this is more effective long term as well, because it can be used as propaganda against the effectiveness of “socialism”

However, people who are still harboring viewpoints that are in favor of imperialism should not be allowed on this site. If users like this do a lot of self crit and acknowledge their mistakes, I would not be apposed to them being here. However, users who actively believe that the U$ military is not a reactionary force, and that its soldiers should be treated with any level of respect should never be able to make it past account creation.

This isn’t representative of frauddog at all though? Like maybe I’m misunderstanding something but it sounds like you are saying this is the kind of person frauddog is and that’s obviously untrue. Frauddog joined the military as a teenager, and now as an adult is very aggressively against imperialism and colonialism. It’s not like null is an active troop secretly infiltrating this place. I think null should have had more humility in void’s last interaction on this site, like obviously having been part of the us military is pretty fucking shameful even if you were ignorant at the time, but it’s really bothering me how people have been acting as though null was like, a secret fed who actually loves the us military or some shit. And it’s frustrating to me that this is how null went out, because null had been talking about wanting to delete for a while due to the frequent racism from white users on this site, but since it went down like this if feels like that racism, that continues to harm users here, is being ignored in favor of pointing out a gotcha about a user they didn’t like. Idk, I know my thoughts are disorganized here but hopefully I’m making sense.

Why does it matter if the site looks less active than it is? It’s not like there would actually be a difference in the amount of activity if someone made a post in the trans community vs a comment in the trans mega, and the megas themselves are pinned to the top of the feed so I think they would be tough to miss. Personally, if posting in the megas were discouraged I would just post less, because I don’t feel the sort of things I comment in the megas would make good standalone posts. They are more like light chats or just talking about some stuff that happened that day, things like that.

The news mega would be the exception in my opinion, I do think that there’s often stuff posted in there that would be worth it’s own post, but I also don’t think it’s a big enough problem to warrant mods intervening.

Oh, and my pinball grind continues as well! I’ve learned a few techniques and I’m actually getting to the point where I can keep a game going for a bit and aim the ball intentionally, though I still miss my target a lot of the time.

I started Dark Souls II and made a cartoonish fancy butler type guy because I’m planning on doing a dex build to change it up from my usual build in these games (all strength caveman), and a goofy posh asshole seemed like the appropriate form for that. I also started 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors for when I’m not feeling up to getting my head smashed in. Plus handheld gaming is always nice for the commute home.

As far as virtual pinball goes, Visual Pinball X is a FOSS simulator and works great. Agreed that it can be an expensive hobby though. I’m pretty poor and even playing in arcades is too expensive for me to do regularly. I can’t imagine ever owning a table, or even one of those faux tables that looks like a real machine but is actually just a simulation.

So almost three weeks ago I asked my boss about an accommodation at work (I didn’t phrase it this way but they immediately knew that’s what it is). It’s a totally reasonable request imo and has a minuscule cost. Boss says they are fine with it and will talk to HR. Fast forward to today and I see the HR rep for the first time since then. I follow up with them about it and my boss never even brought it up with the rep 🫠

Apparently I need to wait another couple weeks due to logistical stuff. I guess it needs to go through the business owner too which has completely tanked any confidence I had in this, because this person is super ableist and has stood in the way of my efforts here several times before (even when it literally didn’t affect them at all). Just feeling really pessimistic.

oh boy finally off work, now i can relax with my favorite activity: arguing with assholes on the internet

for real though i’m glad i’m almost home. hope you all had/have a nice day

Espgaluda, or really any Cave game imo but I especially like this one and MAME is the best way to play it. The slowdown in the CV1000 games isn’t very accurate*, but everything else should emulate great. Battle Garegga is another good game if you are a sicko.

*You can lower the CPU speed in the settings for those games and it makes it feel good enough, but it’s still not really accurate and there’s not just a default Good setting for it either. Usually around 50% is close enough iirc.

Up on your thumb feels pretty comfortable imo since you mostly just need it for jumping. It’s rough if you play a character that has 360 inputs or something like that though. Hitbox style controllers in SSBM put up on your right pinky by default, that was tough for me to get used to…

oh idk what this is about, i was just talking about the one post that was 4 hours ago in your screenshot

Maybe they mean it goes in slop? I do wish that mods would say what the right community is when they remove posts for being in the wrong one.

Yeah I mean idk it might just be buzzword shit anyways, I don’t know if they are even talking about an llm or what. Just struck me as a red flag. In any case it’s no worse than anything amazon is doing

I haven’t tried it, but the fact that they brag about their machine learning ai in big bold letters on their front page already makes me not want to give it a chance lol. I use BookWyrm for tracking what I read and it gets the job done, but I don’t think it would be very useful for recommendations, and it doesn’t have a stats page unfortunately.

You do hit a certain point where you basically can’t lose though, especially if you use Shield Maiden block build.

Shield Maiden is so silly lol. Granted I’ve only done one run as her, but I was excited to try a new character since she wasn’t in the game the last time I had played. Then I built up enough block strength that I noticed I could just stand still and realized maybe I don’t want to play this character… The idea of being so tanky that nothing can hurt you is kinda fun but in practice it just feels like, if I can put my controller down and let the game play itself for a minute while I sip my drink, then what’s the point of playing a game where the whole appeal is dodging swarms of enemies?

I couldn’t fight off the urge to start something new so Final Fantasy VI is on the back burner for now. In its place I’ve started Cave Story, which I’ve only played about 2 hours of so far but I’ve been enjoying. Other than that I’ve been on a big pinball kick. There’s a table at my work that I found a good virtual recreation of, so I’ve been learning the mechanics and practicing in the hopes that I can get on the leaderboard. I only need 30 or 40 million to get on there, I can’t remember which at the moment, and I’ve already gotten a little over 20 million as my personal best so I think with some more practice and a little luck I’ll get on there soon enough.

As for my favorite games I played for the first time this year:

As for games that actually came out this year, well, I barely played any… I guess Caves of Qud is pretty fun? I think I would really like it if I played more, but roguelikes where you play as the same character over several play sessions never really stick for me. Halls of Torment and Balatro have both been good for the occasional play session, but I’m not too excited about either. There was some cool looking stuff on my back log I meant to play that came out this year, but I never got around to them. Maybe next year!

I found out last night that Visual Pinball X actually runs on Linux now so I stayed up late trying it out. The setup is still pretty confusing but I was able to get some tables running at least!

Last time I did this it was Stardew Valley, and Terraria before that. Monster Hunter is good for this as well but only if you are gathering or farming something that isn’t too difficult. Old School RuneScape if you are into that kind of thing. Haven’t actually tried it with these ones but I bet OpenRCT2 and Monster Rancher would be great podcast games.

Chinese woman finds type 1 diabetes reversed after stem cell transplant in world first

This was the last thing I read about it but there might have been more updates since then, I’m not sure. Here’s a link to the research paper as well if you want to dig into the details more.