I do miss the spontaneity that existed when games were smaller. It made ideas feel much more organic and flexible, and everything just happened faster with fewer people so you could pivot quickly if you wanted to. Out of curiosity, I looked on Wikipedia and this is the blurb talking about the design of Joust. It’s cited as coming from Retro Gamer magazine Issue 63, but sadly it looks like the current publisher has requested it be taken down from the Internet Archive.

John Newcomer conceived Joust as a “flying game” with cooperative two-player gameplay; however, he did not wish to emulate the popular space theme of previous successful flying games like Asteroids and Defender. To that end, he made a list of things that could fly: machines, animals, and fictional characters. After evaluating the positive and negative of each idea, Newcomer chose birds for their wide appeal and his familiarity with fantasy and science fiction media featuring birds. To further increase his understanding, Newcomer went to the library to study mythology. He believed that the primary protagonist should ride a majestic bird. The first choice was an eagle, but the lack of graceful land mobility dissuaded him. Instead, he decided that a flying ostrich was more believable than a running eagle. To differentiate between the first and second player characters, the developers picked a stork, believing the proportions were similar to an ostrich while the color difference would avoid confusion among players. Newcomer chose vultures as the main enemies, believing that they would be recognizably evil. Python Anghelo created concept art of the characters as guidance for further design.

As long as it’s not “spammy” and there’s actual engagement or discussion on the posts I don’t see an issue. But if the community being posted to isn’t engaging with the posts, or it’s crowding out the more interesting posts, yeah that’s not great and shouldn’t be allowed.

It’s even worse apparently. Apparently someone looked at where the coins are going, and the coins are going to the 1337x admins, and the uploader is just getting a cut of those coins. Which explains why the admins are unlikely to really care because they’re profiting off their users.

I have severe trust issues with any kind of pirated software so I basically never download it as a result, and shit like this is why. Even private trackers and “trusted” groups aren’t enough for me to download most software.

That’s fair. I guess when they mentioned they were building a PC I assumed it was relatively recent hardware. But I’ve been there when you can’t get or find drivers, or Windows tells you the old drivers aren’t compatible with newer OS’ and things like that.

I was going to say… If it takes you literally 1.5 days to simply install and after 2 days you can’t even launch Steam? I’m sorry, but you have extraordinarily fucked up. Whatever the fuck is happening there is not on Windows. OP, I would love to understand what you were seeing or what was happening. And I also wonder if you are using an actual Windows OS image, or what you tinkered with or ran scripts on to maybe “clean Windows up”. Unfortunately so many of those scripts are also fucking notorious for breaking some Windows functionality, like the Xbox games and what not.

Don’t get me wrong. Windows is becoming worse and worse in both features and performance (AI powered file recommendations in my start menu? get the fuck outta here). But I’m sorry, this complaint in the OP is not it.

Open a crack so the cat doesn’t wake me up at 4am.

Ordered! I love reading his books.

Admittedly, I just use Sonos myself. However, I do hope to one day move to something else more open.

BluOS is another solution to look at. It’s still pricey, but works offline and higher quality than Sonos if you’re someone who has lots of high res music files.

If you want something that’s more open, but way more DIY, I found this blog post that talks about a solution using Mopidy server: https://blog.platypush.tech/article/Build-your-open-source-multi-room-and-multi-provider-sound-server-with-Platypush-Mopidy-and-Snapcast

Can’t vouch for it, but looks interesting and according to the GitHub is still being updated so worth a look if you don’t mind putting in some work and tinkering.

https://lemmy.fmhy.net is up and running!

A vote was held on Mastodon and the majority elected to start fresh versus waiting longer to work out how to do the migration. A bit of a bummer, but still happy to be back.