I love deer. One of my favorite bits of trivia is the etymology of the word. It used to mean just generally any wild animal, but we eventually found names for all those other things. Deer remain unnamed. Truly wild.

I’ma be real here, mine did come with an implied price tag and $45 is cheap by comparison.

I suggest you all take advantage of the deal before it finds you some other way. It might even be fun! Maybe it has something to do with bees, I don’t know.

PSP still rocks. I’ve been playing Phantasy Star Portable (edit: it abbreviates to PSP, oh my god were they doing a Sony equivalent of the DS thing? brilliant!) for the past two weeks and it’s really scratching an itch. Solid 7/10 game, excited to check out 2 Infinity (there’s a fan patch).

This article is a lot about the hardware itself, but I’d just like to take a moment to talk about old portable games from the 3DS/Vita eras and prior, they’re still very much worth your time. It’s before DLC and a lot of gacha/roguelike/gambling mechanics really set in, they’re designed to be both lean due to processing and battery constraints as well as set down at a moment’s notice because of the implied nature of portable gaming. Instead of purposefully hammering your attention and engagement, they expect that you could put them on pause at any moment to pop the device in your pocket and get on with your life. It’s seriously helped heal some of the fatigue I’ve been feeling.

On one hand, Etrian Odyssey can be a difficult and grindy game, but there’s something soothing about playing it on a little portable device while I casually watch a show in the background vs. fucking Wizardry Variants Daphne where even a bronze sword now has upgrades and star ratings and several different modifiers applied to it (do I want more attack or hit?) and can be used at the blacksmith as upgrade material for the next sword, etc. etc.

I’m straight fucking fatigued, bro. I don’t have ADHD, I have burnout from everything following the same dark patterns. Do you know how cool it is to play an old school RPG and open a chest and get legit excited for a silver sword again because of the simple, satisfying, understandable, and immediate upgrade it represents for your party?

… anyways, give it a try, yeah? What’s some of your old school favorites from PSP or other?

I absolutely agree with you but I think that take is a bit short-sighted and undercuts just how evil this stuff is.

Tom Nicholas did a Youtube video on the metaverse a while back (oh my god it was 4 years ago, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM00M-dRMBk) and it’s been stuck in my head ever since. The pivot towards VR was an attempt to get even deeper ahold of our attention and what better way to do that than with goggles that are constantly in front of our eyes? The same with AI as it attempts to insert itself as a substrate layer of all technologies, and again with the smart glasses.

It’s easy to dismiss these efforts as hilariously misguided but they’re not. They’re extremely calculated and he only needs it to pay off once to make everything worth it, and I think there are others that realize this as well. We just gotta keep praying that these efforts burn him out before they strike it big. I’m neither a praying nor gambling man, but praying is all we got right now to stand in his way and I wouldn’t put money on the certainty of Facebook’s failures …

My first experience with WINE was trying to install an old Windows 3.1/95 pinball game (https://www.myabandonware.com/game/3-d-ultra-pinball-creep-night-3fh) and just double-clicking the installer to see what would happen.

It installed and launched without issue and even added a shortcut to the KDE app launcher.

I use Bottles now to keep cleanly separated environments, but … even I wasn’t expecting things to just work like that? I thought WINE would be more difficult to figure out but nope!

It feels stupid to say, but of all the things that got me to move to Linux and never even install Windows 11, it was that stupid Start menu. Windows 10 was kind of perfect. You had your full list of alphabetical apps if you needed it, but you also had the ability to pin nicely sized tiles for frequently used apps, sort them into groups, and even make folders. Windows 11 gives you a little grid of icons. Just a huge step back.

I don’t have the energy to rice my desktop anymore and KDE has been perfect.

The thing is, though, is that Microsoft is literally incapable of solving this problem when you think about it. So much of Microsoft’s current business model is centered around being able to subtly direct you and your actions and maintaining tight control over the UI experience is key to that. People aren’t stupid and they’ll always feel that friction, so it’s just a push-pull of how much they think they can get away with at any point and slowly nudging it until it pisses you off again.

You’re a disgusting, nasty, dried out bread donut! throws chair

Hold me back, bros! Home me back, RRRARGH!

It used to work so much better, I swear. I fought it for awhile but eventually retrained myself on it and got pretty good. I was pretty sloppy, but it was amazing at guessing both the nearest swiped word as well as the next logical word in my sentence and now it’s straight shit. I swear this corresponded with AI.

And it makes sense, right? Like this should be one of the narrow things that an actual LLM would be good for, right??? But no. It recommends words and names that are nowhere near my vocabulary and it keeps recommending the same broken suggestions. For reasons I will never understand, probably usually comes up as pregnant? I assure you, I absolutely never mean pregnant except now I’ve typed it twice and forever reinforced it hysterical sobbing

Enshittification. Everywhere, in everything.

Honestly, just most, but who’s got the time?

I just want Lemmy to have a better, more wholesome, and welcoming experience for new users, as such I’ve decided to block the things I think we can all agree are bad:

• Calls for violence
• Politics
• Sex
• Nu metal
• People who put egg in potato salad
• Jerry (all of them)

“We want voters to understand that they cannot legally make a bet on an election and cast a ballot in that same election,” WEC Administrator Meagan Wolfe said in a news release.

“If even a handful of our users in Wisconsin see this and get scared away from voting, that could EASILY swing an election,” a Kalshi spokesperson told the local outlet.

The sheer gall of it, my god.

Boo! Add pawb.social, furries deserve to be there, too! (complimentary)

I used to work at a pet store and we’d get big cartons of crickets for reptile food. If you’ve ever purchased them from Petco/PetSmart it’s just a garbage bin in the back room with some egg crate in it.

Anyways, they shipped with potato slices and other things to help sustain them but they were usually pretty savage by the time you opened the box to add them to the bins. Surprised me the first time I got my arms covered in them and they started munching away. Didn’t hurt at all, they’re crickets, but boy were they trying. Dozens of little cricket mouths gently pinching away. I just kinda stood there dumbfounded like are you for serious little dudes??

My bluetooth headphones have the worst power button. You have to press and hold it for ~1 second to turn them on, but that’s only the activation threshold. They still take a further ~0.3 seconds to turn on. So basically you just need to press it for the whole ~1.3 seconds because otherwise you end up pressing it for what you think might be 1 second and then waiting to see if they eventually activate and then if they don’t, then you’ll just end up pressing and holding it for 3 seconds until they’re all the way on.

Those numbers might not be entirely accurate, I’ve never actually really timed it out, but you get the picture. The entire window is frustrating to nail down and feels just awful and unsatisfying, sometimes I don’t manage to turn them off either because it’s the same behavior backwards.

I feel like the design is to prevent them from getting bumped in your bag and turning themselves on and draining the battery and while that might technically work, they’re just as likely to end up getting squashed in my bag in a way that presses and holds the button anyways. None of this would even be necessary if you just put in a cheap, old school, tactile slide switch??? Like what is the fucking point?!

I remember downloading a copy of King Missile’s Detachable Penis incorrectly credited to The Flaming Lips. Like … I must’ve known it wasn’t them, but it sat on my Flaming Lips playlist for years and I just assumed it was something from their earlier, weirder 80’s days.

I remember talking about this on a message board once before and like 3 other people chimed in with this exact same song, apparently it was a bit of a thing. Probably just one person’s mistake, but the internet felt a lot smaller back then and it’s not surprising it would’ve propagated like that.

The most existentially terrifying thing about it is that it’s not about education or overall intelligence, but personality. And even then, there’s an emotional edge to it that may catch people in particularly vulnerable states.

Like a virus is a load of DNA being driven by a questionably alive entity, AI is a load of emotional signal being driven by a questionably conscience one (though I still argue not, I think the analogy stands). Education and intelligence can help ward it some, but people are complex and there’s no telling what subsystems or random strings it manages to hook onto.

I have a background in CS and AI (from the early 00’s, don’t be too impressed) and have friends in linguistics. ML and more specifically LLMs have been on my radar for a long while and I am aware of their possible uses, but I’m tired of having to hedge every conversation around it. What we need to do is cultivate a strong social and cultural boundary for ourselves.

I heard someone say that the only thing AI should be used for is stuff people never should have been doing in the first place, things like catching spam/phishing out of your email. GenAI is just pure abomination.

Isn’t this one of Zitron’s oft-cited horsemen?

Hah, lustful longing.

Terry Pratchett is a classic of course. I was making my way through publication order, but can’t remember where I stopped at this point.

As for the lesbian smut, definitely give The Starving Saints a look. Not spicy, but more the painful aching, if that’s your thing.

Oh yes! I’ve read Perdido Street Station and The Scar and greatly enjoyed them. I should get back to checking out more of his stuff, I know Iron Council is also in that setting but I’m not sure of much else. I tried Un Lun Dun back in the day and while it was fun, it was a little too YA for me.