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Cake day: April 10th, 2025

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  • Yep.

    The absurdity of it all… I do not see how any thinking person could understand, and not be enraged.

    I did a bit of a stealth edit, wrote more after you replied here, but basically:

    Anger is a gift, when it is righteous, it motivates just actions.

    But it is also a danger, because too much anger makes you stupid, makes you do things that will not help the situation, potentially make it worse.

    All I can say for myself personally is that self-discipline… must be strong, and diligent.

    When death can visit such a dispossessed (or dispossesable) person so easily, making mistakes needlessly is just going to shorten your lifespan, and you must be alive to be able to enact or spur any kind of real and good change.

    Thus the anger must be controlled, otherwise, you will lose yourself, in one way or another.


    If I can offer a seemingly stupid but effective trick:

    Box breathing.

    Inhale for 5 seconds.

    Hold for 5 seconds.

    Exhale for 5 seconds.

    Do that at least 3 times, if you need to, wait 30 seconds, do 3 of em again.

    By some quirks of our biology, with most people, it does help lower cortisol, and help you maintain focus, be more rational.

    Sometimes, in a particularly enraging or terrifying situation… which is still ongoing, you still need to be able to think, or you may die.

    Or, just generally, when you’re not in a life threatening situation, it works too.


  • Well without going too much deeper into my own story:

    I then got very badly injured, got fired, got evicted, spent years crippled and homeless.

    … So I know I don’t count.

    And, having been something of an impromptu … effectively a field medic … oh yeah, I had ODs die on me, had people with necrotic, long untreated wounds, exacerbated by drug use… that I could do a basic field dressing of, beg them to go to a hospital, then never see them again. Sometimes I was treating minor gunshot wounds, stab/slash wounds. Sometimes I was dodging drive by shootings myself.

    I’ve now very directly personally saved some, at least temporarily, and lost friends.

    To the point that I have PTSD now too, and can tell you there is an entire second world behind the facade where a low level war is playing out, all the time, that most ‘normal’ people just … want to go away, whatever it takes, whatever it costs.

    … To the point that I’m not able to be clever, or philosophical about it… I’ve fully experienced the horror of it, and can frankly only conclude the reason I am still alive is … basically, dumb luck.

    All I know is that it doesn’t have to be this way, and that it is this way… causes me great anger.

    My current goal is working on controlling that anger… pure rage makes you stupid, thus useless. Also makes you into a just generally unlikeable asshole.

    I’m really still just recovering, physically, and mentally.

    … yeah, don’t even know where I’m going with this, like I said, it broke my ability to … consider the implications of ‘the whole thing’. ‘The whole thing’ did too much damage to me.


  • I mean, no 100% guarantees here, but I don’t know how they would block it…

    I guess they could just block an entire massive port range or something, but I think that would break a good chunk of the internet.

    I think the more realistic fear in this case would be your own at home router or pc itself having backdoors and rootkits you don’t know about, that then ‘phone home’, or perhaps store some kind of local log you don’t know exists, that they grab physically.

    Yeah I think they’d have to basically say ‘its illegal to use anything other than a US gov approved router and browser and OS, brought to you by megagcorp,’ full on cyberpunk fascist overdrive.

    Now would even that totally block it? Technically, no, effectively, probably?

    Honestly, do you own research on this… I’m not an expert, I could be wrong, but my understanding of it so far is that… yeah, it would take ‘unthinkable’ measures to effectively block this.


  • You are correct.

    Like, I actually don’t think I have any notes, at all, for once, hah.


    No, yeah… once upon a time I was naive bright eyed idiot that thought the system was fucked, but at least theoretically could be fixed.

    Worked for a few corps. Some genuinely good people, management never has any humanity.

    One day… I walked past a crumpled lump, in the alley, just before the block with my building.

    It was a person.

    I’d… never actually seen that before, a homeless person, just sheltering under a blanket.

    I could not shake this… it bothered me immensely… what was the point of this whole city, if that can happen? What the fuck am I even doing this for? Who am I trying to impress?

    … Go out for lunch, walk past the same spot.

    The lump is gone.

    Men with essentially flamethrowers are burning the… spot, on the ground, where he was.

    I had a complete break down, panic attack, whatever.

    The existential dread became fully realized in the same moment I realized… I am part of this machine that eats people. I pull its levers. I am having a pathetic break down, whereas that man died.

    That was it. That was what radicalized me.

    Quit, worked for a non profit helping the homeless, after that.


  • Same, on all counts.

    Problem is that we’re above the temp where the AC can really do anything, where I am… it is simply too hot outside.

    So, if I turn on the steam machine, im just wet bulbing myself in the next hour or two, even if the shower itself is cooling.

    It’d turn into a sauna, one that I can’t really meaningfully air out, because it is also humid outside.

    … Still 86F. Might be 80F in 2 or 3 hours… uggggh i am a bog monster lol.


  • Oh, but I’m a crazy conspiracy theorist when I tell people something like this almost certainly exists…!

    … god fucking damnit.

    Yeah. Yeah this is what the TPMv2 push was for.

    This is why dual booting is always impossible in practice, because Windows can rewrite the boot sector, whenever it wants, and the Pluton system allows Windows to have an effectively below ring 0 level of access to the kernel, and… you cannot audit this.

    https://en.ittrip.xyz/windows11/pluton-firmware-event

    Windows 11: Bonus Combo Bundle with unremovable NSA rootkit!

    Its for your health!

    … they never needed to do this, it makes and it made no sense to throw away so much goodwill/reputation by just declaring the vast majority of the worlds pcs are now e-waste, upgrade to our new hardware standard for secure computing!

    The only explanation that could ever make sense was that they wanted total control. Because its insane brand suicide from a purely capitalistic pov, the juice is not worth that hard of a squeeze.

    Fucking… Windows is malware, by the FBI’s own guidelines for that from not too many years back.

    … they just applied the same approach they did to making Xboxes non hard-moddable… to all PC hardware.

    Make it so the system physically cannot function if you remove or even poke the part you’d need to poke or remove, once it has their software on it.

    People think the Israeli pager thing was a well done supply chain attack.

    … MSFT invented this shit.

    Used to work for em, had a veteran co worker tell me about the one time he got deployed to Saudi Arabia to flash the bios of hardware destined to be installed in Saddam’s CnC/Air Defense systems.

    And that was for Gulf War 1, by the way.

    As far as I know, that is still fucking classified, because I’ve never heard anyone else talk about that, anywhere, ever.

    … fuck.

    Doesn’t matter now, I guess.


  • In all fairness to Romero, and many other heroes/legends of the ‘birth of fps’ era…

    These dudes are getting old.

    Getting old sucks.

    Everything hurts, you’re always more tired than you used to be, you can’t pull 7 all nighters in a row anymore, it might actually kill you.

    While the present circumstances are not … exactly awesome, dignified, ideal in any way…

    … there would always one day need to be a changing of the guard.

    All our favorite studios from the 90s/00s… they’re all mostly gone, they just have the same name sometimes, like the ship of Theseus. People leave, teams get shuffled… and the captains that are still there, are growing gray.

    Don’t mourn this.

    Be inspired by it.

    Do what they did, but with that extra/other thing that you always thought they should have done, but never actually did.

    It doesn’t have to be any graphically fancier than what they did decades ago… graphics age, gameplay is timeless.

    You can do it, if you are curious, persistent… and humble.





  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneRule Breaker
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    21 hours ago

    That would be my guess, yeah.

    Pie = short/stout circular cylinder, involves some kind of dough/bread, tends to have a crust, tends to have stuff witin the uh, semi-enclosed volume made by the bread.

    Can have bread/dough on top also, but doesn’t need to.

    I think that works for a chicken pot pie (apparently also shepard’s pie?), a pizza pie, an apple pie, a lemon merengue pie…

    That at least seems plausible/likely to me, but, I am only me.

    … maybe some very bored linguist or statistician has actually polled people on this?





  • Yeah… Todd and Emil… are gonna have to… actually make something good.

    For the first time in a decade.

    Right so like Asha’s statement said that no publically announced games have been cancelled.

    … Does Elder Scrolls 6 … actually count as publically announced?

    Its never had a release date or window, its only ever had one trailer, basically just a panning landscape shot…

    FallOut 5 certainly isn’t any kind of actually ‘publically announced’.

    Yeah I can see enough wiggle room there that Asha can basically be a fascist and just straight up tell Todd and Emil exactly what to do, and threaten to fire them if they don’t.

    Also just… as a former MSFT employee… I do not have enough lols to type in response to ‘we’re going to make sure there are no more than 5 layers of management, and also having a COO is probably a good idea’.

    Yeah. Yep. I … actually just straight up agree with that one, yep.

    Too bad expressing such sentiments a decade ago wasn’t exactly uh, well reviewed by my superiors at the time, oh well, cest la vie.