Yeah I have two without noses now, but I finally got Flesh Shaping unlocked so soon I can start pumping out replacements. Also the leader got a bionic spine, then immediately got both legs blown off in the next fight. She is costing me a lot in advanced components lol.

I’m very deep into a full Rimworld playthrough with the new DLC. Being able to build a grav ship and hop around the world has opened it up so much that I’ll probably be on this for a while yet.

Obligatory weird Rimworld storytime: I’m currently super invested in this one character who was a dirt mole kid that some colony guests just left behind. We took her in because why not, and she turned out to be a pretty good melee scrapper with a penchant for losing body parts. No worries, we have bionics, we can rebuild her. So a bionic eye, an arm and a couple of new legs later, she gets her nose shot off by a turret. At the same moment some vampires arrive and want to have a meeting in our spaceship, and offer to make someone a vampire in return. So now I’m pretty sure immortal noseless cyborg vampire girl is going to end up leading the whole colony but I really want to see where this goes. The current leader is the last OG colonist still alive, but she’s currently ruling from hospital because a lancer blew the spine right out of her body so her effectiveness is limited until I can source a new spine.

Yeah I’ve tried it and bounced off it a couple of times, but I get the sense that it’s one of those games where eventually I’ll push past the beginning part and then become obsessed with it for a while lol. Alien: Isolation was one of those too.

As a non-American, this is definitely something that’s been an annoyance for as long as I can remember. Whenever the US decides it wants a war, every other country in the world is expected to join in (the “Coalition of the Willing” springs to mind) or else be bullied at best (Freedom Fries) or labelled an enemy at worst just for not wanting to spend huge amounts of resources and hundreds/thousands of lives on a war that’s nothing to do with them.

But then when it comes to any sort of international agreement that would benefit everyone such as the Paris Climate Agreement, the Ottawa Treaty, the Rome Statute of the ICC, or the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, guess who doesn’t step up?

The US seems to want all the power of being the World Police, without any responsibility towards the stewardship of the planet. They could pretty much get away with it so far IMO because they were so powerful, but now that the political system there seems to be falling apart, who knows? I am certain though that if things continue to get worse and the US faces a serious crisis like another civil war or something, they’ll find a way to make it everybody else’s problem as well.

Also worth noting that they own Github, which puts them in a position to disrupt a huge amount of Linux infrastructure if they ever feel like it. They might also pull some weird move like trying to buy Canonical or something like that.

Roses are red

Violets are blue

Poetry is hard to

I stopped using Youtube a few years ago when one of my videos that wasn’t monetized and had a very clearly public domain piece of music in it got flagged by some bot for copyright infringement (on the public domain music) and Youtube monetized my video without my permission and put ads in it so that they could send the money to the bot that falsely flagged my video.

I don’t want to share my old reddit name but I got this:

Your Reddit comments are so consistently ‘removed because of killing 3rd party apps,’ we’re starting to think you’re less a user and more a digital ghost haunting the ruins of old Reddit. Dedication, or just stubbornness?

Phew lol

The thing that annoys me the most about it (well, aside from the massive invasion of civil liberties and general dystopian behaviour) is that we don’t even get any of the fringe benefits of it. By that I mean, if I contact the government because I need some information about myself (recent examples: vaccine history, polling information, National Insurance query etc.) they act as if they’ve never been contacted by a person before and seem to immediately go into a panic and send you in a big loop of Other People Who Might Have It, with the end goal seeming to be “nobody knows where it is, let’s just hope they give up and stop asking.”

Like if the government must insist on tracking every single thing I do and say and look at and place I go to, the least they could do is actually have that info to hand so I can use it too. It seems the more they track us, the less capable they are of actually doing anything useful with that information.

Comrades, there is no true social revolution without the liberation of women. May my eyes never see and my feet never take me to a society where half the people are held in silence. I hear the roar of women’s silence. I sense the rumble of their storm and feel the fury of their revolt.

• Thomas Sankara

I actually didn’t know you could nest Virtual Desktops within activities, so that was nice. Now I can make my setup even more absurdly complicated for anyone who’s not me to use lol.

As a Brit who has seen the UK government’s ill thought through and unworkable attempts at police state bullshit go through the process a few times now, I’m going to predict: VPN use goes up massively, the government starts talking about banning VPNs without considering that this would break half the internet, then some wealthy business donor has a quiet word to them because businesses need VPNs to function, but they can’t publicly back down because they already called everyone who opposed it a pedo. So they pick one or two VPN companies (whichever ones have the most foreign-sounding names), have the tabloids run a propaganda campaign about how evil they are, then ban them even though they aren’t based in the UK and it makes no difference to anything, then they’ll claim they won and the laws will stay on the books forever but nobody will bother to enforce them and everything will carry on as before.

Half-baked bullshit. You can get around it with a VPN or a copy of Death Stranding 2

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I have a long-running theory that we’re the US’s testing ground for authoritarian nonsense. If they roll it out here and it doesn’t get too much resistance, it’ll show up in the US in the next 3-5 years.

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Yeah I have the Libre Colour and it’s great! The pen feels good, it lets you do what you want with it (eg. using Calibre to strip the DRM off your books and loading them via USB, installing KOReader etc.) and it works well with Libby for getting eBooks from the library (at least in Canada.)

A while back I heard someone describe LLMs as a magic 8-ball with infinite answers that uses math to nudge it towards the answer you want.

I agree that there must be other stuff living out there, but I don’t think they’re here. My belief that I can’t prove is that the Fermi paradox has a simple but quite depressing solution: that space and time are just too big and there’s no special undiscovered way of getting around it. I’m sure there are some staggeringly unlikely situations out there somewhere where two species have evolved independently at the same time to a similar level of intelligence at a distance close enough to reach each other, but for the vast majority of intelligent life the odds are so vanishingly small that they might as well be alone.

If we’re a typical example of an intelligent species, for example, we’ve been capable of space flight for less that a century and we just about got as far as the moon, and with all the inventions that came along with becoming capable of space flight we’ve almost destroyed ourselves countless times. It’s kind of a wonder we’re still here at all, and with climate change who knows how much longer we’ll last? TBH I think the best we can hope for is to maybe get a radio signal from some ancient place that’s probably long gone, and send one back knowing we’ll probably be long gone by the time it gets there.

AFAIK it’s not necessarily about Linux using Microsoft keys, it’s more about Microsoft shoe-horning their bullshit into everything they possibly can, including at the hardware/firmware level.