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supersquirrel

@supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz

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After announcing increased prices, Spotify to Pay Songwriters About $150 Million Less Next Year (www.billboard.com)

When Bloomberg reported that Spotify would be upping the cost of its premium subscription from $9.99 to $10.99, and including 15 hours of audiobooks per month in the U.S., the change sounded like a win for songwriters and publishers. Higher subscription prices typically equate to a bump in U.S. mechanical royalties — but not...

supersquirrel ,

Gotta love all my friends who are really into music who happily use Spotify and don’t give a shit it is a weapon of class warfare being used on musicians disguised as a music player!

I basically lost all my drive to make something of my love of creating music seeing how little anyone in my society actually values music or musicians in terms of material support and reward, it is honestly pretty scary how broken music has become.

supersquirrel ,

There is a “tool library” sort of service (for profit)

Wait I am confused

library

Alright got it.

(for profit)

What

Ok….Why is everybody using the world “library” like it is an even remotely compatible concept with a for profit rental business??!

Is this just capitalism trying to purposefully destroy any meaning behind the word “library”?.

If your service is to rent tools out to places you are a tool rental company not a “tool library”. You would be a tool library if you were a community governed non-profit that let people borrow tools for essentially no money.

sigh it makes me so cynical how clearly libraries would never have been allowed to exist in a time as nauseatingly conservative and capitalist as this if they weren’t already old and boring concepts, the media, corporations, centrist democrats and republicans would all lose their mind about libraries being too radical of a concept if a leftist proposed them as an idea now.

:(

supersquirrel ,

It’s a for-profit service that people use to rent-out, and rent-in their tools

So yes this is the same old shit as labeling Uber or Lyft a “ridesharing app” instead of calling it what it is, a taxi service.

The correct name for this type of entity would be a consignment & rental store.

This kind of thing has NOTHING to do with libraries whatsoever in structure but more importantly in intended function and community impact.

supersquirrel ,

quoted £245 for a handyman to come in and do the three hour job

Power tools, hand tools, clothes, batteries, heavy painters cothes, gloves etc.. do not make the job.

The skill of the handyman who can quickly and efficiently deduce an effective solution (described vaguely by a couple of photos and a description over the phone by someone who doesn't know shit about the problem they need solved) to a carpentry/handyman repair and do it within 3 hours is what makes the job.

People often make the point about learning home repair as a way to save money, and true it definitely is a necessary skill to some degree as a home owner unless you have a lotttt of money... but learning to do your own home repair really isn't "saving money" so much as simultaneously devaluing your free time AND labor time to the point that all of the incurred debt is inscribed into your body and lost time with your family or friends rather than in invoices for repairman. This leaves me hesitant to call doing a significant portion of home renovation yourself ON TOP of holding down a full time job "saving" anything even if it helps keeps monetary expenses down.

supersquirrel ,

I think this meme might actually be perfect

supersquirrel , (edited )

Get a Steam Deck.

No seriously, Steam Decks run on an immutable Arch (edit: I thought my steam deck was a Ubuntu distribution until just now when someone corrected me, see how much of a fool I am and yet I still find my steam deck easy to use when I am exhausted and don’t want to troubleshoot/learn new shit!) distro of Linux. Immutable means every update addresses the core of the operating system in a way that you can’t fuck up anywhere as easily as a normal operating system.

The desktop UI is great, there is a flatpak App Store pre-installed, I mean you can search for Xonotic or any other utility you need and install it in 30 seconds flat. It is just a Linux desktop with decent presets.

The thing is the Steam Deck doesn’t boot to desktop, it boots to a big picture mode where the UI looks like a console. It is easy to browse your games and it feels like you are using a very focused, locked down device from the likes of Apple or Nintendo, not a full blown portable Ubuntu computer running a slick wrapper around one of the most extensible constructions of software ever made (no unfortunately the Steam Deck isn’t a LISP machine).

The clever bit though is that SteamOS (basically a Ubuntu distro) has Proton which is designed to emulate windows (closely related to the other windows emulator WINE). This allows you to play the vast majority of windows games on your Steam Deck and because the windows games are ran in a virtual environment…. when you press the power button to sleep your Steam Deck it just pauses that virtual environment which means that ALLL kinds of games old and new that were never designed to be abruptly paused and resumed end up with wayyyyyyy less issues on the Steam Deck than they would if you were running them in Windows natively and trying to do the same thing (with say a microsoft Surface or something).

I regularly play Steel Panthers WinspWW2 on my Steam Deck. I run it on dosbox which either comes preinstalled on the Steam Deck or is available on the “app store” I can’t remember (not really a store because no one is selling anything).

https://www.shrapnelgames.com/Camo_Workshop/WW2/WW2_page.html

^look how shit this website looks, this is an ANCIENT game running on DOS and it honestly barely runs on native windows anyways, you can’t full screen it without it crashing on windows.

All I had to do was add the launch file to steam and now I can open up my steam deck, scroll down to WinspWW2 and start playing the best turn based tactical strategy game ever made… on the go….. that came out in 1995 and has been updated continually since and is basically being kept functioning by an elaborate janky lifesupport system that most people with windows computers don’t even want to bother with because the experience of playing the game is too annoying….

It just runs on my Steam Deck tho!

The virtual dos environment lets me not have to worry if the game will crash when I pause and alt tab to a different program or abruptly put my device to sleep without giving the game time to save or something…. the Steam Deck just suspends the virtual environment and from the perspective of WinspWW2 no change needs to happen. The program just sits open and frozen waiting for me to press the power button on my Steam Deck and keep playing.

Not saying you have to do nerdy shit with your steam deck, what I am saying is that you can do whatever you want to with your steam deck and not have to worry that a company like Microsoft is going to take a dump on a nice thing you had worked out between you and your gaming setup.

Get the Steam Deck it is the best of both worlds, slick and polished when you want it to be, customizable and extensible when you need it to be.

supersquirrel , (edited )

I understand, you can use the steamdeck docked liked a normal desktop of course.

You just have a fairly hardware limited extremely lightweight gaming desktop that you can throw in your backpack, but it still does a damn fine job of that too so shrugs. I mean get a Logitech k780 or whatever Bluetooth keyboard you like, a mouse too, Bluetooth works just as fine on the Steam Deck as any other laptop.

I like plenty of indie games and I have a deep love for entire genres of video games that categorically don’t require any computing muscle to work (cataclysm dark days ahead I love you) so I don’t care as much about having a super powerful gaming computer at this point in my life but it is definitely a valid criticism of the deck.

supersquirrel , (edited )

Hahahaha well I am an idiot

I do love that this is basically like being a devout worshipper of a cult but realizing 5 years in that I got the wrong address, showed up to the wrong cult, but then everyone was so dark and moody and only spoke in deceiving rhymes so that nobody realized the administrative mistake, including me AND the innocent villagers going about their day outside the cult complex who I continually tried to convert to worship a god which was quite obviously in fact not the god lovingly illustrated on the sign atop the cult mansion’s roof either in name or description but in point of fact the god worshipped by the other cult mansion two blocks south on Michael Street not Michel Street (? Is that even a name?).

An understandable mistake for a citizen passing by from the other side of the city, but when you are actually in the wrong cult and don’t even know it? Oof that is some next level shit.

supersquirrel ,

you’re testimonial here isn’t very convincing. It’s a portable gaming device that requires a dock (or hub) to even play on a monitor. It’s underpowered by design. Not even all top Steam games run on it.

Damn sorry I can see why you don’t like it and those are valid points about doing a bad job with my testimonial, I don’t really know that much about any of this I just type things into google and yell excitedly at the words that pop up most of the time when I am programming (I am looking to learn how to automate this with AI).

Also ok my confusion in thinking WINE is a virtual environment and an emulator when it isn’t, is something anyone could get confused about, if they wanted to make sure everyone knew they should have Put It In The Name and instead they named it after that sour grape drink I would always see my parents friends drink who think the New York Times is a genuinely progressive news organization.

But whatever, I am a fool as I keep telling people and if anything my post should be more convincing because I love my steam deck and find it easy to use even when I am downloading and installing utilities in desktop mode like Qutebrowser and tailoring custom keybindings to use it. I can still figure this out, which is a miracle if a very mundane one at that.

You are clearly right here, and if I was going to make a good argument for the Steam Deck I should have come off as someone who evidently loves their Steam Deck and wants to chat with people about it in a critical fashion where commenters with various different perspectives acknowledge the ups and downs of the device and it’s inherent limitations while refraining from the need to correct newbies sharing their love for the device on incorrect technical details that other newbies aren’t going to care about.

I haven’t gamed on Windows since buying my Deck

Wait

supersquirrel ,

I don’t think this can really be argued, the environmental impact of billionaires both directly and indirectly is catastrophic on a planetary level.

supersquirrel , (edited )

Hmm, Dokuwiki is a reallllllly underrated wiki software that is extremely lightweight and doesn't require a database to run on (files are just stored in a folder). Multiple different wikis can be run on the same Dokuwiki server with plugins and in general it is a supremely easy way to host a body of text and images that can be easily edited by multiple people (or be kept private). The media manager for uploading images and managing them is really nice too.

Backing up your wiki on Dokuwiki is also absurdly easy because it is just a folder... that you can backup in any number of ways (git.. syncthing.. whatever).

https://www.dokuwiki.org/dokuwiki

Seriously, Dokuwiki needs more love.

supersquirrel ,

Oh super cool, yeah checking out your Dokuwiki personal website it just reminds me how much I like the software. The UI of pages is so simple and clean and Dokuwiki is so easy to setup I honestly don’t see the reason to really go with a normal website over using Dokuwiki unless you have very specific needs (especially because with the farm/animal plugin or whatever you can host multiple different wikis on the same website).

I don’t think Dokuwiki is perfect for what you want though but it is so lightweight and customizable that I originally mentioned it to suggest considering if you can tweak your workflow to make it work.

Have you looked at Logseq? It is a free and open source personal wiki/knowledge base with a great mobile app. The structure is every day has its own page that you add notes to, you then link to other pages to create them and move on to editing those pages like a normal wiki. Might be a little closer to what you are looking for.

https://logseq.com/

supersquirrel , (edited )

This is actually something that is really important to do with your dog, especially if they are a young pup that is going to grow into a large, powerful dog.

(This is obviously advice ONLY for a dog you trust or unlikely to be seriously hurt by)

Lay down next to their food bowl while they eat, get your face near their food, pet them and make them feel rewarded for doing what they are doing as they are eating. Pick up some kibbles out of their dish with your hand (again, ONLY do this if you already trust your dog or feel safe doing this) and offer them to your dog to eat out of your hand as they are eating their meal. Don’t let your dog become territorial towards humans about eating their food, teach your dog that humans don’t steal their food, it makes your dog so much less dangerous around other people.

Lol so yeah, I literally do that last panel with my dogs, but I do it so a human having a face near their food isn’t perceived to be a threatening thing to them, it’s just normal. I grew up with german shepherds and we trained them to be friendly family dogs, you can’t risk a kid running up behind your shepherd while it is eating, surprising them and then having their entire face bitten off. They need to be chill about humans being around their food or you are raising an animal that could seriously hurt somebody.

supersquirrel ,

Hey if you only have one hand that is a lot of work to type up I imagine so don’t be too hard on yourself.

supersquirrel ,

Why would anyone care who the stereotypical white dude is?

Because he doesn’t deserve to be the guy in the meme. Think about all the other actually cool people who have been immortalized in silly memes, a lot of times they get interviewed and it is really funny. Everybody enjoys on some level that the person in the funny meme they are looking at is actually a real human being who has the goofy honor of being famous for the really specific, niche context of that meme.

Why give that joy to a complete asshole and loser? Why give it to a media personality who spreads hate? Who cares if nobody recognizes who Crowder is, Crowder doesn’t even deserve to be interfaced with as an anonymous white dude in a meme, it takes away the necessary shame Crowder should experience at every interface with the broader public.

supersquirrel ,

Just drive fast in racing games, it is surprisingly not just safer but way more affordable than buying a sports car and paying for tires and getting speeding tickets…

supersquirrel , (edited )

You can also still experience that strange calm people love that comes from driving at your limit, where there is zero room for anything other than your presence in the moment reacting to the road, your vehicle and what is coming around the corner…..

But with the throttle screwed on there is only the barest margin, and no room at all for mistakes. It has to be done right. . . and that's when the strange music starts, when you stretch your luck so far that fear becomes exhilaration and vibrates along your arms. You can barely see at a hundred; the tears blow back so fast that they vaporize before they get to your ears. The only sounds are wind and a dull roar floating back from the mufflers. You watch the white line and try to lean with it. . . howling through a turn to the right, then to the left and down the long hill to Pacifica. . . letting off now, watching for cops, but only until the next dark stretch and another few seconds on the edge. . . The Edge. . . There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others -- the living -- are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later.

But the edge is still Out there. Or maybe it's In. The association of motorcycles with LSD is no accident of publicity. They are both a means to an end, to the place of definitions.

The above is a quote from Hunter S. Thompson on this odd but enchanting species of calm that he gets from driving his motorcycle too fast and though I am sure it is much more intense to do in real life, the fact is if you play a good driving game you absolutely go to a similar place in your mind. You face the same mental situation of the road coming at you so fast that all you can do is exist in the moment, except instead of the edge-y boy antics of almost killing yourself or someone else from driving like an asshole (and also burning fossil fuels for no reason, though with a motorcycle that point is moot they get such good gas mileage usually) you are playing a video game where a spectacular crash is part of the fun (looking at you Flat Out, Burnout and Wreckfest :P ).

That mental state that people who love driving fast crave is the same mental state gamers who like playing competitive games pursue (you ever see someone play quake multiplayer competitively? It is the same exact flow state even when it isn’t a racing game), it’s just one hobby puts human lives at risk and the other is a fun time no matter what.

supersquirrel ,

That is badass, I would define driving cars so fast that you are a celebrity and then using that celebrity status to stick a middle finger up to racism rampant in the fanbase and culture of the motorsport your career hinges on as "Living The Dream".

supersquirrel ,

Or… how about we just treat the fediverse like it is a…. public forum…. and use different tools for having more private conversations?

Threads is automatically hiding comments that mention Pixelfed (mastodon.social)

For anyone wondering if Threads and Facebook at large will be a fine neighbor in the space and compatible with other apps/services in the fediverse: they’re already automatically hiding comments that mention Pixelfed https://mastodon.social/@dansup/112126250737482807

supersquirrel ,

The chicken comes prehatched inside the egg so to speak, but when the chicken hatches it is just a really tiny useless chicken that lays eggs the size of ice cream sprinkles.

supersquirrel ,

Automatic “spam” protection is the exact thing which co-opted e-mail.

👆 this

supersquirrel ,

It makes perfect sense when you understand modern city design as a form of mostly unconscious but purposeful violence, that pretty much defines the middle class Boomer generation in wealthy rich countries. Structural violence… as far as the eye can see!

US Boomers love that shit, the prison system, healthcare, highway design, the tax filing system the list just goes on and on.

I really wish my parents generation could have just been skipped and instead I had parents from the previous generation who actually fought for something and understood how to defend workers rights.

supersquirrel ,

Ha, suck it PenguinCoder my eyeball day is tomorrow

supersquirrel ,

The aspect that makes the fediverse and in particular reddit-likes uniquely adapted to growing in this harsh corporate hellscape has everything in my opinion to do with the critical early seed phase of communities.

When you make a website with its own forum, you have huge friction to overcome with the network effect… but if you are plugging into a federated network than all of a sudden being a tiny community on lemmy with 2 or 3 people becomes an invitation to users passing by who already have an account to start a conversation and create that spark that will grow (slowly) into a real community.

Consider the minimum viable population of users in a community, how many people does there need to be in a room before that warm feeling of a gathering sets in with comfortable conversation naturally occurring? For federated lemmy communities (and similar Reddit-likes) federation effectively lowers that number by a significant amount since it puts doors everywhere that people can spontaneously wander through and contribute small amounts to help kindle a spark and get the community going.

This changes the paradigm of “social media platform metabolism” if you will, it facilitates much more organic early growth in communities.

supersquirrel ,

With all that out of the way, I don’t see very many companies lining up to license a far left-leaning dataset that had all non-echo chamber discussion banned.

Maybe this isn’t what you are saying, but Reddit (at least in the past, on smaller more expert subreddits) is no more an echo chamber than any other politically charged community space online, it’s just in other communities the rightwing people who control the levers of power usually don’t let leftists have any kind of voice or power in the first place.

supersquirrel ,

It is more than just being crazy. In the US at least, I would say people are desperate and under so much pressure that lots of people are near the edge. You can very easily push them over that edge with a random interaction and you don’t want to find out what happens when you do. They aren’t necessarily crazy people though they could be.

Ubisoft Exec Says Gamers Need to Get 'Comfortable' Not Owning Their Games for Subscriptions to Take Off (www.ign.com)

Ubisoft Exec Says Gamers Need to Get 'Comfortable' Not Owning Their Games for Subscriptions to Take Off::An executive at Assassin’s Creed maker Ubisoft has said gamers will need to get “comfortable” not owning their games before video game subscriptions truly take off.

supersquirrel , (edited )

Actually I think Ubisoft unfortunately has some bangers in its back catalog.

Steep is by far and away the best backcountry skiing/snowboarding simulator (shreddders is better in the mechanics of snowboarding, but steep is better at being a giant winter playground).

Ghost Recon Wildlands looks awesome especially with the first person mod (though I would probably find the politics of the game insufferable)

Both these games are extremely detailed games, with massive open worlds and are generally fairly critically acclaimed at least at this point (not sure about release). These games sell for chump change now though. Steep regularly goes for $3 which is insane when you think about the fact that there isn’t a Steep 2 nor really any rivals other than Shredders (Riders Republic just isn’t focused on winter sports). Ghost Recon Wildlands sells for $7 which I guess is fair but still seems like underselling the game.

My point is that Ubisoft being attached to games actually reduces their value by quite a bit. If Steep had been made by an indie studio it would still be selling at $10 or more, it is a stunningly big game and nothing else comes close.

Oh yeah and Riders Republic, the game Ubisoft is/was trying to draw in a bunch of more casual players into a unified multiplayer sports game, has apparently really fun gameplay (though arcade-y for sure) but has a 45 MINUTE NON-OPTIONAL TUTORIAL YOU CAN’T SKIP. For a casual, multiplayer open world sports game….

It is hilarious how much value Ubisoft destroys in just being associated with products. They are the opposite of a business, they take valuable things and destroy their value to consumers. Some of the games they make could easily sell for premium prices way into the future but Ubisoft undermines the value of their games so much that they end up trying to sell these massive games, with huge open worlds carefully made through countless hours for chump change because everybody hates Ubisoft.

edit I forgot about Anno 1800, a momentously big city building game that is extremely critically acclaimed already being sold on sale for $12, that shit is bonkers. Any other dev and that game would never have to come below $20 until there was a sequel.

supersquirrel ,

This is really cool, I wonder if it can have integration with the “threadiverse” such as with lemmy or kbin?

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