Manifold Garden is a game I felt like I have always wanted, even before it was made when I was a child fucking around online and discovering the concept of fractals online. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced the concept of such an infinite-feeling infinity the way I have in this game. The idea is kind of timeless, and I think a lot of people who don’t really play games can at least enjoy watching someone play it.

I finished the main game and can really recommend it, although there’s more to the game than just the main levels apparently. There’s a whole bunch of achievements I didn’t get. Should probably go back in and try to get them sometime, traversal and problem solving in that game were so cool.

If you still think the hardware is pretty good, you haven’t been using their newer hardware.

I think I wrote a comment about this recently, but their newest mouse with a layout I like (G604) was made with terrible soft rubber that is practically designed to disintegrate with use. All their mouse switches are also short life crappy switches that stop working relatively quickly.

Soldering new switches into the G604 is an absolute PITA because it was designed by people who didn’t care for repair. Still doable, just annoying. I just wish the rubber was replaced with the grippy hard textured plastic they used a few years earlier.

At least you only need to use the software at first when you’re setting things up.

I read the title as Roblox and was going to make a joke about finally knowing Mr. Tallarico’s valuation for his sound.

His mother’s very proud.

I only ever participated in the original Place years and years ago, putting down maybe two or three pixels.

Maybe where you’re from it’s easy to separate your government flag as its own symbol that doesn’t represent real people but when you’ve got like 20x30 pixels it’s hard to represent a local community online with something better than a flag. I think we ended up with less than ten pixels inside of a heart iirc.

At least for me, in my own country, I associate flags with popular protests and other symbols make me think of the government. Law enforcement uniforms and mismatched old automatic rifles from fifty years ago. Crippling bureaucracy that operates four hours a week that stretches five hours of paperwork errands into a six month chapter of your life (not a symbol but when you say government that’s what I think of).

Point being I don’t find it weird at all that people wanting to represent themselves will default to a national flag. My understanding is that in like Germany there’s a line where nobody wants to seem too proud of the flag, and in the US people are so desensitized to seeing every McDonald’s have 4000 flags on display, in England the red and white flag has different connotations if it’s in a football context or not, etc etc etc

A lot of flagpoles here are faded and tattered and often with one of the stripes almost separating off the flag. Might be doomerism but I think it looks cool, I think it very much is an appropriate representation.

I’m from Lebanon, this flag is for me, and when the government uses it, it’s using it deceptively to pretend it has any interest in our lives and our problems

Suddenly thinking about how the race to sustainably create more soil will probably be a theme for scientific research in the near future.

Desertification is scary!

It’s kind of nice how everyone is in on the joke now? Like I think if you told the average person 15 years ago that a lot of history “documentaries” are racially motivated drivel you’d get a funny reaction.

I think I could show this to my (quite conservative) parents and get a good chuckle out of them now.

Granted I’m from the Middle East and the racist theories we have here have some of the roles swapped around. We don’t have 24 hour electricity but the average person genuinely believes we are the god-chosen enlightened people who are only held back by some combination of hubris, western empire, and “western empire” (this one should have a bunch of parentheses around it, several sets, I don’t want to get caught in some spam filter).

I remember seeing people mod the iPhone 4 to replace the glass back with a nice wood back.

Metal and wood can’t be a worse idea than glass. Grippy too. Although without the right treatment it can get gross I guess.

I have the opposite problem weirdly enough. I played a ton of Civ V, and have had a lukewarm aversion to Civ VI knowing it would be a huge time sink when I could be playing other games. Such as KSP. Which I also haven’t been playing for the same reason.

I’ve had it in my library from some bundle or sale for years now but it still feels like it’s much newer than it is to me. I’ve just played one or two games of V when I have to scratch that Civ itch.

There’s just too many games and too little time

A lot of cool designs actually. Thanks to the LAPD for their endorsement or I wouldn’t have known about it.

I’m not American so maybe different ones appeal to me (Lucky Once is fucking hilarious and the Cantona Kick is very much up my alley)

I did get shown the ad, I thought “huh, it’s not like Apple to do ragebait marketing”. I thought that was just what that is, and that everyone can see that. The “Newphoria” marketing tagline I think was verging on it as well, but I didn’t see anyone moaning about it online. Much harder to avoid for me because it was on giant billboards and shop signs.

I guess it’s just working as intended if people are recycling it every day into news fodder, not like there’s anything else going on in the world (ongoing genocide? No we have four tweets about Apple’s new ad and boy are these tweets strongly worded!)

It’s also funny because It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is still airing too, and that is massively more edgy than anything seinfeld ever did.

And that’s always been my argument when it comes to this particular dead horse. I don’t think any jokes are off the table, you just really have to make whatever discomfort you’re summoning be worth the punchline. The edgier something is the more it has to be funny to compensate, the point of offensive humor is to be funny not to offend, right? This has to be common sense. I don’t get how it flies over the head of so many people.

Funny how the bare HTML makes this feel weirdly personal. Maybe I should get around to making the shitty personal website I always wanted to make fifteen years ago.

The buttons on the G700s will also pop eventually. I recommend you learn how to take it apart and replace the switches before they go bad.

The G700s is kind of a pain to disassemble (and there’s a mod to make it easier to assemble and disassemble for the future).

The only thing close to a successor to that mouse is a G604, and not only did it get discontinued in a very short time frame, but it also has cheap switches. My G700s started double clicking after several years of use (I’d like to say 5?) but my G604 started double clicking after like two years. And let me tell you, yes you don’t need to mod it to make the insides more accessible, but the inside is much more annoying to navigate. Several different screw lengths and sizes, a lot of unintuitive plastic interlocking parts, as opposed to two stacked PCBs in the G700/G700s.

I’ve swapped the switches on both with switches made by Kailh that are supposedly much longer lasting. The G604 is basically perfect from a layout perspective (the rubber wears out much faster than the hard textured shell of a G700/G700s though, which I don’t like. I’ve superglued it back into place where it peeled, but really, it’s a shame how even Logitech makes things this low quality now. It’s both good and disappointing that the fixes are very easy, because yes you can fix them, but why the hell is that a point of failure in the first place?

The software was shit and it only got worse. So, you know. No notes there. Praying on my hands and knees for something like QMK to pop up that we can flash all our mice with once and for all.

This is the comment that got me back out of lurking mode. Hi. Apologies if any of what I write goes against the Solarpunk ethos, it’s not something I know the details of, just the broad ideas.

So, the Middle East has a weird relationship with solar power. I will split this into two parts for two very different regions:

In the Gulf, solar installations have been gaining momentum as essentially vanity projects to show the world “Hey, look, we’re not all dependent on fossil fuels! Look at this n million dollar investment we made into solar power! We are actively participating to become more sustainable!”. I applaud any initiative to harness some of the sun’s free power, I think it’s not a net negative when they do this. But it is worth mentioning that these places really have no drive to push away from burning fuel for their main source of power. It literally comes out of the ground, of course it made sense to use it before all the money came in, but these solar projects are really just puff pieces. I am glad they are building these arrays but they certainly aren’t part of some solar revolution. If we want to look at sustainability more broadly, it’s not like the urban planning, transport infrastructure, or labor conditions are geared towards sustainability. This is a part of the world where sustainability is seen as a tech thing, hell, a tech feature. “Oh you like the environment? Your single-family home must have a dedicated Tesla charger!”. But the Gulf is its own thing. I do believe that since that part of the world is going to be dealing with the effects of climate change head-on, and they will be figuring out stuff like how to deal with microclimate management and so on. I’m not familiar with that kind of science, I want to be optimistic about something.

They do have to keep cleaning the panels though, it’s really dusty out there.

I cannot really speak for Palestine, but I do know about the relationship my country has with solar. I’m from Lebanon, a place with a climate very different from the Gulf (for now). You may remember from a few years ago we were in the news for a bunch of reasons: Record protests, economic meltdown, the whole port incident, all fun things. In 2021 I remember seeing articles pop out from western news outlets with “uplifting” stories about how many households in Lebanon are setting up rooftop solar. Sadly, those stories are not uplifting. Solar (PV) is not this great liberator that the average household is setting up to become more environmentally friendly or independent from the (very terrible) power grid/power mafia (let’s not get into the mafia thing or this comment would be 10x longer). Solar is something only the top 10 odd percent of households can afford, so it’s kind of given us one more layer of inequality here. Don’t get me wrong: my own household installed solar, at what for us is a significant financial investment, and I can tell you for a fact that for people here it is absolutely life-changing. I haven’t had 24/hour electricity in my lifetime, it’s really only something I saw in hospitals. My life is so much better, I can do things overnight thanks to battery storage, I don’t have to worry about how some appliances react to having their power taken away for anywhere between half a second to a few minutes. Things just work and it is amazing.

But the inequality angle I think is being lost on a lot of us, and I find myself forgetting that not everyone has electricity after midnight. We have never been particularly wealthy - I remember seeing photos of my friends on vacation abroad as a kid and asking my parents why that wasn’t something we would do - but now those same friends roll their eyes when I suggest we play one more round of a game at 11:50 PM. There’s a weird survivor’s guilt with being able to pay your way out of a problem. I’m a true believer in household solar, this isn’t just a “throw money at the problem” thing - my country runs on diesel and I hate it so much. The main power stations are ancient and inefficient, and have been converted decades ago (inefficiently) to burn diesel. The mafia generators that used to fill the gaps in power run on diesel. Heating runs on diesel. I hate the smell of diesel smoke interrupting the fresh mountain air, I hate the sound of generators in the street. I hate the generator mafia shaking us down monthly, and I hate them even more after they started pulling more dirty tricks after we installed solar. But this is so worth it, and it’s been worth every dollar (and dollars aren’t as easy to come by here). It has been a life changer for me and my family. If only we can generate water from the sun :p

I hate to make this a “woe is us, Lebanon has it really hard” comment, especially with the manmade hell that has been unleashed in Gaza, but yeah, the Middle East has different areas with different relationships with solar.

I also think Jordan has a PV manufacturing plant, I guess that’s nice.