I love some classic Mario Kart 64, but a family member and his friends kind of ruined that one for me. It’s a game that has relatively little content and is best played in small doses to not get sick of it, but they didn’t do that. They went through a whole phase of playing it every day and gaining expert level skills in it. I was not aware of how deep the meta for MK64 is, because the last time I played against them, they were exploiting glitches in virtually every track and leaving everyone else in the dust.

Was always more of a Diddy Kong Racing fan anyway.

Seeing as the free and open-source software movements have been a very effective, enduring, and successful method of liberating a lot of digital infrastructure, I think it provides a powerful model as an alternative to “seizing” the means of production.

One example already in practice is Open Source Ecology. FOSS industrial machine schematics have to be the basis. But the factory itself needs to be reinvented, from a linear process to a circular and, I think, general purpose one. Like a maker space scaled up enough to provide for the needs of one township.

And part of the reinvention needs to involve using a property trust framework to ensure the physical production property is in common ownership. We need to copyleft the means of production.

Secure from what? Security isn’t a dick measuring contest, it’s a living process and arms race. If someone is trying to tell me, “My stuff is the mostest of the biggest security because, hard!” - what I’m hearing is that their threat modeling is ill-defined, maybe not defined at all, and something misleading is going on. Especially when the lead dev of a platform appears to be screaming and shouting about everyone else with a dubious persecution complex.

So in the drama between the Graphene team vs every other privacy-focused Android dev - who should I trust?

Lightsabers are overrated.

Have you ever looked into the details of their shelters?

If I could photosynthesize and fix my own atmospheric nitrogen, I happily would.

They do, in their own way.

Okay, cool. That sounds like the way to go. I’ll just use a different account and email for the free trial, then switch back to my main if I ever start a subscription.

I mean, I’m currently already 650 episodes into the main anime already, so I may as well keep going. 😅 One Pace sounds great though, so I’ll probably try that for a rewatch someday. Maybe after reading the manga for comparison.

I remember buying Final Fantasy XIV on Steam some years ago, and something about doing that made it so I completely missed out on the free trial. So now I’m not sure if I want to try to disassociate my Steam account from my Squeenix account and make a new one for the latter and see if that gives me access to the free version; or wait until I’m either comfortable paying the subscription or if a private server gets off the ground.

Final Fantasy XI private servers are alive and well in the meantime, and that’s a game I still need to experience as well. Also PSO Blue Burst.

To be fair about One Piece, there’s so little unique content in each episode, sandwiched between a lengthy theme song and recap, and next episode preview, that 37 episodes is more like 15 episodes.

And I love all of it.

I like the ds4 - so much so that I want to get a new one and mod it for more modern features. But it’s still distinctly larger. It can be kind of surprizing to re-experience just how small and light the ds2 is compared to newer controllers.

I would call it less of an issue (at least in my case), and more of something that became apparent only after going back and experiencing the smaller controller to compare others to.

I really wish there were a modernized controller in the exact form factor of the classic ds2. Like if it had tmr sticks and a better dpad, but was still a wired controller and had 4 shoulder buttons instead of two triggers. Don’t get me wrong, triggers have their place, but there are some games that work better with all buttons, which probably partly explains the popularity of hair trigger mods.

I remember reading that light mode is better for extended reading, so that’s what I lean toward. My personal experience is that reading white text on black background can be a little more straining, but it wouldn’t surprize me if others feel differently.

As someone also with large hands, I still love well designed controllers that fit well for smaller hands - like the classic Dualshock 2 controller. I used one again pretty recently. Had to stop because the analogs were virtually useless, but the smallness of the controller stood out to me because after enough time playing a game I noticed I could more easily forget the controller itself and focus on the game (except those damn broken sticks).

When I went back to the DualSense, it felt clunky and unwieldy by comparison. I feel bad for gamers with small hands, because all the standard controllers must be monstrous for a lot of people. No wonder mobile gaming gained so much traction - game companies forgot that kids play games too.

I do appreciate that the grips are flared out at least a little on this controller. The 90° ones on the Steam Deck can be quite uncomfortable, especially given that it’s a pretty heavy and cumbersome device.

My biggest skepticism is the dpad though. It looks nearly identical to the Steam Deck’s, which is easily one of the worst dpads I’ve ever used. Hopefully the underlying mechanisms and feel of it has been improved.

I don’t like the look of this controller… I’m still gonna get one. Everything else I love.

Especially that SteamOS is apparently going to become available on ARM devices.

The concepts they’re referring to have more to do with Ken Thompson’s Trusting Trust essay. Laurie Wired recently came out with an episode about it. It’s a rather intractable problem in computing, and unfortunately, even with the best practices to overcome it, you can never be 100% sure that your system is completely free of compromise.

I could waste my time assembling links to articles about the rise of fundamentalism in the US, the infiltration of law enforcement by white supremacist groups, and the roots and connections between white supremacy and christianity; but given your determination to deny, and that you’re already misrepresenting my own words, I am not going to bother.