I used to work exclusively night shift and it was such a pain getting anything done that required me to go into a government office or a bank or any of those “respectable” businesses that only operate during the day time, since I was typically sleeping til 4pm usually right before I needed to go to work. It was literally night and day switching to 1st shift.

Depends, are you anywhere near Lebanon? If so, you may want to put your phone in airplane mode.

I started playing one of the Gacha games a few months back now, Watcher of Realms, I think the only reason I started was because it showed jiggling boobies in a trailer. The name is goofy and the story is almost non-existant, the gameplay isn’t terribly deep, but has some nuances to it, it’s like a tower defense RPG game. It’s kind of dumb as a game because it records your playthroughs of scenarios that you can then use later on to “Auto-fight” for you as you frequently have to grind for different shit. So you basically set the game on auto-pilot and stop playing the game. I’ve been playing for something like 6 months now, but I’ve been committed from the start to never pay a single dime for it and I’ve stuck with that the entire time. Granted, I’ve put way too much time into the game and, if time is money, I’ve wasted a bunch that way, but I’ve never actually paid for anything in currency. Cheap skate 4 life. I honestly don’t know why I keep playing, knowing what the game is setup for, but I still log in day after day.

I can definitely see how it encourages players to spend money, there’s so many mini-currencies within the game that obfuscate what you need to do to earn this or that hero or get whatever thing you’re trying for, but ultimately the incentive is to buy shit to get further along. In this game though, the rates are so goddamn ridiculous that you’d have to be an impatient jackass to pay the rates they want for simple things that don’t even give any guarantees of better performance in the game. On the one hand, I thing games like this are evil for trying to take advantage of people, but on the other, if you’re that stupid and that rich that you have money to burn on a game like this… maybe throwing your money away on digital stuff isn’t the worse thing you could be wasting your money on (like real world drugs or donating to Trump or something stupid like that). But yes, for kids who haven’t mentally developed yet, there probably should be some sort of protections for them, since they’ll pay for dumb shit at the drop of a hat.

How much easier it’s gotten and most of what you download nowadays is exactly what you’re looking for. In the 90’s/00’s, alot of what was pirated had the potential to just be total BS or mislabeled, so you were never entirely certain what it was you were getting. I think Madonna had even gotten into it and released a one of her own albums as a fake download with her telling the listener “What the fuck are you doing?” At the time I mostly got music, though the Dreamcast pirating scene was pretty big for me for awhile. I think anymore though I’m probably more interested in obscure RPG books now.

I think with torrenting, there’s a certain amount of trust that’s inherent with some torrents by virtue of the number of downloads/seeders there are on a torrent. At least for me, I can assume, ok, there’s 100 people seeding this thing, chances are this is exactly what it says it is, otherwise this many people wouldn’t be still seeding it (you can fool some people some of the time, or something like that). I don’t pirate nearly as often as I did when I was younger, but now I feel the need to use protection (via a VPN) because you just don’t know who might be watching. In my entire time having pirated stuff over multiple decades, I had only ever gotten a single letter from my ISP, so it’s not something that I ever felt particularly afraid of, but you never know and it’s better to be safe about that stuff.

I like to treat every standard like a limbo bar and see how much lower I can go.

That’s an episode of “Will It Blend?” I didn’t think we’d ever get in real life.

This was a really interesting video on how modern wargaming is used by the military and its links to the recreational scene, I just got done watching it yesterday. I think Quinns, in typical fashion, seems to try to moralize a bit much, especially with his pointed questions, but then does a good job of coming back around to show the other point of view, though I think the overall view he had seemed negative. He tried to present both sides at least.

He did recognize the need for militaries in general, but then seemed to equate any use of wargaming as resulting in deaths, which was automatically bad. I think some of the wargame professionals made pretty good cases for why it was justified and how “wargaming” is a bit of a misnomer, it’s more a way of contingency planning and working through possible scenarios you might encounter, so wargaming just helps prepare for different scenarios by showing the range of actions that players/actors might take in a given situation. They’re mapping out probabilities using human psychology, along with boardgame and videogame mechanics.

I think the ending portion where he called on gamers to “do something” about making wargaming ethical was kind of whatever. As if the gaming community was any sort of unified bloc that could even do anything about it. Something like that would probably require like a wargamer’s guild or union that added some sort of restraints on the kinds of projects they would work on (only scenarios that minimize casualties) or something like that, but that sort of defeats the purpose of trying to map out probabilities, since you’d purposely censor certain probabilities from your line of thinking. I think wargamers will just continue to do whatever they’re doing.

The only things I don’t like about pooping at work is when there’s no private restrooms or when they don’t have some sort of white noise in the bathrooms (in the case of public restrooms). Inevitably, there’s people who don’t care about shitting in the stall next to mine, which I absolutely hate, I don’t want to hear you shit. I only want to shit when nobody else is around or when the sound of a fan or something blocks out the noise. It’s like some sort of instinctual feeling. Otherwise, pooping at work is great.

Overall maybe only like 5–10%. Known numbers always, unknown numbers get iffy when I might be expecting a call from somewhere but don’t have their number saved.

We’re going to have to get used to regions of the world becoming permanently uninhabitable.

It’s so dumb, like of all the challenges facing us as a species now, THAT’S the shit that people are getting worked up about? Life on Earth for humanity is in the process of going through a set of major environmental changes that we’re probably not ready for and is going to have catastrophic results for some… and there’s people out there getting bent out of shape about pronouns and sexual orientation. We need to be doing alot more preparing for what’s coming over the next few years and a lot less bitching about things that don’t personally affect us. It seemed like we had made some big strides for awhile there, and that seemingly got erased within the past 8 years.

I don’t actually like validation, recognition, or getting compliments, but I somehow feel slighted when I don’t get them and think I should’ve.

You might even say they’re sieg heiling this victory.

I grew up playing FPS shooters like Doom, Quake, Tribes, Team Fortress, Counter-Strike, etc, but I had avoided Fortnite for awhile because it just seemed like a kid’s game, whatever. Then my oldest son started getting into it and we’d play matches together, and suddenly I felt out of my element. The addition of building mechanics adds in a whole other element that you don’t really have to think about in other games. Granted, it’s not realistic being able to build shit that quickly, but whatever, it’s a game. And seeing some of the skill involved with these people running/gunning/building elaborate forts and the sort of battles that play out between two people gets insane sometimes.

Another interesting aspect of it is all the cross-marketing that goes on, you’ve got almost every major franchise represented in some way, shape, or form. It reminds me of Ready Player One. It sounds dumb, but Fortnite is probably the closest thing to a Metaverse that we currently have. I mean, hell, Emperor Palpatine somehow returned in between the movies in Fortnite (a dark day for Star Wars fandom).

Real science or faked science?

I’d be happy to write you a poem about meters:

In every line, a rhythm beats,
A pulse that guides our wandering feet,
From soft iambs that gently sway,
To trochees bold that lead the way.

Anapests with a quickened pace,
Gallop through with urgent grace,
While dactyls, with their falling sound,
Plant roots deep in the fertile ground.

The syllables dance in measured time,
A metronome of verse and rhyme,
Counting out the poet’s heart,
Where every beat becomes an art.

In meters, life’s cadence is found,
A melody both soft and profound,
For in each measure, strong or sweet,
Resides the music of our feet.

Sure! I’d be happy to help with that:

In the forest, where the shadows play,
Among the leaves of gold and gray,
A squirrel leaps from branch to branch,
A tiny acrobat in a woodland dance.

With eyes aglow and tail held high,
It races beneath the autumn sky,
Gathering acorns, one by one,
A treasure trove before winter’s done.

The wind may howl, the trees may bend,
But the squirrel’s journey will never end.
With nimble feet and a heart so light,
It chases the day into the night.

For in this world of bark and pine,
The squirrel knows the forest’s rhyme,
It lives in the moment, wild and free,
A tiny soul in a grand oak tree.

I use tagging for sorting media that falls into multiple categories and defies normal hierarchical methods. I didn’t know about tagging users on Lemmy though, but I don’t know that I honestly will use it ever. You’re all just random people talking into the void, hell, half (or more) of the people here may very well be bots, I don’t know. The idea of tagging people based on past interactions seems a bit weird to me I guess (not that I don’t see uses for tagging for organization in general).

Edit: actually, I don’t even know if user tags are supported by Voyager, the main app I use to access lemmy. So, that too.

I’ve run into exactly the same issue with my large ttrpg ebook/pdf collection (+100k file data hoarding… it’s not a problem, I swear) and I’ve not really found a good option I’m entirely happy with. Calibre duplicates everything and I don’t like the thought of having my collection’s organization tied to a specific piece of software if I just delete my duplicates. Plus I’m elitist and think the UI/logo are gross to look at.

Zotero is the least worst option I’ve found, but it’s geared towards scholarly journals and such, so not great, but serviceable. Not sure if it’s on linux though.

Jellyfin is apparently able to handle ebooks with a plugin, though I didn’t particularly care for it when I tried it months ago.

There’s a handful of other ebook software out there, mostly geared towards comics/manga, so depending on what you have those might be worth looking for.

I’d like to use Obsidian for it and just turn the directory into a vault and let it automatically scan the folders for files, but that doesn’t work great either.

The best piece of software I’ve seen that could potentially handle it is an app called Stashapp… which is unfortunately geared towards adult film. But it’s feature-set if it could be applied to PDFs seems like it would be ideal.

Huh. War is apparently a bit harder to do when you have to try to not kill (your own) civilians.