Quick Time Events; characters that automatically do 60 things just by holding down “forward” on the joystick; the Ubisoft logo.

Gotta keep going. Not all signatures are going to be legit, so a reasonable buffer needs to be in place.

Ignoring the world definitely makes you good global citizens and not problems to work around. Good job. Way to go.

NodeBB. It’s a fairly popular webforum, but ActivityPub support is fairly new. It’s really something else to see the Fediverse through a the lens of the old Internet.

Because there is zero trust that this won’t be a one-sided liberalization, in favour of the fascists.

“We’re the front page of the Internet!”

“No, not like that…”

Voting like this is a bit of a dark pattern, though. Especially downvotes. They come from places where the platform owners want to download the responsibility of community management to the community itself. This has a nasty tendency to silence valid criticism while simultaniously supporting brigading behaviour.

At the very least, we should be having serious, design-focused discussions about eliminating or highly restricting downvotes.

My ex is surrounded by support, from the same people who I thought were my best friends.

This is the reason why. Your ex has managed to control the narrative and has manipulated the social atmosphere to ice you out. Emotional abusers are often very good at this. They mamipulate everyone around them.

And they are really good at choosing their abuse victims. They know who they can love bomb, who they can isolate, and who will keep their mouth shut.

I have been there. Watched people I thought were friends just evaporate, choosing their relationship with my ex over me. Realizing they were never my friends, they were “ours”, and ij the end they stuck by her, the more openly social and boistrous one.

It’s taken a long time, and many different therapists, but I’ve come to accept my experiences as abuse, as not my fault, and… sometimes… that I am worthy of love, friendship, and happiness.

I have found the books The Body Keeps the Score and Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving (available as audio books), as well as videos on toxic shame and attachment by Heidi Prieb, very helpful.

I know the words feel hollow, because they feel so far the opposite of true, but you are not alone. Many others have been through what you’ve endured, and have made it out the other side. There are people out there who will, one day, be so very glad to have you in their lives.

Some day, when you’re ready – and much earlier than I did, I implore you – you should join some activity groups. Take up a recreational sport, join a gaming group, take group acting lessons, join a choir… anything that is a) casual and b) a group activity. Bonus points if it’s something you always enjoyed, buy your ex tried to excise from your life. This will help you rebuild your social network, and let you reconnect with yourself.

Physical activity and a healthy diet is also important here. It may be the last thing you want to do, but it actively helps fight all of your worst psychic injuries. Not only is it physiologically good for you, it’s psychologicallly good for you. You know that it’s good for you; your brain knows it. Doing healthy things means choosing to care about yourself. You need to actively choose yourself at every step of the way. It trains your mind to see yourself as worthy of care.

Oh, and ritually burn things that were hers, or that were shared and tied to your relationship. You don’t need them. You don’t need her. You’re going to be better off without her.

I bet door-to-door salespeople would make way more money if they could just break into your homes, leave their junk on your table, and steal your credit card, and yet we don’t let them do that.

Right. But when the bar is owned by a Nazi, your options for pushing them out of the bar becomes a lot more limited.

“Reviewers” need to understand that, unless they paid their own money, from a bog-standard store, on or after release day, they are not reviewers, they are hired spokespeople.

JXL is my favourite squadron.

The reasons why the wealthy like liberalisation matters, though. The reasom the wralthy want more wealth matters.

Money is power. The wealthy are competing to have the most power. Eventually, that turns to taking control of the state. So, the wealthy will back free trade and deregulation right up until they, personally, are in a position to attempt a coup. After that, regulation and trade barriers work for the particular rich folk who have taken control over the state.

Doom 2 was the peak. 2016 was a strong reimagining of Doom 3, but it was already trying to be something Doom wasn’t.

Was this not known? I’ve known that my fingers wrinkle the same in water every time since I was 5.

The choice to be on open-source, community-owned social media rather than corporate owned platforms is, itself, a political choice, and one that, in the absence of other focuses for discussion, will attract politically outspoken people. With no other core community here to focus discussion, everything will fall back to the things most people here have in common: FOSS, anti-corporate sentiments, etc., all of which are themselves inherently political topics.

I think it’s dangerous to imagine people follow these folks, or let them run rampant over society, because they aspire to be like them. That makes it so much harder to really understand why people support them, or even just refuse to tell them “no”, and makes it impossible to do anything about it.

People believe that life is a meritocracy. Even when they themselves can look around at the people near them and see that those in positions of power don’t deserve it, they still view society as a whole as “fair”. Yes, they personally have may have gotten screwed over, but, in general, the people who float to the top got there because they were smarter and more capable. Therefore, we should sit back and just let them cook.

They need some kind of trigger to see the billionaires not as people who have earned their place, but who have stolen it.

The fact that there has been so much noise over $80 video games makes me question the thesis here. There are a huge number of video games out there now, it’s true, but if gamers truly gave a shit about them, I think everyone would be rather quiet about the prices from the big publishers.

All of the noise tells me that gamers will continue to prioritize big name, big dollar releases, rather than actually even glance at their backlog of Steam games. And $80 spent on games you never, ever play is not a better investment.

There is no reason to even suggest that AI ‘means well’. It doesn’t mean anything, let alone well.

The game prices I’m ok with. When I was a kid, video games cost $70 CAD, and that’s almost $200 now. I’m perfectly OK with going back to buying fewer games. I have too many of them I shouldn’t have bought in the first place.

I’m wildly upset with the console price, in no small part because Nintendo and other electronics manufacturers seem to be trying to smooth over the shock of Dorito Don’s tariffs by increasing prices globally.

The Americans made their own bed. I’m not willing to lie in it with them.