Demoscene, baby. People made things, shared them anonymously, and almost turned their nose at building a reputation or a brand.

The internet I fell in love with years ago is nothing like the pathetic shadow of it we live with today.

Macroblank has a fun compilation of remixed demo music, many of the original tracks are mostly known for being used in keygens. It’s called Keygen, obviously.

CalcKey? FireFish? Developers of Discord alternatives are just a special kind of person. Their efforts are commendable of course.

There was an idea tooted over on Mastodon

It’ll just be called Microsoft Copilot.

None of you are in an abusive relationship with the cruel mistress that is Windows and her accursed family and it shows.

Personally I’m excited for when they rerelease regedit as Windows Copilot, MFS as (Co)Pilot, and Purble Place as Copilot Kids Demo.

I used to refuse change at the bakery when I was a kid and would instead pick something out of the stack of pirated PS2 games. Something like two US dollars? Three? Not an egregious sum for my child self to waste every so often. The death of the on the ground piracy culture of the third world really sucks, although those beautifully dodgy TV boxes give me hope for humanity.

Those were the fucking days eh? You either catch a movie on TV or in the cinema, or you get lucky with whatever they’ve got on random counters in random shops. Remember watching schlock? Was that bad for culture? Was it really that bad?

Has Z Lib just been down for a while? I think I remember using it not that long ago

Errands, dishes, cleaning the house, illegally unpaid overtime, Sisyphean traffic, overeating, illegally unpaid overtime, doomscrolling the YouTube homepage of all things if you can believe it, dishes, researching projects I don’t start, near-catatonic day sleeping, opening and closing my kitchen cabinets to look inside, a few rounds of Megabonk on handheld or iOS 4 era tower defense games on my phone, staring at the ceiling listening to weird internet music, programming 0.04% of a new personal project, Sisyphean traffic, errands, staring at the ceiling listening to podcasts about the terrible football team I follow, researching projects I don’t start, overeating, a few rounds of Megabonk on handheld or iOS 4 era tower defense games on my phone, cleaning the house, doomscrolling the YouTube homepage of all things if you can believe it, dishes, near-catatonic day sleeping, researching projects I don’t start, staring at the ceiling listening to nothing, illegally unpaid overtime, dishes, traffic, ceiling, dishes, unpaid overtime, podcasts, sleep,

The game I’m currently playing is great! I haven’t been able to play this last weekend though. Please ignore that Steam says I haven’t launched it since November 4.

I’ve hit procrastinating games that I want to play. Do you understand where that leaves other things that could be more important?

If the Mullvad desktop app could just exclude the Tailscale ports this would be fixed. I like their implementation but I would much rather have the full controls of the Mullvad software itself especially if I’m on a desktop.

I think I’ve heard somewhere an opinion that someone preferred the original atmosphere of the game even if it was flawed. I do wonder if they have a mode for that.

I haven’t played the game so I don’t know, but that’s the first thing I think of for some reason

I’m so vehemently opposed to using their euphemism for it. “Age verification” is just the marketing name for it, it’s identity verification.

Huh. Reddit used to allow VPN users to access images they host even if they didn’t let them browse the platform anonymously. Guess they “fixed” that.

O&O Shutup10 is the most straightforward for Windows. You can run it every once in a while to see if anything’s changed, and it will let you know.

I did have reduced frights on and it didn’t work for me. I’ve even read some anecdotes about it being worse than having it off. It doesn’t remove the creatures I think it just makes them walk slower and makes the sounds less jumpy, I think.

Put off the DLC for so long (4 years now? 5?) that I’d have to relearn a fair bit to get back into it.

I remember being chased by a creature and noping out. I’m not built for horror games and that was a huge shift in tone from the idyllic feeling of the base game. I get that the thing I’m avoiding is basically a sprite with eyes and some music cues designed to feel a little stressful but I don’t know.

Oh there’s absolutely no excuse for it not to open Terminal when you type terminal. I can’t replicate it on my side but I’ve probably turned that “feature” off ages ago. I’m a little surprised at the downvotes, as I’m making fun of Windows. Linux used to have a reputation for its learning curve, especially knowing CLI commands. Daunting stuff for the average user. It’s better now, and beautifully enough it’s Microsoft’s fuckery with putting unwanted shit in their OS that’s teaching people more about the inner workings of the system they’re using, both pushing them towards gutting the OS, and towards other OSes. In the Lemmy demographic that’s usually Linux, around me it’s actually been Macs, and those are even more egregiously expensive where I live.

Another way the esotericness tables have turned: the Windows configuration UIs have similar names, do adjacent functions, and aren’t listed anywhere in one place. You have to know what setting you want and where it’s found. There used to be one Control Panel, and a few advanced tools you could find in the Start menu. Microsoft wants to “modernize” some of these, so they’ve pulled parts of their settings piecemeal into their new Settings UI (which they call an app, I don’t like that). But you still have some settings that are still in the legacy Control Panel UI. You have a ton of settings that are still in standalone legacy settings UIs. Some of them look like Windows 10, some like Vista/7, and there’s a handful that look like Windows 95. You need to know that the display color calibration options in the Settings UI can be overridden by the vendor’s control software (that’s a whole rant), and that what you actually want is a standalone settings window called Color Management. You need to know what operations can be done in Disk Management, Disk Cleanup, Optimize Drives, you need to know that they exist, and you then need to know if the command you want is actually only achievable in diskpart. I have nothing against diskpart but I can’t tell you which among Terminal, PowerShell, or Windows PowerShell (or any of the x86 variations plural of each of them) is the right place to use it. I can intuitively tell it’s not Windows PowerShell ISE or Azure Cloud Shell though. Yay for computer literacy. I type cmd into the Start menu and it works from there, so I’m content with that. I can’t say Raspberry Pi OS has this many configuration locations but once you know the two or three places to look you’re done.

I know that I will have to move to Linux eventually. I’ve only complained about things in Windows that aren’t designed to abuse the users directly, which is a drop in the bucket, ethically at least, when you look at the responsibilities of the world’s most (or second most) influential company regarding personal computing. But I look at all this and feel like it’s accelerating the scary trend of younger people getting worse with computers. I was able to follow instructions correctly in a novel computer environment to set up a mini homelab with a bunch of Linux servers talking to each other. People my own age and slightly younger at work seem to know fuck all about the computers we use and that terrifies me. We were supposed to get better over time, not worse! There’s a new, younger IT guy, he’s not much younger than me, and half of what I’m procedurally required to ask his help on is something he doesn’t understand at all.

Home server mountain hermit life is no longer over the horizon for me, that’s all I can say really.

You’re not wrong but there’s something very funny about a gaggle of Linux evangelists complaining about it not being obvious what aliases to type to open something

AFAIK there was a memory leak in PowerToys. But it’s definitely ballooned in scope since it was first released. I suppose turning off the parts you don’t need would help but it really should still be more efficient. Doesn’t help that the Microsoft Department of AI Department seems to have started sinking its teeth into it as of the last few updates.

I’m seeding a handful. I think maybe one or two has a non zero share ratio, and none above 1. But it’s not clogging up any bandwidth for me, so I’ll keep it going for now.

This might have been the last AAA game I was hyped for, bought at full price, and enjoyed within its buzz cycle.

I should play it again.