EGM will always be my favorite vide game magazine. I like Game Informer, had a subscription back in the day, even had a subscription last year before they shut down. But GI is no EGM. Wish they’d come back, too.

Griffin, who for now remains a judge on the state Court of Appeals,

The fact that a judge is doing this somehow makes this so much worse. I would be constantly be questioning this judge’s impartiality on basically any topic.

Of course, that’s just one of those idealisms. That judges and courts are above the fray. It looks like NC Court of Appeals judges are elected anyway. In partisan elections, at that. Which is insane to me for judges. Non-partisan retention elections are about as far as I’d go involving elections for the judiciary.

Damn that’s a game I haven’t thought of in a long time. And I forgot that the SNES had a mouse! at all I even remember that hard plastic mouse pad it came with.

Very interesting article. I’m not a Washingtonian, so don’t have much to say, other than that the state certainly has some hard decisions to make going forward. Especially in the face of a likely hostile federal trifecta, even if weak.

Not that I care about TikTok one way or another, but one of the best arguments I’ve seen against banning it dealt with supposed protection of Americans’ data. And I’m pretty sure that’s the approach that lawmakers have taken with this; it’s not that Chinese propaganda is bad, it’s that China shouldn’t have this much private info on Americans. I believe that’s the primary angle they’ve taken to get around First Amendment concerns.

Anyway, the argument is, “Oh, but it’s OK for US tech companies to harvest data? That’s it’s OK that we have weak privacy and data protection laws? As long as US companies are doing it, then it’s not a problem?” Because, remember the laws says that the company becomes “unavailable” in the US if not sold to an American company. Presumably, if TikTok were sold to a US company, then the app could continue with no issue, tracking and collecting tons of data on Americans to be packaged and sold to the highest bidders.

I will admit, I was somewhat more pro-ban before hearing that argument. But now I’m more neutral. I don’t use it, so I’m not/shouldn’t be affected. But the government trying to hide behind data privacy and protection to ban TikTok does feel rather empty.

It’d be interesting if everyone “started” in the same place. For example, Mastodon.social. But then eventually, like maybe after 90 days, one was forced to choose a “home” instance to migrate to. Could be through a list of servers presented, or maybe a user has found one through friends, so they just type in the server and it kicks off a migration process. I’m almost thinking like an MMO starting area.

During that 90 days, the user has to (or should) learn about federation, why decentralization is important for privacy and security, what defederation means and blocking options, how and why instances are a thing, how to migrate an account, etc. Maybe even some info on how and why one could stand up their own instance.

And this doesn’t have to like a classroom/book setting. It doesn’t have to be “read this documentation.” Maybe some 1min video clips, brief tooltips, little reminders to read a brief paragraph of two on some Mastodon topic. Gamify it; let people collect badges and achievements.

During all this, users have full access to everything Mastodon users can do. They can interact with anyone on the entry server, plus any server that’s federated with it. Or maybe they’re an already experienced user and want to go straight to another instance; they can either skip all this and migrate or start straight at another instance.

Though I wonder if that’s still too much friction.

Because Mastodon and the Fediverse is confusing, especially at first. I’m a techy person. I work in IT. But when I started to looking at the Fediverse back in 2023, it was confusing. Where do I go to sign-up? There are different services on the Fediverse? Which do I get access to? Do I need an account for each service? How do I know that this instance for this service (Pixelfed, Lemmy, Masto, etc.) is a decent one? What happens if my friends/people I follow are on a different server? Will we be able to interact? What does it even mean to federate/defederate?

These are all the questions I asked as I was looking to all this. And it wasn’t a quick 15min look. No, I spent a few hours looking into it.

But the average person isn’t going to ask all this and research this. They just want a place to follow famous people, post about their life, and post pictures of their food and pets. When these people (myself included) signed up for Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, etc, they just went to the appropriate site and signed-up.

It’s not nearly as simple for Mastodon. Sure, Mastodon.social acts as the flagship and “gateway,” but there are still the other questions that probably need some answers. Otherwise, a user may have a bad experience (“Oh, my friends aren’t on this Mastodon server thing? And we’re not federated? I gotta make a new account there? Ugh…”). Twitter and even Bluesky don’t require those questions. Everyone is on the same instance, all the time.

The reality is that most don’t really care for options and choice. Or even security and privacy. They want ease of accessibility. Mastodon is likely a better product (in most regards; I have and use both Mastodon and Bluesky, daily; Bluesky does a few things better), but the options Mastodon provides, especially at the start, are really more roadblocks or offramps than anything.

I do like politics, so perhaps it is right up my alley! I know it’s fairly different from FP1, but we’ll see.

Finishing up Frostpunk. I started last year, then put it down basically for a year. Anyway, I recently finished 2 of 3 DLC campaigns. Working on the last one right now. Easily the hardest colony manager I’ve played, but it’s so good. Can’t wait to start Frostpunk 2 after this.

With friends, playing Barotrauma. We’re doing our annual playthrough/attempt to get the to the end. Which we done once. There’s 5 of us regularly playing (a 6th sometimes joins), which for us, seems to be the minimum we need. Think we just entered The Great Sea, which is the 4th of 5 biomes. Just upgraded to a Tier 3 sub.

Wonder when we’ll see US-style tariffs in Europe on Chinese vehicles, particularly EVs. In the name of protecting European jobs and auto marketshare. Which would be unfortunate, given the need to move to EVs to mitigate climate change. As an American, I would’ve loved to have a $20k Chinese EV. I don’t think there are ICE vehicles in the US that cheap these days.

But I also get the jobs issue, too. I think much of the West is in the situation we’re in because of offshoring of jobs and competition from cheaper labor overseas. Loss of jobs, income, ability to support family, etc.

Curious to see how this plays out.

Ah fair point. Yeah, I rarely look at political content on YouTube, Instagram, and even Bluesky. Mainly because I use my real name on these platforms.

I reserve that for reddit, Lemmy, Tildes, and Mastodon, where I use screennames. And Mastodon doesn’t have an algorithm.

On Twitter, I did engage in political content, even with my real name, but I largely stopped using Twitter daily years ago. I went from tweeting regularly, to only lurking, and just maybe once or twice a week at that. By the end, I was checking maybe once a month. The Twitter algorithm probably didn’t have enough info on me, given my weak activity levels.

Same. And I am a racial minority (though not black, so that may color things…excuse the unintentional pun). That said, on Mastodon, I mainly interact with the people on my instance. And it’s small. There’s probably only a core group of like 50 active individuals, and I’m one of them. So there I’m not surprised I don’t see racism.

Interestingly, I have the same experience on even the proprietary social media sites. I was on Twitter from 2009 to 2023. I can’t say I was ever served up far-right content by the algorithms. I’m still on YouTube; same experience. Same on Instagram. Same on Bluesky.

I’m not trying to discount other people’s experiences, and I’ve seen the horrible tweets referenced in news articles and reddit comments and such. So I know it exists, but why am I not being served this content, while so many others apparently are? I mean, I’m OK with not getting far right wing content, lol. Leave me out of it! Makes my online life easier and more enjoyable. But it’s just odd.

Oh god, please no. I need some mind’s-eyebleach.

Last warning. Be(e) nice.

How do one sign up to get one or a few of these twink concubines? Asking for a friend.

I don’t even know what that liberal nation would be anymore. Sure, for example, Europe is still largely pretty good, but even some of those countries are facing the rise of the right. And they have same objectives as the right here in the US has. Just because it’s not as bad as the US right now, doesn’t mean it can’t be in the future, or even near future. Look at what’s going on in Germany or France with the right or even far-right parties making large gains in recent elections and polls.

Feel like it’s fucked in much of the world right now.

FYI, you’re on Beehaw. Be(e) nice. I know times are crazy right now, I get it. But we still expect people to follow our rules here.

FYI, you’re on Beehaw. Please be(e) nice. I know it’s crazy times right now, I get it, but we do want folks to still abide by our rules and such here. Thanks.

This is normal shit in Missouri. The state voted for medicinal and eventually recreational marijuana. But then they sent people to state legislature and offices who vehemently opposed it. Can’t remember which type it was, but IIRC, the courts had to step in to force the state to license dispensaries and grow ops and such.

They voted lobbying and redistricting reform. But then they sent pols who absolutely didn’t want it. This time, the pols got their way and lobbying and redistricting reform went away before it ever got put into practice.

Every so often, the GOP-controlled legislature sends RTW legislation to the people. The people reject it time and time again, but they don’t reject the people in the legislature who keep bringing it up time and time again.

So I was super confident that Amendment 3 in MO would pass, based on past results. But I was also super confident Trump, Hawley (fuck Josh Hawley), and a multitude of other GOPers would be voted in. Based on past results.

Because Missouri makes no fucking sense.

If you don’t vote, I’ll be sad. Please don’t make me sad.