Next week, imma be all about this.

I understand what you’re saying, but AOL had the opposite problem. The internet at that time was hard to use in general, so it was more about trying to provide enough of anything to get commercial viability for regular people. At one point, AOL was 30% of the entire internet. Seriously, it hosted almost a third of everything online. The alternatives were CompuServe or Prodigy or simply not being online at all. But you paid for it up front as an ISP. AOL didn’t provide anything for free up front.

The Web 2.0 walled garden approach is about preventing you from wandering out onto the wide open spaces of the rest of the internet out there and not seeing the content curated to make the platform provider money. And making the 10% of daily internet content composed of idiotic FB comments and posts seem like it’s worth all your time when you can easily use one of 5 or 6 search engines to find alternative content. Making staying in the garden so cost effective and frictionless that even using a search engine seems “hard” to do.

The day I wiped all partitions from my dual boot and started fresh with no windows on the machine was a revelation. My heart sang and my soul wept with joy. Windows lives in a caged state now, a neutered monster I rarely demand dance for me because it is ugly and awkward and on an external drive I don’t care about.

Not the only one, but it’s the walled garden platform approach.

The idea (from around 2010ish) was that every platform is an app and every app is everything. A company buys up other smaller companies until you have a payment system, a marketplace, a VOIP system, advertising, job posting boards, 4 different waya to share media, etc. etc.

While the tech world sold this as, and actually viewed this as, some organic online super village, it wasn’t. It was a series of shit stripmalls adjacent to a Walmart in a shitberg town on a big freeway linking other shiberg towns with Walmarts. Sterile, restrictive, one size fits all dipshits kind of garbage. There’s a kind of person that thrives in the parking lots of Walmarts and stripmalls in shitberg towns, and they thrive on social media, too.

Lemmy reminds me more of early internet as well, but also refined by the common language of those platforms as a common starting point. It’s a niche, and it’s not for everyone. But it is for you, welcome.

Still to this day I hum Black Sabbath when I drive fast or do any fancy weaving.

TIL there’s an arcade version of Ghosts n Goblins

Thanks for the links!

I feel it. I feel the cosmos!

Earthworm Jim

Atomic Robokid (Genesis)

Tempest (Atari 2600 version)

Ghosts and Goblins (NES)

The game where it’s a rich guy that sends a trained assassin out onto a island with nothing and hunts him for 24 hours, and if the assassin kills the rich guy he gets his freedom and like $20K.

Rock n Roll Racing (SNES)

Beyond All Reason/Planetary Annihilation

Doing OSINT is exactly what converted me into a privacy advocate.

I saw some retiree earlier today trying to take a pic of something. Opened his phone holding it up for all to see, and has only stock Android and bloatware apps. Like he just set it up yesterday. Worn cover and screen indicates, nope, not a new phone. I sighed a heavy sigh of sadness. Old guy has no idea. And would be pissed if he actually knew how much data he sprays all over.

Funny how it had to happen in that order.

Well, it’s built to use Ooga, but it’s also set up to be able to handle Booga as well. It depends on the driver set you need to load Fire and Club.

Formally, it’s the Alliance to Restore the Republic. Mon Mothma is the Alliance’s Chancellor, which is a sort of association of rebel cells spread across the galaxy. So she’s sort of elected by the leadership of each rebel cell.

Then on the starship side, it basically seems like anyone with a ship gets promoted to general and promised back pay once the Republic is restored. It’s sort of a gamble, but it beats smuggling spice and contraband.

Holy shit. Yes, it does. Thanks! Hadn’t heard of it until today

Because it’s an option already. “Transliterate to Latin letters.”

Edit: I should add that you should look at how many keyboard layouts there are. It’s kind of silly that for me to use an OSM based map and go to any county east of Slovenia I need to both have the keyboard AND know the transliteration of the alphabet.

Have you seen the Armenian or Georgian alphabets? What makes the K sound?

Did you know every dialect of a Slavic language using Cyrillic has it’s own distinct keyboard varied by mostly the letter for the nya sound and J?

Greek?

All while transliteration works fine in Google.

Destination search in all the OSM based maps is a challenge. The Latin letter transliteration only applies to large features. So if I want to find an address in a country try that doesn’t use Latin script, I literally need a keyboard in that language or do a lot of cut and paste from Google Translate. My address never, ever works on OSM. Gets the wrong street, can’t even handle house/building numbers. Works fine on Google.

Depends on the person. My spouse and I, along with 5 or 6 friends, use a variety of key words from a couple shared languages to talk about things when we don’t want other to understand. Mostly haggling or talking about sales stuff to discuss if we like something or think it’s too expensive when a human is hovering right there. So I can give body language of disappointment while saying “this is great.”

I don’t hate Arch. Or Vegan diets. Or Crossfit. Or colleges outside of Boston, either.

But the people…well…

The problem with the money problem is the money part. As much as I actually do want to donate to ALL the open source platforms I use, I don’t have enough to do that equitably between platforms and even cover processing costs of the payment. 25 services split $100? Why bother?

A foundation with an endowment is actually the solution. The Open Source Foundation (or someone like them) needs to become a neutral arbiter and incubator.

But also - I would, and can, provide labor. I would love to give anything FOSS 20-30 hours a week of my time. But doing what? Should I get a part time job to support 25 FOSS services? Take Fivr gigs and donate it all? Or can I just directly hustle a part time work week somehow?

Rural poor checking in.

I’ve lived in a camper, and then in the back of a convenience store my patents ran. Eventually upgraded to a doublewide. But I went to a rural school with like 40 kids that were all also poor. One kid and his family were miners living in a series of vans upon blocks by the mine. My best friend and his family lived in a half used rundown motel, the other half too broken down to bother living in. The richest kid was a rancher’s family that lived in a barndominium.

So every family on TV was rich to me, but it was TV, so I figured it was all fantasy land anyway. Star Trek wasnt real, either. I had seen a “normal” school before 3rd grade, but by high school and college, people that thought Nickelodeon (which I didn’t see until college anyway) shows were relatable at all just seemed like space aliens to me. I was likely more the space alien to them.

I can’t help you other than to say MSI is awesome. I wish you luck on your quest.