My first tech was a Sega Genesis and the family’s 486 DX2 computer running Windows 95.

While I had access to new genesis games by renting them, getting new games for the 486 was a rare event due to how expensive software was back then, and there were few places we would visit that sold it (mostly what Costco had available). That meant rotating through a lot of the same games for quite a while, which meant I would eventually get bored of them for a while until I would try them again a month later.

The effect of that is it seemed to encourage me to find other ways away from the tech to entertain myself, like play with legos, or head outside to invent games with the neighbor’s kids.

I don’t want to assume that type of exposure to tech is ideal just because it’s what I experienced, but I wonder if an artificial software limit may be a good idea today for young kids to encourage them to find new ways to solve boredom with their imagination instead of it being done for them exclusively.

I’ve also seen parents start their kids off with 90’s tech and games, and slowly introduce them to newer tech/games each year, which is an interesting idea.

I think I’d start them off with a raspberry pi running a retro emulation os and a small selection of the best games from the 90’s, a small camera, an mp3 player, and a Linux PC without internet access, but with access to some edutainment games (humongous entertainment, some point’n’clicks, etc), and programing tools with kids appropriate teaching material.

Once they’re old enough, I’d give them internet access, and eventually a phone so they can keep in touch with their friends.

There’s a pretty massive item market for this game to use real money for in-game items, where the seller will meet you in a match and drop the gear. So there’s a big financial incentive for people from third world countries to hack so they can quickly acquire valuable items to sell on that market.

Ah! My bad, it’d been a while since I saw that video.

The cheating problem is off the charts. There was a really good video of someone who investigated how bad it was, and found that about 50% of players were using wallhacks. of matches will have a hacker.

I played it for a couple months. The gunplay was pretty impressive, but the cheaters made it incredibly frustrating, and after seeing that video, I uninstalled and never looked back.

EDIT: The video in question.

It’s mostly underwhelming, IMHO. Pick it up on sale only, if you can. And make sure you have at least 8gb of vram, or it’ll cease working after you get to Italy.

Until other countries begin accepting asylum claims from U.S. Citizens, that simply isn’t an option available to most of us, except for the wealthy or those who already have the desired jobs that would allow them to emigrate.

You have no idea how much I would love to see a general strike tomorrow, or literally any time before 3 fucking years from now, and if we’re lucky that will happen.

But so far the only concrete date we have that’s being pushed by our biggest unions is May 1st, 2028, so that’s the date I’m going to spread. If there is a call to have one sooner by any of the major unions, then I’ll switch to spreading that one instead.

Less than 10% of the US workforce is unionized. Non-unionized workers are terrified to unionize, or to join in a general strike without one due to living hand to mouth, often a month’s wages away from homelessness, and many more with health conditions rely on their job for critical life insurance to afford staying alive.

Unlike the EU, we don’t have strong social safety nets that would encourage a less formal and spontaneous general strike.

That’s not to say I don’t understand how time sensitive this is, and that every week we wait, the regime gets stronger and more able to suppress us, but I’m trying to work with what I’ve got.

If you have any suggestions, I’d be happy to hear them.

I can’t find anything referencing 2030, so I assume you’re joking (or something is whooshing over my head).

For others reading, May 1st 2028 is still on, plan around it and try to get any contracts you negotiate to end on that day (but strike with the rest of us even if not).

Hell fuckin’ yeah! Y’all best slap an email to the IWW and get that ball rolling so you’ll be able to join the general strike planned for May 1st 2028 (May day).

I did build the big ship, but I don’t think I used the planters effectively. I just remember needing to frequently recharge it and repair it.

I also wasn’t a fan, mainly due to how often you need to resupply to stay alive. You get a very small window of opportunity to do actual exploration before you need to go find more food and water, on top of gathering a bunch of other materials.

I liked parts of it, but ultimately just got frustrated with the tedious parts and bailed.

Older desktops can have a somewhat hefty idle power draw due to the overall system consumption contributing more than expected, such as the southbridge. According to this old review of the i7-2600k, the system idles at 74w, which at $0.12 per KWh, would cost you roughly $77 per year. Though you might want to confirm that with a Kill-a-watt meter if you can (libraries sometimes lend them out), since I’m pretty sure that total system power chart includes a discrete GPU, so the real number for a GPU-less system is probably around 40 or 50w at idle.

If that is accurate, you could potentially replace your i7-2600 with a used Dell Wyse 5070 thin client from ebay for about $40 (in the US), and that idles at 5w, which would only cost you $5 a year at the same rate.

Older thin clients and laptops tend to have much better idle power draws compared to desktops. For other people reading this, if you’re using a desktop for a low-power use case, it’s probably worth finding out what its idle power consumption is and doing the calculation to determine if it’d be worth replacing it with a more efficient used thin-client or office mini-pc.

I didn’t mind the RPG elements of the gunplay either, it was how lame all the guns felt to use even with higher skill levels.

The shotguns take way too many rounds to down people, the smgs are pea shooters, and pistols can work ‘okay’ with headshots, but still just feel meh. I assume the sniper rifle is more effective, but I never used it much.

I wish they had made it to where low skill makes reloading and accuracy suffer greatly, but if you do manage to score a hit, it hits hard. That would make shotguns in the early game super valuable, but they could’ve still encouraged stealth and more thoughtful tactics by limiting ammo availability.

Basically the RPG and story elements combined with Tarkov style gunplay and thief-style stealth would be heaven for me.

I’d be curious of your thoughts on revision, if you ever feel like coming back to this comment section by the time you finish it!

I’ve made multiple attempts to finish Deus Ex over the years after giving up each time due to aspects of the gameplay. I would normally never give a game so many shots, but I love so many aspects of Deus Ex, I want to finish it, but I just can’t push myself to continue at certain points.

I think the biggest blockers for me is I love stealth games (thief 1 & 2 are all time favorites), and since Deus Ex does have a stealth system (though primitive), I tried to play it like a stealth game. a vanilla install means that tranq darts make enemies run around like headless chickens for a minute, and knocking people out with the baton is unreliable. Combined, stealthing is both visually comical, and realistically very frustrating to play.

I could deal with that, and I’ve tried switching it up by going more guns blazing, but the gunplay of Deus Ex is just as clunky, with slow firing weapons that deal little damage on fairly bullet spongy enemies. Combat just doesn’t feel good.

I tried mods and overhauls to see if I could rectify either of those points, which do sorta work as a bandaid. GMDX makes stealth WAY more fun by making headshots with darts work instantly, and baton-ing more reliable. With it, I was able to get all the way to France without quitting, but I think due to GMDX, I hit a massive difficulty spike where my stealth build became much less viable, and it once again just became frustrating. Perhaps a gun-build with GMDX would’ve been the winning combo.

I think my best experience was with the Revision overhaul, but by then I had started the game over so many times over so many years, I just didn’t have the appetite to get all the way back to France.

It’s a truly spectacular game in terms of story and open-ended level design, but the mechanics really are a turn-off. I wish my first playthrough had been with the Revision overhaul (though I wish it didn’t radically change the level design so much), but even still, I think it would benefit from a Nightdive style remake.

I don’t believe it, or rather, I think Warren Spector and Ricardo Bare really didn’t intend for it to be political, as both of them were far more focused on the game parts of Deus Ex; the mechanics, the balancing, the level design, etc, and are seemingly oblivious to how the writers took those puzzle pieces and made it political. Though the extent that Spector is completely unaware of that fact seems unlikely, and instead he almost appears to be whitewashing what the writers intended? Based on his stance that only movies and books can be political (which is a wild take, since games actually seem the most ripe medium for that), he may be trying to frame Deus Ex as A-political because of that.

It’s very odd that this article didn’t interview the lead writer of Deus Ex, Sheldon Pacotti, for an article about the politics of the game. Sheldon absolutely intended for it to be political, and in an old interview even goes into how capital is used to exploit and suppress the working class, which is what leads to radical terrorist groups, such as the NSF. He mentions in the first part of that interview series how the designers would create the levels without any concept for a story (citing the blown up statue of liberty as an example, which the level designer just thought would be an arresting sight to the player, but didn’t consider how it would tie into a wider narrative).

I think Ross’s Game Dungeon on Deus Ex really shows how Pacotti was able to make Deus Ex realistically political by tackling real societal problems that we all now face, and very few games dare touch, which continues to set it apart it decades later.

Also @Coelacanth@aggregatet.org & @paultimate14@lemmy.world

In the US, pensions have become extremely rare, and were mostly replaced with a 401k, which is essentially a tax deferred stock market account. Often your employer will match contributions that you put into it up to a certain point.

What if their wages hadn’t allowed them to build up a 401k? They likely won’t be able to survive on social security alone.

I suspect a VM would introduce latency (big no no for music production), and I can’t imagine getting ASIO working would be easy (though I’ve never tried it).

According to WineHQ, Ableton’s compatibility with wine isn’t stellar. FL Studio works quite well in it, but switching DAWs can be a pretty major undertaking.

For Linux native DAWs, Reaper and Bitwig are the two best options. Reaper is the most affordable at 60 bucks, with an infinite free trial.

Pretty sure it’s just EU citizens. If you can’t vote in elections there, you probably can’t sign this.