Fuck 'em. This far into Meta's descent into a capitalist surveillance platform, they should know what kind of company they work for. They only find it to be a problem if they aren't "finding meaning" in the "interesting technical challenges" of turning people into data points.

Just to give you an idea of what she thinks "success" for Xbox looks like, she said around the time of the last major layoff and studio culling that she wants the Xbox platform to hit a daily player count of one billion users. So literally enough unique user accounts to cover one in every eight people on Earth will need to play within the Xbox ecosystem within the same day for her to be satisfied. If you count mobile, I can see hitting north of 200 million, but executive expectations are detached from reality.

I saw a guy walking around town the other day with a sign that said, "Are we great yet?" and felt like that was a great little slogan that confronts Trump supporters with the fact that all of this was supposedly being done to restore whatever personally idealized version of "great" America once embodied to them. Pretty sure the majority of people who voted for Trump wouldn't even say that using federal agents to murder Americans in the street for exercising their constitutional right to protest is included in their own personal definition of the "greatness" that they feel America needs to get back to.

You know, I miss when 90% of the Internet was shit like this.

Unfortunately, no.

I'll agree that Star Trek at its best has always had a progressive stance that challenges societal expectations, but the problem with nuTrek (imo) is that the writing isn't challenging expectations reflecting society at large, or examining it's own biases, it's just performative and pandering. It doesn't seem to be written to encourage questioning as much as it appeals to nostalgia or engage in pleading the "right social perspective" that Hollywood happens to espouse that week. For God's sake Elon was one of the "innovators" used as an example in DISCO when SpaceX happened to be popular.

Or Mina the Hollower...

1000xRESIST and Pathogenic

1000xRESIST was on a lot of underrated games lists last year when it came out, and I kept putting it off because the plot points I had heard about seemed very heavy, but it is a beautiful piece of art. It's a very cinematic game with a lot to say about identity, family, and the pain we inflict upon ourselves. Saying anything about the story would probably ruin it, but it's a walking sim with some light puzzle elements.

Pathogenic is a rougelite twinstick shooter where you play as an infection fighting through the human body and upgrading along the way by adding internal upgrades that power up external upgrades like tentacles that allow you to move or appendages that shoot/attack. It's almost the complete opposite of 1000xRESIST. Basically no story and all gameplay.

Silksong, but I put that on hold as I think I hit my skill ceiling in Act 3.

In the meantime, I'm playing The Seance at Blake Manor which has been really fun and is perfect for the Deck.

I feel like Worf would make for an excellent navigation voice. Just imagine:

"It would be most honorable to keep left at the fork."

"Today is a good day... to arrive at your destination on the right."

Son of A Liche by J Zachary Pike. It's the second book in the Dark Profit Saga. A friend of mine had recommended I read the first book (Orconomics) for years, and I finally got around to it. I'm enjoying the series so far, but I thought it was a standalone novel and was looking for a fun one-off read, so I probably wouldn't have started it if I knew it was a series. The series satirizes fantasy tropes in the context of an excessively capitalist society built around a "hero-for-hire" industry. It's got very tongue in cheek humor, and I think if you enjoy a lot of the more recent DnD media (Vox Machina and the like), you'd appreciate it.

Please please please, fuck off Randy.

SWORN if you like Hades. It's pretty transparent that they just said "What if Hades, but rip out any depth to the story, make it up to 4 player multiplayer, and change up the pantheon of gods" then made that, but it's still fun to play.

Esoteric Ebb is a self-described Disco-like (referring to Disco Elysium) where you play as a cleric investigating a local tea shop that exploded. You have the typical RPG stats that you distribute points into at the beginning (so you can basically make whatever class you want despite your job being a cleric at the beginning), and as you go through the game, the stats are represented by different parts of your psyche that will comment on and influence your actions. The writing is genuinely hilarious and the sheer amount of content could keep you coming back for many playthroughs with very different experiences each time. I've never played a video game RPG that captures the experience of playing a TTRPG as well as this one does.

I hadn't seen Mina the Hollower mentioned in this thread, and I really enjoyed that earlier this year too. It's a more modern take on 2D Zelda game with more focus on skill difficulty (harder enemies and some brutal platforming) than puzzles. It has some great pixel art in the style of a Game Boy Color game and is packed full of secrets to discover. It's got a really great soundtrack too!

Please excuse the dirty screen! Atomic Purple case with holographic buttons from deckbuttons.com and accent skins from dbrand. I also usually have the Killswitch case on, but this was taken just after I had completed all the surgery to replace the shell.

I'd definitely recommend it to anyone who enjoys point and click adventure games. The time mechanic can seem a bit constraining at first, but unless you're clicking on everything or exhausting every conversation topic, I think you'd be able to figure out like 80% of the mysteries just by pulling at relevant threads. The only advice I'd offer is to remember how to get to all of the journals and notes you collect because the game doesn't have a traditional inventory system, and there were a couple of times I forgot about information I'd previously collected that's needed to solve some puzzles because it's a little buried. It does a great job of establishing the atmosphere, and if you're in the mood for a creepy mystery, this is an all-timer.

After not ever having set up a gaming focused distro, I gotta say, I was shocked at how seamless CachyOS makes it. Outside of creating the install media, installing CachyOS and getting everything set up to game takes like 10 minutes.

The use cases are different for me, personally. There are some minor (on the surface), but major (depending on how you use the software) differences between them out of the box:

• Logseq is focused on daily journal pages and pages with lots of linkages, the idea being it keeps you on focused on tasks without feeling like you are spending too much time tinkering, organizing, or like you have to build out a perfect system right away. I like it for work because it lets me work "in my notes" rather than needing to work "on my notes" if that makes sense. I'm aware of similar Obsidian setups, but having it work out of the box in Logseq means many of the other design choices in the program are made with this workflow in mind.
• Every note is structured as a tree with hierarchical items (blocks) nested within one another. This means every block has a reference, so it's easy to create and maintain links to different pages. Obsidian does support block references out of the box, but you have to insert them for every line you want to reference because it isn't set up to enforce a tree structure by default.
• Tags and note links are interchangeable. I would actually say this is the main point against vanilla Logseq compared to Obsidian. There are plugins you can use to give tags different behavior to links though.
• The community seems smaller and there aren't as many plugins. Many plugins don't seem to be well supported or maintained, but they are usually pretty focused on solving one particular problem.

I use Logseq for work where being able to reference blocks is more useful (especially for task management), and Obsidian for personal projects where I feel a more free form PKM with customization options is nicer.

In my experience, it's easier to deal with local movers completely separately from the shipping service. The one time I was on a time crunch and hired an "all-in-one" service, all they did was get local guys giving them the cheapest quote anyways.

When the movers showed up, they claimed they hadn't been told about "all the extra stuff" and quoted me literally double the price to pack it up. My wife and I had padded every number we gave to the moving company (e.g., room was 12' x 15' and we'd just say 15' x 15' and full of stuff) beforehand to avoid this, but they still tried to gouge us. I was able to negotiate them down by about 30%, but I was going to be on a plane in less than 24 hours; so they had me over a barrel. They would have been perfectly fine leaving me high and dry if I didn't shell out the cash either. It's an industry with a lot of predatory practices.

Meanwhile, every time I've just hired local guys on both sides and dealt with shipping separately, it's been cheaper (still not cheap), and I sleep better at night knowing that way less money is going into the pockets of middlemen.

I've had good experiences with ABF Freight, but it might not work for everyone. They drop off the back of a trailer at your place, let you load up, then you call them to pick up the trailer and tell them where it's going. They charge by the square foot of the trailer that you use, so there's some more savings there. They provide bulkheads that you use to seal off "your section" of stuff in the trailer, and they'll fill the rest with other stuff going to the same place.

Biggest downsides are that you need to have the space to put a 30+ foot long trailer (usually street parking unless your driveway is long and straight) for at least 2 days, and I would recommend that you have storage on the other side for your stuff even if you don't yet have a place because the one time that I had to pay their trailer storage fee, it was quite pricey. Also you gotta be flexible on delivery (don't pack anything you can't survive a month without) because occasionally, their drivers get rerouted or delayed.

Pop!_OS on my laptop and CachyOS on my desktop.

Literally read a Texas Monthly article asking What's Wrong with Downtown Dallas today: https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/whats-wrong-with-downtown-dallas/

I grew up in one of the (many) suburbs of Dallas in the late 90's early 00's and the problem I had with it is it's the most extreme form of gentrification I've ever witnessed. You can probably estimate an individual's annual salary within about $20k based on their zip code. The city is so concerned with seeming like a good place to visit, they don't seem to care if it's a good place to live.