MudMan

When the product is the content or the features rather than the platform this chart is useless.

You don’t sit down and go “I’m going to stream video”, you go “I’m gonna watch Star Trek” or “Hey, there’s a new season of Severance”. It’s the same with chat and social media. It’s not “I’m going to instant message”, it’s “I’ll text mom”.

You use what you gotta use. You don’t decouple from US big tech by boycotting it, you decouple by having EU big tech (at which point you’ve fixed nothing) or by competing with them with a different standard, which is possible but very, very hard and way outside the typical thought processes and organization patterns of most of these alternatives.

See also: why Bluesky entirely replaced Mastodon as a Twitter alternative despite showing up a year late with no pre-existing working standard.

This chart is less “yay let’s make things better” and more “woof, things are dire”.

Bread is coarse and crumbly. Jam is gooey and wet. Surely butter makes it less likely for the jam to stay on. I always assumed it was just for flavour. My grandma used to do butter toast with just a sprinkle of sugar on top, so I never even considered that butter was there for a functional purpose.

Butter on peanut butter is just weird, though, unless you’re buttering before toasting. But then peanut butter is a recent import here, so maybe it’s an old fashioned thing in the places that cultural imperialisted peanut puree unto us. Who’s to say.

AI is whatever, but man, has social media been mind poison.

I say we burn it all down, honestly. Including this place.

I think that amount of pawns is pretty much what you need to make it winnable. Maybe a few less if you take black’s pawns away. Pretty sure this one, as presented, is unwinnable, which… kind of undermines the point they’re trying to make.

I mean, cross-platform cloud save support isn’t about “a Windows clone” and has zero to do with Linux doing things differently.

Also, it is supported, just not by GoG. Which makes this excuse weirder, because presumably it’s blanket deflection for anything that doesn’t work until it works, at which point it becomes bragging rights. It’s a weird way to evaluate how both these things work.

And it IS absolutely reasonable to expect software you need or want to work as a requirement to switch over. It’s not the user’s fault that the software they need doesn’t work. If their needs aren’t supported they’re just going to use whatever supports what they need.

This is not true, to my knowledge. Heroic can download GOG cloud saves on Linux. Upload them, too. There may be edge cases for games using a launcher or their own cloud save system, and some games don’t support GOG cloud saves, but you can absolutely keep using existing GOG cloud saves on Linux through Heroic, which has at least some official endorsement from CDPR and GOG (they have an affiliate link that gets them some revenue if you buy games from GOG within the Heroic launcher with ad support turned on).

I get that it’s easy to miss this because GOG itself won’t advertise it, you just kinda… have to know to use Heroic for this and turn the cloud saves option on. But it works. I use it on a dual boot setup and I’ve been playing The Alters back and forth.

For the record, I agree on some of the pains of trying to daily drive Linux for some things. Which is why I dual boot instead in the first place. And I do agree the packaging situation on Linux is absolutely bonkers and only makes sense in that ecosystem for entirely self-referential reasons that don’t matter to users and shouldn’t be a thing.

All but one of the major papers where I’m from have a print version. I imagine that changes in different countries.

But… yeah, point taken. Over here you can’t even not have a Whatsapp account. Some businesses and transactions just… assume you do and default to it for communication.

An interesting wrinkle is that some of that legacy media is part of this loop, too. You can, in fact, buy new tape players and tapes and you can put new music into them. It’s all just very expensive trendy, hipstery small run collector stuff that costs a lot of money and sells to privileged people with a nostalgic desire for posturing. Which does put a lot of where this message ends up in context, I suppose.

Consistent habits.

The couple of games where I got those types of playtimes were either things I had semi-perpetually running for long periods of time (because reasons) and one game that became my “one hour decompression post-work” for maybe three or four years. Turns out if you do a thing consistently for a couple thousand days in a row it adds up.

Oh, man, care to point me to all that history I haven’t heard of? Would love to read more about all the liberal regimes that collapsed into fascism democratically but were liberated by a civil war and everything was just fine afterwards. Bonus points if it’s either pre- or post- cold war and there isn’t a bloc system where they can act as a proxy for a remote superpower. Would have been so useful to know when our country descended into decades of fascism by the exact opposite method. We didn’t know we were doing it wrong.

But hey, at least I can recognize that as accelerationist nonsense. The weird part is when normie Americans seem to have the same set of assumptions out of nowhere. That’s where the real weirdness happens.

Anyway, I’ve had enough yankee for a day. I’m out. You guys enjoy your barbecue or civil war or however you decide to spend the weekend.

They will record full replays automatically you can use to practice and there’s an “undo” button in some modes where you can trade time to fix a mistake.

One of usssssss

Tetris Effect Master Mode

Have you tried Tetris The Grand Master 4? Came out a just a few months ago.

I’m sorry/you’re welcome.

I guess the car thing comes from the use of “pre-computerized”. Cars have had computers in them much longer than they’ve been connected to the Internet by default. I guess my mistake was taking the panel at its word there.

Also, man, I appreciate the alignment, but the “millions of Americans” really made me feel icky. Beyond the moral and political refusal to give Americans primary decisionmaking power on these things, these trends and companies are global. Even in the US you probably would need tens of millions to make a dent, but some of these userbases are in the billions. Millions of Americans decided Facebook was for old people and left it and it’s still the biggest social media platform on the planet by some margin. That’d be the collective inability to gauge scale in a dystopia of global monopolies I was talking about.

… so weird.

I genuinely believe history will struggle to explain American decay accurately, because who would ever stand in front of a classroom with a straight face to explain Americans were too lazy to not elect a fascist president twice into full control of the state’s apparatus while actively fantasizing about a civil war to oppose him.

Like, you’d need to explain a century of main character syndrome fed by mass media and then degraded by social media, and even then it’d be a struggle. If anybody survives it’s all going to be rationalizations about Citizens United and whatnot and history will do its best to forget how it all actually went down.

That last panel hit me like a truck because… yeah, that’s what people think happens when they do their little personal choice things to pretend they matter.

They really buy like a paper book once and go “ah, yes, Bezos is fuming right now” while he makes another billion.

We have lost all sense of how to influence society and all ability to gauge scale. For all the folksy traditionalism in this (which includes driving a gas guzzler from the 70s, apparently?) the Internet has created this entirely disproportionate sense of our footprint on the world and this strip is as much a result of the hyperconnected dystopia as everything it’s complaining about.

In my experience this is extra bad for Americans who, frankly, didn’t need that much of a push to go from their individualist, self-centered perception of society to this vision of sitting on a couch listening to a walkman as activism.

Wait, is the civil war the better outcome here? I mean, you granted Trump control of all branches of the government and elected him president twice. How do you guys envision that playing out?

Ugh. Every time a US politics post gets through my blocklist I’m baffled at the surreal narratives in there. Americans are so weird.

It’s actually much cheaper to buy MKW bundled with the console than standalone. There is really no good reason to buy one without the other unless you’re extremely not into Mario Kart, and in that case there wasn’t a reason to get the Switch 2 until Bananza came out (after the period being reported here).

Clearly the price was less of an issue than people were guessing on the Internet. Which makes sense. The Switch 2 is still cheaper than a Steam Deck OLED, a PS5 Pro or a mid to low range smartphone. People like to compare straight sticker prices, but it’s been quite a ride for hardware prices since Covid.

So just so I’m clear, somebody decided that the way to handle this was… free advertising?

1 hour?

Is this privacy, security or both? Because honestly, in one hour to normies I don’t think we’d ever get to proselytism of any kind. We’d barely get through explaining MFA properly.

I mean, all due respect to Firefox and adblockers, at that level you’re concerned with people not having “password123” as their single password across all things with no fallbacks. Depending on the demographic you’re talking to if you can get them to not do that and can explain to them what phishing looks like in a world of deepfakes and voice clones you’re doing work.

Huh. I don’t think it’s come up in a game for me, but maybe I just don’t use that input enough for those. You can remap it, anyway (including to the mouse shake thing, if that’s your bag).

And for Windows people, there’s a PowerToys thing where double clicking control highlights it.

Worth noting that on some setups the cursor can straight up disappear until it’s moved. It’s not even just that you’re dumb and can’t see it, it often gets hidden by certain types of content.