All those “active listening” skills to trick people into thinking you’re paying attention or care. Lol

Pico8 is not open source? TIL. That’s so odd.

Thanks, I was about to suggest this too. Aegis is awesome. :) I can’t understand why most banks sms a code instead of using something like this. It’s insanity.

On one hand I have my personal firstname-lastname-dot-com I’m still hosting for years. I’m not a webdev but WordPress is awfully bloated and everything else needs a touch of webdev skills.

So it’s been at “coming soon I’m working on it welcome to sample example theme page” for years, but hey it’s indexing well based on age alone!

The other is a fun clever one I route through cloudflare to access all my home server stuff via HTTPS over TailScale. Never have to expose any ports to the big scary world wide web. :p

I like to think that glass is half-ass full.

Yeah YouTube ads are stubborn! But hey, por que no los dos? I run pinhole as my DNS on a little server and Ublock on all my end user machines.

It makes the web…bearable again.

Used to work in a public library. Majority of the job was walking people through “forgot password” which was never a simple affair, and getting to see what a Hotmail/Yahoo/AOL inbox looks like with like 90,000 unread because they gave their email to every store and web form they ever encountered.

Near drove me to madness.

Ah yes, all those books whose plots are being used as manuals these days. :( lol

The Giver was really neat. Accessible too. The movie adaptation was such a bad idea because I thought one of its strengths was how it was set in an ambiguous time, iirc. The reader’s visuals seemed really important for that story.

Oh wow, I actually haven’t read the Rama books (been meaning to!), but I vividly remember the flawed-but-wonderous PC adventure game. Have you played it by chance?

Haha, grokking abstract space-math associations maybe wasn’t my strength when I was like…7 or something (prolly still isn’t LOL). But I sure did enjoy crudely drawing the biots and aliens. :D

The soundtrack is still one of my favorites from any game, ever.

This humorous review is fun to watch, but there’s really good gameplay and stuff without commentary too. :)

https://youtu.be/Pu4n5YXPaMQ?si=adgsTuyyKWRXS8Xc

There’s been some surprising upsets recently though! We were all bracing for a fashy-wave but lots of progressive leaders have been elected lately, after it looked like their hardline iron-fist nationlist counterparts were gaining ground.

By no means a reason to take it easy and give them a breather, oh no! But we should definitely acknowledge every little bit of dystopia we manage to collectively avert. Even if only a little.

Peggle fans stand with you likewise. :(

I’m not 100% sure I’m getting this one. Is emergency room coffee:

• Super crazy strong because the staff’s gotta commit to being so inhumanly wired at all times?
• Heinously putrid because chaos doesn’t allow for regular cleaning and replacement?

I miss that feeling a little bit. My undiagnosed-ADHD highschool self with like 18 characters hovering around level 20, never maxing one out because the ~30-40 slog was real, just chatting up strangers for fun while hopping around various towns’ mailboxes and occasionally actually doing game content. (Remember when Barrens chat was a meme for basically being like the /b/ of WoW? LOL)

… And it didn’t feel like impending doom or that I was somehow wasting my life away. It’s just what I did after school and that was alright.

It’s how I met my wife though, so it all worked out. :)

I could go on for days but WoW’s peak was a neat way to build social skills while being behind an avatar kept you from being too vulnerable.

I feel like online gaming now has gotten so anti-social and that the mere fear of potential toxicity just has everyone locked up and suspicious; Afraid to talk to anyone they don’t already know. Thanks to, what, basically Discord? Game chats are completely dead.

I remember trying Guild Wars 2 and thinking every other player might as well just be a bot because nobody interacted. :(

Ragnarok was so weirdly awesome. I loved how unique it was and somehow the jank was charming. The sprites and job tree were fantastic too, and I could listen to that music all day. :D

And I’ve learned it doesn’t want us unless we wanna be nomads or we really have something amazing to offer.

(Maybe I’m setting the bar too high looking into Scandanavia lol)

It’s in europe tho.

Hahaha you had us U.S kids in the first half, not gonna lie. :D

The newer trend with fancier jobs here is “unlimited paid time off”…Which sounds so amazing!

How it actually shakes out is there’s no actual number of how much you can take, you’re just guilted and looked at suspiciously and passed over for promotions by using any amount whatsoever.

I’m sure someone can correct me though because I’ve never had that. My last job gave me a rate of “A week’s shift’s worth of PTO per year.”…I worked 19 hours a week.

(Also PTO isn’t “sick” days, it’s paid time off…sick and “I’m just not putiup with it today” used up the same resource.)

I’ve mostly heard it from musicians on various distro forums and such for some reason. You’re right, there’s JACK, and low latency versions of kernels and all sorts of other stuff. (LMMS is more than fine for my experience level lol)

Mainly I think it’s because a lot of the fancy paid DAWs or plugins boil down to Windows, but I’m not an experienced musician myself to really know what their exact complaints are.

I think it still might just be FUD generated by frustrated people, because sometimes you gotta do a little more than “unzip and run” for a lot of plugins.

Elsewhere in the thread people say he’s an “audio guy”, so that’s actually kinda neat if he’s going to Linux.

We’ve made progress on the Linux gaming front, now we need to dispell “Y’but you can’t use Linux if you’re into sound.” :)

Well, remember also that mentally, we also build our own prisons.

I absolutely was stuck in a job that was crushing my soul because I was getting paid better than worse jobs in the surrounding area, I wasn’t forced on my feet all day…

…So I felt like I had no choice, and that it was the best I could do in the moment. So I kept going back. Even though every day I wanted to just set the place on fire and never look back.

Sorry I know somebody already kinda explained it but I’d like to weigh in on the concept. :)

All the cautionary sci-fi warned us dystopia would involve nanotech and cyber arms and robot overlords, flying cars, climate wars, mind-jacking hackers, a realistic meta-universe underlying our reality, militarized corporations, pizza delivery being one of the most dangerous jobs in America…

It seemed insane and over the top.

…Our reality is a “boring dystopia” because we have a lot of those hallmarks of that dystopian worldbuilding, but most advancements in technology aren’t even interesting, mainly because they’re immediately used to let bosses and corpos fill our lives with more dull drudgery and economic downslide.

…Tech is evolving rapidly even though societal advancement as a whole has perceptually stagnated.

It’s like living in 2008 forever, but there’s electric cars now, and computers read your emotions to sell your identity to advertisers and rat you out to your boss.

Computers are faster than ever but they’re used to consume the energy of a small country to generate make-believe speculative gambling currency or ugly monkey bitmaps, and now threaten creatives’ livlihoods or automate the scam industry.

It all boils down to it being harder to make a living and the rich keep adding zeroes to their net worths.

Our world is controlled by people so stupidly evil they make four-color comic-book villains look nuanced. And we don’t even get cool synthwave neon streets or rag-tag resistance cells who (effectively) fight back.

I think we all hoped that by the time it got that bad, we’d have some good folks with nano-augments or “L337 H4X1NG $k!115”…but we’re repeatedly crushed to the sound of our coworkers’ moaning “It is what it is. Ya do what you gotta do.” And we go back to work.