There’s always Diablo 1.

But my favorite is Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, which was made by some of the people who created Fallout and has a LOT in common with it. It’s an open world, a combination of classic fantasy with elves, dwarves, and halflings with a rising steampunk technology that competes with magic. There are many schools of magic and technology, as well as social, stealth, and combat skills. The graphics are very crude by today’s standards, but the gameplay is outstanding.

When I walk along a street, I count the number of drivers I see using their phones. It’s been a consistent 50%. And the ones who aren’t on their phones tend to be elderly. So what’s surprising about an increase in pedestrian deaths?

I’m in the same place without having read that piece you mentioned. And I’m not going to be looking it up.

As I see it, climate change is the greatest threat the human race has ever faced. It makes World War II look like a squabble in a kindergarten playground. We should all be INCREDIBLY impacted by this, and yet everyone keeps going on as if nothing is happening.

But I think 50 years is a little bit of a narrow time frame. More likely we’ll all die within 100 to 150 years. I mean, our species will go extinct.

Lately I’ve been thinking about what a sane society would do to try to mitigate the worst effect of climate change, while preparing society for the world that’s coming. A world without fossil fuels or basic infrastructure.

I don’t know about deletions, but I requested my data for takeout more than two weeks ago and I still haven’t received it.

Yes, a LOT.

Wouldn’t e-bikes be a relatively stopgap measure? They still require a relatively advanced and carbon-wasteful technological base, after all: maintenance and repair for the bikes themselves (including regular replacement batteries, which are definitely NOT environmentally friendly), plus paved roads in good repair (again, requiring a lot of fossil fuel expenditure).

There’s also the likelihood that as the Earth’s environment becomes increasingly hazardous we’ll require protection from the elements more and more often - protection which would be difficult to add to a bike of any sort.

The US military has projected that basic infrastructure in the USA will be collapsing throughout much of the country in less than twenty years. It’s hard to see how ebikes will be practical under those conditions. Gearing towards long-term lower-tech solutions would seem to be a wiser choice.

Those sociopaths have weighed down this sorry planet for far too long.

I did exactly that. And ever since then, I’ve been backing up my full uncompressed photographs onto several duplicate hard drives and flash drives. Plus my videos, of course. I really should set up a server so I could do all that automatically, but I don’t really know how and don’t have the energy to figure it out.

Kim (1901) by Rudyard Kipling is the story of a boy coming of age in colonial India. Kipling grew up in India himself, and the sheer richness of the many cultures that Kim experiences as he travels across India and up into the lower Himalayas with a Tibetan llama is mind-blowing. Meanwhile Kim is drawn into the “Great Game” of spying between the European powers. It’s a deeply moving and beautiful book. Best of all, you can download it for free in all the major ebook formats!

I was part of a group that left Goodreads when they sold us out to Amazon and Amazon started censoring reviews they didn’t like. We set up a community on Google Plus to research alternatives to Goodreads and secondarily, to Amazon itself.

I set up the spreadsheet we used to track our discoveries. It’s WAY out of date, but it’s still there - unlike Google Plus.

It didn’t exist back then, but BookWyrm would by far have been the best choice. It still needs some improvements, but it’s already outstanding.

I’m BobQuasit@bookwyrm.social there, by the way.

I will never trust Google for anything since they killed off Google Plus. Getting rid of “don’t be evil” as their corporate motto was a huge giveaway.

It was well before I turned one; I was still in a crib. It was dark, nighttime, and incredibly hot. Some sort of animal with glowing eyes stared at me from the floor.

I thought it was a dream, but decades later my parents confirmed that when I was a baby the thermostat had broken and we had a night where the temperature was 100°. As for the animal with glowing eyes, that was our cat.

That seems unnecessarily complicated! But I appreciate the info.

I find it strangely hard to care about the fate of a handful of multimillionaire tourists when hundreds of refugees died last week due to the indifference of the Greek authorities - and the media barely noticed.

“Good content”? You mean like the stuff that’s on Facebook now?

Yes, Infinity. Actually I used the official Reddit app until all of this hit the news. Then I deleted that app and switched to Infinity. When infinity goes, I’ll delete it and I’m done with Reddit except on an alt account on my desktop. And that will just be for correspondence.

Would different parts of the community be hosted on different instances, thereby spreading out the burden? Or would the entire community be mirrored to each of the hosting instances, thereby providing backup security?

I’ve actually been wondering about that. For example, what if an instance with a popular community went down or defederated from everyone? Would all the content of that community be lost to everyone else? I’m guessing that under those circumstances one or more new communities would be started to replace the “lost” community, although things could get complicated if there were more than one trying to replace the original - or if the original community refederated after the replacement communities developed.

That would be awkward in some cases. Say, if a non-Nazi ended up on a Nazi server by random chance.

That’s a damned good point!

I agree completely! And thanks for clearing up the disassociative identity disorder question, because I actually was wondering for a second. 😆

But if #1 is too hard, the ability to download all of your data from a login and possibly upload it to another account would be a good stopgap.