I feel I should make a video about this. Online social media has made it very easy to find the 500 people across the whole world who think our frog picture is funny. It’s a lot harder to find 3 people in your town to have a drink with.

One simple idea; something I joined instead of initiating, is to make a WhatsApp group, put its QR code on a page (print at the library if you don’t have one) then put up the link anywhere you think people tend to walk. Explain it’s a social group for your given age demographic, but suggest it’s open to anyone. From there, suggest outings, get to know people, ask or offer small favors, etc.

I feel like I get where he’s coming from, but I can see the revulsion.

I picture someone asking their AI to write a rules engine for a gamemode and getting masses of duplicative, horrific code; but in my own work, my company has encouraged an assistive tool, and once it has an idea of what I’m trying to do, it will offer autocomplete options that are pretty spot on.

Still, I very much agree it’s hard to sort the difference and in untrained hands can definitely lead to unmaintainable code slop. Everything needs to get reviewed by knowledgeable human eyes before running.

I’ve never even installed the Epic Lawnchair. I just use Heroic, which works very well.

1. Developers should spend effort vouching for a launch without startup logos. Even if supporting libraries/publishers are credited some other way, startup movies take up a lot of time when gamers launch the game many times.
2. Trails in the Sky has a feature where you can choose to launch the game directly into your most recent save game rather than ending up at the menus. This would be a boon for many singleplayer games, especially those with densely animated menus.

Only a small blow in a big battle, but one suggestion: Put active effort into your searches for positive content on something rather than negative.

Don’t watch 8 videos about how Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 sucks, and it’s over for Activision. Do a search for videos highlighting 10 great indie games that deserve your attention. YouTube even has an “AI search” that, while it is tools of the enemy, may let you be more explicit about what you’re looking for.

The secondary benefit of finding these videos is that anyone putting them out is probably aware negativity and outrage manufactures more views, and is instead choosing to better their content for its own sake.

Some other search options to curate your feed: Animations by hobbyists and college students, zoologists giving introductions to animals together with their name/location (NOT out-of-context 5 second clips of funny animals stolen without permission), any decent animations in Garry’s Mod / SFM, Machinima…

Heck, if someone wants a specific pointer and has a spare day, look up the Clear Skies trilogy. Yes…trilogy

Sort this one with the girlfriend’s “would you still love me if I was a worm” philosophy. It’s so far outside of reality it’s not worth considering.

Publically accessible does not mean publically reusable. You can find a lot of classic songs on YouTube and in libraries. You can’t edit them into your Hollywood movie without paying royalties.

Showing them to an AI for them to repeat the melody with 90% similarity is not a free cheat to get around that.

Yeah…a long time ago I learned lessons about patience, delayed satisfaction, and ended up building a large roster in that game without giving them a dime. I could afford their packs, but it seems like a bad price ratio especially when acknowledging the low chances.

On the gacha front, I play Zenless Zone Zero. Parry mechanics are nothing new, but I love both the way they have you parry by swapping in an agent to take the blow, and the very detailed effects and animations they have for each attack.

It’s still a gacha, and I remind myself to stop playing anytime it bores me; but it manages to hold my attention decently.

Here’s aiming to be hopeful…

I remember back when playing DRM video in a web browser on an open source operating system seemed like a worrying impossibility. Many sites stayed stuck on closed-source flash players for that reason alone. It was a while before we ended up with this solution I only partly understand - where the DRM decoding is handled through some kind of trusted block, that generally doesn’t have full OS control?

I feel like a lot of these pointer devices miss the simplicity of a remote. A simple one will have a tough time entering passwords, but it’s perfect and simple for the most common actions: Turn on without walking across the room, open the most recent application, play the next episode of the series I was watching last, usually just by mashing confirm. (Nothing to tell it to go fullscreen: Because that’s an obvious assumption for everything)

Running it all on a PC just adds more steps, unless you follow a LOT of guides to configure it to get through those things easily.

I’d really like it if web standards were better at allowing a video website to be navigated with an “Up/Down/Left/Right/Confirm/Back” device, so that you didn’t need apps for everything. That would be good for consumer devices like Apple TVs as well as people running home PC setups.

Everyone else didn’t have these social media options. So, a lot more people were seeking interaction via community locations.

I think certain shared topics like religion have fallen aside too; even if you find Sky Man to be silly, it was quite often a good reason for people to gather and chat.

Increased media also means we have limited time and attention spans. We have such a ridiculous number of options for how we use our eyes, it feels wasteful to commit them to one thing, even just socializing, for a long period.

It’s not impossible to break the cycle if you recognize how everyone else also recognizes the issue. But being open with others, especially being the initiator everyone appreciates, takes practice.

Trails in the Sky has some interesting logic behind this where the gameplay serves the story.

You’ll do some quests for people who actually end up being evil later in the plot. There’s also party members who temporarily join you while they have time off from their other job - then as the story progresses, their “lunch break is over” and they go back to their life. So, if you try to save content for later, it won’t be there anymore.

Those little things end up putting more focus on what is accessible at a given moment, so a level 60 player isn’t going back to the starting area to wrap up quests he doesn’t care about for completion.

I had a PC connected to my tv for a while, main issue was I didn’t want to use a mouse or keyboard to interact with it. I tried desperately to get more ways of starting via controller or other lite interface devices, but nothing convenient. It was an old machine, so eventually I gave it away.

“Look at this! You can run GeForce Now on anything!

Also this thing we sell is a thing”

I used to make a lot of Garry’s Mod animations. One such one…

https://youtu.be/72f-vNEfLpY

Never did sign my channel up for monetization - I didn’t like the patterns YouTube pushed you into and each animation usually took me many months. You can kind of see on my channel I tended to get distracted by whatever was a current trend. I’m trying one more that took me the better part of this year.

A lot of people remark that “I must really enjoy animating” - I do enjoy the result, but it’s a lot of work and takes willpower to push myself into another 3-hour session of laborious posing to get a scene in my mind on the screen just right. I also really hope for the animations to garner attention, even if just to make someone’s day better.

Whut, yeden can’ fek givin’ the ritesiden? Com off yen

I don’t know if it’s “favorite”, but an old classic was Aquaria. It had a surprising amount of content, even to the point of several secret bosses, and an absolutely excellent soundtrack. Sadly, the main guy behind it is dead now. Ori was also fantastic.

I’ve been using CachyOS and impressed by the array of available software, and it was only in the back of my mind, the thought; “Wow, so much of this is so refined and polished. I wonder who has motive to maintain it?”

Joke’s on me, the motive is hardly there - and it’s a shitty time for it with Windows announcing that 10 is the last version and that there are no plans for a new one.

I’m glad Valve has a profit motive towards open source right now, but especially in a world where fewer people can donate at random, I really hoped that the model wasn’t specifically built to rely just on tip jars.

I have so many causes on my mind that all need money; some for helping starving children, others for supporting sane politics, GoFundMes for people affected by a warped healthcare system; the request you’re making very much makes sense, but it’s so hard to put it above so many of the other critical needs for donations, when the image of an open source worker is someone who can, and often does, get paid working for a large company.