I didn’t play Darkfall but I know people who did, and I was completely unsurprised when it failed the first time because it had the same problem as Ultima Online but much worse: the people engaging in PVE are the only ones actually taking any risks.

EVE has the same problem if you’re running high end gear or implants (people will always kill your escape pod in the hope of causing you this pain). The factors that are supposed to discourage random killing are easily subverted with only minor investment, and there is a culture of “milking tears” that has persisted even into what passes for adulthood for many of these people.

I honestly have concerns about recommending EVE, it has changed a lot including a lot more real-money transactions.

Wurm Online, Vintage Story, Eco, and some of the Minecraft servers (typically with “civilization” or somethong in the title) are all very crafting focused games. Beware that Wurm Online is a subscription game.

If you’ve got questions let me know: I haven’t played a lot of Eco and Minecraft civs yet but I understand the basics. I have a decent chunk of hours in Wurm and Vintage Story.

Its funny how much of the random PVP crowd still cries about Seamless Coop. I have been playing open PVP games since Ultima Online and frankly open PVP has never been fun. See the fans of this mechanic will say “well you’re just afraid to take risks carebear” but in reality they’re the ones closer to carebear mentality than the people running valuables through risky places. The victim is ironically the only person taking any real risk, because the attacker can choose their battles and take only equipment they’re willing to lose.

Once I figured this out I built myself to trick people into attacking me and then they’d find out I’m entirely specced for player killing, usually much too late to do anything about it. The tears from the people who call others carebears are the best tears of all.

My friend and I got into Wurm Online and we went way too hard doing this. Like to the point we managed to upset half the server (and I’m not exaggerating, there were many forum threads about us lol).

Has your friend ever tried EVE Online? I guess a better question follows: should they ever try EVE Online?

I wonder how? Plex is actually worse to navigate and filled with ads and shit.

The issue I had: Jellyfin experience is a better on Firestick and Chromecast than it is on Roku, but the difference has been shrinking fast due to contributions from someone named 1hitsong on GitHub. That person has absolutely hammered patches out over the past few months.

When my friends talk about what books they’re reading and it comes back to me I just joke and say “oh I largely read non-fiction”.

I read every manual, decision tree, process document, whatever lands in front of me.

RTFM is life

I just personally wish the COVID lifestyle was more accessible.

Same, it suited me quite well and I feel bad saying I missed it because so many others, including some of my own family and friends, suffered. Now that I’m back in the office 5 days a week, I lose >2 hours a day with my kids. I had my own parents say “i don’t get why you’re complaining, we got by before COVID” while refusing to acknowledge it’s different because one of them stayed home with us, while my wife and I must both work to survive.

I grew up in a religious conservative family. These and other experiences drove me to the left in a big way. I see now that thinking we can solve systemic issues with individualism is bullshit. I want a world where my wife or I could stay home (or some communal solution) to raise our family right rather than having a bunch of latchkey kids and being stuck doing chores from the moment we get home until the moment we lie down. Some people say “well that’s how I was raised” but it isn’t right.

Now that would be a funny headline.

No sadly COVID lockdown isolation did them in. I’ve never seen minds and bodies decay so fast. I have another friend who developed full-blown psychosis from it too, and at this point it looks like he’s never coming back. The lockdowns were harder on some people than we were/are ready to talk about I think.

When my wife’s grandparents had to get a new computer they got upset about the new windows interface and the fact their old games didn’t work, so I set them up with Linux and a DE that resembled XP (it’s what they were familiar with), and I was able to get most of their games going.

They used it without issue until they died.

Your OS isn’t getting regular updates!!!

This is a feature imo.

It aligns with Democratic Socialists well enough, but not the seize-the-means socialists.

That’s a fair observation I think: UBI doesn’t put the same pressure on financialization that worker- owned industry does. Ultimately I think eliminating work is a terrible idea, but reducing work, focusing on actually productive work, and ensuring we all collectively benefit from it is ideal.

A system is what it does. If it costs us jobs, enriches the wealthy at our expense, destroys creativity and independent thought, and suppresses wrongthink? It’s a censorious authoritarian fascist pushing austerity.

Show me AI getting us UBI or creating worker-owned industry and I’ll change my tune.

I’m in Canada and it’s only marginally better with respect to police under/overreaction. A friend and I once got the “don’t go to school on X day” message and we went immediately to local, provincial, and federal police. No one took us seriously. We had a friend working at CSIS (American analogue would be CIA) look into it and later that week we saw the article in a local paper.

Police investigated the home and found:

• 5000 rounds of ammunition
• body armor
• explosives
• only thing he couldn’t get was legal firearms because of his history of mental illness, but he had been working on connections to acquire illegal ones

Point being we couldn’t get the police to lift a finger to check out what we believed to be a credible threat (this guy never even joked about that stuff), but boy were they willing to burn rubber racing to my school when I committed the crime of defending myself in a “normal” school fight and one of my bullies claimed they felt threatened by me. This event set off a whole series of events, like requiring me to get a full evaluation at a psychiatric facility, before being allowed back in school. Our system is broken.

I cannot possibly imagine trusting a school issued device.

Imagine it’s 1995 and you’re an average person. You don’t know all that much about separation, you just know that the coming referendum is about it and you don’t want to separate. You likely are not a college/university graduate and a significant amount of the people you know haven’t even graduated high school. You probably don’t have a personal computer or internet access even if you do. Your primary news source is likely the odd updates you get on the radio while driving to or from work, and you haven’t been following and aren’t familiar with how people talk about separation. You show up to vote and you get this question:

Do you agree that Quebec should become sovereign after having made a formal offer to Canada for a new economic and political partnership within the scope of the bill respecting the future of Quebec and of the agreement signed on June 12, 1995?
French:
Acceptez-vous que le Québec devienne souverain, après avoir offert formellement au Canada un nouveau partenariat économique et politique, dans le cadre du projet de loi sur l’avenir du Québec et de l’entente signée le 12 juin 1995?

What the hell are you even voting for or against here?

The Québec referendum on separation was so confusing people remarked they didn’t actually know what they were voting for. The situation resulted in a law (Clarity Act) that forced all secession votes to pass some tests to be considered valid, and also indicated that a secession requires amendment of the Constitution of Canada, which makes it incredibly difficult to actually do.

I really don’t want to give Québec undeserved credit on this, they handled it quite poorly tbh and the whole thing felt like it was exploiting the ignorance and anger of a minority population that had even less education and literacy than the average Canadian at the time. That said, Canada has since devolved further into being a neoliberal anglosohere shithole so perhaps they were on to something.

That’s not a no.

Knowing full well you are leaving to find a man in another town, you accepted another man’s request for a date and now you want it to be platonic?

Removed by mod

Removed by mod

Americans are being lied to all day, every day, by complicit corporate media backing an ever more corrupt establishment. This is not exclusive to Republicans by any stretch of the imagination: remember all the people clamouring against the “Bernie Bros”? I’m sure some of the people taking this extreme position against Republican voters were also bashing Bernie Bros and saying “it’s her turn”.

Where did that get you people, huh? Sanders and AOC extend an olive branch and fill up stadiums, while you continue to try to drive even more wedges between us. “He will not divide us”? You were right, because OP and people like OP are all too happy to drive the wedge in on their own. Trump is not the thing you’re fighting against, he’s effectively what you’re fighting for. Go ahead, keep driving people away to the right and see what happens.