Just gonna throw this out there; If you’ve never had a Nintendo Wii, I’d genuinely recommend picking one up and modding it.

My last console was a PS3, after that I went exclusively PC since every newer console seemed far too expensive for the very few exclusives that interested me, and they began to charge a monthly fee to play games online. The only console I didn’t have from that generation was the Wii, as I’d always written it off as a gimmick. But after taking a closer look at its library, it’s surprisingly packed with good titles, and the motion controls are a pretty unique way to interact with games.

I picked one up a few months ago off ebay, and even for a lot that included a Wii balance board, it was less than $80. Modding it was extremely easy, and after it was done, I was amazed to find that it has access to a surprisingly polished online homebrew store full of emulators and cool little homebrew games that download and install with a single click.

That means the console has access to:

• The entire Wii library (Including unique modern light-gun style games, like Deadspace: Extraction, plus Wii fit with the balance board, which is actually really fun)
• The entire gamecube library with the Nintendont emulator (best paired with either a gamecube controller or the Wii Classic controller)
• Pretty much every retro console such as SNES, Genesis, GB, GBC, GBA, etc with emulators
• The highlights of the N64 and NeoGeo catalog thanks to being ported to the Virtual Console (the Wii shop is dead, so you’ll need to sail to get those).
• You can even still play online in Mario Kart thanks to modders, and it’s still active!

All for less than $100. It’s an absolute gem of a console, especially when paired with sailing the high seas (which is really easy since the Wii has an SD card slot, so you can slam it full of stuff), and has quickly become my favorite of all time. I sold every other console I’ve ever owned, but I suspect I’ll be keeping the Wii for the foreseeable future due to its versatility and ease of use (especially for retro games, no messing around with RetroArch’s horrible interface!)

But it is possible to pick up a cheap used office PC off ebay and stick a used GPU in it, which would let someone play almost any game on the market for much less than a console.

Max Stirner.

I believe MX Linux shares a lot of devs with Antix, but offers full DE’s.

MX Linux (Debian based) has a KDE version, and lets you choose a non-systemd init during the install.

As an aside for anyone else reading, Trillium Notes is a good open source alternative to Obsidian.

Not the person you responded to, but I also generally prefer Krita for GIMP-y/Photoshop-y tasks, though I am by no means an expert photo-shopper, just an amateur.

Krita has most of the necessary tools for photo editing, especially as it now comes with the G’mic tool pre-installed (it can be added to GIMP as a plugin, too), which is incredibly powerful, and has features such as a fantastic heal/object removal tool called Inpaint (shown here in GIMP, but the same process is used in Krita), as well as a quite good alternative to Adobe’s Magnet Select tool called Extract Foreground.

GIMP has a different heal tool plugin available called Resynthasizer that I think is a little quicker to use, but from what I recall didn’t give quite as good a result compared to the G’mic inpaint (though much better than Krita’s non-G’mic heal tool, which gave the worst results).

There’s more tutorials on different G’mic functions here, which really shows off how capable of a toolset it is.

The new text tool is huge, since the old one was naff to use. This new one is a game changer for me.

It took me a bit to figure out how to make a call (definitely bad UX). What got it working for me was adding the other user as a contact (beyond just messaging them, it’s like a different thing), and then making sure they also added me as contact, and each person accepted that contact request, then the call button seemed to show up, and the call worked fine, even video.

Movim in particular is the most suited for a discord replacement in the XMPP space, as the dev implemented discord-like channels with rooms. It also has group video calls and screensharing with audio (must use a chromium browser for now to share the audio).

It is still clunky compared to Discord, but that generally applies to most of the alternatives 😅

Matrix has a lot of problems, some of them inherent to its design, including leaking metadata of encrypted messages to any server that participates in a chat room (this metadata includes the time the message was sent, size, sender and recipients of messages).

I personally think Movim is the better option that’s actively federated, while Fluxer is also promising if it successfully implements federation as well.

It certainly was my kind of game growing up when I had a lot of free time, but even then, I wasn’t super into grinding, I just did it to get to the quests, which I very much enjoyed.

If there was a server with virtually no grinding and just quests to where I could play it essentially like an online point’n’click adventure with some combat, I’d hit it for sure. :)

I tried a couple of those a few years back, but even with the xp multipliers, it seemed like a bit too much of a time commitment :(

For secure messaging that isn’t centralized and doesn’t require a phone number, I’d suggest Delta Chat.

it’s very clear we have to escape Android and Google entirely, there is no other option.

Please donate to PostmarketOS if you have the means, it gives us a true alternative that is completely community owned, it just needs our support to become polished and to add support for more phones.

We have to support software that’s still made for us. While we still can.

Uhh, no? I pointed out the good parts about it that stand out even to this day, and that I had a much higher tolerance for endless grinding when I was younger (the clear negative of the game).

Your response is leads me to believe you only read the first few words of my comment.

I played the older rune scape growing up, like a lot, it was my first MMO, and also my last, since nothing else scratched the same itch.

The draw of the game, at least for me, were two things.

One: the punishment for dying was losing all but 3 of your items, so there were high stakes that made enemy encounters kinda exciting. It was pretty unique at the time, though maybe Ultima Online had that too, not sure.

Two: the quests in run escape actually slapped. Unlike literally every other MMO on the market (which had simple fetch quests or kill X amount of things quests), Rune scape had really well written, funny, interesting quests that often played like an older point’n’click adventure, many of which gave really unique and odd rewards that you could practically use in other parts of the game.

Those just blew my wee little mind back then, and I was absolutely hooked on it. I think in particular the quests would hold up, even against modern titles.

The downside was to get to those quests, you had to grind like a motherfucker to get the required skill levels to start it. That padded out the play time by hundreds of hours, but doing it with friends or chatting while you did cooked some lobster for the 300th time made it bearable, sometimes even soothing to zone out to.

I could never tolerate the grind today like 12 year old me could, it’s unbearable, but if I could play a version of runescspe that removed the grind, I’d be tempted just to play allthe quests I never got to.

1.6 and 4.6 million people is an extremely small population

Respectfully I have to disagree there.

As the population scales up a centralized government is inevitable because the system has too many moving parts.

I haven’t found that to be the case in my research. Decentralized modes of society appear to scale very well as long as it is combined with federation.

To make any of this happen globally, or even just a country, you have to rely on all people behaving differently than they have for the past several thousand years. Human tribalism, selfishness, and greed were a problem way before capitalism was a thing.

While hierarchical oppressive societies have been prevalent for the past 8,000 years, new evidence shows that before that, the norm for humans were egalitarian societies, so our current path is quite an aberration from that norm. If you’d like to delve into that research yourself, you can read it for free here.

1930’s Catalonia and Rojava are very solid evidence that with the right societal structure, we can actually bring out that latent egalitarian ability of humans. People who lived through what happened in Catalonia described there being a period of acclimation to the concept of things being free, yet only taking what you need, but that once people understood that there would be more waiting for them later, they quickly adapted to living in a post-scarcity fashion. There’s a good documentary on that topic here, if you’re interested.

Are you involved in Anarchist movements to know that to be true? Because it sounds like FUD to me.

An extreme minority, perhaps, but it hasn’t been a mainstream anarchist position for a century. And accepted Anarchist theory has never in all of its history advocated for lawless chaos.

Out of curiosity, what is your own personal political worldview?