I bought That Dragon Cancer ages ago because it seemed like an amazing and innovative idea for a game, and I’ve never had the guts to start it up.

Melted plastic, plastic fumes, and microplastic particles already aren’t great for you, and 3D-printing introduces a bunch of ways for them to be introduced directly into your body.

I worked in the 3D-printing industry for a long time, and I’m confident whoever does my autopsy is going to get a clown-style poof of confetti.

Fitting that it’s ending in (eternal) September.

That’s the scariest thing about this all to me. I’m middle-aged and happily married, but my own youth was a long battle with various mental heath struggles, social isolation, abuse, extreme loneliness, and having to figure out so much of my life without enough help. I have no doubt that if this bullshit were available to me back then I’d have been very susceptible to it carrying me off into far deeper unhealthy mental states and worse decisions than the ones I ended up with. I had my own poor decisions, hard lessons, and all-around awful shit to wade through, but ultimately I was able to learn, work, grow, and find myself somewhere better.

I have a very good life now, with a real human partner, family, friends, and others who appreciate my existence as I appreciate theirs. I’m not rich or famous or whatever, but I’m constantly grateful to be doing as well as I am. It absolutely fucking devastates me how much more difficult finding one’s way to a more positive future is now for kids who are dealing with anything like I was back then, with uncaring capitalist asshole-fueled bullshit like this getting in the way.

BEBOP COLA GOOOOOD!!!

So I ask everyone again, what business model exists for a software company to make money without ads or charging a monthly subscription.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_models_for_open-source_software

Speaking of WIkipedia, https://wikimediafoundation.org/who-we-are/financial-reports/

Breathing through 3D-printed plastic would be bad enough for you without the cigarettes.

I assume you hired that person for being clever.

Right now I’m really hooked on Lucky Tower Ultimate. I’ve never been this into anything like it before, roguelites mostly bore me, but this game has such a goofy charm and - for an Early Access game - surprisingly deep explorability. It’s my go-to game for picking up my Steam Deck and screwing around for 20 minutes or an hour. I’m still having a ton of fun with it.

Add some massive unregulated grifting and hideous environmental consequences to your idea, and you’ve just invented Bitcoin.

I grew up hating a lot of vegetables because my grandfather - who I’m sure meant well - used to boil the life out of them. Green beans or broccoli would be soft, mushy, and greyish (while the water became green), and taste like unseasoned sadness.

One day when I was in grade school in the year nineteen eighty-bad, the cafeteria served hot dogs which had gone greyish and we were all told it was fine. They smelled awful and made a bunch of kids sick.

The question is about the worst food you’ve ever eaten. Are you Steve?

Excellent point!

I wanna go gambling with your hard drive.

Or the terrifyingly-random bullshit that happens when someone chooses to depend on a free service such as Hotmail as their primary mission-critical address. (This article is about the developer getting locked out of their Hotmail, and the generally-broken state of Hotmail’s account recovery process.)

My version of this would have the smiley face in every square.

It’s good to be alive!

The full post by linked source Taylor Lorenz about this appears here on her Patreon (openly readable, not locked as of now).

She still writes on Substack, though, which ultimately works in support of This Sort of Thing.

Lemmy’s federated structure makes it easy to block the instances which don’t moderate the nazis or tankies or anything else away to your satisfaction, while Substack is a centralized platform which has chosen to not only allow, but actively encourage and reward its nazis.

So, any such problem on Lemmy is “better” because we can all (as individual users, and/or collectively as instances) deal with it as we like instead of bowing to Substack’s decision to be a nazi bar for all its users.

https://slashdot.org/software/p/Substack/alternatives

The linked story has been updated. The headline now reads:

Labour rules out VPN ban in UK but issues warning to UK households

Labour won’t ban the use of Virtual Private Networks

And the story begins:

Labour has ruled out a possible VPN ban after reports thousands of UK households were at risk following the Online Safety Act kicking in under the government. Labour Party Tech Secretary Peter Kyle has revealed that the Government is “not considering a VPN ban” - after reports in Guido Fawkes suggested it was possible.