You can’t say the phone companies should block calls from unverified numbers while at the same time saying Google shouldn’t block download of unverified apps.

Sure you can. There’s a difference: Whether or not the owner of the handset requested the traffic.

A random APK from F-Droid isn’t going to suddenly demand my attention while my phone is sitting on my desk with the screen off. An Indian man threatening to jail me if I don’t mail him Amazon gift cards has and will again.

You’re not going to find an Obama Hope edition firearm out there.

What’s Merrell?

I once named the disease “The Disease From Madagascar” and it started in Madagascar.

I also killed the world with a bacteria called Red Ass.

I’ll accept that out of an alarm app. An alarm app gets to say “Look I straight-up need push notifications to work.”

Maaaaaaaaybe a messaging app. Signal gets to send push notifications.

Ugh, my dumbass boomer father.

Okay. 1. My father goes by his middle name. Let’s pretend his name is Christopher James Smith. He introduces himself as Jim. For my entire life, it’s been easy to screen calls for him because “Hello, may I speak to…Christopher Smith please?” That’s spam. “Hey is Jim there?” That’s someone who knows him.

2. The dumbass answer the phone “Hello, this is Jim?”

If I was in charge, all phones would be required to have a built-in taser. The recipient of a call should have a button they can press to tase the caller. This taser must be strong enough to seriously injure a human, like, burn ward you never hear out of that ear again strong enough, or strong enough to set any computer that phone is attached to on fire. Capital offense to remove or disable the taser from a phone.

That would solve the problem I think.

Co-op is the first thing we knew about Subnautica 2.

Man none of the best game developers can count to three. We’re gonna get a Subnautica 2 Episode 2 Part 2.2.

Subnautica 2 is a co-op game. How they treated respawns in Subnautica 1, where the screen goes black and you pop back into existence back at base agreeing with the game to pretend that didn’t happen, isn’t going to work here. So they need to acknowledge why you’re able to get trampled to death by deep sea wildebeests and then keep playing with your friends. Kind of like why in Portal 2 the co-op characters are Atlas and P-Body. Easier to explain why they can get crushed and then keep playing than Chell and Mel.

So is NoA the respawn bot? Does he/it swoop in and collect our hoofprinted corpse to reanimate, hence why he asks us to find a “convenient” way to die? So it’s easy for him to retrieve your pieces?

Is “You’re going to die here, and that’s okay” That whole line about forgetting everything and just exploring at first feels kind of defeated but she’s trying to talk you into being at peace with it? But if you have a resurrection machine…

I’m going to speculate that we’re the second to arrive, the first were the two women we hear. We’re going to follow their trail of audio log breadcrumbs, at first listening in on them getting settled in and “learning how to survive” but then when all is lost they’ll start addressing the players they know are coming to educate/warn us. I think the French accented woman is still clinging to hope that whatever mission can be completed, I think American accented woman has given up and is just embracing existing on this world, and is likely the one who biomods too close to the sun and wants to “go to the tree.”

Edit:

They released a series of audio teasers about a character that books passage aboard a “Pioneer” ship off to colonize a desert world that goes missing. The last one is a mayday from that ship saying “unscheduled phase gate jump, position unknown, crashing into the moon’s atmosphere. 40,000 souls on board.” Anyone here read the Battletech novel Far Country?

Alterra knew exactly where the Aurora was, she was on her planned sidequest to sniff around the 4546 system looking for the Torgals and had received the Captain’s mayday. And still they weren’t able to rescue Riley. The Cicada is lost. Neither the crew nor Alterra knows where they are, so…yeah “Forget Alterra, the life you planned on is all gone now” makes sense.

They did have blue labels though.

The thing I took from this…and I didn’t take much, was the line “you’re going to die here, and that’s okay.”

Subnautica has a shipwreck plot. You play as Some Guy: Space Janitor, a man with no voice and no characteristics. Your ship is shot down and crashes on a strange alien world, and from the moment you take control to the moment you press the Win The Game button, your goal is “Survive, escape.” What action you’ll need to take to implement that goal change throughout the game, but “survive, escape” is always your ultimate goal.

Below Zero had a plot they threw away at the last minute and replaced with You are Robin Ayou, xenobiologist and idiot. Your sister Samantha, robotics expert and idiot, has gotten herself killed as an Alterra employee on 4546B. Robin, not believing Alterra’s report that her death was caused by her own negligence, books passage to 4546B to investigate for herself. Robin more or less intentionally maroons herself alone on a hostile world with basically no tools, and almost immediately gets MechaEeyore downloaded into her brain. Sam’s plot becomes entirely optional as the game is actually about building MechaEeyore a body of his own.

Subnautica 2…the plot seems to have a “marooned beyond a point of no return” plot. Not sure how they’re going to put a sense of urgency behind that but we’ll see I guess.

Every Zima I’ve seen was clear.

Double Fine is still around?

Can I have the vasectomy without the Cybertruck?

I don’t give a shit if you’re from Long Island, the far tip end of Maine or Danville Virginia, I catch you bitching out a retail worker about how things are done “up north” you’re what we in the South call A Fucking Asshole Who Needs To Go Home.

North Carolinian here: The asshats from New England especially New York who move down here to escape their native climate and/or manmade hellscape and then scream at retail cashiers for not saying thank you are yankees.

We don’t care how you do things up north. If you liked how things are done up north, go up north.

You asked five questions, none of them are stupid.

What exactly is the fediverse? What’s included in it.

I have heard two definitions in use. The first is narrower, it refers to the collection of servers running compatible Reddit-alike software including Lemmy, Mbin and Piefed which are pretty much 1 to 1 compatible and communicating with users on one from another is more or less seamless. The big, distributed Reddit alternative that allows you to post from lemmy.ca onto lemmy.world and me to read it from sh.itjust.works.

The second is the broader, simpler definition of “anything that runs on the ActivityPub protocol and is federated with something else.” Which includes all of the above plus the likes of Peertube, Mastodon, Pixelfed, Loops etc. They are technically cross-compatible, I’ll get to that later.

Is Lemmy part of it or not?

Yes it is, Lemmy runs on ActivityPub.

Are other systems like Bluesky part of it or not?

Some are, some aren’t. A few examples:

• BlueSky. Not part of the Fediverse, it uses a different protocol, their own thing. It is sort of designed to federate but not really in practice.
• Diaspora. Similar concept of federated social media, but not compatible with ActivityPub. The Coke to our Pepsi.
• Truth Social. It is my understanding that The Church Of Trump is basically a fork of Mastodon. They don’t federate though, they turn that feature off thank a long list of random deities and WWE wrestlers.
• Threads. Meta/Facebook’s Twitter clone. IS part of the Fediverse, it uses ActivityPub and has federation turned on, though a lot of instances defederate with them on principle. You can interact with Threads from a Lemmy instance. …If it still exists. Is Threads still a thing?

Do I transparently see posts from all those different systems?

Yes and no. You can kind of think of the Fediverse like the Universe itself in that there’s nowhere you can stand and see the entire thing. You and I are from neighboring star systems in the same galaxy, we’re both on servers running Lemmy, so we can communicate completely seamlessly. I see a comment immediately above you from someone on piefed.social, they’re on a server running Piefed, not Lemmy. That’s another Reddit-alike, they can communicate with us pretty easily. You might occasionally see someone on Mastodon chime in. You can usually spot this because they @ the users they’re replying to. It would be really cool if a Mastodon user could reply to this message to demonstrate. As you get farther afield, it kinda stops working. It’s difficult to interact with Peertube from Lemmy, for example. I have commented on a Peertube video from a Pixelfed account though.

It would unbecoming of an officer and a gentleman!