A sizable minority of Palestinians are Christians, a sizable minority of Israeli settlers are atheists, a sizable plurality of Zionists around the world are Evangelicals. This isn’t a cut-and-dry sectarian conflict.

It’s not a witticism. Users of a lot of modern mass media platforms (TikTok is the one that comes to mind) need to use increasingly euphemistic language to speak about anything. Unalive is a specific, famous one, you must have seen it before, even in deeply serious situations. Imagine watching someone sobbing while retelling a deeply personal experience only to say “I wanted to unalive myself 🥺” straight-faced between tears. That’s heartbreaking, disgusting stuff.

Someone sent me a cool woodworking video from TikTok a few months ago, and the carpenter man kept talking about dogs. I bought a dog of dogs here, I cut off a dog, make sure to check how many dogs your wood is. What the fuck? Checking the comments, they were all like “LMAO dog 💀💀💀💀💀💀” with zero explanation.

What are dogs? Dogs means feet now apparently. Fuck me if I know. If you say “feet” on TikTok, you get flagged as a fetish channel, so people say “dogs”. Why dogs? I don’t care. If you’re going to use stupid imperial measurements at least call them by a name I recognize.

“Corn” for porn is kind of funny because corn is a very unsexy word (and concept).

There is a lot of euphemistic algorithm evasion on TikTok, and this is not a phenomenon I’d want to see become endemic on the Fediverse. It’s also a thing on Instagram. And now it’s diffusing to unrelated places.

I’m usually not this petty on here but it really pisses me off. This is also becoming a problem on Tumblr apparently, which I intentionally mentioned up there. It is a platform with a rigorous tagging system, which lets users block what they don’t want to see, making it possible to write properly even, about rough stuff, without unnecessary self-censorship. Apparently new, younger users, coming from places like TikTok, will just write “CW:🍇🍇” in their post instead of using the word rape, for example. So people who would previously be safe, by filtering out “rape”, are now finding shit they don’t want to see in their feeds. People should have a place where they can write about their experiences, no matter how harrowing, but this cheapens it and makes it harder to properly organize.

The internet is for communication. Its usefulness as a means of effective communication is under attack from all sides. Let’s not just let that happen in our spaces, yeah

un-alives herself

For fuck’s sake. This is not baby’s first Miiworld, this is not club penguin. Say kills. Say commits suicide. Say hangs/gets strangled/finds a gun under her bed and blows her brains out, spraying chunks of bone blood and flesh on the concrete. Say murder when you see murder, say genocide when you see genocide. Words have meaning.

You can use the correct words on the Fediverse. If anyone doesn’t want to see the word “suicide” they can filter it out. Tumblr got this right twenty years ago and modern social media has been beating newspeak out of previously fully communicative human beings. I swear to fuck I would rather have every single comment on Lemmy say skibidi gyatt ohio L aura about any serious topic than to see “unalived” one more fucking time. This is embarrassing.

……. Uh anyway yeah unskippable cutscene am I right haha crazy

(I actually believe both she and Jeffy have a probable reason to kill themselves: they may be otherwise facing a fate worse than death…)

At the risk of coming off as too gatekeep-y, Arabic is structurally so different from English and French (the other two languages I know). It has a reputation for being difficult for a reason.

Despite it being my native language I’ll occasionally still think of an idea phrased primarily in English, and contorting it into Arabic is very clunky (despite Arabic being much more loosey goosey with word order, in general, you can figure out how to tie up an idea as you go - this applies more to MSA, dialects usually sway more towards a small number of forms).

While strictly more rigid, you might be better off at least grasping the basics of MSA first before jumping into a specific dialect. It is antithetical to how I think about languages (go learn the specific prescriptive form of Arabic instead of the most commonly spoken popularly developed one) but it might be easier to learn that way.

(I’m thinking of it like learning piano (or MIDI?) as a baseline for music and more instruments vs learning guitar first and having an understanding of notes and scales that is very closely associated to the relational positioning of these notes on these strings.)

Or maybe it might not be easier that way. I didn’t learn Arabic as an adult with a background in western languages, fuck if I know what the pedagogically optimal way to learn Arabic is. Arabic is hard, dude. Doesn’t help that half of all Arabic media is (I say this as an Arab) embarrassing mindless drivel.

The oil industry is famously completely independent from government subsidy. Especially when it comes to setting urban development policy and planning transportation systems, these have no bearing at all oil demand and they also cost nothing.

That model is over a terabyte, I don’t know why I thought it was lightweight. Not that any reporting on machine learning has been particularly good, but this isn’t what I expected at all.

What can even run it?

It’s as simple as getting the EU site and privacy policy when you connect from an EU IP. These systems are typically not as rigid as you might expect and the only friction might be around things like payment processing or things like that.

I get relatively uncensored internet access through UK/Ireland servers. This law and this type of law completely terrifies me.

I do have an oversized battery buffer. Most people are discouraged from cooking or using any resistive load on the batteries, but I opted to invest in a bigger battery backup specifically to be able to do that, it’s why I said 85%+ and not like 40%. The battery buffer really is the point of this system, having 24/7 electricity in my home that I can pull over 20 amperes out of at the drop of a hat is without a question the most decadent luxury I have ever experienced. That’s not something I can just hook up to my house.

If I reconnect the grid-charging circuit, it is more than enough in the winter months nowadays (the grid was down more often in 2020-2023). But that gets really expensive, and relying on the grid is not wise.

If I use the secondary (mafia) grid more frequently (as I did in 2020-2023 out of necessity) I can pull a tiny amount of amps at an extortionate kWh rate, that’s enough to keep things like the fridge and lights and the water pump running. But turn on one hot plate or accidentally use the microwave, turn on the heater to the wrong setting (or the AC to the right setting but at the wrong time) and you have to cover up to get to the freezing street to switch the breaker back on. Sounds obnoxious? Well pre-solar that was the only option for 12+ hours of the day. I remember going down to flip the breaker over twenty times one day as a kid.

Let’s not get into the water situation. I just spent a weekend grappling with neighbors and floater valves.

They don’t, my current machine is a Maingear branded one that someone painstakingly hauled over from the US, and my potential new one would be an XMG branded machine, shipped at significant expense from the EU.

I’m in the armpit of the Middle East, I don’t have a local reseller, and even if I did, they’d want $1,000 more than just going through the pain of buying from overseas, alongside a blood sacrifice and the soul of my firstborn child, and a slap across my face for the insolence of asking.

I might be the wrong person to answer in this community since I daily drive Windows, but my Tongfang has been a dream and I’m thinking of buying a new one.

Although in OP’s case I’d probably still be looking for the cliche used Thinkpad. Unbeatable.

I live in a country with abhorrently unreliable electricity.

Even now that I have solar and even if I mostly (85%+) cook on a plug-in resistance hob and electric oven, gas is just unbeatable as a backup during the winter. No sun? Grid down? Milk boiled over and got into the hob’s thermostat? Need to cook more than one pot at a time? Israel decided to bomb a fucking residential substation for no reason again? Power company operator decided to accidentally pull an epic prank and route the wrong voltage to everyone’s house, frying a whole town’s fridges, during a year when people couldn’t afford to replace them (I can’t find an English article to link but I promise this happened)? No problemo

I also got a plug-in induction infrared plate and while it is pretty much magical it also makes my inverter shit itself uncontrollably (all my LED lights flicker and it makes an uncomfortable noise) so I really only use it when the ”good” grid is on (the bad one can’t handle it, the good one is the one from the prank above).

You can pry my backup butane from my cold dead hands. I replace the tank less than once a year, it’s fine. Not everyone who wants this option to stay is a regressive cultist.

As someone who VPNs into the EU specifically for the privacy laws, this is troubling. I do wonder what my next move should be. I’d hate to lose my Steam account in particular.

Too many people here don’t understand that memes and shitposts are not the same thing.

Decent enough shitpost.

To be fair, I do this at work and while I get funny looks I do get complicated ideas across better when I can provide visual aid.

Frankly I need to improve my MS Paint skills. I need to get my mouse handwriting up to at least 70% of the Khan Academy guy’s level.

Time for USB-D.

My suggestion is a ridiculous round plug where the bottom three/four contacts are a standard 3.5mm audio connector and then you have like twelve extra (narrower) contacts at the top.

A TRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRS jack.

sufficient performance > sufficient beauty > power usage > max beauty > max performance

This is basically alien to me. I think it has to be game specific.

Euro Truck Simulator? Beauty is more important than performance, unless playing it on my handheld, in which case I can knock the FPS limiter down to 40 and crank the settings down

Satisfactory? Performance over everything.

Granted most of the games I play are older (so I don’t need to choose) or CPU-bound simulation games (Raising the graphics doesn’t make it run meaningfully slower if your CPU is the bottleneck).

Although I must also point out that I think the current trend of “fidelity=beauty” is ridiculous. I recently played INFRA, a game built in Source, and while the fidelity was clearly “outdated”, the game looked fantastic.

Plugging my system into a Kill A Watt was enlightening.

Laptop gaming is a harsh but educational mistress re: power consumption (even when it’s plugged in), I’ll tell you that. All the heat you generate is right in front of your face, as is all the airflow (and noise) needed to wick it away.

Is the resident Lemmy population becoming too easy to troll?

Hello lemmings are you all left wing because you are CIA and racist? Also if you go outside you will not hate car

12 upvotes 912 downvotes 1,210 comments 14 reports

In no particular order, here are some games I’ve enjoyed most in the past decade or so (and found most interesting to shill to my friends):

• The Roottrees are Dead (online sleuthing game, with a cool but slightly campy story, wears its Obra Dinn influence on its sleeve a bit too obviously for some people)
• Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic (Cities Skylines for people who understand economics are more than just dollar signs and tweets, it’s more like Factorio than SimCity)
• Hacknet (Learn basic command line stuff in a game about hacking)
• Duskers (atmospherically amazing game about controlling distant drones in hostile environments. Genuinely chilling)
• Chants of Senaar (language deciphering game)
• Outer Wilds (le le le dae hidden gem for a reason)
• Dyson Sphere Project (more Factorio)
• Satisfactory (you guessed it, more Factorio, but very different environment than most of these games)
• Factorio
• Shapez (minimalistic Factorio, with a less minimalistic sequel)
• Nomifactory (Minecraft modpack that was formerly known as Omnifactory. It’s more Factorio.)
• Curse of the Golden Idol (finally a good retro adventure mystery thing)
• Return of the Obra Dinn (immaculate game.)
• CHR$143 (Zachlike-ish)
• Kerbal Space Program (my next obsession)
• INFRA (one of my favorite games of all time, I’ve written about this extensively, a sort of urbex walking simulator with incredible atmosphere, deep deep lore, amazing world building, and light puzzles, that goes on for about 40 more hours than you expect it to)
• Hexcells Trilogy (puzzles)
• Hexologic (similar puzzles)
• Baba Is You (puzzles that make you think you’re an idiot)
• NaissancE (I don’t know how to describe this, I think it’s free)
• Manifold Garden (you dreamed about this game when you were 8 years old, decades before it existed)
• The Big Con (be gay do crime 90s)
• Death Stranding (this game is so boring, I played it for 200 hours and got every achievement, I love it, it sucks)
• The Forgotten City (this started its life as a Skyrim mod and still has that baggage)
• Mostly Intense Monster Defense (PvZ homage)
• The Witcher (1) (CRPG with a cool world. Needs a few mods to cut down on tedium. Pretty different from its sequels but it has a special place in my heart)
• Binary Domain (absolute schlock, but from a previous era of gaming. Not necessarily a good game, but cool to see from a historical perspective.)
• Cultist Simulator (needs an eternity of patience but I promise there is something in there)
• SLUDGE LIFE (SLUDGE LIFE)
• What Remains of Edith Finch (I fucking love walking simulators with good writing and cool art)
• Promesa (obscure walking simulator, it’s barely a game, I love it)
• CUCCCHI (check above description, same guy. Artistic showcase of a painter called Enzo Cuccchi. I’m not a modern art guy, but seeing these works contorted into worlds to walk through… a unique and interesting experience. Soundtrack is someone’s once-lost old experimental tracks and it absolutely slaps)
• Please Touch the Artwork 1 and 2 (one of them is free, funded by the Belgian public art fund. Weird and cool)
• Betrayal at Club Low (part of a series of games by Cosmo D, this one is different from the previous few. The first, Off Peak, is free, but it’s also the least polished. Astonishingly excellent music, there’s some cool lore in this series. The art style is a bit out there but this guy’s stuff is gold)
• Engare and Tandis (mathematical patterns puzzlers, I promise they’re so cool)
• What the Golf? (An actually good mobile game. I mostly played it with a controller on my TV lol)
• Cities Skylines (my beloved)

And then they give a passionate interview about how the original Jeg Spiser Pis short film from 1993 informed their entire creative journey, before immediately going on to direct Mario Movie Minecraft 3 starring Dwayne the Rock Johnson as Sheep and Tilda Swinton as Cat Bowser 64 ft. Ariana Grande burger

I have watched a fair few nigh incoherent French movies with a plot that is simultaneously either the most complex or most banal story ever written (that doesn’t get resolved at the end). You could find me at the one specialty cinema in Beirut every other weekend before it completely collapsed financially in 2020 back when our economy did the funni

I get that a lot of this is turning people off but this is shockingly accurate of a lot of mid arthouse stuff. It’s like trash TV but for movie tryhards. I love it. For the French ones, I almost feel like the experience is worsened by my grasp of the language.

Since then I’ve all but stopped watching movies and even series and have moved to games full time. There’s so much more genuinely fun weird interesting shit.