I haven’t really seen anything since the exodus but I think he’s just not the kind of guy who cares too much about niche decentralized internet communities.

He’s very much in the Applesphere of polished premium apps that do specific things. Which is fine. He’s frankly the only dev I knew of who did that without being a total ghoul and even then I was seeing a lot of complaints about people being begged for subscriptions, which I never found excessive (he claimed those people were experiencing a bug).

I don’t really know what to make of his opinion, I don’t know if he saw the UI as a threat or a liability to him or anything like that.

I would love Voyager (mine is still called Wefwef) as a native iOS app because I run into some quirks of the web app backend (especially when editing text), but what we have now is excellent and has made the transition much more bearable. I do still feel like something is missing and I miss how much more connected with the world I felt as a longtime Reddit user, but it’s okay, people’s primary platforms used to change all the time (and as yet another wave of Twitter users are finding out, it can be a hard first few months).

That was precisely the turning point honestly. It’s been a bit hit or miss on Palestine (like most English-language anything online), but I remember commenters defending that attack as “pinpoint precision” or whatever they’ve convinced themselves.

Doctors have had to pull damaged eyes out of children. People with compromised devices were out on the roads, a few blew up in public buses. Imagine driving down the road and driver in the car in front of you loses half his skull and smashes into a shop. Not so cute huh

Still what happened that day, terrorizing as it was, was easier to live with than what’s happening now.

The human shield narrative is a whole other level of mental gymnastics for me. Is there something in the water preventing people from understanding militants are people and people live in houses and houses are typically built next to other houses?

Just to be clear, these groups are (politically) in the way of a lot of internal progress. I’ve been personally threatened and intimidated by them for some political stuff I’ve done in the past. And even I feel compelled to explain how the situation is more complicated than it looks. Fighting for the right thing often involves putting aside differences, even major differences, for the greater good, so that we may live to fight another day. Yes their internal, extremely regressive politics are very dangerous. The diplomatic quagmire they worsen is also a massive problem. But these conversations are complicated and they require a lot of preamble, and they’re for us to have.

I kept an eye on it because it’s cool to know what the buzz is with the more mainstream memes about wars and whatever. Weapons systems I haven’t heard of, military secrets being leaked on gaming forums, I wouldn’t post or comment there but monitoring it isn’t stupid if I’m browsing All. A little crass about people dying but I thought it’s all an in-joke.

When things started escalating here in Lebanon I was absolutely baffled how the average poster there had zero nuance or interest in questioning whatever they considered to be the status quo. I saw people arguing and getting banned in the comments over “supporting terrorism” while I was out dealing with the very civilian damage we are experiencing. You can check my post history for more on that, my comments detailing the situation feel like screams into the void and I’m less and less motivated to write about my experience.

I never posted or commented anything in NCD because how could I possibly say “Whether you consider this person a terrorist leader or not, their tactics were more pragmatic than potential successors and this will likely lead to prolonged conflict” on a page like that. A message that ostensibly should be very clear on a conflict discussion board.

I think it’s mostly Europeans and Americans fetishizing their fancy weapons, never having been on the receiving end of them. But I have, and therefore my opinion doesn’t matter, because I must be a terrorist.

You see, when football is mentioned online, the collective intelligence of any comment section is cut by at least 90%. This stacks with another 90% if it’s women’s football or any token LGBT acknowledgement in football. The joke is Muslim Bad.

Which is a shame. I used to make fun of le sportsball amirite until it clicked that there was immense entertainment value in these matches, which could be super tense and exciting even when an individual match doesn’t have super high stakes. There’s storylines with each of the players and managers, there’s a lot of diverging personalities among them and they all handle the same game in their own way. And unlike scripted shows, when something unexpected happens it is so much more interesting. Like the story is real in a way that scripted entertainment isn’t.

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.

The TS80P is lower wattage, technically, but the heating element is right up at the very tip, instead of having a heating element inside the handle with a long metal piece transmitting the heat. It gets hot way faster than you’d expect, it doesn’t feel like 30W at all.

It punches way, way above its weight. Unless you’re soldering pipes, comparing the wattage to traditional irons is misleading. Love that tiny thing.

Only problem is that this design necessitates proprietary tips that are relatively expensive. Not a fan of that, coming from the no name Global South Especiale 2$ firestarter irons that are the norm where I am. Not the end of the world, but worth keeping in mind.

The one I bought came with a USB-C cable that couldn’t handle the current though. That was the only real red flag. Shame too, that cable seemed like it was silicone coated and would have been ideal.

Excuse me, what the fuck is that exchange? Is this something that actually got published or some kind of bootleg zine?

(CW the below Wikipedia link has some uncensored imagery of the Sabra and Chatila massacre, I did not think it would have that - I think it’s an important historical event to know about but the page has photos and it’s pretty grim. Just a fair warning)

If this is a real character created from the mid-80s onwards, surely they didn’t name her fucking Sabra of all names? Jesus fucking Christ

Okay I looked her up. Created 1980. It’s a real character, canonically an agent. Making a movie about her in 2025 though?

The Hulk’s sentiment in this page is nice I guess but vaguely gestures at everything

Good lord this makes my blood boil. I’m still in awe of the support being shown by ordinary people around the world these last few months but I don’t think I’ll ever grasp how much hatred is required to keep the machine running.

To think that if history went differently I could just get on a cab and visit the Holy Land like my grandmother did as a kid. Instead I get to watch it get bombed to bits in real time with the excuse that there wasn’t anyone there and if there were any they’re terrorists.

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?

With the effort it takes to make a game worth playing, I’d think the fee isn’t the generous part, it’s the time and work needed to make it happen in the first place.

I’d like to think I could make something interesting if I put myself to the task and really pushed for it. I don’t feel like I could easily find the time and energy anymore.

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.

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

Which is partially felt more because and is exacerbated by the fact that companies and their shareholders feel entitled to capture every drop of money you have, to the point that buying a pizza comes with the option to spread the cost over four months just in case there’s 10$ from a person that they could only capture by offering the option.

I live half a planet away from America and even I’ve seen it. Disgusting.

Remember when we looked at phone apps that cost more than .99 and thought the developers were greedy?

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.

I only ever participated in the original Place years and years ago, putting down maybe two or three pixels.

Maybe where you’re from it’s easy to separate your government flag as its own symbol that doesn’t represent real people but when you’ve got like 20x30 pixels it’s hard to represent a local community online with something better than a flag. I think we ended up with less than ten pixels inside of a heart iirc.

At least for me, in my own country, I associate flags with popular protests and other symbols make me think of the government. Law enforcement uniforms and mismatched old automatic rifles from fifty years ago. Crippling bureaucracy that operates four hours a week that stretches five hours of paperwork errands into a six month chapter of your life (not a symbol but when you say government that’s what I think of).

Point being I don’t find it weird at all that people wanting to represent themselves will default to a national flag. My understanding is that in like Germany there’s a line where nobody wants to seem too proud of the flag, and in the US people are so desensitized to seeing every McDonald’s have 4000 flags on display, in England the red and white flag has different connotations if it’s in a football context or not, etc etc etc

A lot of flagpoles here are faded and tattered and often with one of the stripes almost separating off the flag. Might be doomerism but I think it looks cool, I think it very much is an appropriate representation.

I’m from Lebanon, this flag is for me, and when the government uses it, it’s using it deceptively to pretend it has any interest in our lives and our problems

I remember seeing people mod the iPhone 4 to replace the glass back with a nice wood back.

Metal and wood can’t be a worse idea than glass. Grippy too. Although without the right treatment it can get gross I guess.

I have the opposite problem weirdly enough. I played a ton of Civ V, and have had a lukewarm aversion to Civ VI knowing it would be a huge time sink when I could be playing other games. Such as KSP. Which I also haven’t been playing for the same reason.

I’ve had it in my library from some bundle or sale for years now but it still feels like it’s much newer than it is to me. I’ve just played one or two games of V when I have to scratch that Civ itch.

There’s just too many games and too little time