Love a new youtube rec.

This is a really cool idea though. I’m actually playing F.I.S.T. right now and I’ve absentmindedly noticed some neat details in the environment backgrounds. Might slow myself down to a stroll in one of the city areas and take a closer look.

Been thinking about this type of thing a lot, especially as my older child is reaching an age where his friends are being allowed to play things like Roblox. Finding myself needing to explain gambling-adjacent risks, design patterns intended to capture rather than entertain or delight, and general digital citizenship.

Because he doesn’t have a ton of experience, I think he finds it unnatural to believe people like game makers might act deceptively or even maliciously. And I imagine he’s skeptical that his attention could even be manipulated the way games try.

Even “educational” games like Prodigy, endorsed by and used in his school, are lousy with operant conditioning and flow state design (and by some credible accounts are not even educationally valuable). I drew a line immediately against spending money within games and he’s so far been accepting of it. But the temptation is all over the place.

I think the argument is that even if you’re not consciously noticing it, your brain picks it up and that’s part of the unsettling feeling you get. Is that true? I don’t know. I was unsettled as hell watching Hereditary, but there’s a lot more unsettling content besides the quasi-noticeable woman in the corner of the ceiling.

I’m glad to see It Follows included in the essay though. Watching characters converse in the grass, in the sunlight, in a scenario that in almost all other horror movies would be a tension-relieving safe scene, until you notice another character, blurry and deep in the distance, walking robotically on a straight path toward the central characters, still gives me chills. It remains one of my favorite effects, and is a top-tier reason why I love horror movies even though I don’t love feeling tense or scared.

There are multiple sources referenced to weave a new commentary about the relationship between video games and labor for both players and creators 🤷.

Because email federation is inherent to everyone’s understanding of how that service works. And perhaps more importantly, email “instances” are run by corporations. Laymen are not signing up on a “server” or “instance,” they’re signing up for Google, Apple, or Microsoft - the service they get aligns to a company that provides it. Nearly every single service that anyone has ever signed up for online has followed the same essential process: go to fixed url, create id and password, gain access.

It’s easy to underestimate, especially in communities like this, how enigmatic the entire infrastructure of the internet is to the general population. Think of those videos where people are asked what “the cloud” is: they pause and ponder and then guess “satellites?” because they’ve never even wondered about it. I’m guessing that for many people, something like Twitter is just something that lives in their app store that they can choose to “enable” on their phone by installing it.

People know that software is “made up of code,” but they don’t understand what that means. The idea that an “application” is a collection of services run by code, that there are app servers and web servers, that there are backends and frontends, is completely unknown to (I’d guess) a significant majority of people. And if someone doesn’t understand that, it’s honestly near impossible to understand what anything in the fediverse is.

And most importantly: this is not any user’s fault. IT and the Internet developed so quickly, and it was made so seamlessly accessible by corporations who at first just wanted their services to be adopted, and then wanted everything even more deliberately opaque so those users were more likely to feel locked in and dependent while the services themselves tail-spun in degradation.

We need more, and more accessible, and friendlier, tech literacy in general. The complexity of our world is running away from us (“I have a foreboding [of a time…] when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues” - Carl Sagan) and we simply can’t deeply understand many of the things that directly impact us. But because of its ubiquity, IT may be the best chance people have of getting better at understanding.

Truly I wish that lawsuit the best. I still think the tone of the article is off, but certainly I may be guilty of the same.

Thanks for taking the time. Hard to keep from sinking too deep into despondency.

I get page not found 🤷

I may very well be wrong, happy to admit it. Do you know what laws are being broken?

So…to my untrained ears this sounds kind of dumb.

cybersecurity has always been about protecting computer systems more generally from any sort of misuse, no matter how the adversary might access them.

And misuse is defined the system’s owner, who in this case has given explicit permission to Musk. The whole article is predicated on the idea that Elon Musk…lied or put on a disguise or something. By any currently known measure, he’s allowed to be doing everything he’s doing because that’s what the current, duly-elected administration told him to do.

There was an image on the front page today of the everything-is-fine dog sitting among the flames saying “they can’t do this it’s illegal.” That seems apt for this article. America elected a fascist, and that fascist is openly tearing down all the informal rules and norms that we’ve always treated like laws.

Pretending like there’s a legal issue with a lot of what’s been happening is a distraction and waste of time that Democrats appear to be perfectly comfortable using as air cover to not exercise what little power they might have. I feel confident it will lead nowhere, and unless the people with power and influence who pretend to care figure out how to actually accomplish anything, we will just keep sinking.

“We’ve never been the party that was about checking boxes or identity politics, but the difference is we have women that are qualified to be chairs, and I don’t know why there wasn’t one who was able to become a chairperson of a committee," she added.

They’ve created this cartoonish simulacrum of diversity that they treat like some rabid, overzealous movement so they can ignore it.

Nicole, this thing you’re disappointed about is what that thing you dismiss as “identity politics” is actually all about, you weiner.

My incredulity is as boundless as it is impotent.

I’ve never played one except a PSP game way back that I dont think I understood at the time. I can’t even remember why I had it tbh. But I’ve been eyeing the series for the past few years. They look fun, but I’m not typically a Capcom fan and I’m pretty sure it’s not for me. Glad to be able to finally give one a proper try.

Well deserved. My kids fucking love Astro’s Playroom.

There is some absolutely hilarious material in here, were it instead fictional.

First-term state Rep. Roger Wilder, R-Denham Springs, who sponsored the child labor measure and owns Smoothie King franchises across the Deep South, said he filed the bill in part because children want to work without having to take lunch breaks.

“I keep trying to give them lunch breaks but they insist on doing what’s in the best interest my pocket lining!”

And my favorite, also from Roger Wilder:

“The wording is ‘We’re here to harm children.’ Give me a break," he said. "These are young adults.”

Could you imagine the delivery of this line, with just the right amount of pause after “give me a break” and the right expression to the camera if this were said on something like Parks and Rec?

A Republican hoping to represent Michigan in the U.S. Senate suffered a setback to his campaign this week after facing allegations that he lives in Florida.

Would that all candidates for public office suffered such setbacks if they were accused of living in Florida.

Fine, I’ll play the demo.

I don’t think I’m the target audience for this, I get PS3-era Platinum Games vibes from the little I know, which never interested me. The onslaught of coverage feels manufactured to me, but I’m open to the possibility that’s just because I don’t understand the hype. Time to give it a shot I guess.

Edit: nah, not for me. Cool monster designs though.

No denying it’s been underwhelming. Dave the Diver is a pretty good catch this month though (I assume from its reputation, I haven’t played it).

Pleasantly surprised for Deliver Us Mars. Deliver Us the Moon was a really immersive, entertaining journey.

Some of us buy printers because we have abuse and humiliation fetishes. My OfficeJet is the kinkiest product I own.

I like some punishing games (Returnal, Demon’s Souls Remake, Hollow Knight). Someone convince I’m likely or unlikely to enjoy Remnant From the Ashes. I’ve been on the fence for a while.