100% this. My favorite retro games to revisit.

Exactly, Pokémon was my childhood and I loved Team Rocket. And I think a year or two ago we lost the voice actress who did Misty and Jesse.

And I think on July 8th or so, the Pokémon cartoon voice actor who played Gary Oak, Professor Oak, Meowth, and James from Team Rocket passed away too.

“Change the channel, Marge!”

But in nature it’s much worse. Noise pollution is harmful to wildlife.

This is why I absolutely hate fireworks. They’re terrible for domestic pets (commonly cats, dogs) due to their increased sensitive hearing. Wildlife is dramatically impacted. Birds abandon their nests, and some have even been recorded fleeing in terror and flying over the ocean - where they become too exhausted with no land to land on, so they drown. Other animals of course are terrorised and flee their homes in terror. Commonly, families get separated.

I fucking hate fireworks. They’re so damn annoying, and are traumatising to innocent animals.

If persons want to celebrate holidays, go to professional drone shows. They’re far better, quieter, and much cooler than bullshit fireworks. Fuck fireworks.

See the excerpt from my comment you replied to:

If we can’t keep those spaces small and safe from corporate abuse, maybe that not-so-small minority will begin using the internet only as a utility and instead leave the socialisation and interaction entirely for the real world only. It’s far more personal and meaningful that way.

I predict a not-so-small minority will get tired of bots, AI bullshit, SEO optimisation, AI-written articles peppered with Amazon affiliate links, predatory algorithms, etc. That minority will find smaller, human spaces to interact and socialise in. The majority, ever the fan of convenience, will continue to adapt to the corporate enclave of the internet.

The answer is decentralisation. The more fatigued we get with the traditional way we interact with the internet, the more common it will become to return to (or create) new decentralised spaces. Maybe those spaces won’t be as large as the Fediverse. Perhaps we’ll fragment further to niche forums, group chats, etc. If we can’t keep those spaces small and safe from corporate abuse, maybe that not-so-small minority will begin using the internet only as a utility and instead leave the socialisation and interaction entirely for the real world only. It’s far more personal and meaningful that way.

I was a paid customer of Proton’s for many years. After that whole debacle, I let my subscription expire, and then deleted my account. I sure as hell wasn’t going to use their service even if it was free. Made sure to leave very specific feedback to them why I was deleting my account.

Clicking that delete account button felt so good.

Only downside is their CEO supports Trump, and tweeted his support for Trump from Proton’s official company Twitter account. When this whole thing happened, Proton never took those tweets down. Don’t know if they’re still up or not but I don’t care.

The point is, use Proton if and only if you’re okay with knowing that the company’s official stance is in support of fascism.

Alternatively, I’d recommend Mailbox.org or Tuta.

Still sounds gross. While the developer might have opted in to selling your processing power to scrape websites, I doubt the users of each extension opted in.

Response from the developer:

" Users who want to support a free software product or creator can decide to opt-in to share their bandwidth. … Developers can decide to offer them additional features and content or simply use the money to keep the products free and available."

On User Consent:

“Our approach is always opt-out by default. I’ll write more below on how we are going about enforcing it now as part of a stricter approach to maintaining a transparent ecosystem. We provide default opt-in/out hosted pages to simplify asking consent and have left this page where users can see all the plugins to which they have opted-in and manage their settings with no developer as an intermediary: mellow.tel/user-control.”

In other words, users are opted-out by default. They can also go to that web site, and when they click the link, the page checks which extensions are installed in the browser and whether or not you opted in.

On Opt-In Enforcement:

Ars Technica article states there are “no checks to determine if a real user knows what they are approving or to determine if the developer just opts all users in on their behalf”.

“We do have a page where users can go and see if they are opted-in or have been opted in without their knowledge from the developer: mellow.tel/user-control. But you are right and we should do more. We have started enforcing the opt-in policy from today (by simply checking each integration and not sending requests to those that don’t show an opt-in) and will be doubling down on that in the coming days. Each new websocket request from an unknown integration will be quarantined and we won’t allow requests to go through until we have controlled the integration is compliant and is asking users to opt-in + is leaving an opt-out option clearly visible. We will also start enforcing routine checks on our Mellowtel integrations to create a transparent environment.”

In other words, the Mellow.tel developer has it set to always opt-out by default. However, developers of extensions may just opt-in the users without consent - which, I agree with you is gross. It’s possible those developers don’t explain the full implications. Now, the Mellow.tel developer is putting in remediations to ensure that the opt-in policy is enforced, and users will have more exposure to knowing whether or not this is happening. Meaning, they’re going to try to enforce default opt-out (as they stated this was always their policy), and make it easier for users to know they get opted in.

On Personally Identifiable Information and Monetisation:

The developers basically claims everything is anonymized. And the way they make money is, if you opt-in, you share “a fraction of your bandwidth” when browsing the web, fetching from a server, etc. They don’t collect or sell your user data because they aren’t advertising, and their business model is not advertising.

“all [Response data] is completely anonymous, it doesn’t point back to any user, and isn’t stored except the minimum time to at on it… Location - The only information used is country level (e.g., US, ES, DE), [and] it isn’t associated with any Personally-Identifiable-Information (PII) at all.”

So my conclusion - I care about my privacy. I don’t like being opted into things without my consent. According to this developer’s response, they never did. They’re trying to come up with a model to help the web stay free. Who knows if this will be viable or not. Developers of extensions can leverage this stuff, and in the past, some of those developers may have opted users in without their consent (or without full transparency or understanding of how this was happening). Even if a user was “opted in”, it doesn’t appear to be a significant impact to privacy as they have their source code published, processing happens locally on the user’s device, and the data that gets process is not transmitted, sold, or even have any identifiers. In fact, the data they claim is quite sparse to the extent that it’s limited to bandwidth allotment, country, and simple “keep alive” checks (heartbeat). Now I don’t have any association with this company, know this developer, nor do I have any stakes at all in this. This just caught my attention and I Had to read and learn more about it, and assess whether or not it affects my privacy threat model (it doesn’t for me, simply because none of the extensions I use have this thing).

For my background - I’m a software engineer for a SaaS provider. My company processes observability telemetry, and we assist customers to instrument agents in their environments (server, machines, clusters, DB, and end-user devices like browsers and mobile devices) to collect metrics to enable observability of their platform, and generate automatic application topology. Also a suite of tools to examine metrics and dynamic baselines, health rules for baseline deviations or other anomalies, analytics, user queries, complete business transaction view, incident remediation, etc. However, I have no background whatsoever in security. So I can’t comment on the security point because I don’t have a cyber security background. I’m only going off what the developer said, and it made sense to me. But I’d defer to a person with cyber security expertise to comment here.

Edit: Added some additional context, fixed some spelling.

Nice, thanks for discovering that. I wasn’t aware there was a rip off version of it.

These extensions use MellowTel-js. After this article from ArsTechnica went live, the developer responded in full detail and transparency.

If you’re a Dark Reader user (as that’s one of the most widely used extensions), definitely read MellowTel’s response on how their technology works. It made me realize the Ars article was not fully vetted.

https://www.mellowtel.com/blog/responding-to-ars-technica-and-mellow-drama-article

Edit: Dark Reader on this list is actually a knock off version just for Edge browser only - it’s not the widely used Dark Reader that’s on multiple browser engines. See another user’s comment that replied to me.

Currently playing The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. Game seems okay overall. I’m still in the early parts of the game and I’m waiting for it to hook me.

Love this game. Have fun!

Add Hades in this list, too. Incredible game with so much love poured into it.

Sure thing. I also read more comments and saw you have a laptop and stream games to a tablet.

For my use case, I have a desktop PC for when I want to play at high fidelity and have serious time to sit down and game. The Steam Deck I have is for the free moments of gaming time I can get. I can be on the couch and game. Sit on my porch during a break and game for a bit. I can click the button to sleep the console and pick up in two days from right where I left off - either Steam games or ROMs.

A Steam Deck isn’t cheap so definitely weigh your options and find out what works best for you. If you feel you want the performance uplift and can just wait, then put your laptop in another room so you won’t hear it and steam it to a tablet with a controller in your hands or something. That’ll give you a great experience, too. Then you can get Deck 2 and feel happier with your decision.

If money isn’t as much of a concern, freaking get it now lol.

Even if a new AAA comes out that you’re eagerly wanting to play and the performance may not be great on Steam Deck, don’t forget about all the hundreds of games you also love that can be played on Steam Deck. Or the ROMs from nostalgic consoles that you love.

If you have a gaming solution now and you’re not ready to commit, just wait for the inevitable next gen Deck as you’ll be happier that way. Of course we’ll never know when it is coming.

Get a device now and play the games you want? Or wait ~2 years and get the next gen so you can play some games better?

Only you can make that informed decision that works best for you. Best of luck!

DONALD. STOP WITH THESE TWEETS. YOU ARE DUMB AS HELL, AND YOUR ART OF THE DEAL CLEARLY IS SHIT. CATZOOMIES, LEMMY USER

Overall I love my PSVR2. Got it with the pack in Horizon Call of Mountain game, but that caused way too much motion sickness for me.

Instead, I use the PC adapter and play games on Steam. Good entry level headset, especially considering I got it for half price during a huge sale. I enjoyed what I’ve played so far and it didn’t cost a lot to find out if I can tolerate VR gaming.

My spouse and I were watching the game showcase event and saw this trailer. Couldn’t help but laugh at the overt level of misogyny. Female character models had extreme jiggle physics in tandem with skin tight revealing clothes. I think we saw one straddling a motorcycle and watching her butt ripple everywhere like jello on a trampoline. Male character models had no jiggle physics whatsoever.