I’m pretty sure that the airspace around Heathrow is controlled, too.

Ehh…

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-05-10-we-2559-story.html

The Duck Wars : Mating season is a brutal time for the female birds, who often are injured or die. Residents along the canals have created a sanctuary.

This is mating season, and, as the ducks’ human friends will tell you, it’s no Disney movie. These are ducks out of a Far Side cartoon, says one observer: They should have jackets that read “Hell’s Waterfowl.”

The ducks of the Venice canals, most of them crossbred mallards officially known as urban domesticated ducks, engage in mating behavior that is hard on the females in the best of times. A female that wanders near a group of males will be mounted again and again. Females that escape alive drag themselves out of the water stripped of the feathers on their heads and backs. Some lose an eye.

For some reason, Warno didn’t grab me and Steel Division 2 did. That being said, I may not have given it a fair chance – I bailed out on it after a short period of time, probably because SD2 was also available at about the same time. It is true that it’s one of the few options out there with a late Cold War setting, like Wargame, so if you like that setting over WW2 – which is refreshing – it’s certainly worth looking into.

IIRC, one thing that was a little disappointing was that the unit database was a lot smaller than in Wargame: Red Dragon – I’d kind of taken that, which had been built up across multiple Wargame games, for granted.

Hmm. “Strategy” is pretty broad. Most of the new stuff you have is turn-based, but you’ve got tactics stuff like X-COM and strategy stuff. If we’re including both real-time and turn-based, and both strategy and tactics…What do I enjoy? I tend to lean more towards the milsim side of strategy…

• Stellaris. Lot of stuff to do here – follows the Paradox model of a ton of DLCs with content and lots of iteration on the game. Not cheap, though. Turn-based, 4x.

• Hearts of Iron 4. Another Paradox game. I think unless someone is specifically into World War II grand strategy, I’d recommend Stellaris first, which I’d call a lot more approachable. Real time, grand strategy. I haven’t found myself playing this recently – the sheer scope can be kind of overwhelming, and unlike 4X games like Stellaris, it doesn’t “start out small” – well, not if you’re playing the US, at any rate.

• Carrier Command 2. Feels a little unfinished, but it keeps pulling me back. Really intended to be played multiplayer, but you can play single-player if you can handle the load of playing all of the roles concurrently. Real-time tactics.

• Rule the Waves 3. Lot of ship design here, fun if you’re into gun-era naval combat. Turn-based strategy (light strategy), with real-time tactics combat. Not beautiful. There is a niche of people who are super-into this.

• I agree with the other user who recommended Steel Division 2. If you’ve played Wargame: Red Dragon or earlier Eugen games, which are really designed to be played multiplayer, you know that the AI is abysmal. I generally don’t like playing multiplayer games, and persisted in playing it single-player. Steel Division 2’s AI is actually fun to play against single-player. Real-time tactics, leaning towards the MOBA genre but without heroes and themed with relatively-real-world military hardware.

• XCOM-alikes. I didn’t like XCOM 2 – it felt way too glizy for me to tolerate, too much time looking at animations, but I may have just not given it a fair chance, as I bailed out after spending only a little time with the game. I have enjoyed turn-based tactics games in the X-COM series and the genre in the past – squad-based, real-time tactics games. Problem is that I don’t know if I can recommend any of them in 2024 – all the games in that genre I’ve played are pretty long in the tooth now. Jagged Alliance 2 is fun, but very old. Silent Storm is almost as old, has destructable terrain, but feels low-budget and unpolished. There were a number of attempts to restart the Jagged Alliance series after 2 and a long delay that were not very successful; I understand that Jagged Alliance 3 is supposed to be better, but I don’t think I’ve played through it yet. Wasteland 2 and Wasteland 3 aren’t really in the same genre, are more like Fallout 1 and Fallout 2, CRPGs with turn-based tactics combat. But if you enjoy turn-based-tactics, you might also enjoy them, and Wasteland 3 isn’t that old.

• If you like real-time tactics, you might give the Close Combat series a look. I really liked the (now ancient) Close Combat 2. The balance for that game was terrible – it heavily rewarded use of keeping heavy tanks on hills – but it was an extremely popular game, and I loved playing it. There are (many) newer games in the series but they started including a strategic layer and a round timer after Close Combat 3. These improved things in the game (and if you like a strategy aspect, you might prefer that), but I just wanted to play the tactics side, and don’t feel like the later games every quite had the appeal of the earlier ones. Still, they’ve certainly had enough to make me come back and replay them.

For old school RTS, Total Annihilation

If you don’t care about the campaign, probably the much-newer games based on Total Annihilation that run on the Spring engine.

EDIT: Yeah, another user already recommended Zero-K.

I mean, it’s not beautiful, but for strategy games and other high-replayability games, I don’t find that eye candy buys that much. Like, I feel like a good strategy game is one that you should spend a lot of time playing as you master the mechanics, and no matter how pretty the graphics, when you’ve seen them a ton of times…shrugs I think that eye candy works better for genres where you only see something once, like adventure games, so that the novelty is fresh. But what you like is what you like.

If it’s too complicated – and the game does have a lot of mechanics going on, even by strategy game standards – Illwinter also has another series, Conquest of Elysium, which is considerably simpler, albeit more RNG-dependent. I personally prefer the latter, even though I know Dominions. Dominions turns into a micromanagement slogfest when you have a zillion armies moving around later in the game. Especially if you have one of the nations that can induce freespawn, like MA Ermor. Huge amounts of time handling troop movement.

It might be more tolerable if you play against other humans – I mean, if you’re playing one turn a day or something, I imagine that it’s more tolerable to look at what’s going on. But if you’re playing against the computer, which is what I do, it has more micromanagement than I’d like.

Trying to optimize your build is neat, though. There are a lot of mutually-exclusive or semi-compatible strategies to use, lots of levers to play with, which I think is a big part of making a strategy game interesting.

I think that Dwarf Fortress has a higher learning curve, but if you’re wanting a strategy game that has a gentle learning curve, I agree, Dominions probably isn’t the best choice. It also doesn’t have a tutorial/introduction system – it’s got an old-school, nice hefty manual.

Unciv is a free, open-source reimplementation of Civilization V. It doesn’t have all the eye candy and music and such that the series is famous for but as a result of not having it runs responsively on a phone.

Link: !sysadmin@lemmy.world

I can see it now: “New worm infects PDFs, causes users viewing them to mine Bitcoin.”

I think that Tetris is probably the oldest game that I’ll play some implementation of occasionally. I don’t know if I’d call it my favorite, but it’s aged very gracefully over the decades.

Bethesda has said that they aren’t going to do one until after the next Elder Scrolls game, so if anything in the Fallout world is going to come out on any kind of a near-term schedule, it’s going to have to be via someone with available bandwidth licensing it.

This statement is not true for cases where one or more person has average intelligence.

The standard “interchange” filesystem on USB sticks that everything can understand is still FAT.

FAT is not a journalling filesystem – you can still corrupt the thing if you interrupt use of a mounted drive.

Plus, even if you have a journaling filesystem, it’s probably good practice to unmount because even though you won’t corrupt the filesystem, it still might be that data won’t have been written to said drive – like, if you save a new version of the file, you might have the old version of the file.

It could be that OSes have tried to be more aggressive in buffer management, tried to flush dirty data to USB flash drives or something sooner to help shrink the size of the window in time where issues can come up. But I still wouldn’t just go running around yanking USB flash drives out of machines without unmounting them – that’s the only situation for which you can be guaranteed no issues.

EDIT: Honestly, I think that it’s a little disappointing that it’s the case that we don’t handle this well in 2025. Apple handled removable media on Macs with 3.5 inch disks correctly by having the user ask the OS to do the eject, which physically ensure an unmounted disk prior to eject. They did have a pinhole for an “emergency” eject, but the normal case was for a clean unmount. DOS and Windows used a mechanical eject button, which was still liable to see issues.

checks Zip drives

It looks like Zip drives had a software eject button, so they’d also be able to ensure an unmount.

CD-RW drives have a software eject button – the OS tells the drive to lock the tray prior to beginning a burn – so they were okay too.

I’d guess, though I don’t have experience, that tape drives probably all ensure a clean unmount.

But USB flash drives, probably the most common form of transportable writeable media in 2024, don’t, which is a little disappointing.

Drink liquids to stay hydrated, use lotion-impregnated tissues to avoid drying out your nose when you blow it, take a DayQuil.

Hmm.

IPv6 addresses are a far less-constrained resource than IPv4 addresses.

I wonder if it might be possible to do the requests over IPv6, using a range of addresses, assuming that the image hosting services in question only care about rate of requests from a single address.

EDIT: Also, for OP’s case, all he cares about is propagation of images hosted on other lemmy instances, not image hosting services. Presumably those instances don’t care about other instances serving their pictrs images. I wonder if it’d be possible to have an option to only proxy for pictrs-served images?

So now if i want to see a post by a user on blahaj, i have to turn on my VPN just to see it. Fuck this place. 🙄

One of the first conversations I was on when I joined was one between Ada, the lemmy.blahaj.zone admin, and some guy in a Middle Eastern country. Apparently his country had blocked lemmy.blahaj.zone at the national network level.

The Threadiverse is federated, so one could view posts from lemmy.blahaj.zone elsewhere, but not images, which did not propagate.

I thought that at some point, lemmy servers had started also storing images posted on other lemmy servers, but upon checking, it looks like they have not. I did run into one – no longer up – that had, according to the description, had apparently been modified to do this, probably to afford its users more privacy and not expose their IP addresses other than to their home instance. In theory, if you could find one that did so, you could make that your home instance and just rely on propagation of images through the network.

EDIT: It sounds from this year-old post like a lemmy instance can at least be configured to cache remote images:

https://futurology.today/post/6440

I suppose it’d be possible to go look and find out exactly what the current situation is.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FarSideIsland

“Far Side” Island

A comedic Deserted Island that is circular with a radius of two meters or so and a single palm, coconut, banana or pineapple treenote  in the center. Usually has a single inhabitant. If there’s more than one, they’ll either be constantly arguing or one will be slowly driving the other insane in a comedic manner (Meat-O-Vision may also occur).

I don’t know if The Far Side comics were the first, but I have indeed seen a lot of those, so I imagine that they at least popularized them.

https://www.google.com/search?q=far+side+island+comic&tbs=imgo%3A1&udm=2

https://screenrant.com/funniest-far-side-desert-island-comics/

Electrical service should have a fixed connection fee.

The reason this happens is because electrical companies have two different kind of costs:

• Those related to obtaining the electrical power from generation companies.

• Those related to maintaining the grid and providing a connection.

In the past, normally what they did was to simply reduce this to a single price, and for that to be per unit of electricity used. That is, the consumer pays $N. That was at least not an entirely unreasonable approximation when people were pulling electricity off the grid.

The thing is, if a user mostly generates power locally, they still want to have that electrical connection and providing that connection still costs money. But now they’re also not paying for their share of the grid connectivity – it’s getting offloaded to the people who aren’t generating electricity locally.

Hence, the split that many utility companies are shifting to. There’s a fixed charge to have a connection to the grid, which covers the cost of grid maintenance. And there’s a separate cost per kWh of energy used.

If someone doesn’t care about the grid connection – like, they’re confident that they can handle their power needs locally, don’t care about having a grid connection, they do have the option to just drop service. But most people want to have the access to draw more power if they aren’t generating enough, so they want to retain their grid connection. With the grid connection fee being broken out, they cover their share of the costs.

Now, I’ve no disagreement that California electricity rates are pretty bonkers. They’re some of the highest in the US:

https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/

But the issue isn’t having a separate grid connection fee from an electricity used fee.

If you seriously want to set something like this up, you’re going to need a device that can emit the smells that you want.

This instance of a device looks like it uses atomizers hooked up to different tanks:

https://www.amazon.com/Automatically-Releases-Immersive-Compatible-Platforms/dp/B0CNMXSN2K

I’d imagine that one run as many tanks as one wanted.

One limiting factor is that scent isn’t going to immediately change when you change your virtual environment. I’d guess that emitting the vapor close to your face, maybe running a hose up towards it, would help. Probably want some kind of exhaust to purge the previous smell from the room. My guess is that the reason that the reason that a “booth” is used in the submitted article is to minimize the airspace surrounding the user and thus clearing time.

Second, some form of computer control. Maybe some device that has relays controlled via USB. A relay is an electromechanical switch that can can cut power to an atomizer on and off, could run it to the atomizer.

https://ncd.io/usb-relay/

Those guys sell USB devices with up to 64 relays. I haven’t looked, but it probably looks to the computer like a virtual serial port, takes text commands.

Then you need some kind of daemon running on the computer to send these commands at appropriate times.

And lastly, you need some way to trigger the daemon when the game is seeing some sort of event. Could monitor the game’s logfile if it has one and contains the necessary information – I recall some Skyrim-hooking software that does this – take a screenshot periodically and analyze it, or identify and then monitor the game’s memory, probably either a technique called library injection (on Linux, library interposers are a way to so this) or using the same API that debuggers use.

If the hentai game that your friend is after is Ren’Py-based – a popular option for visual novels, which many such games are – and the game includes the Python source .rpy files, which some do, then the game’s source itself could simply be modified. If it contains only compiled .rpyc files, that won’t be an option.

You’re going to need to obtain whatever scents you want to emit as well. You can get collections of essential oils – the aromatherapy crowd is into those – and mix them up to create blends that you want, stick 'em in the atomizer tanks.

One issue is that hacking it into an existing game is going to mean that the game isn’t intentionally designed around the use of scent.

I’m human, and you just interacted with me.

EDIT: This community has apparently about 11,000 active users. You just interacted with them and it didn’t seem to be an issue.