I recently played Metro Exodus and I felt like it was a drag at the beginning of the game instead. It was one of the few times in my life in which 1 hour into the game I was so bored I was googling whether the game would eventually get going and become fun. The story “twist” at the beginning felt extremely rushed and out of nowhere and it sort of put me off. But as the game got going I got very into it and I was the one “dragging” it by doing every secondary objective.
I’ve been playing Cities Skylines a lot - got pulled back in with all the talk about the new one - and also Going Under.
Going Under is one of those games I bought a while ago because it seemed fun, played for a bit, got my ass kicked more than what I was used to with roguelites and stopped for a while. I started playing it again recently and think it finally made sense to me. Looking back, I probably wasn’t paying much attention to the game the first time I tried it because I didn’t understand there was an indication for weapon damage on different weapons - which made weapon choice feel random - and I also didn’t understand how the mentor system worked - which is a big part of the strategy of the game. I’ve been having a lot of fun with it now, though.
I tried to play the original System Shock two/three years ago but gave up at a stage that felt very close to the end. I basically had a save at a weird spot, when I was low on ammo and anything else useful, right between two complicated rooms. I reloaded a ton of times and always died trying to go forwards or backwards before giving up.
Anyway, would you recommend System Shock Remaster for someone who likely almost completed the original one, gave up, but still liked it overall? Or is there something shockingly different about the original’s ending I’ll be missing?
Yeah, it’s not even niche topics, it’s almost everything outside of technology. Almost all of the creative communities I used to follow on Reddit have practically no associated activity on the Fediverse. None of the photography communities have really picked up on Lemmy/Kbin either.
There’s some photographers over on Pixelfed but finding content or accounts to follow is pretty bad. I follow maybe a handful of people whose photos I like to look at, and the only mechanism to find good noteworthy accounts is the trending section - which I check daily but it’s mostly the same handful of people everyday. Scrolling to the public feed or trying to follow generic photography hashtags mostly nets me memes, porn and random pics which aren’t photography at all.
I stopped going to Reddit as much, came over here, after a few weeks I’m not using this as much anymore either, so I’m mostly trying to do more useful things with the time. Though I’m sad that I’ve lost a few communities in the way.
But people are definitely less productive working from home
How so? I personally think it’s a somewhat personal matter, but people who are less productive are home seem to be people who can’t focus in general. I am far more productive working from home, mostly because I don’t get distracted by others. I have colleagues who spend hours bantering only to then stay in the company until later to compensate for the banter - I’d rather get my work done so I can end my day on time and go home do the fun stuff. But I do have colleagues who say they get distracted easily when working at home and they’d rather work at the office.
Overall though, my company used to be very against working from home, but after the period of mandatory work from home, management admitted overall productivity had increased. They still insist people should come to the office every now and then to maintain the “friendly” environment the company is supposed to have, though, which is fair I guess.
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I typically only buy games on discount some years after they’ve launched. I’ll sometimes make an exception for indie games that come out which seem like exactly my kind of game. And I made an exception for Battlebit as well - I bought it immediately after I saw the first person playing it because it seemed like ultra fun, and I’ve probably already played more of it than all Battlefield games combined over the years.
Nice one, I’m always on the lookout for more accounts to follow on Pixelfed.
This looks really cool, though I assume maintenance must be a pain. Maybe one day I’ll give sff a shot.
Ask the hundreds of millions of corpses in Indonesia, Brazil, Guatemala, Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Libya, Iraq, Syria, Grenada, Iran, etc, etc. if they think liberalism ‘won’t actually try to kill them’ if they have an opinion that isn’t aligned with capitalist interests.
Yeah, sorry, I’m gonna pass. Like I told the guy above, I’m sure whatever definition of Liberalism you use fits whatever point you’re trying to make, but unless you have a specific point to make, I’m not going through all of these countries’ histories in search of how “liberalism” has led to hundreds of millions of corpses. Especially because I see Brazil in that list and I’m familiar enough with its history to bet your definition of “liberalism” is actually fascism, so I’d rather not bite.
’Tankie’ is literally the word your sect uses to describe Marxist Leninists
I don’t use tankie to describe marxist leninists. I’ve made that very clear in my comment above. Like the person above, you seem to be trying to mix concepts in order to attack points I haven’t made. I also wonder what sect you think I’m a part of. I’d ask you to at least pretend you’re arguing in good faith and, if you truly want to argue, argue against the points I’ve made, not the strawman you’ve made up in your mind. Thought that would probably mean veering off the pre-approved script.
Such as? By the way worker’s rights and socialism cannot be attained simply by voting
The communist party in my country is very fond of aligning with the new far right party when it comes to women’s right - which aren’t an issue according to the communist leader, as only workers’ rights are a true issue - and minority rights in general. It was a bit surprising to some when they decided to walk that path, but I guess we should’ve known.
As for workers’ rights, a combination of voting, strikes and protests have worked fairly well for my country’s history. A lot of unions in the past 20 or so years have steered away from the communist party, given their alleged attempts at suppression, and have become independent. The communist party has been continually losing votes as it clings to fringe topics such as the defense of dictatorships and often attacks unions which try to act in a democratic manner and pick leaders among the workers, instead of accepting the outside leaders the Party had decreed.
But what would you propose as an alternative to voting and protesting? Terrorism?
Examples?
I don’t know if you’ve accidentally only cropped part of what you intended to. Do I really need to show you examples of the far right trying to sell the idea that everyone to the left aligns with dictatorships? You can just look up any interview of any far right leader in europe and you’ll probably find your example. Thought I’m confused why you need examples of that.
This isn’t comparable to my Auschwitz comparison, because this picks two unrelated things. The USSR also didn’t genocide millions of Ukrainians.
They are as related as your two picks. The meat of the comparison was simply how you cherry pick a bad thing about the horrible dictatorship you dislike and something good about the horrible dictatorship you like.
I don’t see a difference between Marxist-leninism, “Stalinism” (not a real thing, though sometimes people use the term), and communism. I’m happy to go into the nuts and bolts, if you’d find that interesting. I’ll try to use Marxism-leninism going forward, if that’s easier.
There is a very distinct difference between Marxism, Marxist-leninism, Stalinism, etc. I couldn’t tell you what communism means in the modern world. Just going through a list of communist parties in europe, for example, they all defend such radically different things that even they don’t seem to agree on what communism means. I appreciate your offer to inform me, but unlike most communists, I’ve read Marx’s works. Cool stuff. Shame many modern day communist movements have completely thrown out that whole part about workers’ rights and class struggles and have gone full into adopting far right conspiracies in order to grab hold of the extremist votes as what used to be their main talking points has been normalized as is mostly still defended by movements closer to the center.
If these are the reasons you oppose both fascism and Marxism-leninism, do you oppose Liberalism the same amount?
I don’t oppose Marxism-leninism. Tankies are by definition not marxist. I don’t understand why you keep shifting the conversation to try and mix tankies with actual communists. It’s usually the far right who tries to argue that people who might be favourable to marxist rhetoric are the exact same as people who condone genocides commited by states which defined themselves as “communist”, so it’s extra weird to have to defend this notion from a supposedly marxist-leninist.
As for Liberalism, like with Communism, I don’t really know what it actually means. What americans call Liberalism is practically the opposite of what is described as Liberalism in European politics, which itself is fundamentally different from something like classical liberalism, so you’d have to be more specific. Having said that, none of these groups usually defend genocidal actions, so I don’t “oppose” them in the sense I oppose fascists and stalinists. I might disagree with everything they stand for, depending again on the kind of liberalism we’re talking about, but at least I know they won’t actually try to kill me.
What is your opinion on people “screeching” about the Holocaust, given it happened so long ago?
EDIT: No answer. I’m assuming the user is as in favour of erasing memories of the Holocaust as he is of erasing memories of the genocides commited by Stalin and his supporters.
Almost the entirety of the political spectrum of most democratic countries sits as far away from Trump as it does from tankies. Let’s stop pretending that if I oppose people who pretend that no genocides happened under Stalin I’m suddenly pro-Trump. There’s an entire political spectrum between those two.
“People who built the Volkswagen, people who genocided millions of Ukrainians, what’s the difference?”
Just thought I’d turn your line around. It’s fun to reduce the atrocities of a movement to a good thing they did. Though the OP didn’t even mention communists at all, he mentioned tankies, as in the people who actively deny the atrocities of stalinism and maoism. It’s weird that you’d jump to defending communism.
You’re right that there’s a difference between fascists and tankies/ stalinists. And if this were a discussion in an academic setting, that might actually matter. But in an online discussion about the evils of both, it sort of doesn’t really matter. They both have a track record of authoritarianism and mass genocides, and I don’t get along well with people which defend either.
Nice pic, and another community for my collection
Really cool! Also didn’t know pics organized a photo of the week, good to know.
The main cause of natural fires over here are lightning strikes. There’s some phenomenon in which high temperatures can cause thunderstorms which are fairly “fast”, as in they don’t last very long, and a strike in the middle of the forest combined with hot temperatures and dry forests can cause a natural fire. But that’s actually fairly rare in my country at least.
In the past, I’ve seen studies that mixed natural causes with unknown causes, which made the number of fires happening from “natural causes” seem impossibly high - leading to the thing you pointed at in your first post, where some people actually believe that a fire could just start from nothing.
Thank you. I’ve been a volunteer firefighter for a few years so discussions about wildfires always hit a nerve and I hate how many of them are used to steer public opinion towards very specific problems, while ignoring how complex the topic really is.
I live in a European country that’s practically known by its summer wildfires. We’ve had enormous fires ever since before I was born and before temperatures got this high in the summer. Our own stats show that around 70% of occurring fires happen due to human action - both negligent (people who insist on using electrical machinery in the woods in the summer) and criminal (loonies who like causing chaos and watching firefighters). The remaining percentage is mostly fires in which we can’t pinpoint the cause, and few of them actually occur “naturally”, simply because of high temperatures.
Most of our forest has been abandoned over the years, partly because the people who own it moved to more urban areas, partly because a lot of economical activities linked to the forest have become financially unfeasible for the average person. State forests get abandoned as well because state budget usually gets discussed outside of wildfire season, when everyone forgets that wildfires exist. We’ve also lost a lot of volunteer firefighters in rural areas because of a lot of immigration to other European countries for better job opportunities.
Every year, by this point of the year, the news cycle turns towards wildfires and the same old discussion about what causes them starts all over again, with most political actors - and the public themselves - attributing the causes to whatever problem they identify with the most. By october, no one in my country - or on here, most likely - will be talking about wildfires anymore.
That’s exactly the time in which we should begin clearing forests, doing maintenance work on access roads and fire stopping strips, and in general discussing what needs to be done to stop this - but by then most of the public forgets that wildfires exist and any attempt to finance those things ultimately fails as public opinion moves on and suddenly switches from “oh no, we’re all going to burn” to “we’ll deal with wildfires next year, we have plenty of time left!”. Any attempt at gaining public support to finance the necessary work to prevent wildfires is constantly shut down because, outside of summer, no one really cares about wildfires.
I’ve seen this cycle happening year after year for most of my life. We’re in the “thing I don’t like is the only cause of fires and we should stop it!” phase, and in a few months everyone will collectively stop giving a shit and move on. Fires are getting harder to fight, both because of rising temperatures and because of a collective unwillingness to act - it’s getting harder and harder to get people to volunteer at fire stations, likewise for every charity I volunteer at. Though every stat we have shows people are supposedly more politically active than ever before - or at least it appears so judging by their online activity - less and less people everyday are willing to go out and actually do something useful for their community. It’s all talk and no game. But not to worry! Only two months left till october when we’ll all pretend wild fires haven’t been destroying our landscapes for years and years.
While I understand the sentiment, I hate this trend that whenever someones talks about how soulless the internet has become, the answer is always Web 1.0.
I don’t want web 1.0. I like having CSS and Javascript around. I use them to build things I couldn’t with HTML alone, and I’ve seen countless incredibly creative websites which fundamentally couldn’t have been built without Javascript. It’s weird to me how the article mentions the creative aspect of the old web, versus the commercial aspect and “sameyness” of the current web, only to then toss out tools that allow for even more creativity and personalization in the current web.
Whenever I finish reading one of these articles it always feels like it’s mostly nostalgia and not much else.
He was in the opensuse board of directors at some point I think. I knew him from his Youtube channel that talked about Linux and related topics, it was fairly popular in the Linux community for a while. I mostly watched it for Linux related news and technical opinions. A bit after he left that position, he started occasionally mentioning how now that he wasn’t representing opensuse anymore he could finally “speak freely”. That’s when the channel started taking a weird turn.
At first he started going on weird political tangents while doing the whole “I don’t talk about politics” thing. Some videos started popping up where he would attack some person or organization for what seemed to be mostly political reasons, but under the guise of his reasoning being purely technical.
Eventually, he just started sounding like someone who fell into a conspiracy rabbit hole, or some weird far right cult. I stopped watching then, most of his videos by then had little technical interest anymore and they sounded more like someone who was losing their mind. I don’t know if it’s a mental issue or something, but his whole persona shifted dramatically into something… weird. I haven’t kept up in the mean time, though.