experbia

I went through a Second Life land trading phase quite a few years back. Properties like this were very valuable to advertisers. Because of advertisers, it was possible to be a niche real estate mogul for weird useless little virtual properties like this that could earn you an actual meaningful real-world income. Second Life had (may still have, I’ve not been back in a while) its own advertising industry and multiple adtech networks. A despicable inevitability of having completely free content creation tools and also an economy that can trade with real money. People trying to sell their creations want people to pay in game currency to get their things, so they can extract the value to real money. They want people to know about their products, so they turn to people who will accept in game currency to blast awareness of their products everywhere. Those advertisers want land, which they need to buy. Probably from another player.

So, the first thing I thought of when I saw this plot was “BILLBOARDS!!!” and I hate it.

I’ve been working through my first playthrough of Cyberpunk 2077 - it’s fairly enjoyable, I’m glad I ignored it outright until well after big patches rolled out. There’s something very satisfying about blowing up enemies through a camera.

I’ve also picked up Dwarf Fortress (Steam) for the first time. It has a lot of depth but has been fun to learn and try and figure out. I just flooded a section of my fortress by digging into an underground river.

My chill-out puzzle game has been Can of Wormholes and it’s pretty fun! It’s weird for sure… but definitely fun.

I’m glad to hear Wargroove 2 is worth it! I really enjoyed the first and I was worried when I heard about a sequel.

I agree entirely

This is great. This is how it always should have been.

Organization of any kind needs a Twitter page or subreddit? No, they need their own official, self-controlled Mastodon instance anyone can see and listen to and interact with, even without accounts on that specific instance. They need their own kbin or Lemmy instance to make and administer their community on and have control over, everyone can still participate even without signing up for accounts on that specific instance.

I’ve been playing through Control, which has been pretty fun, but… I just came out of TotK and every other game so far feels a bit… shallower. I don’t know how to explain it. I’ve also been taking breaks into Infinifactory again to finally finish it. Been a while since I’ve felt the itch for Zachtronics, and it feels good. The mechanical intricacy overshadows that hollow feeling.

What should I play next if TotK has set my bar so high? Will it just fade in time?

I love this guy, one of my few favorite YouTube channels and subscriptions. Anything he fixates on is suddenly interesting.

Wow, can’t say I’ve heard of that movie and I’m well over twice 15 these days lol. That scene sold me though, that was phenomenal.

I have complicated feelings on the idea of instances doing this defederation. I’m new to all this, so maybe this is natural. I mean, I’ve been peripherally aware of the fediverse for a few years. It was hard to miss after Twitter, but even before then I was keeping an eye on Matrix and PeerTube especially. But, never dipped my toe in until now.

On the one hand, I really resent the idea that my instance owner could simply be hiding part of the world from me over their personal opinions. Not just that, but silencing my voice in some corners, too. I know I could register accounts elsewhere but I don’t want more accounts, and how am I supposed to be knowing what I’m missing if it’s invisible to me already? I thought this is what federation was supposed to do: let me participate in anything from anywhere.

But as I’ve been watching some of this reddit stuff unfold, I guess it makes a lot of sense. Our current modern internet culture is inherently very insular. For any given person, there are bright beacons of strong attraction to those who think and feel like you do, and there are also dark areas of repulsion from communities whose ideals represent something that oppose yours. Online, like attracts like, and most people seem to really enjoy that. I think that most people are actually into social media for the entertainment value, and we all usually like to watch what we can relate with.

So for most users, this kind of thing probably really does improve their corners of the fediverse. It doesn’t have to be the end for people who want the freedom to read and write to any corner of any niche community or ideology. My wariness for being informationally controlled (fostered by recent commercial social media blowups) manifests in the fediverse as wanting my own instance, I think. There are a fair number of very small instances it seems like, and I’m assuming it’s because of people like me who felt the same pressure.

This puts me at ease, I think. I still have a way to remain independent, I just need to take responsibility for it. I’ll learn a bit more about how it all works, and maybe help improve it along the way to make it easier for others to achieve, too. I wonder if this isn’t a good thing for internet culture, really - encouraging the establishment of these new kinds of little lagrangian independence points people can be drawn to, between the extremes of the rest of the internet’s social attractors and repulsors, which we can leave for the people who really want that.

I really want to like this but the fact that two separate Nintendo communities (for example) can exist on two separate instances is a non-starter for most users and very nearly for me. Is there not a mechanism of some kind to join them so anyone joining their instance’s Nintendo community gets plugged in with every instance’s Nintendo posts? This will truly confuse most new people coming in from Reddit where communities had single canonical names.

Fuck spez.
Same, hell yeah.