If you’re looking for an alternative to the USA’s big landscapes and natural parks then Canada is your best bet. If you’re looking for more cultural stuff and things to do in cities then Canada only has a few nice cities and they’re spread across the country from coast to coast.

If you really like food then learning how to cook is one of the most rewarding skills of all. Personally I think it’s even more than that. I think it’s harder to appreciate a really good meal until you’ve learned to cook it yourself.

Most of the games I buy today are less than $10 anyway. What I want from games has really changed, and a lot of the time I’m just playing free Roguelikes rather than commercial games.

A billionaire beating up a bunch of starving postdocs!

We didn’t buy most games when I was a kid, we rented them. There were countless games we paid $5 to rent for a week and that was plenty of time to finish the whole game and return it.

I only had one rich friend who had like a hundred games he owned. He let me borrow some of them but most of them I had already rented and finished myself. There were only a few games I ended up owning myself, such as Tecmo Super Bowl and the Legend of Zelda.

Some games could also be bought used for a lot less than full price (at stores such as The Games Exchange). They also bought games back from you when you were done with them!

If I could time travel to live back then as an adult I would rent everything and only buy a game if I foresaw wanting to play it long after a week was up.

I never had any issues writing LaTeX with vim. I used UltiSnips and wrote a bunch of my own snippets for it. I also wrote a lot of my own macros in LaTeX.

I’ve tried. It breaks my brain too much. I’ve even used emacs without evil but the unholy combination just does not work for me.

I have the same problem with all vi/vim emulation modes in other editors. There’s always some incongruity that messes me up.

I prefer to call it the dark side!

I don’t really recommend people learn vi/vim even though I’ve been using it for years and love it. It’s a very personal thing and the time you invest into learning it might not be worth it if you don’t use its features enough.

I think it’s dependent on your personality and neurodivergence/neurotypical characteristics (I don’t know a word that encompasses all of this). If you’re the type of person who gets really annoyed/distracted by any sort of “friction” in the editing process then I think you may be a good candidate to learn vi. Otherwise probably not!

Edit: by the way I’m also a LaTeX user!

Yeah. A lot of people who use vim don’t know how to use the full power of vi. They’ll often install plugins to do things they could have easily done with built in features!

The one area where regular vi sucks though is undo. If you want multiple undo then you’ll have to at least go with something like nvi.

Wait so Reddit is taking action against moderators who block X links on their subreddits? Wow! That’s draconian as fuck!

I hope we get a big influx. There’s so many small subreddits I like which have no Lemmy equivalent!

If you’re revisiting BG1 via the Enhanced Edition it’s actually been changed a lot from the original game. One of the biggest differences is that summoning spells don’t scale in the number of minions you get the way they did in the original. I remember summoning great big walls of skeletons with Animate Dead and just having my entire party pelt the enemy with slings and arrows from relative safety. Can’t do that anymore!

I actually prefer walls of text these days. I find myself too impatient to sit through long, voice-acted diatribes. I can read 10 times faster than the voice actor can speak, so I just end up turning on subtitles and skipping most of the voice acting anyway.

I also just find that voice acting tends to compromise the amount of writing. They just won’t have the VA read a wall of text and instead they’ll cut it right down, removing tons of nuance. Voice also similarly compromises the amount of dialogue options available to the character. I have yet to see a voice acted game with the sheer breadth and depth of dialogue option choices as games like Planescape Torment or Fallout 2.

The issue with “easy mode” is that it can be disabled. Scammers can and will find ways to trick grandma into disabling easy mode on her devices and then get her to install malware.

It’s Synecdoche, a figure of speech where a part of something is used to refer to the whole.

A few of the things were explicitly designed (such as the rules for elections, the composition of parliament) but a great deal of it evolved (English common law system, electoral districting/Gerrymandering, and many decades of legislative processes by many different people).

That last one I want to highlight because it seems like it is something explicitly designed. It is not. It’s like a soup pot many chefs walk past and add their own ingredients to. The fact that the soup is not very good can’t be blamed on one particular chef. Thus there is no real designer of our body of laws.

I also want to further point out that laws are not systems, they’re just words on paper. The system is the combined effect of all the people in society acting to produce an outcome. This outcome may be strongly informed by society’s laws (and also by social norms such as respect for the rule of law) but it’s not determined by them the way a computer’s actions are determined by its programming.

One need look no further than the Trump administration which has severely undermined the rule of law in the US. Without the rule of law the system turns into chaos. But that is also an outcome of the system itself, since social norms are the product of social forces (which are themselves highly chaotic).

Oh I don’t doubt that another violent revolution is coming. But each violent revolution proves the failure of the one that came before. Violence begets more violence.

Building a stable system that works for everyone is much more difficult. It takes many years of careful work. Flipping the table never gets you there. Table-flippers love to take all the credit, however.

As for your premise on “non-violent versus violent revolutions”, I reject it entirely. I’m an advocate for careful reforms, not revolutions.

The main takeaway I would hope people get from the idea (one that I heard from a forgotten source and then began using in the light of my own understanding I have to confess) is that we are living under a system that has been disproportionately and consistently shaped over much of its history by moneyed interests in various ways for the specific aim of winning the class war for the wealthy. That’s what the system is doing, that is its purpose.

Another objection to “the purpose of a system is what it does” is that it implies that systems have purposes in the first place. Many systems don’t have a purpose because they were never designed. Ecosystems are the biggest example of this.

Talking more specifically about our political and economic systems, I think the ecosystem view is helpful. Believing that an elite have conspired over centuries to create a system which entrenches their interests is dangerous, conspiratorial thinking which most importantly does not lead in any positive direction.

Violent revolutions rarely work, yet Americans have a peculiar affinity toward them, perhaps due to their history. It’s a particular sort of societal sickness which I believe leads to perfectionist, radical thinking and shuns graassroots, reform-oriented work.

The original topic of discussion (for this thread) was voting systems and two party systems. Grassroots political work can and has been proven to work at solving problems like this. There are many cases around the world where such voting systems have been changed thanks to the efforts of grassroots politics.

Ahhh, that’s where I messed up! I forgot to cool the bacon first!

Which tells you that all creative energy has long since departed the company.