To be fair, I do this at work and while I get funny looks I do get complicated ideas across better when I can provide visual aid.

Frankly I need to improve my MS Paint skills. I need to get my mouse handwriting up to at least 70% of the Khan Academy guy’s level.

Time for USB-D.

My suggestion is a ridiculous round plug where the bottom three/four contacts are a standard 3.5mm audio connector and then you have like twelve extra (narrower) contacts at the top.

A TRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRS jack.

sufficient performance > sufficient beauty > power usage > max beauty > max performance

This is basically alien to me. I think it has to be game specific.

Euro Truck Simulator? Beauty is more important than performance, unless playing it on my handheld, in which case I can knock the FPS limiter down to 40 and crank the settings down

Satisfactory? Performance over everything.

Granted most of the games I play are older (so I don’t need to choose) or CPU-bound simulation games (Raising the graphics doesn’t make it run meaningfully slower if your CPU is the bottleneck).

Although I must also point out that I think the current trend of “fidelity=beauty” is ridiculous. I recently played INFRA, a game built in Source, and while the fidelity was clearly “outdated”, the game looked fantastic.

Plugging my system into a Kill A Watt was enlightening.

Laptop gaming is a harsh but educational mistress re: power consumption (even when it’s plugged in), I’ll tell you that. All the heat you generate is right in front of your face, as is all the airflow (and noise) needed to wick it away.

Honestly I’d love to see more of this. Wheels and panels as well, not just gamepads. I’ve always wished for fully assignable controller support where the icon and HUDs etc change, ETS2 is looks so much better now that the icons don’t flicker twice per second because of my hodgepodge DS4Windows control scheme anymore. And with multi-button combinations and stuff making more things doable from the controller.

I do kind of wish Steam Input was a separate piece of software though, sort of like Xpadder back in the day. Some kind of open button-mapping standard with an API and everything.

Is the resident Lemmy population becoming too easy to troll?

Hello lemmings are you all left wing because you are CIA and racist? Also if you go outside you will not hate car

12 upvotes 912 downvotes 1,210 comments 14 reports

Needs a Starbucks and a McDonald’s and an ATM for a bank nobody uses to be worth it tbh

In no particular order, here are some games I’ve enjoyed most in the past decade or so (and found most interesting to shill to my friends):

• The Roottrees are Dead (online sleuthing game, with a cool but slightly campy story, wears its Obra Dinn influence on its sleeve a bit too obviously for some people)
• Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic (Cities Skylines for people who understand economics are more than just dollar signs and tweets, it’s more like Factorio than SimCity)
• Hacknet (Learn basic command line stuff in a game about hacking)
• Duskers (atmospherically amazing game about controlling distant drones in hostile environments. Genuinely chilling)
• Chants of Senaar (language deciphering game)
• Outer Wilds (le le le dae hidden gem for a reason)
• Dyson Sphere Project (more Factorio)
• Satisfactory (you guessed it, more Factorio, but very different environment than most of these games)
• Factorio
• Shapez (minimalistic Factorio, with a less minimalistic sequel)
• Nomifactory (Minecraft modpack that was formerly known as Omnifactory. It’s more Factorio.)
• Curse of the Golden Idol (finally a good retro adventure mystery thing)
• Return of the Obra Dinn (immaculate game.)
• CHR$143 (Zachlike-ish)
• Kerbal Space Program (my next obsession)
• INFRA (one of my favorite games of all time, I’ve written about this extensively, a sort of urbex walking simulator with incredible atmosphere, deep deep lore, amazing world building, and light puzzles, that goes on for about 40 more hours than you expect it to)
• Hexcells Trilogy (puzzles)
• Hexologic (similar puzzles)
• Baba Is You (puzzles that make you think you’re an idiot)
• NaissancE (I don’t know how to describe this, I think it’s free)
• Manifold Garden (you dreamed about this game when you were 8 years old, decades before it existed)
• The Big Con (be gay do crime 90s)
• Death Stranding (this game is so boring, I played it for 200 hours and got every achievement, I love it, it sucks)
• The Forgotten City (this started its life as a Skyrim mod and still has that baggage)
• Mostly Intense Monster Defense (PvZ homage)
• The Witcher (1) (CRPG with a cool world. Needs a few mods to cut down on tedium. Pretty different from its sequels but it has a special place in my heart)
• Binary Domain (absolute schlock, but from a previous era of gaming. Not necessarily a good game, but cool to see from a historical perspective.)
• Cultist Simulator (needs an eternity of patience but I promise there is something in there)
• SLUDGE LIFE (SLUDGE LIFE)
• What Remains of Edith Finch (I fucking love walking simulators with good writing and cool art)
• Promesa (obscure walking simulator, it’s barely a game, I love it)
• CUCCCHI (check above description, same guy. Artistic showcase of a painter called Enzo Cuccchi. I’m not a modern art guy, but seeing these works contorted into worlds to walk through… a unique and interesting experience. Soundtrack is someone’s once-lost old experimental tracks and it absolutely slaps)
• Please Touch the Artwork 1 and 2 (one of them is free, funded by the Belgian public art fund. Weird and cool)
• Betrayal at Club Low (part of a series of games by Cosmo D, this one is different from the previous few. The first, Off Peak, is free, but it’s also the least polished. Astonishingly excellent music, there’s some cool lore in this series. The art style is a bit out there but this guy’s stuff is gold)
• Engare and Tandis (mathematical patterns puzzlers, I promise they’re so cool)
• What the Golf? (An actually good mobile game. I mostly played it with a controller on my TV lol)
• Cities Skylines (my beloved)

And then they give a passionate interview about how the original Jeg Spiser Pis short film from 1993 informed their entire creative journey, before immediately going on to direct Mario Movie Minecraft 3 starring Dwayne the Rock Johnson as Sheep and Tilda Swinton as Cat Bowser 64 ft. Ariana Grande burger

I have watched a fair few nigh incoherent French movies with a plot that is simultaneously either the most complex or most banal story ever written (that doesn’t get resolved at the end). You could find me at the one specialty cinema in Beirut every other weekend before it completely collapsed financially in 2020 back when our economy did the funni

I get that a lot of this is turning people off but this is shockingly accurate of a lot of mid arthouse stuff. It’s like trash TV but for movie tryhards. I love it. For the French ones, I almost feel like the experience is worsened by my grasp of the language.

Since then I’ve all but stopped watching movies and even series and have moved to games full time. There’s so much more genuinely fun weird interesting shit.

j 8 sss LED 3

“But if they say an illegal sentence like “child murder is bad” then we deport them too.”

Know a few people who emigrated to Germany. They aren’t thrilled. One of my friends was basically snubbed by all of his coworkers for months until one of them told him on the side that people suspect they’d get in trouble if it turns out he’s a “Syrian Islamic Extremist” down the line. My guy isn’t Syrian or Muslim. His name is Joe. Not even Youssef. Joe. جو. Fucks sake

“Doctors in Racism” is the way he described the people of Germany. Which is incredible because we’re from Lebanon and “Doctors in Racism” should be our rightful title. Geopolitical events are happening as we speak and people are talking about US stuff and changes in the US since it is so influential on what happens here, and I’ve heard someone say something about “that slave Obama”. This fucking week. Come on now.

FWIW Germany looks like a nice option for me, but I can’t say I’ve been convinced that the good will fully outweigh the bad. If I’m going to be a second class citizen I might as well go to the US and get a shot at making a bit more money.

Years of videos and headlines like this have really started to get grating. Like those “heartwarming” stories about kids paying off each others’ lunch debt in America or whatever.

I don’t want to be “built different”. I want people to stop pointing at me when horrible shit keeps happening to (and around) us. The sax man looks cool, but like do you know how hard it is to get a good gig as a saxophonist here? My guy wants to eat good this week. He’s a professional. You need to have nerves of steel to survive.

My friends from around the world sent me the video over and over, wow you guys are so badass, as if half a city wasn’t razed to the ground by more munitions than an actual battle’s worth mere months ago. Maybe it’s badass to stare a killer in the face. But that shit wears on you.

If you run to your car and drive home when you see this shit in the sky and you’re the target you’re dead anyway. Of course we keep dancing. In moments like these we feel like we’d be better off dead anyway. I see shit in the sky all the time now. I only finally understood I had no faith when I saw drones getting shot out of the sky from the window of a plane, when I understood that for me, if this is it, this is fucking it. What the fuck else can I do in that moment.

I get that you’re saying something positive here, but I just want to literally not have a rapacious snarling serial killer pushing the cold metal of a Glock against my forehead for twenty fucking seconds of my life, I want to be known for who I am and not for the inescapable Russian roulette jigsaw trap I’m stuck in, that has to be reasonable, right? I’d love to hear about some horrible dystopian hell technology called “Dad is Here to See his Loving Kids❤️✨” and not immediately think fuck my life there isn’t a chance in hell I’m not in that database.

Addendum on “that shit wears on you”: seeing unhinged LinkedIn screenshots of rattled genocide fans bragging about working from home in the bunkers under their houses. Nothing says peace lovers like living in war infrastructure. My bunker is a bottle of gin and an eclectic mix of old Arabic songs and YouTube videos of two goofy South Australian men jerry rigging an old Fiat back to life. Fuck you.

On the topic of something you explicitly mentioned here. There’s some unpleasant but critical subtext about people dancing “two blocks away” from a man made Hell on earth. Some people believe that they are from the “good” ethnoreligious community and that they won’t get bombed, and that their “forbidden lovers” on the other side of the border are cleaning out the rabble to some extent. The shit I’ve heard people say… I lost friends this past year, and these friends I’ve lost are alive and well. Let’s put it like that.

Hm. Interesting how negatively coded this scene is when I hear people talk about their own “that one dream public bathroom”.

I distinctively remember mine having knee-high cloudy water, but it was very dark. My innate “understanding” in the dream is that the water is some kind of natural feature, not sewage. I don’t remember the sinks, tissues, cleanliness or of the bowls, or anything, just the incredibly weird layout and flooding, and the weird lack of privacy due to the doors and walls of the stalls being higher to accommodate the water.

US style stalls where you can conveniently park your XXXL truck under the divider aren’t a thing here.

I miss gaudy old corporate art. So much better than sterile new corporate art.

(Actually maybe not “better” in every sense but at least they were trying to do something)

Boy have I got news for you.

Look up the Zizians.

(Ok they’re only a tangential offshoot of people who maybe really like the Basilisk thought experiment and mostly don’t believe it. But hey. It’s underway!)

I can’t place why, but the thought of used enterprise SSDs still sketches me out more than HDDs. Maybe it’s just that I only ever think of RAID in terms of hard drives, paired with a decade+ of hearing about SSD reliability issues, which are very different from the more familiar problems HDDs can have.

The power and noise difference makes it more appealing to me, moreso than the speed, personally. Maybe when consumer bottom-barrel SSDs get a little better I could be convinced into RAIDing a bunch of them and hoping one cold spare is enough.

EDIT: I can acquire new ~200$ 4TB Orico branded drives where I am relatively easily. Hm.

I have to VPN into Europe a lot, because if I’m exiting out of somewhere, I’d like it to be somewhere with good privacy laws.

I hope this doesn’t fuck that up for the many others who do this.

Once every few months I remember that there’s virtually no chance my name and information aren’t in these databases, especially now that my country has gone through a recent war phase. Even if I didn’t sign up to Instagram and Facebook when I was a teenager, my family, friends, and whole neighborhood use unscrupulous online services that can be used to map out communities like that. I live far from the border with Palestine but let’s not pretend that makes a difference.

While I don’t think it does us any favors to front-load any plans for the future with “just send <group> to <place>”, it’s also good to point out that a chunk of them are originally from Libya in the first place.

Oh yeah. I’ve poured months of my life into Nomifactory (formerly Omnifactory) and will one day play the even longer Nomifactory CE as a finale. This might be the first time I forget to mention modded MC in this context.

When I played it the first time in 2019 there were a few modded mods to make some tasks easier on setup and on the CPU, since the original mods weren’t made with the sheer volume of automation needed in the pack.

When I replayed it again five years later, there were even more helper mods. Sure setting things up the harder old way was more satisfying the first time, but when you have to build the same setup another eighty times? Give me the streamlined stuff please. It was much less tedious, although I was still vaguely familiar with all the mechanics, which also helped a lot. So did my CPU being like 10 generations newer.

That said, if we’re talking about avoiding shithead devs, Microsoft has finally been included in mainstream boycott discourse, and Notch has always been a bit off. Although I’d assume most people into this stuff must have already gotten the game before. It’s not like I’ve given them any money for it over the past decade+.