Veraxus

That didn’t happen.
And if it did, it wasn’t that bad.
And if it was, that’s not a big deal.
And if it is, that’s not my fault.
And if it was, I didn’t mean it.
And if I did, you deserved it.

• The Narcissists Prayer

Musk is on #4

Oh yeah! I was all-in on the Wasteland 2 Kickstarter and bagged the CE of Wasteland 3. Those do scratch the itch a bit, but Fallout’s universe is so much more interesting and weird. Wasteland is a lot more straight-laced, comparatively.

I’m fine with the visual presentation of Bethesda’s Fallout games, but I hate the gameplay. Fallout was the ultimate exercise in player agency and consequences… so many different ways to approach situations with so many possible outcomes. It’s not just shooting things. While New Vegas flirts with those principles, BG3 is the first game in 20 years to REALLY recapture that magic for me. That’s the kind of game I want more of, and that’s the kind of game I want Fallout to be.

New Vegas is the only post-Interplay Fallout game that actually feels like Fallout. It would be nice to get a remaster, though… it’s not aging well.

How did you get it working on the Deck? I can load into the menus, but when I try to start a game it crashes.

You shoot pirates, scan animals, and mine things… repeat. It really does feel a lot like “Shitty No Mans Sky” so far (about 4h in so far).

Your ship is basically a TARDIS. You pick a destination from your star map and then your ship magically disappears from one place and appears at another. There is “space” but it feels completely fake, like they tacked it on at the end. Really, so many of the games mechanics feel fake and the effort it takes to suspend disbelief is really high.

Spent a few hours trying to fix the broken ultrawide support. Eventually, the good old hex edit fix for aspect ratios on the EXE did the trick. After that, the FOV was messed up, but the game doesn’t have an FOV slider (or HDR, or DLSS)… so eventually I managed to fix that with a custom ini.

The next few hours was spent shooting pirates like I was playing Far Cry in Space, and struggling with the game’s horrifically designed UI, menus, and inventory. So far, I am feeling very angry about the game. Like we were flat-out lied to about what the game was. There is no exploration. There’s barely even “space”. You just teleport from map to map shooting pirates… with a little scanning creatures and mining rocks mixed in. I don’t understand how anyone is okay with this.

Same boat! I did their free trial, was genuinely impressed with their search results, and now I have a family subscription. I can control what my kids see too, which is a plus.

And they should. If you aren’t going to California, Hawaii, or Massachusetts… you should be careful about vetting the state you plan on visiting. Things have gotten very nasty in “red states” over the last few years.

Sounds like you need to find a new employer. That is a toxic and discriminatory policy that exists exclusively for one reason: because the executives are raging bigots.

I’m a parent and have plenty control over what my kids can access. Most devices have parental controls, and for everything else there is Pi-hole. I don’t need anyone else to do my parenting for me, especially when it means that I, the parent, get treated like a child.

“Oh please, daddy gubment, can I see this website?”

No. Not gonna fly.

Mozilla gets Google’s money only because Google wants to avoid antitrust charges, so they have to help keep Mozilla alive as competition. It doesn’t mean Mozilla is in Google’s pocket or has any strings attached at all.

Do not use any Chromium based browser. Full stop.

• If you are on Mac, I recommend Orion (Webkit based, but Mac only ATM).
• For every other platform, including Linux, Firefox.

Honestly, Google has gotten so aggressively evil I’d strongly recommend cutting yourself off from all their products entirely. Consider Kagi instead of Google search and Proton instead of GMail. Other offerings also have alternatives that won’t spy on you, steal your information, or treat you like both a criminal and a product instead of a customer.

Huh. Never heard of this before.

But if I’m being honest, crappy indie pixel art games are a dime a dozen, so it takes a lot to overcome my general resistance to games like this. It can happen, though… Dave the Diver, Blasphemous… it’s just a much steeper uphill battle for pixel art games than other styles.

We need to forcefully reform the US political system… doing everything in our power to bust the current party system. There should never be a scenario where one party controls anything even remotely resembling power.

The first step is national RCV on all matters. Until we can get that, there is no other peaceful path forward.

Edit: The second step is aggressive campaign finance reform. The third is limiting all representative groups to day-to-day operations only, while guaranteeing that all legislative matters anywhere in the country are vetted ONLY by a public vote.

Yes, Bernie, we know. We will because we have no other choice. Because of how absolutely broken and corrupt our entire political system is, we can vote for a ideologically repugnant lame-duck conservative or a literal fascist.

No matter how much we hate Biden and the DNC’s corrupt, self-serving conservatism, we still have two brain cells to rub together and do, in fact, understand that “both sides” are most definitely NOT the same.

Chromium is compromised… not just Chrome itself. Anything downstream of Chromium is gets all of Google’s recent malware like adblock-prevention and web-DRM baked right in.

No matter the downstream projects’ goals, they are still working from a compromised upstream source.

Orion is by the developers of Kagi (a paid search engine that is actually as good, if not better, than Google) and has ad-blocking and anti-tracking built in natively. It’s awesome.

They would have to be able to hold a conversation. Octopi are much, much smarter than cows, I will still happily eat them… though I feel a little guilty about that. Cows, though? No guilt.

That said, there is much tastier red meat to be had, if only we diversified our livestock. Kangaroo and Ostrich, in particular. And both of those animals are cold-blooded killers who deserve to be eaten.

I wouldn’t count those eggs just yet.

And even if we get a smidge of justice for Trump’s crimes, the government is still full of openly corrupt right-wingers at every level that will never, ever be held accountable for their crimes and abuses.