If you JUST want to read pirated ebooks? Kobo is probably the best bang for your buck. But you can also pretty easily sideload ebooks to any kindle via the email interface (which I believe Calibre can utilize).

That said? I have a mix of ebooks I got from legal and less than legal sources. And some of those legal sources include amazon kindle because the prices are REALLY good.

So I like my Onyx Boox. Yeah… it is jank as hell and it allegedly comes with a free 5g modem so be wary of what personal info you put on there. But it works well as I can use the kindle app (which also syncs with my phone) for amazon stuff and the native ereader for any epub files. And because I use a webdav to sync my notes, grabbing new books is as simple as remembering to scp a folder to my nextcloud periodically.

Never thought this was possible? Maybe go do some research on what we did to Americans of Japanese (or Chinese or Laotian or…) descent back in WW2.

Also: Anyone who doubts that the military will “just follow orders” on this hasn’t been paying attention.

Depending on where you live, rent/mortgage is generally 20-30k a year for people who can even consider this. Add in utilities, property tax, etc and it is not that much higher. And if any meal plans are included in this, it is potentially cheaper than what a lot of the FIRE crowd would be expecting to pay.

That said: After cruise ships became literal plague ships in 2020, I do not know why ANYONE gets on a frigging cruise anymore.

Skimmed through a few of these earlier and REALLY excited for later today (pre-ordered on Steam for the bonuses, will refund if it is a total trainwreck)

The scores are all over the place because this is a B-A game so it has to actually technically perform well (unlike AA-AAA games like Jedi Survivor that get a pass…), But the actual text is fairly consistent:

The world is amazing. The early-mid game balance is brutal and unforgiving and you will spend a LOT of time using AKs so degraded that they WILL jam. The emergent behavior from the storms and enemy placements lead to frantic struggles to reach cover. And the performance and bugs are all over the place and we all REALLY hope the day-one patch fixes things but nobody is that optimitsic.

And… as a STALKER fan who loved SoC and CoP (and didn’t hate CS…):

Just to add on a bit for people thinking “I’ll wait ten years for the community patches”. Yeah, that will be a less painful experience. But it is well worth looking back at how modders have handled the STALKERs over the years. Even as early as year one there were people who insisted on changing the game balance heavily and EVERYONE wanted to re-enable the cut repair features at merchants. Which made the game a lot less frustrating but also kind of defeated the purpose of the game.

Because the experience of stocking up on ALL the good 9x39 ammo in The Zone to take your VSS up against the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant? That involved using AKs and ARs to go from point A to point B because you wanted to save up that durability for when it mattered. And when it did matter? The fighting was so intense that you burned through ALL that ammo AND your gun was busted and there was the experience of basically throwing away a perfectly good gun that you spent your entire net worth on to sprint out from the cover of a burned out bus (that looked suspiciously like the same asset pack Metro and Fallout 3 used…) to grab an AK off a dead zombie to return fire before the RPG soldiers got a good shot.

Also… this is a Ukrainian as fuck game made by Ukrainians during a war for their very survival. Decide how much slack you are gonna cut for that and how much long term support you expect with the upcoming “wrinkle” of 2025.

Its Texas. They just have to leave it open during the winter. Or the fall. Or the summer. Or probably the spring in a year or two.

Climate change and the inevitable week long power outages because of a self “managed” grid is more than enough to cause mass deaths.

but games consoles and its peripherals are indeed related enough to games to be allowed.

I still have no idea what you are on about and it sounds like you actually have a different set of rules you want to enforce.

So rather than confuse everyone when you are tired… maybe update the sidebar and the list of rules so that people know what you want this board to discuss?

…

Yes. If we completely changed how the internet is structured and written AND migrated back to a plugin based economy AND completely changed the role of a web browser then a project called “Chromium” would be feasible to be maintained by a decentralized group of randos in their spare time.

Please don’t use ableist hate speech.

REALLY curious how “rigid” your interpretation is and how you feel this is not “related to games”

…

Wait. It didn’t support the PSN cloud from the start?

Like, I thought it was questionable that it couldn’t play ANY games locally (PS1 games run on a potato at this point) but sure. But I assumed it at least supported the cloud streaming Sony occasionally remembers they try to sell.

This thing was SOLELY for playing people’s own PS5s? What the fuck?

They worked great for 4x games and even slower paced real time strategy games or grand strategies. And they are an excellent shim for more action oriented games that are built around M+KB and don’t support a gamepad.

The problem is that this came out at the time when EVERY PC game was rapidly getting gamepad support. And with very few exceptions (Terraria and Stardew come to mind), it was a worse experience to set up your own mess rather than just use the bindings that let you play civ on an xbox controller anyway.

But yeah. If we can get both this time? That would be perfect AND encourage people to really dig deep on their setups for steam deck games. I know I would use the trackpads and even back buttons more if it wasn’t learning a completely different scheme for a game I also want to play at my desk or in front of my TV.

That said, I am also very wary of fitting all those controls on a single controller. Most of the mock-ups people make have HORRIBLE ergonomics. But… Valve knocked the Steam Deck out of the park so day one.

Here is a handy map of some of our nukes as of 2006 https://uploads.fas.org/sites/4/NotebookMap.pdf

But also? The expertise to maintain and build nukes are very much California and New Mexico as that is where the three major NNSA labs and their support facilities are.

The reason those problems are centralized is BECAUSE they are so complex. And because they are so high risk. Bad actors will GLADLY spend a year or two sneaking in various MRs to compromise a browser because it can potentially pay enough to never have to hack again.

Maybe that’s for the best. Some frugality with using standards. Web is a planetary library more than it is a platform for applications.

I love it. We take away their de facto standards. We increase their day job workload exponentially. And then we expect them to put in the after hours efforts to optimize page loading.

I mean… as long as California takes Colorado and New Mexico with it, I see no real issues with that. We get the economy, the nature, and the nukes.

“Short term” implies there is a real path forward.

Of the Chromium forks, the only ones with enough revenue to consider pumping back into major development costs (because the engineers you want working on the browser ~66% of the world uses aren’t cheap) are the ones you REALLY don’t want to have controlling said browser.

People have a tendency to very much not understand that even open source projects have development costs. That is WHY there are major foundations around Linux and the like. Because a hobby project is something people can work on in their spare time. A browser (or an OS) is something that requires full time engineers. Would have to check, but I wouldn’t be shocked in the majority of community MRs at this point are also funded by companies (getting a fix or feature support in).

And the idea that, “short term” all the Chromium forks and all the community would unite to manage it themselves when they have been dependent on Google/Alphabet doing the heavy lifting for 16 years.

At best? We are looking back at the dark times where anyone doing ANYTHING “web” related needed to have like twelve different browsers installed and fix specific bugs for internet explorer and netscape and so forth. More likely? We are seeing massive stagnation and you can bet that every single blackhat (and most of the greyhats) are gonna be out for blood.

By all means, fuck Google. But people need to understand what they are asking for and what will likely happen.

And those Chromium forks very much depend on Google to fund most of the heavy lifting and development work.

I definitely feel something needs to be done about google’s MANY de facto monopolies. But we do have to understand that divesting them of Chrome basically kills Chrome and a LOT of the browser landscape.

Hell, even Firefox is very heavily funded by Google, if memory serves.

Make sure to actually understand how those “non-profit” websites and services are functioning.

It costs money to power servers and to maintain them. Most of the fediverse instances like to claim they are run on donations and so forth. But… think about how angry people get at the idea of tipping for ANYTHING and then wonder how many of those are throwing significant cash at your favorite lemmy or mastodon instance per month.

Everyone is always shocked when they find out how social media or a “free” vpn or whatever is funded and where there information is going. But hey, I am sure it will be completely different this time.

… But people DID have a choice. They could have voted for Sanders or Clinton or Biden or… fucking Yang (look… he was advocating for nuclear power and UBI).

So how would we “get a choice” if the primaries were skipped in favor of Sanders because people chose not to vote?

And before you say “Well, how was that fair with Kamala”: That is actually a common refrain. And I genuinely don’t know what we could have done (I mused on it elsewhere in the thread) considering how fast everything had to come together. And a Biden who dropped out earlier in the year would have just fueled countless “Even the Democrats know they failed” messages

And before you say “Well, the fucking super delegates meant that Bernie never had a chance”: And how would we have been overriding the will of the Democratic party? It wouldn’t be the ordinary delegates…

Since the thin rainbow line isn’t going to answer it:

All of those questions boil down to the same thing libertarians were telling kids in the 90s. They want to push the country/world to the breaking point with the expectation that they will come out on top in the revolution. Which works especially well in a culture where guns have more rights than children and EVERYONE thinks they are the totally no-homo love child of John Matrix and Captain Price.

I like to lurk at Restera when I am bored and it was REAL funny to watch all the folk in the “Socialism OT” get mass banned around the time they got bought out (I think MMO Network quietly owns them?). because suddenly having swarms of people openly talking about wanting guns for violent uprisings became a no no.

And the other reason I decided to reply to this: Just because someone understands that trans rights are human rights doesn’t mean they support all civil rights. Trans folk learned the hard way just how many Ls and Bs are TERFs, for example. Bisexuals continue to get “pick a side” shit from the G and the Ls. And so forth.

Because it is the same with racism. Understanding that racism against your skin color or even your friend’s skin color doesn’t mean that you care about racism against ALL skin colors. Just ask us AAPI folk (and watch as we instinctively explain that our parents somehow became white supremacists rather than acknowledging that we get shit on by all our “allies” any time it is convenient).

But… I didn’t vote for Bernie in either primary. So I guess that makes me a lefitst? I mean, I consider myself to be more of a very progressive (American definition of) liberal but… your logic is infallible.

Also: You need to actually make a point before you huff off in a mess of ad hominem. But I am sure all us slow people don’t understand the 9-d chess you are explaining to us or whatever.