DragonofKnowledge

joined 7 months ago
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[–] DragonofKnowledge 2 points 41 minutes ago

Ah. In that case, why not?

[–] DragonofKnowledge 9 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Tofu is tried and true and super versatile.

Learning to cook seitan feels like a veritable lifehack the first time you experience turning 2 cups of gluten powder into a massive bounty of sandwich slices.

Things like Beyond (ideally their avocado-oil versions) are a bit too pricy, but a nice change of pace when they go on sale. They're good for those random burger cravings. Same story with those breaded Gardein patties.

Soy curls are a miracle.

[–] DragonofKnowledge 3 points 11 hours ago

There's nothing wrong with meat substitutes. Vegans don't take issue with the taste and textures of foods, we take issue with where those foods come from and how they're acquired. Mock meats are a great way to help people ease their transition into a better lifestyle until get more accustomed to more plant-forward meals, as well as being a panacea for people who have food sensitivity issues.

[–] DragonofKnowledge 1 points 11 hours ago

Last I saw, there's only a simple asset demo that comes bundled with the engine to help serve as a base to build free content on. I haven't heard about any full free alternatives yet though.

One of their more recent blog posts does go into detail about some experimental work they're doing to introduce compatibility with Quake-engine resources though, so that's all cool.

[–] DragonofKnowledge 9 points 11 hours ago

The necessary resources to do so. 😔

[–] DragonofKnowledge 2 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

That's a pretty interesting idea. Unfortunately it depends on being somewhere where copyrights ever actually end.

[–] DragonofKnowledge 5 points 13 hours ago (3 children)

Seems like it would be a lot more work and potential attack surface for what's essentially redundant.

Also seeing other comments, I'm out of the loop. What's so bad about the lemmy devs?

[–] DragonofKnowledge 25 points 1 day ago (5 children)

I know it's not going to happen, but I would love it if legislation could go as far as requiring companies to open-source their engines and servers after maybe a period of time, or on ending support for the game. It could be done ID-style where the company retains full rights of the content and trademarks, which would still require players to buy the game to legally play it.

I'm aware there are a lot of cases where games include middleware that's licensed from 3rd parties that complicate preservation efforts. But if open-sourcing the code is the path taken, there's a simple solution for that: just release what you can, even if what's released is in an unplayable state without the middleware. It then becomes the responsibility of any volunteers to take that code and bring it back to a usable state however they choose.

This drama highlights that there's still a great need for better computer literacy. Anyone with even a basic education in how software, source-code, and software licensing works can tell PirateSoftware is full of shit pretty much immediately. That is, anyone educated who are themselves not grifters.

[–] DragonofKnowledge 2 points 2 weeks ago

Oh, duh. Lol, thanks.

[–] DragonofKnowledge 2 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

That's strange, what distro are you running on this hardware? VLC has been around for a long time, so while older hardware might not support versions of it that support newer codecs, I'd imagine it should be able to do at least some video playbook on older versions of VLC.

[–] DragonofKnowledge 16 points 2 weeks ago

I hope this guy is caught, arrested, and prosecuted. I have no doubts his mind is full of the whole spectrum of maga christofascist psychosis, and I hope we get to see all of that on full display.

The more awareness the country has of how deeply disturbed, and corrupt, Christian fundamentalism is, the better.

[–] DragonofKnowledge 19 points 3 weeks ago

Pinta is the main one that comes to mind. I don't use it every day, far from it, and that's a part of why I love it. On the rare occasion that I have to do some image editing, I load up Gimp and then proceed to fight against it for at least a whole day to make it do the simplest of things before finally ragequitting. Then I load up Pinta and actually get the task done in either minutes or hours at most.

It's like old school MS Paint, but better. Simple, intuitive, no huge learning curve, just enough features to get my nonprofessional tasks done. It should be a distro default.

 
 

As a start, here's the companies known to have supported Trump's presidential campaign.

https://www.opensecrets.org/2024-presidential-race/donald-trump/contributors?id=N00023864

I'm sure there are more. Let's start figuring out who all we need to stop supporting. We need to also identify alternatives, and then put this all together so that everyone possible has a comprehensive guide for boycotting everyone who is supporting this administration.

 

Tl;dr: skip to the bottom for links.

I originally posted this here, and linked to it in a subreddit where evidently a community of pirates hates piracy.

This post is intended specifically for the retro gaming communities, though it's applicable for anything related to information sharing. In these spaces there's a strange kind of self-harm going on circa 2024, in which a nontrivial amount of people(sock puppets?) are fomenting anti-piracy sentiment, and defending aggressive industry juggernauts, as if these corporations aren't actively harming and seeking to eliminate these very same communities.

This is strange since retro gaming is all but founded and completely dependent on the free sharing of information and culture, which often includes piracy for better or worse. The word 'retrogaming' is nearly synonymous with emulation. It used to be that older games would rarely, if ever, be preserved on new systems. Even to this day there are still many games considered to be "abandonware". It's arguable that the growth of emulation - and piracy that most often accompanies it - played and plays a critical role in the renaissance of both indie retro-styled games, as well as the plethora of classic games which have officially had re-releases.

Ironically even as these behemoths are actively trying to destroy emulation, many companies have chosen the lazy route of using emulators to re-release their classic games, rather than making the extra effort to either open-source the classic engines or port the source material themselves.

As a sidenote, here is a list of legal video game engine recreations and source ports, however many of these do require you to own a copy of the original game to make use of them.

What it comes down to is that they don't want to compete. With a retro handheld I can suddenly have access to thousands of games either through native ports, emulation, or open projects like PortMaster. What's even better is that I can trust that whatever other computer hardware I decide to use in the future - whether PC, single-board computers, Android devices, or the plethora of retro console and handhelds flooding the markets these days - I can preserve and bring all of the content I already own into all of these devices and keep playing without a hitch.

Importantly, these communities enable the wonderful world of romhacking - free sharing of info, whether legally sanctioned or not - is a benefit for creators as well as consumers, and can easily be a gateway for the latter to grow into the former.

By contrast what the game console racket wants is to scam you into buying the same games you've already purchased over, and over again, through planned obsolescence, ignoring the environmental impact of these awful business models.

They want to leverage proprietary software and weaponize copyright law to eliminate competition and keep their users in a walled garden, where the entire experience is controlled from top to bottom by them. Their business strategies are dependent on the de-legitimization and elimination of the free sharing of information and culture.

Piracy is only bad for those who want to horde wealth and build monopolies.

If you're a content creator or someone who aspires to create, you might feel like piracy is a danger to you. My hope is that if you read everything linked in this post, you might come to recognize that the free sharing of information can do the opposite - it can be an asset to your career. At a glance the Free and Open-Source Software movements are living proof of this. There is no need to remain attached to a Faustian pact.

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