

to be clear: I do think Palestinians have a right to fight for their own freedom. But with the amount of disinformation at play here i don't know how many atrocities are actually committed by Hamas and how many are the result of Israeli misinformation campaigns. But the amount of any of that doesn't change how I feel -- Innocent civilians should never die in a conflict like this. I don't care if Hamas is doing it [edit: or not. The purpose of this statement is to show that I don't care if Hamas is doing something abhorrent and Israel isn't, or vice versa because it's irrelevant to the broader point. Just to clarify, my language was unclear], Israel is very clearly ALSO doing it, and it's abhorrent and gross no matter who. But in terms of the conceptual "high ground" the west likes to bandy around, Palestinians have a right to fight for its freedom from an occupying colonial force.

EA is an immensely useful tool for game devs, the issue is EA as an excuse to ship unpolished games or to leave games unfinished forever. Neither of which are problems intrinsic to early access, they're just bad business practice that should be shunned like any other

So, not to be cold to this decision (because I totally understand that this didn't come lightly and don't want to "well ackshually" the mod team) but given I'm new to the fediverse as a concept, what does this mean for me as an end-user? Can I no longer engage with those communities at all? Or rather, what does defederating mean overall?

I think the mod is fucking stupid and entirely unnecessary but the guy that made it is well within his rights to make it, in much the same way that I and nexusmods are more than within their rights to say this guy's an idiot, and nexusmods is in a position to do something about it. if he's able to express free speech by making his mod in the first place, he is not exempt from the consequence of that expression of his right lol

Being simple and honest is a virtue if the things you're saying are principled, being simple and honest when you're a slimy businessperson with zero sense of moral agency just makes you a fucking leech

It also sounds too much like Firefox. But either way, it doesn't sound like accounting software anymore which was my issue with calckey's branding prior to now anyway lmao

But it's by far the best fediverse platform I've used from a functionality standpoint and I'm quite fond of it so hopefully this puts more eyes on it

I agree, I always feel like the "I always knew X was a bad person" discourse that always pops up in the wake of this stuff indicates that like. Somehow you had more knowledge than anyone else about this. It's basically just fueling your own ego as a result of a situation like this. You don't know these people, what makes people feel like a gut instinct suffices as sufficiently damning evidence? Like, it's fine to not like someone and abstain from engaging with them accordingly. That's okay. But going "I always knew that he was bad" does no good.

Obviously listen to Madison, trust victims and support them (do note that this doesn't mean not to listen to further developments and adjust your moral judgment accordingly, come what may) but that doesn't mean to indulge yourself and over-justify your ability to judge someone you've never had an interaction with based on vibes alone, that's a pretty unhealthy pattern to fall into in my opinion that has negative effects long term that don't benefit anybody.

One day, after school, I decided to tinker with the Mac systems at my school, and in that process I learned that Mac has a virtual drive that it uses as a setup medium that it doesn't clear, it just un-mounts, when you finish installing. So I just re-mounted the setup drive on the computer from the command line, restarted, booted in like I was setting up a fresh new computer and gave myself an admin account on one of the computers in our lab. Didn't really do anything nefarious with it, but it was a fun little experiment regardless

Tbh as long as it's relevant news, I don't see any reason why not to. Like. The reddit discourse will die down, but watching a site implode in realtime is worth talking about even if we weren't active reddit users at one point yknow, like. It's interesting and worth talking about, add on to that the fact that there's some semblance of personal stakes and it's gonna be p prevalent around here. But that'll die down with time.

I want to echo the steam deck recommendations, but not because I have one, but rather because I daily drove gaming laptops for the better part of a decade and hated it

Sincerely. Get a device dedicated for gaming, not a compromise between form factor and expected output. A cheap used Thinkpad with some knock around Linux distro will do 90% of what you likely need a laptop for, and put the rest of your budget into a tricked out steam deck. You'll have money left over relative to a gaming laptop, too, which are always -- and I mean, always, terribly low on battery life, extraordinarily hot, and rarely performant enough to justify either shortfall. Usually they weigh a ton too.

I'm glad gaming laptops are improving steadily and integrated graphics are improving to shore up the slack through things like the steam deck and also just letting most laptops play games better without breaking the bank, but I'd have been far happier with a cheap gaming computer and a cheap laptop than an expensive gaming laptop as my only option. And in lieu of a full tower for gaming, a steam deck is your next best option

The only exception, in my eyes, is if you need a laptop as a portable video editing workstation as well as for gaming. Then gaming laptops become a more valuable proposition, but even still I'd go with the above. I just figured I'd mention something that gaming laptops have over a steam deck or other comparable offerings, steam decks make a creative workload a lot more cumbersome than a proper laptop would be

the ability to run a pokemon game above 20 fps, ideally

I love scarlet and violet, I was quite fond of them, but I really want a pokemon game that doesn't feel like pulling teeth to play

I have never been happier to download an app in my life. Connect was great for the time but the polish and ux of sync is unmatched

I completely agree. And it's deeply frustrating too because this is something the right does EXCEEDINGLY well. There's a lot of ideological diversity on the right (none of which holds up to much rigor, but there sure is a lot of it) but they all agree that step 1 to getting their way is pulling the Overton window further right. Which is true, so while the left quibbles about whether anarcho-syndicalism or marxist-leninism or whatever else is really "correct" the right gets to sway common consensus in their favor BEFORE trying to get people to identify with a label. It's fundimentally missing the forest for the trees, and ignores the #1 thing that the left is supposedly all about: helping people. How can you help people if you're too busy telling them that x left-wing ideology is better than y? People don't really care, frankly. They care if they can make rent. If they can eat. If their kids won't get shot in school.

And if someone shows up to tell me that "actually anarcho-syndicalism is a marxist-leninism philosophy" you're making my point. These labels matter very little. And until your favorite label is struggling to make rent, it never will.

People that espouse the values of the fediverse often forget that people use these sorts of non-federated tools to engage with community, and sometimes a shitty thing can have good communities. Like how do you expect an artist who accepts commissions regularly from their followers to support themselves on mastodon when Twitter is right there? How do you expect communities around games, just as a single example, to universally migrate to matrix?

These alternatives are better for myriad reasons, certainly, but the moral posturing reducing engagement with these platforms to being the only moral consideration to keep in mind, which is an incredibly narrow understanding of how people use these social media platforms. It's like people that were mad at "any mods not privating their subreddits" during the reddit protests not acknowledging that places like the substance abuse subreddits perform a public good and it's almost like engaging with these platforms isnt just engaging with the platform, it's also engaging with the people there

holy shit I'm glad I saw this because i thought my screen was going or something, the colors are good but they're just barely different enough to where I thought I was going crazy

Thank you for this space you have helped create. You deserve to exist in it as well, not just operate it. I appreciate your work very much but you are always more important than any work, so please take care of yourself. Wishing you well

its funny, I go by pixel which I didn't pick with the intent of it becoming my name but when you're in gaming spaces for long enough your tag kinda becomes your name, as it were? Like I still use my "real" name in my day-to-day but just about everyone just calls me pixel outside of my family or very very long-time friends, and it's "weird" enough that it kinda reads as an enby name in the first place lol

So, on one hand, yes. absolutely agreed, on all counts.

On the other hand, the point of social media is to engage with people. What if your mom has an account on meta's new activitypub platform? Is the interoperability of these platforms not also a huge feature? What if I want to follow my mom on mastodon when she's on facebook whatever, but not give meta my data? These all work best when we can protect ourselves and engage responsibly, and defederation/blocking at a server level, while a WONDERFUL emergency button, also rejects a lot of the funcitonality and beauty of the fediverse. And I think there's probably room to find a middle ground that protects users well while still letting them have that sort of engagement?

Calling them virtues is charitable if you're doing this while willfully refusing to acknowledge the fact that you stand on millions of hours of volunteer labor and you'd rather spit on them than give them their due. It's a lie by omission.

Honestly I genuinely think that 2017 might be the best year of gaming, ever. Breath of the wild, nier automata, mario odyssey, fortnite, cuphead, horizon zero dawn, hellblade: senua's sacrifice, destiny 2, xenoblade chronicles 2, prey, sonic mania, injustice 2, divinity original sin 2, nioh, splatoon 2, hollow knight, middle earth: shadow of war, night in the woods, pubg, pyre, yakuzas 0 and kiwami, even tekken 7's console release and persona 5's western release if you want to count those. And that's not mentioning the smaller indie games that were acclaimed within their circles like Absolver or the expansions for games that were critically acclaimed like Guild Wars 2: Path of Fire or Final Fantasy: Stormblood. Like, '98 is legendary for a reason but I think that as far as just, number of incredible games released we've never seen a year like 2017.

I've been playing Guild Wars 2 a ton over the past two years and honestly I'm really glad I've spent so much time in the setting, it's so not traditional fantasy and it's richer for it. I wish that more fantasy played with the expectations of the genre. Tolkien-esque fantasy is a great jumping off point but I wish authors/creators did more with it than just start and stop there

I don't disagree, but if it takes off there's going to be a selective pressure on instances to engage with meta's activitypub stuff and that's going to let meta scrape data. I think that being able to engage with a wide variety of users, especially on platforms like mastodon or other similar offerings, is going to be a good thing, but the protocol needs implicit ways to protect its users outside of just blocking out other instances, whatever that looks like, so that decentralization can be granular and not just "how much do you want to give your data to meta"

Yeah this is how I feel. I don't think that stopping this merger is going to make triple a games a much less hyper-capitalistic hellscape but I feel like forcing a change of hands might mean better conditions for the abk devs, because from what I've heard from friends that have worked at Microsoft's studios they've got a decent track record for employee care. Nothing remarkable, mind, but if it gets the devs away from toxic hypermasculine leadership and also gives them more security to make better games, I'm willing to nod the merger along. ABK's games have long had a human cost that I'm not super keen to see them continue to pay yknow

Honestly, pretty miserable. A "promotion" ended up docking my partner's pay (the difference in what they were making got rolled into benefits) and now we went from being totally fine to things being tremendously tight basically overnight. It's been hard finding work on my end and I'm just incredibly stressed. I'll be alright though, I hope.

And brave being built on chromium is somehow markedly better?

I haven't enjoyed a "pokemon clone" as much in a very long time, coming from both a lifelong pokemon fan and a competitive battler. It respects your intelligence, buildcraft is fun, the monsters are cool, the story is surprisingly good (not incredible but still well done and touching and fun, big pokemon black/white and black2/white2 vibes in that regard just a bit more adult). I loved it

This is a great idea and if it exists I'd love to use it

Connect is stunningly well polished for how little time it's been in development and the dev pushes updates incredibly fast. I'm probably going to switch to sync whenever it gets released bc it was my reddit client of choice but connect is doing quite well in the interim

the thing is, cyberpunk 2077 released and did gangbusters (after perhaps the rockiest launch cycle in recent memory, but still. game sold well). Deus Ex taps into a lot of the same themes and aesthetics that got cyberpunk 2077 to sell well, it just seems like embracer doesn't see it as a safe bet, and their definition of safe is informed heavily by their recent fuck-up with their sauid acquisition gambit. It's a function of a bunch of executives with eyes bigger than their stomach and then having to ballast every possible IP they can manage in order to not ruin the ~shareholder value~ they're working so hard to not shunt into the atmosphere.

No, there's no point in time that would grant Israel legitimacy. The same way America/Canada has to confront their colonial past over Native Americans, or Australia with the Aboriginiees, or any other number of colonial nations, despite the time that's passed since. I'm sympathetic to the plight of Israelis that were born into an apartheid system and now feel they have a claim to the land and a life there, but by saying they have equal claim by nature of being born there you let time erode the culture and heritage of the Palestinian people that were also born into that space, but into a different and much more unfair system. That concept of time granting increasing legitimacy to Israel as a state is exactly what Israel needs, the longer it's able to commit these atrocities to enable further existence of the state of Israel, the more and more ridiculous "why not just give it back?" Seems as an argument.

Palestinians do have more of a right to violence, but I don't think that violence should be directed at those of whom don't have power within that system (civilians). Violence is a tool of the oppressed to fight back against the oppressor. The child who was born into Israel and hasn't even been able to grow enough to form an opinion on the system they were born into isn't an oppressor in the same way the Israeli government is, the same way the idf is, the same way other facets of the system that serve to squash Palestinians are, and as a result should not be a target of that violence. That's abhorrent. But Palestine's very existence, these people's lives are at stake if they don't fight back. Ignoring how unfair a two state solution even is to people whose homes were robbed from them in 1947, Israel hasn't even been so much as willing to come to the table regarding that solution, so Palestine needs to fight for its continued right to exist outright, and that's a natural consequence of Israel trying to weaponize the passage of time to further legitimize it's existence as a state, and giving them that is dangerous for the lives of those Israel has a vested interest in murdering.

Tbh the genshin community isn't necessarily toxic, genshin is so large that it's genuinely difficult to pin down an entire genshin community. There's the twitter genshin community, the tiktok community, different content creator's communities, etc. It's not a monolith just because the game is so gargantuan. The social media communities tend to be horrible but like, i watch a small genshin tiktok-er and theorycrafter and his discord and related communities around that have been genuinely lovely and actively elevated my experience with the game. I think it's important to look at how, past a certain point, specific communities dont really exist? and that's not just a genshin thing that goes for anything, different communities sort of splinter off and it's hard to hold the whole thing to task ig

In any case, FFXIV is a weird pull because in my time playing GW2 I have many friends that have gone to ffxiv and come over to guild wars from it and almost always I hear nothing but good things about the broader community. It might have a bit of a toxic positivity vibe to it at times but I think the broader community seems to be pretty good? But uh. Valorant's gotten pretty bad. I love the game and the people I've met through my time with the game, and the community was quite good around the beta but it's just at a point where it's just. fueled by ego and weird horny tiktokers, it's not a great time lol

I'm masc presenting and I was worried for a while that women tended to not like submissive men, which was really discouraging for me. I found my current partner though, who does, and that's really changed my perspective. I'm not remarkable in any means (I'm 6' tall but not conventionally attractive, not thin/don't have tremendous muscle. Just kinda average) but my perspective has changed from "women don't like submissive men" to "lots of women do like submissive men, there's just 1) not a ton of them, 2) they don't tend to advertise it the same way men do, and 3) they don't tend to look as intently as submissive men do for dominant partners" -- partially because there's just less dominant women, and partially because I think they find long-term partners that meet those needs and that's it for them

I'm not gonna tell you it's easy, it's not, but I'm a thoroughly unremarkable person that was pretty comfortably in your shoes for a long time and then I lucked out into my partner. The best advice I can give is being a decent person goes a long way towards smoothing over any concerns with dom/sub dynamics, and if that dynamic is important to you it's good to be open to talking about it even if it results in failure. Find spaces where advertising that is beneficial too, join your local kink community -- I've been to a few kink events, namely just sloshes and munches, casual stuff out at a bar. Nothing tremendously freaky, but it's a good place to find women that might be more interested in someone that identifies themselves as a sub. Good luck!!

I'm not sure I agree, to me the difference between JRPG and RPG is like the difference between anime and animation. In a western audience, the label has been coopted by games closer to home with tropes we're more familiar with. That doesn't make the labeling of Japanese media othering in that sense, so much as it allows us to understand what contexts it is both from and for.

I can see how, to some people, it might be a turn-off (just see all the people that turn their nose up at anime conceptually even if they'd like it) -- see the people that may have seen edge of tomorrow in theaters and enjoyed it, but would likely sneer at being told to read all you need is kill, differences in media notwithstanding. But as the media landscape changes and grows it's useful to have different ways to sort of illustrate the differences in audience as well as the differences in creative context.

Not super educated on the subject but I'm pretty sure Usenet was just one platform/standard whereas the fediverse is a bunch of interoperable standards. That's a pretty huge leap I functionality

I love cave story but cs+ plays better and has many more creature comforts than the original. I'd never encourage someone to buy it over the original, but at the low price of free, vs. an already free game it's hard to say "play the original." You're right that the original dev got fucked over by Nicalis but my understanding for free games on services like this is the devs get a big lump sum from epic or Amazon or whoever else is distributing them and they move on. In that case, they already have their payday so why not just take advantage of that to play one of the most important indie games ever made with like. Remappable controls and actual 60fpa (the original ran at 50 lol)

Yeah but there's different ways to interact with the fediverse via activitypub, whereas Usenet was just. Usenet

im super on the fuck unity train right now but like, real normal people work there that need employ and have families to support. I hope unity changes course due to public sentiment but i don't really think that death threats forcing an office closed are going to be the way to invite that change

Haha me too. it's funny, I decided to switch to this tag on my 15th birthday which is also coincidentally when I got involved in the gaming spaces I spent the most time in, and also when I kinda started really questioning my gender more aggressively, so going by Pixel let me fit in more and also let me sort of avoid the conversation about gender, because it wasn't a name, but the more time passed the more it was absolutely a name lmao

I don't care who is doing it because it's abhorrent from both ends, regardless of the frequency or scale. It's bad no matter what.

But the ends don't justify the means in either case, so in stead we need to evaluate what's being fought for in the first place for context, because both sides are commiting atrocities on various scales so you can try to one up whichever side you disagree with so we need to look at the context of the fight and what's being fought for. Under that lens, israel is an occupying colonial force by any metric and was given it's current territory by other colonial, imperial forces. It's claim to the state of Palestine is tenuous at best and isn't even consistent with the Jewish faith, where Jews see themselves as perpetually in exile until their Messiah comes. Israel leverages it's position as a colonial ethnostate to make people correlate support of the Jewish faith with support of their apartheid ethnostate, which is also a false equivalence. None of this is a conspiracy theory, it's rooted in fact and also agnostic to which side is committing more atrocities. I'm not saying Hamas is doing nothing wrong, I'm saying relative to this point it doesn't matter if they are or not. Hamas are Palestinians that had their homes robbed from them, Israelis are not.