I was getting ready to take one look at these and write them off as looking just a little too sharp, but honestly, with how bleak the visionless hyperrealism of today is, the original design shines straight through. I might use this.

I played Grim Fandango about halfway through last year and I really liked it, although something else grabbed my attention.

My reading is that it’s not necessarily a problem with the platforms but society at large.

One example you mentioned: yes, html5 games (and just downloadable itch/steam games) exist and they fill the gap left by Flash games from a gameplay perspective maybe.

But the mainstream appeal of Flash games and animations was different to what we have now. The social phenomenon of people randomly hacking together terrible flash games isn’t the same as the current tiny indie game phenomenon. I feel like the old ones were a bigger piece of the average person’s internet usage than the new one (the average person’s internet usage being 5% LLM 5% web 5% email 25% gaming 30% video and 30% doomscrolling or something like that idk)

I’m struggling to put into words what I mean by this, my comment sounds really vague when I reread it. The specific creative outlet that Flash gave people is not equivalent to what we have now, and the specific entertainment experience of browsing and playing Flash games is different from the experience of scrolling through itch. Am I making more sense?

Like of course the different technologies are different, but it’s where it fits into our lives that it’s really different imo. Hell, we could say this about Flash itself for the last few years before it was discontinued. Just the two thoughts of Newgrounds in 2006 vs Newgrounds in 2016 and how they fit into the internet ecosystem and internet culture are enough to see the difference.

I wonder if there’s a more efficient way to have things sync in blocks or something. I honestly understand very little about server architecture, much less decentralized social network architecture. Maybe having a smaller number of “centralized” (community-run, redundant, independent) nodes distributing blocks of federated data to take load off the actual instance servers that would only need to upload bulk data to fewer places?

Maybe this isn’t very different from how it already operates. Fuck if I know.

I genuinely believed (some number of) people would homeschool because regular school is too expensive. Interesting. American schools being free by default is really unexpected, especially given how expensive tertiary education is over there, and especially with the volume of complaints I hear about American school education being low quality. The free drinking water at restaurants thing is also unexpected to me.

It’s just weird that police have that responsibility there. I don’t get it. Getting questioned over being outside? I get that. Getting stopped? Weird.

In my part of the world (Lebanon) homeschooling isn’t really a thing. Public schools are seen as the cheaper, worse alternative, with many students who were kicked out of private schools continuing their education there. Teachers there get paid dirt and the buildings are often crumbling. Very few have a noteworthy reputation.

Most schools are private, not all that expensive, and usually religiously affiliated. That’s the default option. Then you have a very small number of expensive private schools mostly full of more affluent people.

The curriculum was last updated in like 1992 though which isn’t good lol

I was once walking down the street in the middle of the day on a weekday, and I literally had a cop stop me, thinking I was a high school student playing hookie from school.

Wait what? Is it the police’s job to make sure kids go to school in the US? What if they’re from a family that can’t even afford public school tuition? That’s so foreign to me. Cutting class should be frowned upon but not to the point of being harassed by police.

I wrote a similar comment under a similar post here.

I don’t know if it’s considered better to link or to quote an old comment.

My understanding is that this is a deliberate choice, at least for Mercedes and BMW having their models be letters and numbers instead of memorable names. The idea is that all models seem closer together, kind of elevating them all.

Compared to when you look at an Accord and think this is the nice Honda, unlike the other not nice Honda. The implication is that all of the Mercedes ones should be nice.

But what do I fucking know. I like quirky weird cars, I like shitboxes, I’m one of those simultaneous fuckcars car guys (I hope I don’t need to explain how I can be in both camps at once?). I’m not the person any of these companies are marketing for.

Y axis: Empoisoned or Swumble’s Big Jumble X axis: Menus or Parkour

I think we are moving past the outdated genre system and finally finding a way to classify games properly

Replying under the top comment but this really applies to all of these, how do these search engines determine what counts as a personal site? For example I had procrastinated for years on finally spinning up a static, barren HTML blog. The infamous Lucidity AI post introduced me to Mataroa and I got over the hump and started writing. Would that get indexed? Etc

Does it just crawl through webrings?

Still waiting on the Compute Model 5. Really excited to see what it can do in a PSP shell although the increased cooling requirement worries me a bit.

I don’t find it particularly funny but the art style is cool.

I don’t think I’ve ever expressed this anywhere, but I don’t even consider that place to be a stopped clock. Always saw it as a random number generator with no brakes, which is why all the bad shit gets amplified when it wouldn’t breathing room elsewhere.

I used to like the musical discussions on there, way way back, and the conversations were pretty interesting.

Too bad vaguely gestures in every direction

Oh, I’m well aware. Every few months I search online for used Classics in working condition in my area because that’s a project I’m interested in, but I haven’t committed to it yet. Maybe I should as they are apparently getting expensive and harder to find everywhere.

I don’t think I’ll ever be a Mac user but I’ve seen how fast these newer MacBooks edit video on battery power without breaking a sweat (and without eating through the battery).

People focus on “software magic” with Apple but the M chips are serious hardware that a lot of us don’t take seriously because the company that killed the iPod made them.

Manifold Garden is a game I felt like I have always wanted, even before it was made when I was a child fucking around online and discovering the concept of fractals online. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced the concept of such an infinite-feeling infinity the way I have in this game. The idea is kind of timeless, and I think a lot of people who don’t really play games can at least enjoy watching someone play it.

I finished the main game and can really recommend it, although there’s more to the game than just the main levels apparently. There’s a whole bunch of achievements I didn’t get. Should probably go back in and try to get them sometime, traversal and problem solving in that game were so cool.

Culture and identity and language and all that is a continuum in the Arab world as it is anywhere else. There are people who would claim that our native language where I’m from shouldn’t be considered “Arabic” but that’s a whole can of worms.

I am not a linguist, just a layperson.

I don’t like dividing us into little categories in most contexts because that’s often used in the context of saying “look we’re much better than <other group>” but very broadly four cultural spheres is correct:

• Levant has stronger Syriac and Turkish influence (which also applies to modern Turkish). Unfortunately that’s used sometimes as evidence that we a different (that’s not bad necessarily) or inherently better (this one is bad) people than the peoples to our south. Lebanon particularly also has a strong reliance on French and to a lesser extent English loanwords. Stereotypically seen as a bit gentle (when being generous) or effeminate (when making fun of it) as far as the spectrum of the language goes.

• The Gulf is where a lot of modern Arab stereotypes come from. It’s more heterogeneous than most people give it credit for but there’s obviously a distinct culture after crossing into the desert. The line is a bit more blurry on the East side than the West but this might just be my own bias coming from Lebanon. Some surprising English loanwords scattered throughout. More aggressive in tone on average.

• Egypt is kind of it’s own thing and it’s simultaneously a cultural juggernaut, especially in the past century when it was exporting a ton of music and movies and literature (we were doing that too to a lesser extent). Egypt has a massive population, most of which is very densely concentrated, and a huge media machine. I feel like Egyptian is the most widely understood dialect because all Arabs are exposed to it. Libya is grouped with Egypt sometimes and sometimes it’s not, depending on what you’re comparing.

• West of Libya is basically alien to me. There’s been more culture coming from there that we are exposed to now, especially music in the past decade. We all like seeing Morocco and Algeria pull off upsets at the World Cup but we see them as kind of their own bubble all the way over there. Their dialects are difficult for us to grasp and even the vocabulary they use is very different. Personally, I’ve defaulted to French or English with the few Moroccans I’ve met while abroad. Yay colonialism. Although we do bond over comparing language differences (“You say what for pants? That’s funny.” Etc )

• Then there’s Standard Arabic (we call it Fus7a), which nobody speaks natively but we all learn in school. Most books and articles are written in Modern Standard Arabic. Divided opinion among the more nationalistic types on whether or not it’s important or should be taught. It’s the formalized form of the language and while I’m terrible at writing or speaking it, I do find it useful when I need to fall back to a word I can’t think of. I think of it as a kind of linguistic gear change. You can also drop the odd unexpected MSA word or form here and there to catch people off guard and punctuate your speech but maybe that’s just me.

Wish smaller scale tape storage was more viable for home use (homelab scale). Would love to have tapes instead of spinning drives for something like a home media server.

Last time I looked into it I didn’t even know where to start. Is it more feasible now? I’d imagine power consumption would also be better than keeping disks spinning all the time.

I understand that the subject of the OP is community space specifically for shedding judgement and all that, but

That URL is very suspect, even knowing that not all anime is made for kids

If you still think the hardware is pretty good, you haven’t been using their newer hardware.

I think I wrote a comment about this recently, but their newest mouse with a layout I like (G604) was made with terrible soft rubber that is practically designed to disintegrate with use. All their mouse switches are also short life crappy switches that stop working relatively quickly.

Soldering new switches into the G604 is an absolute PITA because it was designed by people who didn’t care for repair. Still doable, just annoying. I just wish the rubber was replaced with the grippy hard textured plastic they used a few years earlier.

At least you only need to use the software at first when you’re setting things up.