I guess if it splinters the GOP any, it's a good thing, maybe?

Then again, look how the whole Tea Party thing worked out. (Spoilers: not good.)

Mine wasn't really all that bad, but the time that occurs to me involves me at like 5 or 6 years old, snow, a sled, a metal fence post, and a big red bump on my forehead. I hit pretty hard, but I don't think I was concussed or anything.

Your post is all over the place with like 3 different unrelated topics.

The 30k thing is great for you, and maybe a coincidence. (You didn't make it clear.) But I assure you syncronicities aren't unique to your faith.

And I have no idea what that has to do with the meeting or the bible verse you referenced.

What are the chances of two separate gender reveal parties happening simultaneously using the same exact means of displaying blue/pink in the same apartment building exactly one apartment directly above the other?

Also, it bothers me way more than it should that on the middle one, the arrow goes from the movie frame to the window and the other two are the other way around.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure my family was only the second owners of my house as well. All I know about the builder of my house is:

• The same guy was responsible for building basically all the houses on my street.
• He didn't survey very carefully. All the property lines are off by like two feet. Lol. It's caused me some heartache with the neighbors to my south with property disputes. (Well, to be fair, the neighbors to my south would have caused the property dispute had the property lines not been off.)

Oh, I think I know what's going on. It's interpreting the number with a period on the end as a numbered/ordered list. Putting a space before the dot should fix it.

123. This is an ordered list.

And fixed:

321 . And this is not.

Still weird that the number's sticking off to the side and getting cut off. Probably depends what client you're using. In Lemmy-UI, it's not cut off, but the number is further left than it would otherwise be. Jerboa looks fine, but it's clearer on Jerboa that it's interpreting it as an ordered list.

1962

Anyone else read the post title in Contrapoints' voice?

How is the cucumber involved?

Hey, this is a family-friendly webcomic!

Just what AI would say.

One could make a community named "Anon Posting" or something, lock it so only a mod can post, and then make the sole mod a bot that would post anything it got via DM (probably after automoding, rate limiting, etc) to said community.

I do think it's a good idea for the bot to keep a log in case it gets abused for sufficiently evil purposes. One could add some extra functionality to the bot that would give identifying information about the poster to instance admins on demand (via DM), but I think instance admins would have pretty easy access to all DMs made to the bot, along with identifying information anyway. (Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on that.)

Also, the bot could totally delete its logs and with them the identities of all posters after a while. Maybe a month?

And, of course, this wouldn't be ironclad anonymity. But it would keep identities secret from anyone but the bot maintainer and instance admins.

Yeah, sounds like a pretty cool concept. Not volunteering to write such a bot (at least any time soon) or anything, but I support it.

Roughly in order of how much I enjoy them from most to least. (Not that the later ones are bad. Just that they're more low-key.)

Mindustry is amazing, but as I mentioned above, really really addictive. (The commercial game it's most often compared to is Factorio.)

Then there's Shattered Pixel Dungeon. Amazing dungeon crawler.

Endless Sky is a great space mercantile sim.

Luanti is a Minecraft clone.

Unciv is a turn-based civilization development game.

And if you're wanting to do emulation, there's Lemuroid. Also, EasyRPG, an engine for playing RPG Maker games like Yume Nikki. Oh, FreeDoom is a great implementation of Doom for Android.

Those are the ones that'll keep your attention for a good long time. There are tons of much simpler games that are still fun like Frozen Bubble and Hyper Rogue. And plenty of games that I haven't really gotten into very much but that people really seem to like Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.

Man. There are a lot now that I'm listing them out. Lol.

Jesus. People get big mad about this stuff.

The problem isn't mobile games, and it's not console games, and it's not PC games. It's the profit motive and corporations and enshittification. And there's plenty of that going on in games for mobile, console, and PC. (And, for that matter, TTRPGs. And it's not like the 300 different collectors editions of Monopoly released every year aren't enshittification at play.)

Addictive gotcha mechanics are shitty when they're tied to microtransactions. Even when not tied to microtransactions, I think they can still be shitty depending on the specific circumstances, and it's definitely wise to responsibly manage your (and/or your children's) engagement to not cause other problems in your(/their) life. But is addictiveness in a video game inherently a bad thing? I don't think so. All games cause dopamine squirts whether it's Pong or a slot machine. That's kinda the point of games. There are plenty of Open Source games out there that cause big addictive dopamine squirts. (Mindustry, anyone?) And such games aren't made to milk whales. They're made because someone wanted to create and play such a game.

Don't be talking too much smack about shovelware! Low-quality games create their own vibes. Some are accidental masterpieces. Both of my favorite two YouTube gaming content creators do a lot of their content on really low-quality games. This series got me to buy Radiation Island and I had a great time playing it. And here is a great video on all the shitty official games based on the movie Avatar.

"Gaming is as much about socializing as playing" is an awesome outlook to have on gaming! Addictiveness in games can be... concerning. But sometimes particular games are the key by which your kid can be involved in peer group. I'm not saying that automatically trumps any downsides and you should let your kid spend $∞ on Fortnight skins or whatever. But I think probably in most cases a balancing act is superior to a hard "yes" or "no".

I should probably specify that I'm admittedly an old fart who doesn't know shit about mobile gaming. (The only mobile games I play are Open Source ones on F-Droid.) And the only modern console I have is a Switch, and I don't have any plans to get one soon. I've played a lot of Breath of the Wild, though. And a fair amount of Tears of the Kingdom.

Some final thoughts:

• Open Source gaming is awesome.
• The way they're doing anti-cheat on PC is fucked-up.
• But so is the way they lock down consoles and phones.
• Hack your games. Hack your consoles. (If you don't hack it, you don't own it.) Get your kids interested in hacking stuff.
• ...responsibly, of course.
• Play games with your kids! (And not just the ones you want to play.)

I don't know anything about Pokemon canon, but you know LoZ has bomb flowers, yeah? In some games there's no such thing as a "bomb" that's distinct from a bomb flower.

Who's going to tell them about prions?

They can't just get Copilot to finish it?

/s

The MST3K is really good too.

As someone who has never met my father (since I was two, but I don't remember him even a little bit), ghost the SOB. Don't even bother to give him a "no". You don't know this guy is safe today and it doesn't sound like you have any reason to believe anything he says today.

I would tend to lean toward being honest with your kid and telling him that his father contacted you but he's a really scary dude and you don't trust him. You probably know your kid better than I do, but try not to keep the truth from him unless you really have to in order to keep him safe.

So, I've been using Arch Linux ARM on Raspberry Pis for some "desktop systems" as well as for a janky-ass NAS solution, but that project is kindof dying. They go many months in a row sometimes without any package updates. It's wild. And when people ask WTF is going on and offer beg to be allowed to help in some way, the admins lock the thread.

So, I've been looking to switch my Raspberry Pi's to something that doesn't depend so much on some "project" out there to be able to continue to use.

The main Gentoo project fully supports ARM. And even if it didn't, it'd be a lot easier to use Gentoo without support than Arch.

Switching my main box (not a Raspberry Pi -- it's an x86_64 system) to Gentoo was basically for the purpose of trying out Gentoo again and evaluating whether I want to take the plunge and switch everything to Gentoo.

Aside from that, there's SystemD which is yucky. (Yes, I know about Artix, but when last I tried it, it didn't really feel "ready for prime time". It depends a lot on the main Arch repos.)

Plus, I do kindof like the idea of "more control over my system(s)". Configuring/compiling my own kernel (yes, you can do that on Arch, it's much less "in the spirit of" Arch) to make it as minimal as possible and disable everything I don't need. And of course USE flags are a plus if you want a light system.

Anyway, those are my main reasons.

Happy cake day!