Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

time for some obscure #UltimaOnline #gamepreservation history

back in 1997, there was no such thing as a subscription system for MMOs that didn't require a credit card. the UO team came up with the "Game Time Card" system, which allowed people to buy 30 & 90 day subscriptions from brick & mortar game stores. every MMO afterward, like EQ, WoW and SWG would replicate that system.

since the cards were single-use disposables, 99.99% of gamers tossed these cards out when they were done with them. they were impossible to find after a few years. it took me 15 years to find a couple of these cards, mercifully saved by a gamer in Germany, which just arrived today

a 90-day card was included in the Charter Edition of the game (only available by special order prior to launch), pictured below. it is now back in its rightful place in the box 😅

High-profile streamers bail on MrBeast-promoted Creator League after learning there are blockchains involved

September 6, 2023
https://web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=high-profile-streamers-bail-on-mrbeast-promoted-creator-league-after-learning-there-are-blockchains-involved

End User License Agreements are not consent. Burying how you are going to fuck someone over in pages and pages of hard to read legalese that you damn well know the person will not read and might not even be able to understand is a scummy practice we should abolish.

Being an instance admin/mod is a position of responsibility and accountability. You owe (yes, owe) the people on your instance the assurance that your actions as a leader will be level-headed, fair, and free of personal grievances in your dealings with other instances—because your behavior with users outside of your instance gives great insight into your potential behavior inside of your instance as well.

I am begging everyone using the /#fediblock hashtag to keep it clear of personal vendettas and diatribes. It's your choice how to manage your community, but misusing fediblock, a tool for keeping Masto users and communities safe, for lashing out and revenge, flies in the face of a worthy goal and a powerful tool for good.

#FediBlockMeta

shock collar that shocks you whenever someone in your polycule with a distance of 3 or less has an orgasm

self-hosted spotify alternative that shows you a list of people who are currently having sex to that song, with a "beats to fuck to" playlist that plays the songs that people fucking listen to the most right now.

has anybody noticed that computers aren't very good

"Do you believe in life after work"
Spotted in Lucca, Italy

No but for real:

MasterCard getting to determine what counts as "adult" content, including drawn images like figure studies?

Patreon handing your face data & ID information over to a 3rd party?

That 3rd party claiming a right to use that data to train their facial recognition "AI"?

All bad.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/88720290

I'm constantly embarrassed and angry at my conduct in the last decade online

But I've also realized enough to understand just because I have learned and grown from my mistakes doesn't mean that the people I hurt have to see that. There is no reason to force them to look at me again. If I try to, I have learned nothing.

They're allowed to tell their friends about how I pissed them off a few years ago (just as I may do to my friends about them), and I'm allowed to just keep living my life and trying to be better as to not fuck up like that again.

The renaming of T-Mobile NL to #Odido starting today really going well 😂
- Webcare for T-Mobile stopped zero seconds after the announcement of the new name.
- Competor KPN seems to be the only one who knew about this new name
- Lot's of people confused why their phone is connected to Odido, but see point 1: no webcare!
- E-mail/SMS about name change still not send to all customers.

Ja duh, want de werkcultuur is Nederland is ziekelijk "lekker samen zijn van opstaan tot bedtijd", de lonen zijn niet meegegroeid met de huidige levenskosten, er is te weinig personeel voor noodzakelijk werk en teveel personeel voor onnoodzakelijk werk en wtf kost een huis tegenwoordig wel niet. Wordt tijd dat er eens wat Angelsaksische eigenschappen uit de werkcultuur worden verdreven.

https://nos.nl/artikel/2489307-aantal-jonge-werkenden-met-burn-outklachten-neemt-toe-vooral-vrouwen

one of the big frustrations i had very early on in this mess, and i don't... directly think i have seen nik say this, but there *were* calls to uninstall (or at least, I'm Uninstalling loudly announced) by other folks and a sort of Tusky Is Bad Now air.

i was very frustrated to see some folks go "uhhh should i be still using tusky" when like

frankly, as an end user of an app, it never was going to really affect you that tusky was like, spending some of its money on things that didn't get finished

and that's not the fault of ppl who've been told to uninstall bc like. ppl listen simultaneously more and less the more urgent someone is being. act faster with less thought and/or panic. and often when ppl are urgent abt removing software, there are good reasons to heed their words!

but like, basically i think my point is that you do kinda need to know when it's *actually* urgent-as-in-Now to uninstall and utterly stop using a perfectly fine and functional app, in a similar way that it's important to know how to check if an Urgent Alert is really your bank, or a scammer.

(tangent scam avoidance advice: generally, when avoidable, try not to click links in texts or give personal information to someone who called *you* - call *them* back via an established support phone number.)

those reasons are
- security flaws or severe risks thereof

it's quick it's easy it's free. if someone tells u to uninstall a thing bc new information has come out about it, look at what they're saying and ask, yourself or them directly - "does this threaten my livelihood, devices, or data to keep installed"

if the answer is no, then... keep using it and see how things shake out after a few more days, maybe dig into the story if you want to understand it.

but like, frankly, NixOS could be revealed to be doing for realsies money laundering for all i care and it wouldn't yet be my problem if my computer won't be compromised in the near future

also wanna note: fashy or otherwise potentially threatening devs are 100% a valid threat to include in this question as a security risk. if the project is open source it's hypothetically harder to sneak in malicious code, but it's still worth considering as a potential real threat.

i'm sleep deprived and dunno how to end this post bye

I'm really mad at several college professors in the CS department at my undergrad who told us all "self driving cars are coming" and trusting them as authorities I quashed my many qualms and wasted a lot of time in otherwise important conversations about urban planning insisting that we account for the impact of this 'inevitable' variable.

"They will be safer than human drivers." tapped into my confirmation bias ... I hate drivers, after all. Of course every one could be bested by a machine. 1/