I’d love to see someone figure out how to up the player limit or link games. Baldur’s Gate would be such a great medium for a D&D roleplay server if it could be set up to handle it.

The way to fix it is for developers not to sell out. When your small studio’s game blows up, you’re left with a choice. Do you care about art and making quality games, or do you care about making money and appeasing corporations in exchange for empty promises?

Are you going to leave you work in the hands of its creators, or are you going to hand it off to someone whose entire path in life is centered around squeezing as much money as possible out of every product with no concern for its quality or integrity?

That’s horrible. Haldol is like a punch to the brain. They’re going to turn these poor kids into chemical zombies.

The Sega game was pretty cool. You could be a dinosaur!

Nah, it’s a subscription service, but it’s got a few notable YouTubers and they tend to drop extra content there. PhilosophyTube is on there, 12Tone, a bunch of people. As a platform it’s a lot less bullshit, but it’s also obviously less content.

Though now I realize you actually have to get referred by one of the other members in order to start posting, so I’m not really sure they stand to benefit that much. It kind of explains why the content has been lacking. It certainly won’t ever have the diversity of content that YouTube has with that approach.

Honestly learning that it’s more of a market stall than a garden makes me less enthusiastic. It’s there to curate what’s already on YouTube without YouTube’s limitations, not to create a better alternative that’s actually sustainable.

uBlock Origin works fine for me on youtube. Just make sure you keep it updated and don’t run multiple blockers.

This could honestly be really good for Nebula.

You have literally no idea who I am or what I do.

I used GIMP to make a mock-up of a sign for a restaurant just yesterday. Is it going to be the tool I use for the final product? No, because that’ll be in vector, but it’s a lot easier to slap something together in than Inkscape or Krita.

‘Killer apps’ are meaningless in comparison to useful apps. I’m an artist who needs usable tools for her work. GIMP qualifies. Personally, I find it way easier and more intuitive to navigate than Krita, Inkscape, or any of Adobe’s suite. It may not be for you, that’s cool.

But what isn’t cool is to pretend you know about other people’s lives and what they need. Speak for yourself, you are perfectly capable of doing that. If you don’t like GIMP’s UI, that’s great. If you think GIMP’s UI is absolutely horrible for every user and nobody would ever use it for professional work… you’re literally just completely wrong.

This is a repost. Also, like, do we need to keep spamming Beehaw’s tech section with headlines that reference rape as like, a casual way to say that a company did something dishonest? Cause I’m not really into it.

Like, seriously, is there a creepier version of this headline?

It would be nice if companies like this came out with a budget model so more people could participate in supporting their products. Lotta poor folks into FOSS.

5-7-5 is pretty stable tbh.

“Here I was, trying to burn down a building, and in swoops fucking Russia! Do prdele!”

I’m not sure I’d call buying up and burning other companies like furniture in a fireplace ‘sustainable’.

Headline reads like the PM is annoyed that Russia botched the arson.

There isn’t one best tabletop RPG system, or one best edition of tabletop RPG system. There’s nothing inherently better about using one system over another. The only real difference is your own preference.

Like, Pathfinder, the first one, is a really interesting and robust system. It’s great if you know it, but if you don’t know it there are a lot of pitfalls and trap feats built in, and it can be hard to make a character that keeps up with the curve if you don’t know what you’re doing. Kind of reminds me of Magic: the Gathering in that; lots of options that seem good out of context, but aren’t really. That’s fine for some groups, for others it’s a lot of extra headache.

Does D&D 5e treat your characters as being more robust and capable than, say, AD&D 2e? Yes, absolutely. But like, even that is just the default behavior of the system. That factors in, but a competent DM can run a ruthless game in 5e too, it’s just a matter of shifting the numbers.

If your partner feels like 5e is too much of a power fantasy for his tastes, I’d recommend trying Dungeon Crawler Classics. You generate a handful of random level 0 characters and take like 4 per player into a dungeon that’s an absolute meat grinder for them. They progress, you add new level 0s if you need to, and you keep going. It’s a lot of fun watching your shitty little level 0 farmer grow into a fighter or a wizard or something. DCC is an absolutely ruthless system though, so be prepared to lean into it.

On the other hand, there is still plenty of AD&D 2e material out there. Maybe more than 5e, I’m not really sure. It was pretty robust, though, and less forgiving than 5e without being quite as bad as DCC, but your little level 1 wizard with 4 health can still get one-shotted by pretty much anything.

Of course, you can always just tune these systems to do what you want. Want to play 2e but don’t feel like figuring out how THAC0 works or ever bothering to calculate it? Great! Don’t. Just slot modern AC and hit rolls in. Start AC at 10 and when 2e says to go down, go up instead. Whenever something would make your THAC0 go down, treat that thing as an attack bonus instead. Hey, check it out, we’ve just stumbled into 3e’s Base Attack Bonus system.

Tabletop rule sets aren’t a god for you to worship, they’re a tool for you to make as flexible as you need it to be. Take the pieces you want, toss the pieces you don’t, add your own stuff. That’s how any of this stuff got made to begin with, and it’s how it progresses.

Want to make 5e more ruthless? Design an injury system and implement it.

But don’t just get sad that some people have some milquetoast criticism about the one edition you happen to have stumbled across first. Who cares? Check out some other systems and develop your own opinions and contexts.

I hope your partner sorts it out!

Honestly, I don’t need the tools I use to change to become more mass-market focused. Nobody wants to eat a soup designed by consensus. I’d rather use something that suits me and have it continue to suit me than need everything to be the biggest most popular thing. Popularity seems to kind of ruin things.

Wasn’t there somebody just the other day talking about Adobe’s ever-growing bloated bullshit versus GIMP’s sleek UI and consistent features? Oh. Right. It was me.

I think when people think of the danger of AI, they think of something like Skynet or the Matrix. It either hijacks technology or builds it itself and destroys everything.

But what seems much more likely, given what we’ve seen already, is corporations pushing AI that they know isn’t really capable of what they say it is and everyone going along with it because of money and technological ignorance.

You can already see the warning signs. Cars that run pedestrians over, search engines that tell people to eat glue, customer support AI that have no idea what they’re talking about, endless fake reviews and articles. It’s already hurt people, but so far only on a small scale.

But the profitablity of pushing AI early, especially if you’re just pumping and dumping a company for quarterly profits, is massive. The more that gets normalized, the greater the chance one of them gets put in charge of something important, or becomes a barrier to something important.

That’s what’s scary about it. It isn’t AI itself, it’s AI as a vector for corporate recklessness.

So, just to make this clear.

The original goalpost was: “The US is exactly the same as Russia.” This being in the context of an article talking about Russian librarians being imprisoned and active extreme suppression of the free exchange of ideas being organized by the Russian government.

There are certainly issues going on with libraries. John Oliver recently did an episode going over a lot of it. But the difference there is that these are largely organized by either fringe politicians or politicians in heavily right-wing states. I don’t really see evidence of it at a Federal level, which is what would be the equivalent to what’s going on in Russia. Even where some of this stuff is happening, it doesn’t seem to yet be as extreme as the situation there.

Is it a similar and worrying pattern? Yes. Is it ‘exactly the same thing’? Definitely not.

The US is extremely different from state to state, which can make getting anything done on a wide scale really chaotic, but it also means that we get to try new things and strike out on our own as a state if there’s popular support. That’s how we got marriage equality for queer folks, it’s how we legalized marijuana in a lot of states, and it’s what makes us able to do things like pass laws that protect people from other states’ repressive laws. We can do things like provide a safe haven for people seeking abortions who live in states where it’s illegal. There are states in the US that will literally take in trans folks as refugees from states with repressive laws. On the other hand, we have Florida, where there’s actually a no travel advisory for trans people because they’ll arrest us for trying to use a bathroom or having our gender on our driver’s license.

And like, all this stuff you’re saying is absolutely true. It is a huge mess of near unchecked capitalistic greed in a lot of cases.

But at this point we’ve moved the goal posts. Because they now seem to be “the US also has serious humanitarian problems”. Which, that’s true. But it doesn’t mean the same thing as “the US is exactly the same as Russia.”

We have our own set of problems.

Cool condescension, but I’ve been using Photoshop on and off since 2005, have occasionally used Illustrator, and used to spend an absurd amount of time with Flash. In addition to GIMP, I currently have Krita and Inkscape installed.

I literally prefer GIMP’s UI. It doesn’t have extra shit, it doesn’t try to force me into a single window, and it goes really, really well with a multi-monitor setup. I don’t care that it doesn’t automatically edit non-destructively, because my workflow is adapted to it. Layers and folders are plenty.

No one piece of software is going to be the ideal solution for everyone. That’s capitalistic exceptionalism infecting the rational analysis of what tool suits which user best. Photoshop may suit you better, but I’d take the sleek usefulness of GIMP over the bloat that accompanies all that extra stuff I don’t need any day.

Why do I need an AI strapped to my tool for pixel art, pathing, and masking?