Absolutely. I mean, I love the fact that GOG has DRM-free games. It’s really incredible how many games are available without DRM because of them.

But I’m not going to make Valve out to be the bad guy here. Valve is like 99% of the reason why gaming on Linux is viable right now.

Valve seems like a great example of how, if you don’t sell your company to venture capitalists, you can just be cool nerds that make good products. As much as I want DRM-free to be the norm, I’m also not going to vilify a company that is one of the best examples of not enshittifying right now.

This is a good point.

They keep using the term “motion sensor,” probably to avoid saying “this device that you will place next to your kid’s bed has a camera and an internet connection.”

(related community if that makes you nearly have an aneurysm: !privacy@lemmy.ml)

edit: OK, it probably doesn’t actually have a camera, see comment below. I assumed it had to, since it mentioned detecting “hand gestures.” However, that could mean that it just roughly detects you waving in front of it, which wouldn’t require a camera. I still hate it.

Gift link: https://aftermath.site/halo-studios-project-foundry-microsoft-343-industries-bungie?giftLink=f96c1f975fd08c951d870e9d1da32491

I WANT TO BELIEVE

The Juicero was seriously a major point in my personal ideological journey. Around 2013, I was still very convinced that Silicon Valley (and VC-backed startups in general) were a source of innovation that could do a lot of good in the world. I was starting to question that a little bit because I had noticed that every new startup was described as “like Uber for <other thing>,” but I still largely believed that most SV startups were innovative and improving people’s lives, or at least had the potential to do so.

And then the freaking Juicero came along, and I was like, “What the fuck? Do these people actually have no idea what they’re doing? Oh my god, they don’t.”

Look, I’m not saying that if the Juicero didn’t exist, that I would be some Elon Musk fanboy right now. Something else probably would have woken me up instead.

But in this timeline, in this current universe we are in, the Juicero made me see things differently. No one wants to believe that they were changed by the Juicero… but I was. And I… I… I don’t know how I feel about that…

The way that they pulled off this attack is interesting from a cybersecurity standpoint, but we can’t ignore the fact that Israel had no way of knowing who was near the devices when they exploded. They very nature of this attack made it impossible for Israel to know how closely they were targeting the bad guys or how many civilians were nearby.

I’ve been loving RFF the last few months, it might be my favorite new thing I’ve found since I switched from Twitter to Mastodon. It also always shows you the artists’ fediverse usernames so you can follow them, and they usually have a Bandcamp link if you want to buy an album.

They recently said that they could use some volunteer help. I haven’t been able to check out what they need yet, but their matrix channel is #radioFreeFedi:matrix.org, I think that’s where they organize things.

Yes! And if I remember, those races actually lasted 24 minutes, right? I hadn’t played a game that did that before. I loved the fact that there was an actual endurance/focus element to that race.

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit or Burnout: Paradise might be the closest to what you’re looking for. They’re both open-world games, but I don’t think they really have that open-world filler that you see a lot of. They both got remastered releases in the last few years.

GRID: I absolutely loved the original Grid (I think it was called Racedriver: Grid in Europe) when it came out.

Project CARS 2 and Assetto Corsa Competizione: A while ago I tried using a PS5 controller on PC and using the gyroscope to steer left and right by tilting the controller. It works well enough when you get used to it. It gives you more granular control than an analog stick. You really can’t tilt an analog stick 15 degrees consistently, but you can tilt the controller like that consistently. I’m not saying its as good as a racing wheel, but if you don’t have one, it’ll at least let you play games that might otherwise need a wheel. I played a decent amount of Project CARS 2 and Assetto Corsa Competizione that way.

Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed is a fun kart racing game. If you don’t have a Switch and you want something like Mario Kart, you should pick it up. It isn’t just a Mario Kart knockoff with Sega characters. Wait no… that’s exactly what it is, but it’s a good one.

Meta: !simrallyracing@lemmy.world is a community here.

I’ve found that, currently, this kind of works and kind of doesn’t. I’ve boosted a few lemmy and mbin comments from my Mastodon account, and it shows up in feeds just like you would expect it to. Unfortunately, the parent post of the thread only shows as a link to the lemmy/mbin thread, rather than showing the full text of the original post. So it’s hard for people to see the context of the comment.

Mastodon appears to see lemmyverse comments the same way it sees Mastodon comments, but the top-level post that started the thread is somehow different.

I’m hoping that this will “just work” when Mastodon gets quite-posting. You could take a Mastodon post, and then quote-post it into a community by mentioning that community’s name.

This would create a separate thread of replies, which is good. A person shouldn’t be able to suddenly thrust a bunch of community replies onto someone else’s post. So basically it’s what quote-posting is for, but sharing it with a community instead of just your own followers.

I think it’s worth as a long-term goal for the Fediverse to entirely separate the “view” aspect from the “content” aspect of platforms where reasonably possible

This perfectly describes my ideal fediverse, too. Pretty much everything we’re doing here is posting text; it can be a comment on someone else’s text, or a comment on a video, or a top-level post in a community, or a top-level post on your microblog (which is basically your own community where you’re the only top-level poster). IMO the type of fediverse server you choose should be based on which one has the best UI for the viewing and posting you’ll be doing most often, but they should all be able to show everyone else’s content as much as possible.

If I need to, I’ll create separate accounts for separate interests, like one for games and one for professional things. But I’d like to use the same account for following indie game developers (on Mastodon) and gaming communities (on Lemmy) and commenting on game review videos (on Peertube).

I also want interoperability between microblogging and threaded services, but unfortunately I’m a little skeptical about the account mirroring concept. Or, at least, I’d like more details about it.

Do users need to opt-in to have their accounts mirrored, like how they do with brid.gy right now? If there are a bunch of users with Bluesky accounts that don’t have Frontpage accounts, that would mess with the ability to have all comments showing up between the two services, and it would prevent some people from posting a comment on someone else’s comment if one of the commenters has not opted-in to have their account mirrored. Or, can a plain Bluesky account comment on Frontpage threads, but not start a thread?

I like the idea of being able to quote-post link aggregator threads to your Bluesky account, but I think ideally this would only require one account. Which would mean you could also use your Bluesky account to start a thread on Frontpage.

the day after Playstation’s 30th anniversary

Whoa, I didn’t know that. The Dreamcast’s 9/9/99 launch date in North America is so memorable, I had no idea that the Playstation came out exactly four years earlier. So there are two birthdays today!

(Disclaimer: haven’t read the article yet, definitely going to get to it later today.)

This is kind of thing where I am so torn between philosophy and pragmatism.

1. Morally, bodily autonomy is very important. Framing this as “right to repair for your own body” is a fascinating way of thinking about it, and makes a clear, ethical argument in favor or DIY medicine. And that’s on top of the fact that we shouldn’t have to rely on giant corporations for our health.
2. The potential consequences of this are terrifying, not just for misinformed people, but their children as well.

On a meta note, 404media continues to be the best subscription I’ve ever paid for.

This is one of many reasons why I’ve been trying to buy physical PC games lately.

I found a boxed copy of the GTA Trilogy recently. It was for Mac, and had probably been sitting on a shelf in some office supply store for 15 years. I don’t even have a Mac, but I bought it since I figured that, not only would it be the original, non-remade version, but it should (hopefully) have the original music as well.

I haven’t opened it yet. I’ll probably post a thread here when I do. Maybe it’ll run in a virtual machine.

I can’t imagine this one getting a PC release, so I’ll probably never play it, but I do love seeing a good 3D platformer being released. And a console mascot 3D platformer? Feels like we’re in an earlier console generation here.

Right now, a kind of weird one: the Bridget MX, from SGF Devices. It’s a 3D printed, all-button controller for fighting games. They don’t make that specific model now (it was a very early one), but this is the closest to it: https://sgfdevices.com/products/bridget-pe

At first I thought that not having a joystick would make games kind of boring. Like, too practical, not enjoyable. But no, it’s actually fun. Kind of like tapping out notes on a piano. It uses low-profile mechanical keyboard switches, and I have some stiffer, clickier switches on the way right now.

It’s meant for fighting games (Street Fighter, etc.), but I’ve used it for some 2D platformers and it worked great for those, too.

A non-3D-printed, less cheapo one would probably be even more fun to use, but I think I’ll stick with this one for now.