JCPhoenix

EGM will always be my favorite vide game magazine. I like Game Informer, had a subscription back in the day, even had a subscription last year before they shut down. But GI is no EGM. Wish they'd come back, too.

Griffin, who for now remains a judge on the state Court of Appeals,

The fact that a judge is doing this somehow makes this so much worse. I would be constantly be questioning this judge's impartiality on basically any topic.

Of course, that's just one of those idealisms. That judges and courts are above the fray. It looks like NC Court of Appeals judges are elected anyway. In partisan elections, at that. Which is insane to me for judges. Non-partisan retention elections are about as far as I'd go involving elections for the judiciary.

Damn that's a game I haven't thought of in a long time. And I forgot that the SNES had a mouse! at all I even remember that hard plastic mouse pad it came with.

Very interesting article. I'm not a Washingtonian, so don't have much to say, other than that the state certainly has some hard decisions to make going forward. Especially in the face of a likely hostile federal trifecta, even if weak.

Because Mastodon and the Fediverse is confusing, especially at first. I'm a techy person. I work in IT. But when I started to looking at the Fediverse back in 2023, it was confusing. Where do I go to sign-up? There are different services on the Fediverse? Which do I get access to? Do I need an account for each service? How do I know that this instance for this service (Pixelfed, Lemmy, Masto, etc.) is a decent one? What happens if my friends/people I follow are on a different server? Will we be able to interact? What does it even mean to federate/defederate?

These are all the questions I asked as I was looking to all this. And it wasn't a quick 15min look. No, I spent a few hours looking into it.

But the average person isn't going to ask all this and research this. They just want a place to follow famous people, post about their life, and post pictures of their food and pets. When these people (myself included) signed up for Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, etc, they just went to the appropriate site and signed-up.

It's not nearly as simple for Mastodon. Sure, Mastodon.social acts as the flagship and "gateway," but there are still the other questions that probably need some answers. Otherwise, a user may have a bad experience ("Oh, my friends aren't on this Mastodon server thing? And we're not federated? I gotta make a new account there? Ugh..."). Twitter and even Bluesky don't require those questions. Everyone is on the same instance, all the time.

The reality is that most don't really care for options and choice. Or even security and privacy. They want ease of accessibility. Mastodon is likely a better product (in most regards; I have and use both Mastodon and Bluesky, daily; Bluesky does a few things better), but the options Mastodon provides, especially at the start, are really more roadblocks or offramps than anything.

I do like politics, so perhaps it is right up my alley! I know it's fairly different from FP1, but we'll see.

Finishing up Frostpunk. I started last year, then put it down basically for a year. Anyway, I recently finished 2 of 3 DLC campaigns. Working on the last one right now. Easily the hardest colony manager I've played, but it's so good. Can't wait to start Frostpunk 2 after this.

With friends, playing Barotrauma. We're doing our annual playthrough/attempt to get the to the end. Which we done once. There's 5 of us regularly playing (a 6th sometimes joins), which for us, seems to be the minimum we need. Think we just entered The Great Sea, which is the 4th of 5 biomes. Just upgraded to a Tier 3 sub.

Wonder when we'll see US-style tariffs in Europe on Chinese vehicles, particularly EVs. In the name of protecting European jobs and auto marketshare. Which would be unfortunate, given the need to move to EVs to mitigate climate change. As an American, I would've loved to have a $20k Chinese EV. I don't think there are ICE vehicles in the US that cheap these days.

But I also get the jobs issue, too. I think much of the West is in the situation we're in because of offshoring of jobs and competition from cheaper labor overseas. Loss of jobs, income, ability to support family, etc.

Curious to see how this plays out.

When I want to pirate, torrenting is my go to. I don't do it very often, so I'm not really up-to-date on more modern methods. For some movies, I know there are those websites like 123movies or whatever. And I've used those. But Idek what additional methods there are anymore.

That said, I've tried torrenting over I2P, but it's just slow. Not necessarily super slow, but obviously slower than doing it over the clearweb with a commercial VPN. Additionally it seems like there's less available content with torrenting over I2P. At least in the little experience I've had with it.

Last warning. Be(e) nice.

How do one sign up to get one or a few of these twink concubines? Asking for a friend.

I don't even know what that liberal nation would be anymore. Sure, for example, Europe is still largely pretty good, but even some of those countries are facing the rise of the right. And they have same objectives as the right here in the US has. Just because it's not as bad as the US right now, doesn't mean it can't be in the future, or even near future. Look at what's going on in Germany or France with the right or even far-right parties making large gains in recent elections and polls.

Feel like it's fucked in much of the world right now.