I am happy to see that the project was not abandoned, but I’m afraid that the autocomplete is going to spell the end of this. The dev has been working on autocomplete since the last release two years ago. At this point I’m not sure it’s coming.

Sigma Star Saga is an odd RPG game where the random encounters are short side scrolling shmup segments. I really enjoyed the amount of it that I played, but you can get screwed in some encounters as it gives you a random ship each time, and some are worse than others.

There’s a handy “Take Action” button at the bottom of the article where you can look up your representative and send them an editable pre-written email.

On the highest level, they have a constant firehose of as much audio data from a sea of customers as they wish.

Send it to cheap overseas transcribers, use it to train and improve voice recognition and automatic transcription.

Have a backchannel to television viewing and music listening patterns.

Know when different customers are home or not, improving demographics data.

Know what is discussed within the house for data on ad penetration/reach, brand awareness, and better advertisement targeting.

It’s not a direct data to money pipeline, but having an always on listening device in someone’s home nets you a ton of useful data as an online retailer and advertiser.

You could look into using a download manager. No reason for you to manually start each download in sequence if there’s a way to get your computer to automatically start the next as soon as one finishes.

Oh look, it’s the semi-annual “we fucked up” press release. Please take us back, we promise we’ll only be abusive when you really deserve it. 🤮

Oof. Guess you hacked yours before they had sorted out the DNS settings and the module that blocks connections to Nintendo servers? That sucks.

It makes us all look stupid and hateful.

I’d argue that it does a lot more than make people just look hateful. Plenty of assholes out there using progressive causes as justification and shielding for their poor behavior.

The dev could have avoided this easily by merging the original PR and moving on with their life, but there is negative reason for the dogpiling that occurred. It’s open fucking source. Fork it and make your own inclusive competitor.

The behavior of the community around this is reprehensible, and is the perfect ammunition for opportunists looking to draw people into right wing radicalism. “Look at what they did to someone for using he instead of they! Imagine what will happen if we let these people have any real power?”

Just like the “tesla hyperloop” or whatever they’re calling it, it’s not about innovation. It’s about keeping his brands in the public eye as a form of marketing. Even if on a logical level we all know it’s horseshit, it still keeps himself and Tesla salient.

He can afford to burn an incomprehensible amount of money on stunts for outcomes most people would consider inconsequential.

I’m not saying it’s 4D chess, it definitely isn’t. He’s not particularly intelligent in that way. That said, I do think there are some very simple reasons for him to do this that go beyond his absolutely insane delusional ego.

He has enough money that he can continue funding whatever he wants regardless of public opinion. He literally exists at a level where any press is good press as it keeps him fresh in peoples’ minds.

That’s cool, but I think I’ll stick to watching them at home. I like the machete viewing order a lot, and being able to use the Harmy “Despecialized Edition” fan cut of New Hope is wonderful. (Need to check if he ever completed any of the other movies with that treatment).

Personally if I’m going to watch through with the in universe timeline order, I like to mix in some of the side shows and movies, which makes it far too long for an extended continuous viewing anyway.

It’s still not your hardware, so you can’t rely on the data being private to you even if the connection is secure.

Then there’s going to be all the politics present with the location of whatever endpoint you connect to, issues of uptime and availability, etc.

It’s a matter of the threat model you’re concerned about, but this does not fill me with confidence if this is considered a “breakthrough solution”. There’s nothing quite like a half assed solution to kneecap work on a “proper” one.

Depends on if you’re allowed to bring the Pi in at all. Might be safer to just buy what you need “on site”. There’s a lot more to this than just the technical side.

Whatever you do, just be careful. A lot of places don’t play easy with foreigners breaking the law. It can be easy to hide what you’re specifically doing over a network, but they don’t need to know what you’re spefically doing to say “bypassing the filter at all is illegal”, “using tor gives us probable cause”.

Depending on your situation and how they check things you bring in, it might be better to just load up a/some big hard drive(s) with enough content to carry you through until your next trip outside the filter. Knew someone who was in a similar situation for a long while that would emulate their way through old console game libraries like that.

May be worth looking into how political dissidents can protect themselves. Hidden encrypted containers. Private vps outside the filter that you connect to, doing all your questionable shit on the remote server outside, so the only data transfer is video feed to/from. If hiding what you’re doing is needed, steal notes from the people with lives at stake.

So much of this depends on specifics it may not be safe for you to share. Probably worth asking questions in some of the privacy focused communities.

OpenWRT won’t hide what you’re doing from the network that handles your internet connection. It’s just an option for something you could use as a router/wifi AP.

Wow, that’s certainly a take. How are they worse than Sony or fucking Microsoft? Microsoft was under IRS investigation at one point. They dragged thing out resulting in multiple millions of taxpayer money being wasted, ruined the professional careers of the lead names on the investigation, bribed politicians to cut so much funding from the IRS that another investigation of that scale is simply not possible, and bribed other politicians to sway laws in their favor to help make what they were investigated for much harder to pursue charges on.

Do you have any substantive shit that the other big names aren’t guilty of as well? I’d love to hear it!

Toss some CRT shaders over top and this would be very convincing.

• Shattered Pixel Dungeon
• Project Zomboid
• Vampire Survivors
• Rimworld
• Metal Gear Solid V (on PC with mods that greatly expand/enhance free roam, and add more side ops)
• Tomba 1 and 2 (Tombi in the EU)
• Chrono Trigger
• Megaman Legends (love the sequel, but haven’t ever completed it, life keeps getting in the way)
• Castlevania Syphony of the Night
• Sonic Adventure (it’s trash, but fun trash, especially with mods)
• Sonic Mania, Sonic 3 and Knuckles
• Minecraft

Some that I haven’t come back to in a while, but I’m overdue:

• Ape Escape
• Crash Bandicoot (1-3)
• Spyro (1-3)
• Digimon World 3
• Any of the GBA or DS Castlevanias
• Actraiser
• Rayman 2
• Megaman Battle Network series(3 and 4 are my favorite entries)
• Dissidia Duodecim
• Zone of the Enders 2
• God Hand
• Wipeout Pulse/Pure
• Pretty much any Kirby game

Most of these games I find just plain fun. Thanks for asking, I was starting to get burned out and not finding stuff as fun, but writing this out has me hankering to revisit some old favorites again.

Lego Island was one of my first PC games, and I spent absolute ages in it. Still have my CD. As an adult I find it a little too zany and wacky for an in-depth revisit, but as a young imaginative ADHD boy it was an amazing little sandbox to run around in. So many different ways to interact with things, ways to customize your island through different characters changing stuff when you clicked on it, and just enough mysterious things to keep the imagination going.

I’m looking forward to the decomp that MattKC is working on for it.

Outside of that, I played a TON of the old flash and shockwave games on the Lego website. I felt so cool knowing extra lore around the mask of light movie because I had been playing the Bionicle flash game. They also had a lot of neat puzzle games.

The concept of the programmable Spybots, and the K’Nex programmable kit really jump started my interest in programming as a kid too.

Only if you aren’t interested in a conversation where all parties have a clear understanding of what’s being discussed.

Just to stave off anyone else coming in and going “ackshuallee”… it’s true that you could technically do that with libreELEC. It’d be a fool’s errand of using SSH to get to the terminal and install all the programs and dependencies, and you’d still need some way to do arbitrary terminal commands from the kodi menu (I think there are plugins for that and for launching arbitrary programs though).

I played around with that myself for a few hours and gave up.

I’d love something actually good, but the closest you’ll get probably is running Kodi or whatever media frontend you want on top of a stripped down “normal” OS, with a separate frontend for games/programs like HyperSpin. Find a way to launch one from the other and you’d be set.

You’d still have to deal with Kodi not being able to pull full quality video from streaming platforms too, assuming you aren’t just sailing the high seas for your media.

If no one is actually auditing that code, or somehow confirming that the binaries shipped by your package manager match what the code compiles to, then you’re still playing a trust game.

Trusting in open source software devs rather than a capitalist corporation definitely makes sense, but it isn’t some panacea for “safe, nonspying software”.

Also, dependencies on linux absolutely include programs I don’t want. They just tend to be less obtrusive terminal programs and libraries rather than full blown UI based shit. Less visible, but far easier to sneak under the radar.

Google’s monopolistic and often asinine implementation of web standards that haven’t been fully set in stone by the proper internet oversight groups yet, I’d guess?