While the “recent troubles” put energy to my leaving, I have always been uncomfortable with Reddit, Twitter, Discord, Stack Overflow, Quora and Fandom, as corporate-owned repositories who work by, in one way or other, profiting off of freely contributed work.

It used to be that if someone wanted to help people with freely-given information, they’d offer it in a forum, on Usenet, or on a website they started and hosted themselves, or if it fit in there, put it on Wikipedia. Now, people add it to a freaking pile that corporations monetize. Don’t just hand them value! Put it somewhere that won’t beg you to install an app, or beg you to “upgrade” to “Nitro,” or force you to watch intrusive ads, or force people to create an account to see it, or track you! Your volunteer labor should not be a profit center!

An actual ally character from Shiren the Wanderer 4, which never made it to the US: https://archive.rpgamer.com/games/mystdungeon/shiren4/art/shiren41.jpg

(Why did it never make it to the US? It has some, uh, unfortunate NPC designs.)

Wait a moment…

“Work from home is here to stay, US data shows”

“Old MacDonald had a farm, E-I-E-I-O”

Even 20 minutes seems like too long, but that would still be wonderful.

They also hate the idea of phone trees. Companies don’t care unless we make them not care.

I have questions about how useful the basic information Dominos gets from me from their app will be to anyone. Android doesn’t let them just harvest roaming data any more.

I used to work at a Dominos, and their side items have been ludicrously priced for a good while. There’s usually a “coupon” in their app with a substantial discount on pizza, it’s the only way I’d order from them.

It is true: Destiny 2 is rated by ProtonDB as “borked”: https://www.protondb.com/app/1085660

But there are an awful lot of other games with high ratings there. The Steam Deck has done wonders for getting Windows games working under Linux.

Saying “American people” the way the Beastie Boys would say “Another dimension”

It just seems like it’s a lot of papering over a fairly substantial problem. While the example I gave was Handbrake, which does seem like it should be a unique example, every other piece of software that I check Flatpak versions of also had ludicrously wasteful storage issues.

I’m aware of dependency hell, but it seems to me that most software doesn’t have that as a problem, not if the libraries are sensibly maintained? After all, the fact that upgrading a library can improve all the software that uses it seems like it’s usually a positive thing. And the ballooning storage requirements of Flatpak make it a tool that should be used occasionally, rather as a primary way to release software. Using a filesystem that can detect duplicates would help, but itself also seems like a special-case kind of solution, and not a great solution to turn to just to avoid what seems to me to be a significant issue.

Wizardry inspired a lot of games, but the three games listed have greater influences elsewhere. (FF and DQ in particular are more like Ultima.) Sadly the games that were most inspired by Wizardry, sometimes called “blobbers,” have mostly died out: The classic Bard’s Tale games, Might & Magic, Dungeon Master and Eye of the Beholder. Etrian Odyssey and the Japanese Wizardry games hold the torch but are pretty niche these days.

The demise of the original Wizardry series is one of the greatest injustices in the history of computer gaming, up there with the closing of the original Atari.

DOS Wizardry has a significant bug that makes it one of the worst versions.

Warning: this is secretly a Nethack thread!

So, the model was playing on average 2,000 points worse because the player was luckier? The things about werewolves and dogs is a factor but is statistically insignificant.

Nethack has a couple of other gotchas like this. They should be grateful they weren’t playing on Friday the 13th…

The operator for ensuring something appeared in a search used to be “+”, but they stopped using that for some _?^??mYsTeRiOuS rEaSoN^?_??

But it appears like we’re in a situation where it’s not used for specific situations, but for lots of different things. Just a few Flatpak programs starts to chew through a significant amount of disk space, and some programs are only being distributed as Flatpaks.

My response to that is Flatpak. 16MB of software requiring 700MB to download and consuming 2.8GB of disk space. Linux absolutely can be bad, due to cultural issues.

(My example software above is Handbrake. I’m sure someone’s going to “well actually” me about this, and I don’t even care. I don’t see how it can be justified, and I’m kind of curious to see if someone can do it.)

What the heck is Dexerto?

Ed Zitron has a scathing piece about that (in the podcast version he’s seething) entitled “The Man Who Killed Google Search.” Worth checking out, it contains some quality righteous anger.

This isn’t the worst timeline. It was always destined to end up this way. Corporations consider themselves ethically mandated to squeeze as much profit out of customers as they can, to find the exactly monetary line where the number of customers they drive off is balanced by the money they can gain by the things that drove them off. They actually believe that, and that basically means any profit-seeking corporation is going to ruin their user experience in the long run.

Once, I was asked if I wanted a special offer on Microsoft Office on boot up. Explorer freezes so often for me when I right-click a file and select Open With that it’s made me twitchy. Frequently image icons stop displaying. For a long while, every time I’ve installed Windows on a computer, I’ve had to go through and disable all the awful misfeatures Windows tries to put in the taskbar. I also always have to set OneDrive so it doesn’t redirect folders like Desktop and Documents into its cloud storage area. Now Windows 11 is threatening to put CoPilot on my desktop, and I’ll have to disable it too.

I’m positively longing for Linux now.