Thanks, I’ll check out strange horticulture. I’m looking for arthouse games in a sense. Outer Wilds completely changed me, for example, and I want to try to recreate that feeling, but I don’t want an Outer Wilds clone, like how Lords of the Fallen is to Dark Souls.
I want something that’s going to destroy me and make me think, or just be ultra fun and different from anything else I’ve played.
It took me a bunch of tries, too. It’s not really a “fun” game, more like a visual and interactive novel. Once I got the hang of the dice rolls being the biggest part of the game, and knowing/remembering where to seek them out, and getting used to the map, it became easy to pick up and put back down. It’s amazing, but not easy to get going.
My OLED is coming in today, so hyped. Will definitely help with the commute. First off is finishing up Disco Elysium, then maybe playing Edith Finch? Anyone have any other recs? Besides Hades 1, I guess.
True, but that just isn’t a maintainable party platform. There may be denial and violence in the short term, but at that point I think the Trumpian wing of the Republican party is in its death throes and is doomed.
I’m not so sure. While I don’t necessarily have a positive outlook on the future of American politics, I think the Democratic party is in a really good spot at the moment. The Republican party is completely beholden to one person right now. They are in a very, very bad spot re: extremism in their party. It’s essentially their party platform. We’re seeing the ramifications in the House, now. Their party is in disarray and is proving they can’t manage to even govern themselves. Meanwhile, Democrats are capitalizing on that disarray by consolidating around abortion access, protecting democratic institutions, and willingness to actually get things done. We can see this in the immigration reform bill that Trump nuked – that was set to be a huge policy win for conservatives and Democrats were willing to push it through.
If Trump loses this election, where does the Republican party have to go? They can’t just conjure up another personality like Trump – I think DeSantis proved that. They’ve alienated their moderate voters in favor of bigotry and disruption of the institutions they grew up with and helped maintain. Either they’re going to have to revert to establishment, pre-Trump conservatism or double down on his insanity, further alienating the moderate Republicans. And where would those moderates go besides the Democratic party, which, while sure, is supportive of gender-affirming care (a knock for them), at least they are still willing to uphold capitalistic, business-centric values (or in other words, socialism for me, not for thee).
If Trump wins, then the Democratic party is still gonna be around and having a field day with all the issues he causes (see: Dobbs ruling). I dunno this may be a hot take but I could see the Republican party crumbling, and Democrats splitting into left and right camps. Maybe someone can check me, because the more I think about it the more I see Republicans as a fringe extremist group and Democrats as capitalists, and then me over here thinking to myself, “How could we seize collective ownership of Amazon and Google’s computers?” lol
Glad he did an episode on this. People need an accessible and digestible way of understanding the threat of Project 2025.
Yeah, neoliberals are destroying the left, but I’ll take them over an authoritarian theocracy.
Have you happened to read the book? He has a chapter dedicated to his decision to call it technofeudalism rather than capitalism, hypercapitalism, technocapitalism, etc. Basically he’s saying profits have been decoupled from a company’s value, and that it’s no longer about creating a product to exchange for profit (which, in his words, are beholden to market competition) but instead about extracting rent (which is not beholden to competition – his example is while a landowner’s neighbors increase the values of their properties, the landowner’s property value also increases).
Anyways he describes Amazon, Apple store, Google Play, cloud service providers, as fiefdoms that collect rent from actual producers of products (physical goods, but also applications), and don’t actually produce anything, themselves, besides access to customers, while also extracting value from users of their technologies through personal information. They’re effectively leasing consumer attention in the same way landowners leased their lands to workers.
It sounds pretty accurate to me, but I haven’t had much time to chew on it. What’s your take on that idea?
Sorry, buy-it-for-life
I kinda like the idea of a phone that is usually small, but I can make big by unfolding it if I want to. But I do agree that the fewer moving parts, the sturdier and more BIFL. It’s just that BIFL is not really attainable anyways in the current state of the phone market due to software support obsoletion.
I’d like to see a small eink phone or the tiny matchbook from Her.
My late Catholic grandmother believed this. She read some book by a Catholic “mystic” who had visions. Surprise! Racist visions.
Ideologically Ubuntu makes me cringe, but I also use Google and a host of other technologies that fuck my privacy, so I guess I have accepted the world we live in.
In the same way that I think it’s noble when people try to live waste free, I think it’s noble to use things like GrapheneOS, or selfhost all your services, or de-Google your tech. But it’s unrealistic for all of the world to live waste-free or customize their tech so as to be private. In the end, the government needs to step in and force these giant-ass companies to behave better, because they are the primary forces pushing forward the destruction of the environment and personal privacy.
I dont really fuck around with the GUI stuff tbh…I’ve always just done ubuntu-drivers autoinstall
I guess my issues with the installer have mostly stemmed around the software raid and manual partitioning. Simply installing on a single drive isnt bad.
Hate saying it, but Ubuntu just works for me. I’d rather focus my computer configuration and maintenance efforts on clients rather than my own laptop. If I have to reinstall for whatever reason, its pretty easy because I’m already very familiar with the (shitty) installer, and I don’t do much customizing because I’d rather not have to go through that every time I reinstall.
Granted I’ve never even bothered to run Arch, or any really other desktop distro for that matter. Ubuntu + Gnome looks nice, seems to just work, all I need to do is apt install nvidia drivers and firefox post-install and I’m up and running. I don’t want to do work on my laptop, I want my laptop to enable me to do work.
First heard that in The Boondocks. Lol
Hell yeah. I just read Guards, Guards! by Pratchett and I’m working through LotR again. Dune is amazing, but I haven’t continued past the original so maybe I’ll read those next.
If you’re into history, I’ve been listening to The People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn, it focuses on each major historical event from the perspective of the regular individual person rather than focusing on the people who happened to be in power during them, and it’s pretty good so far. I also read Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky, and that was life changing. Those are two pretty political ones, though.
In terms of fiction Id recommend Cormac McCarthy – either The Road or Blood Meridian – The Road is a post apocalyptic story about a father traversing through the ashen environment with his son, while Blood Meridian is a brutal Western set in the 1800s. With both of these, it’s not as much about plot as it is about the poetry of the writing.
I haven’t read a scifi book in a minute, but I haven’t seen a lot of people recommend A Canticle for Leibowitz. It’s three separate-but-connected short post-apocalyptic stories that follow the gradual resurgence of humans after a nuclear event. It’s really subtle in that it doesn’t slam you with like a whole universe and systems like Dune, but it’s expertly written and hits some pretty thought provoking topics. Def underrated.
Me too:) do you have any recommendations off the top of your head? No genre preference, just your favorite book or video essay?
I started preferring long form media recently. Audiobooks especially. Social media allows anyone to say a single thing that may or may not be legit, but since it’s bite sized information units they don’t need to back it up. Long form media requires a person to back up what they say, and having that barrier of entry filters out those who probably aren’t worth listening to.
Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
I live in a small city about an hour away from a major city. I’m also an hour away from what I would call the boonies – rural, remote areas where owning guns and open carrying is normal. In fact, I’ve seen open carry around here, in the city, quite a bit. It’s pretty normal around here.
I heard a shooting happen in the suburbs near my house when I was a kid. It’s what’s considered the “nice” part of town. An old woman walking her dog was killed. I heard the shot through my bedroom window. Only til I moved into the inner part of the city did I witness guns being shot in the city more often. Most of the times you hear pops, it’s fireworks. A couple times, it’s been guns. Those couple times are pretty freaky.
Every once in awhile I’ll walk past a crime scene downtown, usually something happened like a stabbing the night before. One day I scrolled through reddit and saw a video – a point-blank execution had occured outside the club down the road. That one was disturbing. I think the kid is going to jail for a long time.
The inner part of this particular city is not as safe as the suburbs, but for the most part you should be okay, as long as you’re not looking to start trouble. When I’m walking around town, especially the immediate area I live, my eyes are open. At night, they’re wide open.
I got an OLED the other day and splurged hard during the summer sale.
I got Stray and Little Kitty, Big City to show off to my cat-loving GF, and for me I got Dave the Diver, Sifu, and Babu is You. Also picked up Hollow Knight for good measure, but have yet to start it. 9 Sols, Mullet Madjack, Warhammer Boltgun, Baldurs Gate 3, and Return of the Obra Dinn all on my wishlist.