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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: April 17th, 2024

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  • I remember a small wave of this style of meta meme in around 2012ish, all about seeing who can break the format of whatever was popular at the time in the most meta way possible. The joke always being that we can understand these weird image arrangements even after tearing out half of their content.

    This one is just as satisfying as those were when they were still a novelty.


  • Finding a unicorn country where everything works and all traffic is routed is getting increasingly difficult. For example, if a US news site didn’t want to implement GDPR, it geolocates all users outside the US and blocks them, whilst other US services start to require ID/age verification to post content for non-US users so accessing both easily requires switching location.

    You’ve hit the nail on the head, my own post is a bit meandering and this is what I was going for. I hate how many hoops one needs to jump through for basic anonymity online nowadays.

    OpenWRT has a package called mwan3 that in tandem with dnsmasq can allow you set the IP addresses associated with a DNS entry to a particular VPN/country.

    I think this would be infeasible outside of very narrow use cases, but I don’t know. I don’t have an advanced networking setup, but the way I see it, if I, say, route service A and B to connection 1 and service C to connection 2, I only have control over individual IP ranges/DNS entries. So if my bank IP is routed to connection 1 and one new security background service their app/site uses goes to connection 2, something can get flagged, and I could face an unpleasant with the bank/law. I’ve been trying to avoid things like this. (I have a very rudimentary understanding of networking, I’m not super comfortable doing all of this manually).

    I feel as though the most logical way about it would be to compartmentalize connections by application, but I wasn’t able to find an easy way to do this. For example, splitting off a browser window and having that exit from somewhere else. I know split tunneling exists in the basic Mullvad client, and I guess I can just throw my whole network on Connection 1 and route Connection 2 through it (meaning when I split tunnel I find myself on connection 1) but in that scenario I’m doing myself even less favors re: latency and headroom and all that good stuff.

    And that’s just the computers. I use a phone as well.





  • Most of the time it’s not the most creative people trying to generate these. I think everything I’ve ever seen from the Twitter generator can be categorically ruled as textbook slop.

    Most of the interesting generations are made by people who are enthusiastic about the technology, almost always running local generators, trying to nudge the model into generating images that people are not likely to make themselves. It can be a fun thing to experiment with, especially once you understand a bit more about the internal iterative process of these generators.

    As a fun toy, as the ultimate content aware fill algorithm, it’s one thing. As a social phenomenon though, these generators have poisoned the internet and our relationship with visual media as a whole. I’ll watch as my scribbles are iterated into something visually interesting and then minutes later see the IDF on the news posting about terrorizing my country in a sterile cutesy cartoon style - my temporary jpegs are nothing like the latter.


  • It’s not a witticism. Users of a lot of modern mass media platforms (TikTok is the one that comes to mind) need to use increasingly euphemistic language to speak about anything. Unalive a specific, famous one, you must have seen it before, even in deeply serious situations. Imagine someone sobbing while retelling a deeply personal experience only to say “I wanted to unalive myself 🥺” straight-faced between tears. That’s heartbreaking, disgusting stuff.

    Someone sent me cool woodworking video from TikTok a few months ago and the carpenter man kept talking about dogs. I bought a dog of dogs here, I cut off a dog, make sure to check how many dogs your wood is. What the fuck? Checking the comments, they were all like “LMAO dog 💀💀💀💀💀💀” with zero explanation.

    What are dogs? Dogs means feet now apparently. Fuck me if I know. If you say “feet” on TikTok, you get flagged as a fetish channel, so people say “dogs”. Why dogs? I don’t care. If you’re going to use stupid imperial measurements at least call them by a name I recognize.

    “Corn” for porn is kind of funny because corn is a very unsexy word (and concept).

    There is a lot of euphemistic algorithm evasion on TikTok, and this is not a phenomenon I’d want to see become endemic on the Fediverse. It’s also a thing on Instagram. And now it’s diffusing to unrelated places.

    I’m usually not this petty on here but it really pisses me off. This is also becoming a problem on Tumblr apparently, as I mentioned, which is a platform with a rigorous tagging system which allows users to block what they won’t have to see, which has made it possible to write properly without self-censorship. Apparently new, younger users, coming from places like TikTok, will just write “CW:🍇🍇” in their post instead of using the word rape, for example. So people who would previously be safe, by filtering out “rape”, are now finding shit they don’t want to see in their feeds. People should have a place where they can write about their experiences, no matter how harrowing, but this cheapens it and makes it harder to properly organize.

    The internet is for communication. Its usefulness as a means of effective communication is under attack from all sides. Let’s not just let that happen, yeah


  • un-alives herself

    For fuck’s sake. This is not baby’s first Miiworld, this is not club penguin. Say kills. Say commits suicide. Say hangs/gets strangled/finds a gun under her bed and blows her brains out, spraying chunks of bone blood and flesh on the concrete. Say murder when you see murder, say genocide when you see genocide. Words have meaning.

    You can use the correct words on the Fediverse. If anyone doesn’t want to see the word “suicide” they can filter it out. Tumblr got this right twenty years ago and modern social media has been beating newspeak out of previously fully communicative human beings. I swear to fuck I would rather have every single comment on Lemmy say skibidi gyatt ohio L aura about any serious topic than to see “unalived” one more fucking time.

    ……. Uh anyway yeah unskippable cutscene am I right haha crazy

    (I actually believe both she and Jeffy have a probably reason to kill themselves: they may be otherwise facing a fate worse than death…)




  • I do have an oversized battery buffer. Most people are discouraged from cooking or using any resistive load on the batteries, but I opted to invest in a bigger battery backup specifically to be able to do that, it’s why I said 85%+ and not like 40%. The battery buffer really is the point of this system, having 24/7 electricity in my home that I can pull over 20 amperes out of at the drop of a hat is without a question the most decadent luxury I have ever experienced. That’s not something I can just hook up to my house.

    If I reconnect the grid-charging circuit, it is more than enough in the winter months nowadays (the grid was down more often in 2020-2023). But that gets really expensive, and relying on the grid is not wise.

    If I use the secondary (mafia) grid more frequently (as I did in 2020-2023 out of necessity) I can pull a tiny amount of amps at an extortionate kWh rate, that’s enough to keep things like the fridge and lights and the water pump running. But turn on one hot plate or accidentally use the microwave, turn on the heater to the wrong setting (or the AC to the right setting but at the wrong time) and you have to cover up to get to the freezing street to switch the breaker back on. Sounds obnoxious? Well pre-solar that was the only option for 12+ hours of the day. I remember going down to flip the breaker over twenty times one day as a kid.

    Let’s not get into the water situation. I just spent a weekend grappling with neighbors and floater valves.


  • They don’t, my current machine is a Maingear branded one that someone painstakingly hauled over from the US, and my potential new one would be an XMG branded machine, shipped at significant expense from the EU.

    I’m in the armpit of the Middle East, I don’t have a local reseller, and even if I did, they’d want $1,000 more than just going through the pain of buying from overseas, alongside a blood sacrifice and the soul of my firstborn child, and a slap across my face for the insolence of asking.



  • I live in a country with abhorrently unreliable electricity.

    Even now that I have solar and even if I mostly (85%+) cook on a plug-in resistance hob and electric oven, gas is just unbeatable as a backup during the winter. No sun? Grid down? Milk boiled over and got into the hob’s thermostat? Need to cook more than one pot at a time? Israel decided to bomb a fucking residential substation for no reason again? Power company operator decided to accidentally pull an epic prank and route the wrong voltage to everyone’s house, frying a whole town’s fridges, during a year when people couldn’t afford to replace them (I can’t find an English article to link but I promise this happened)? No problemo

    I also got a plug-in induction plate and while it is pretty much magical it also makes my inverter shit itself uncontrollably (all my LED lights flicker and it makes an uncomfortable noise) so I really only use it when the ”good” grid is on (the bad one can’t handle it, the good one is the one from the prank above).

    You can pry my backup butane from my cold dead hands. I replace the tank less than once a year, it’s fine. Not everyone who wants this option to stay is a regressive cultist.





  • In no particular order, here are some games I’ve enjoyed most in the past decade or so (and found most interesting to shill to my friends):

    • The Roottrees are Dead (online sleuthing game, with a cool but slightly campy story, wears its Obra Dinn influence on its sleeve a bit too obviously for some people)
    • Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic (Cities Skylines for people who understand economics are more than just dollar signs and tweets, it’s more like Factorio than SimCity)
    • Hacknet (Learn basic command line stuff in a game about hacking)
    • Duskers (atmospherically amazing game about controlling distant drones in hostile environments. Genuinely chilling)
    • Chants of Senaar (language deciphering game)
    • Outer Wilds (le le le dae hidden gem for a reason)
    • Dyson Sphere Project (more Factorio)
    • Satisfactory (you guessed it, more Factorio, but very different environment than most of these games)
    • Factorio
    • Shapez (minimalistic Factorio, with a less minimalistic sequel)
    • Nomifactory (Minecraft modpack that was formerly known as Omnifactory. It’s more Factorio.)
    • Curse of the Golden Idol (finally a good retro adventure mystery thing)
    • Return of the Obra Dinn (immaculate game.)
    • CHR$143 (Zachlike-ish)
    • Kerbal Space Program (my next obsession)
    • INFRA (one of my favorite games of all time, I’ve written about this extensively, a sort of urbex walking simulator with incredible atmosphere, deep deep lore, amazing world building, and light puzzles, that goes on for about 40 more hours than you expect it to)
    • Hexcells Trilogy (puzzles)
    • Hexologic (similar puzzles)
    • Baba Is You (puzzles that make you think you’re an idiot)
    • NaissancE (I don’t know how to describe this, I think it’s free)
    • Manifold Garden (you dreamed about this game when you were 8 years old, decades before it existed)
    • The Big Con (be gay do crime 90s)
    • Death Stranding (this game is so boring, I played it for 200 hours and got every achievement, I love it, it sucks)
    • The Forgotten City (this started its life as a Skyrim mod and still has that baggage)
    • Mostly Intense Monster Defense (PvZ homage)
    • The Witcher (1) (CRPG with a cool world. Needs a few mods to cut down on tedium. Pretty different from its sequels but it has a special place in my heart)
    • Binary Domain (absolute schlock, but from a previous era of gaming. Not necessarily a good game, but cool to see from a historical perspective.)
    • Cultist Simulator (needs an eternity of patience but I promise there is something in there)
    • SLUDGE LIFE (SLUDGE LIFE)
    • What Remains of Edith Finch (I fucking love walking simulators with good writing and cool art)
    • Promesa (obscure walking simulator, it’s barely a game, I love it)
    • CUCCCHI (check above description, same guy. Artistic showcase of a painter called Enzo Cuccchi. I’m not a modern art guy, but seeing these works contorted into worlds to walk through… a unique and interesting experience. Soundtrack is someone’s once-lost old experimental tracks and it absolutely slaps)
    • Please Touch the Artwork 1 and 2 (one of them is free, funded by the Belgian public art fund. Weird and cool)
    • Betrayal at Club Low (part of a series of games by Cosmo D, this one is different from the previous few. The first, Off Peak, is free, but it’s also the least polished. Astonishingly excellent music, there’s some cool lore in this series. The art style is a bit out there but this guy’s stuff is gold)
    • Engare and Tandis (mathematical patterns puzzlers, I promise they’re so cool)
    • What the Golf? (An actually good mobile game. I mostly played it with a controller on my TV lol)
    • Cities Skylines (my beloved)