I agree, and I absolutely love Sonic Adventure. I think I’ve beaten it more times than any other game I own, but the gameplay hasn’t really aged well. It’s probably my biggest nostalgia soft spot, though.

Gift link: https://aftermath.site/halo-studios-project-foundry-microsoft-343-industries-bungie?giftLink=f96c1f975fd08c951d870e9d1da32491

I WANT TO BELIEVE

I don’t think it’s so clear what some of the money is going to. From the article:

the package includes $3.5 billion for “essential wartime procurement” […] and a $5.2 billion grant for air defenses. The ministry said the $5.2 billion for air defenses “will significantly strengthen critical systems such as Iron Dome…"

With Hezbollah launching rockets towards civilians, I am in favor of strengthening the Iron Dome. But it sounds like that $3.5 billion could be to resupply Israel for their attacks on Gaza, thereby enabling new ones.

The way that they pulled off this attack is interesting from a cybersecurity standpoint, but we can’t ignore the fact that Israel had no way of knowing who was near the devices when they exploded. They very nature of this attack made it impossible for Israel to know how closely they were targeting the bad guys or how many civilians were nearby.

That was a great explanation.

I remember hearing an interview with John Boehner on NPR (former Republican Speaker of the House) a few years ago. He was talking about the government shutdown that happened shortly after far right wing was elected in 2010. Apparently, a few of them barged into his office after the shutdown and demanded to know why the government had actually shut down.

And Boehner was like, “Um…you said you wanted it to?”

And the right wingers said, “Well we didn’t think it would work!”

These are irresponsible people who think they should just get to play games in life.

This headline is easy to read wrong – my brain grouped the subject of this headline the other way at first. I read, “Marjorie rages at (Mike and calls to fund government)” rather than “Marjorie (rages at Mike) and (calls to fund government).”

I’ve been loving RFF the last few months, it might be my favorite new thing I’ve found since I switched from Twitter to Mastodon. It also always shows you the artists’ fediverse usernames so you can follow them, and they usually have a Bandcamp link if you want to buy an album.

They recently said that they could use some volunteer help. I haven’t been able to check out what they need yet, but their matrix channel is #radioFreeFedi:matrix.org, I think that’s where they organize things.

I’ve found that, currently, this kind of works and kind of doesn’t. I’ve boosted a few lemmy and mbin comments from my Mastodon account, and it shows up in feeds just like you would expect it to. Unfortunately, the parent post of the thread only shows as a link to the lemmy/mbin thread, rather than showing the full text of the original post. So it’s hard for people to see the context of the comment.

Mastodon appears to see lemmyverse comments the same way it sees Mastodon comments, but the top-level post that started the thread is somehow different.

Man, I had forgotten how much the “purity” of stars like Britney Spears and Jessica Simpson was talked about. It didn’t even seem weird at the time. (Although I was a little kid, so I probably just couldn’t notice the hypocrisy.)

A quote FTA:

“Wokeness is dead,” gloated right-wing commentator Richard Hanania on X back in March, over a video clip of Sweeney in a black dress with a plunging neckline, her breasts at the center of the frame. Hanania’s logic was obscure, but it seemed to go something like this: Sweeney’s prominently displayed chest was somehow inextricably opposed to the progressive ethos currently fashionable in popular culture.

This whole issue that this article is describing is a perfect example of why it’s impossible to argue against the right on their own terms. Their process is like this:

1. Have a very loosely defined set of ideals. You can believe anything at any time. Have more of a vibe than a set of principles.
2. Invent an enemy. This enemy should be vaguely defined; it is everything and nothing at the same time. For example, wokeism.
3. Because your enemy is whatever you want it to be, and because your values are whatever you want them to be, you alone get to decide when you’ve won. You can declare victory at any time, for any reason. This conveniently fits your insecurity-based need to feel like a winner.

I’m hoping that this will “just work” when Mastodon gets quite-posting. You could take a Mastodon post, and then quote-post it into a community by mentioning that community’s name.

This would create a separate thread of replies, which is good. A person shouldn’t be able to suddenly thrust a bunch of community replies onto someone else’s post. So basically it’s what quote-posting is for, but sharing it with a community instead of just your own followers.

I think it’s worth as a long-term goal for the Fediverse to entirely separate the “view” aspect from the “content” aspect of platforms where reasonably possible

This perfectly describes my ideal fediverse, too. Pretty much everything we’re doing here is posting text; it can be a comment on someone else’s text, or a comment on a video, or a top-level post in a community, or a top-level post on your microblog (which is basically your own community where you’re the only top-level poster). IMO the type of fediverse server you choose should be based on which one has the best UI for the viewing and posting you’ll be doing most often, but they should all be able to show everyone else’s content as much as possible.

If I need to, I’ll create separate accounts for separate interests, like one for games and one for professional things. But I’d like to use the same account for following indie game developers (on Mastodon) and gaming communities (on Lemmy) and commenting on game review videos (on Peertube).

I also want interoperability between microblogging and threaded services, but unfortunately I’m a little skeptical about the account mirroring concept. Or, at least, I’d like more details about it.

Do users need to opt-in to have their accounts mirrored, like how they do with brid.gy right now? If there are a bunch of users with Bluesky accounts that don’t have Frontpage accounts, that would mess with the ability to have all comments showing up between the two services, and it would prevent some people from posting a comment on someone else’s comment if one of the commenters has not opted-in to have their account mirrored. Or, can a plain Bluesky account comment on Frontpage threads, but not start a thread?

I like the idea of being able to quote-post link aggregator threads to your Bluesky account, but I think ideally this would only require one account. Which would mean you could also use your Bluesky account to start a thread on Frontpage.

I would definitely pick it up – I was always curious about this game. I remember hearing about it when it first came out and I didn’t even really understand what the game was. It sounds like it was the perfect, quirky, in-group fanservice full of inside jokes for Dreamcast owners.

This is one of many reasons why I’ve been trying to buy physical PC games lately.

I found a boxed copy of the GTA Trilogy recently. It was for Mac, and had probably been sitting on a shelf in some office supply store for 15 years. I don’t even have a Mac, but I bought it since I figured that, not only would it be the original, non-remade version, but it should (hopefully) have the original music as well.

I haven’t opened it yet. I’ll probably post a thread here when I do. Maybe it’ll run in a virtual machine.

Same. And especially for a live service game, it’s just gone. If someone made some great 3D models and animations for an offline game, even if the game doesn’t sell very well, their work is still out there. But with a live service game, that’s just it. No one else gets to see it for more than a few days.

I also hate the fact that the dev studio will face the consequences of this, while whatever braindead exec with a master’s in bullshit administration will probably still be employed.

But at the same time… I can’t help but enjoy the spectacular failures of these anti-consumer products lately.

It’s good that no one is actually criticizing Mongolia for this – they are not really in a position to handcuff Putin, much as we would all love to see it.

Yep, that’s basically all of it. ActivityPub allows a reader to send messages back to the original poster. Those messages can be a comment, or a like, an upvote, a downvote, or a many others. That’s what ActivityPub unlocks compared to RSS.

RSS only goes one way: the reader can read messages from the poster, but not send any messages to the poster.

edit: if anyone is curious about what the “many other” messages can be, the list is here, under Verbs: https://github.com/activitystreams/activity-schema/blob/master/activity-schema.md#verbs

Technically, that is part of ActivityStreams, not ActivityPub. But there is a lot of overlap there, and ActivityStreams is a necessary addition. For example, downvotes on Lemmy are not part of AP, but you’ll find them in AS, called “dislike.”

I was watching a livestream of this game’s reveal trailer. The chat was excited at first during the cinematic trailer. Sure, it looked like a Malt-O-Meal Guardians of the Galaxy, but it still looked like it could be fun. Then as soon as they said “5 v 5 live service game” there was a giant, collective “oh nevermind lol” from the chat.

As someone who is not familiar with the Animal Crossing series, I first read this as Assassin’s Creed: New Hampshire.