Fighting games and Riichi Mahjong.

There’s usually a local event for at least one of the games I play every month or so. I travel out to Combo Breaker every year for the big major as well.

For Riichi Mahjong, the local club here meets every week. Haven’t had the chance to attend a big tournament yet, but I’m hoping I can fit one into my travel budget at some point.

Currently a Galaxy S9+. Battery life isn’t the best anymore, and I’m running low on internal storage, but it’s still serving me well. I’m not even sure what I’d upgrade to, I really need the SD slot that almost nothing new has anymore.

Best was my old Motorola Droid 2, I miss slide-out keyboards so damn badly.

An improvement.

PSN Plus is $80/year, XBox Live is $60/year. And both of those are for the lowest tier.

$20/year for Nintendo Switch Online. That’s $20 more than it should be, but at least it’s not nearly as expensive as the other consoles.

No. I don’t trust another corporate-owned platform, and I don’t trust the way they pay lip service to federation while still making everything dependent on one central server they control.

Porter Robinson - Unfold

You lost me at the first panel.

Bad media happens all the damn time. The degree to which this got singled out was always just weird.

The true measure of progress is when media featuring minorities can flop and not be a bigger deal than all the other flops starring white men.

Sure, but I think these are terms that are much simpler to explain to someone who isn’t yet on our side.

do you think that you are contributing anything useful to the conversation here

I’d say it depends on what kind of conservative - bigot, capitalist, or both.

Deprogramming a bigot can be done by getting them to interact with and make friends with minorities. On paper this doesn’t sound hard, but bigots become that way in the first place because they don’t have a healthy and diverse social circle, and you may not be able to just give them one. Hell, depending on how bigoted they are, it may not be responsible or even safe to make anyone else have to deal with interacting with them.

Deprogramming a capitalist has to be done very carefully, but I think for many people there is a lot of common ground that can be reached. I think most people feel the same frustrations that we do, but they’ve been too indoctrinated by the legacy of McCarthyism to recognize that capitalism is the underlying cause of most of what’s wrong with the world today. So you have to be slow and subtle in coaxing them towards this, if you use the words ‘capitalism’, ‘socialism’, or ‘communism’, they will just shut down and stop listening.

I’ll never forget when my conservative grandmother watched the primary debates back in 2016 and told me she actually thought Bernie made a lot of good points. And then she went on to vote for Trump in November. And I get why! The one thing Bernie and Trump have in common is that they tell people “I know you’re mad at the world today, I’m mad too, and I’m going to fix it instead of leaving this status quo where it is.” Even if they’re on opposite sides of what they want to do about it, they agree that the world sucks, and that’s really all that a lot of people need to hear. Start there, and then guide them towards why the world is screwed up and how exactly we fix it.

I think the best argument you can make is to talk about how the rise of automation is going to shape the future. We are moving towards a world where there will be far fewer jobs that need humans than there are humans who need jobs. A world where robots are gonna do all the work for us ought to be a utopia, leaving us free to enjoy life and follow our passions. But capitalism relies on the assertion that everyone must work for a living or else they starve and die - what happens when there aren’t enough jobs to go around? The only way we can solve this is to rethink this premise of capitalism, that everyone must work or die. Automation can only be a utopia in a post-capitalist world, under capitalism it will become a dystopia.

Of course, this only works for people who are not rich enough to support capitalism for entirely self-serving reasons. If you’re talking to someone whose job is likely to be automated away in the future, those are the people you have the best chance of reaching. If you’re talking to someone who is going to own all the robots, hell they probably know and don’t care.

Crypt of the NecroDancer.

There are three big challenge characters in the base game:

• Aria can only use the starting dagger, no other weapons. She has only one hit point. And she dies if the player ever misses a beat.
• Monk dies if he picks up gold. All enemies drop gold, even ones that normally wouldn’t, which turns the game into a routing puzzle where you must never step on squares that an enemy previously died on.
• Bolt plays the whole game at double tempo.

Once you have beaten these three challenge characters, plus the other six easier ones, your next task is All Chars Mode. Beat the game nine times in a row, once with each character. If you die, you must start the whole marathon over.

Beating that unlocks the tenth character, Coda. Coda combines the restrictions of Aria, Monk, and Bolt all at once.

And if you can do that, the final achievement is Lowest of the Low, which requires you to beat All Chars Mode without collecting any items.

The DLC adds a few more hard characters, and another achievement for an extended 13 Character Mode, but they aren’t considered to be as hard as Coda or Lowest of the Low. A single digit number of players have stacked the challenges for Coda low% and 13chars low%.

I’d been on the microblogging side of Fedi for a while and was aware there was a federated reddit-like, but my initial impression of it was that it’s a long way from getting enough of a userbase to sustain the kind of niche hobby/fandom communities I used reddit for.

But once reddit’s API scandal happened, I dropped it and decided to check out the alternative. Still feel like it isn’t really there yet, but eh, I’m here anyway 'cause I’m not going back.

I’ve only ever blocked one person, a former friend who hurt me very badly. I doubt they’d ever try to contact me again anyway, but I needed to make sure that bridge stays burned.

Normally these kind of announcements come with some kind of explanation. The lack of one reflects very poorly on Mozilla and leads me to assume the worst.

Depends on how much of a threat they are. Some random loser on /pol/ who will never leave their basement in order to harm anyone is probably not worth punching. But someone like Richard Spencer, who has a lot of reach and influence as a big name, I’ll gleefully watch that one clip over and over with popcorn at the ready.

I suppose the more difficult question to ask is where to draw the line in between.

Porter Robinson - Nurture

Just saw him live last night, absolutely incredible concert.

Yes.