ProdigalFrog
@ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net
- Comment on Welcoming Discord users amidst the challenge of Age Verification 16 hours ago:
For anyone considering something similar, I’d suggest hosting a Movim instance over Matrix, as it’s far easier to set up and configure since it uses XMPP instead. Should be lighter on resources too.
- Comment on 1 day ago:
Unfortunately we’ve allowed ourselves to use proprietary venture capital built apps, which inevitably will bring with it enshittification that makes continuing to use it against our own interests, but by then the network effect makes it like being caught in a sticky web that’s hard to escape.
We can only avoid this from happening again and again by using open-source libre software that allows for self-hosting and federation, just like Lemmy and Piefed, which makes them virtually immune from enshittification.
In this case, we need to migrate our friends and family one last time to something that will let us relax almost permanently for once.
Right now, our best option for a Discord alternative is Movim, which uses XMPP as its back end, which is old, open, and proven. It has the essentials like group video calls and screensharing (without audio, yet), and is currently working on implementing discord-like channels with rooms.
The Dev has been working on it since 2010, and only receives $48 a month from their patreon. If you’d like to support the development of a truly federated, E2EE discord alternative, I’d highly recommend anyone reading this to consider helping out with a donation, if you can’t contribute with coding help.
- Comment on Why do they turn Federation into a dystopia? 5 days ago:
Star Trek is written from the perspective of post-scarcity. There is unlimited free energy, replicators that can create virtually any object from base materials, and an abolishment of money (there is no need for it in post-scarcity, as money is ostensibly just a way to distribute resources).
Rowan J Coleman explores the concepts in a 3 part series here, if you’re interested.
- Comment on Veganuary 5 days ago:
Humans synthesize Vitamin A from Beta Carotene in plants. Only a small minority of people who are genetically predisposed to less efficient conversion of Beta Carotene would need to supplement with the retinyl form (readily available in supplements)
Per the NIH:
The human diet contains two sources for vitamin A: preformed vitamin A (retinol and retinyl esters) and provitamin A carotenoids [1,5]. Preformed vitamin A is found in foods from animal sources, including dairy products, eggs, fish, and organ meats [1,2]. Provitamin A carotenoids are plant pigments that include beta-carotene, alpha-carotene, and beta-cryptoxanthin [1]. The body converts provitamin A carotenoids into vitamin A in the intestine via the beta-carotene monooxygenase type 1 BCMO1 enzyme [1,3,6], although conversion rates may have genetic variability
- Comment on Veganuary 5 days ago:
I’m not sure how you cooked your impossible burger, but personally I can’t tell the difference between those or an animal beef burger. It’s so good (IMO, obviously you feel different) that I’m puzzled why so many people say they’re waiting for lab grown meat, when we already have such an incredible, affordable plant based alternative available in most stores right now.
- Comment on Veganuary 5 days ago:
Which ones are exclusive?
- Comment on Anyone old enough to have used this before GPS? 1 week ago:
That happened a couple times to me lately as well.
- "This game is my apocalypse" - A thoughtful review of Terra Nil from a Solarpunk's perspectivewww.youtube.com ↗Submitted 1 week ago to gaming@beehaw.org | 0 comments
- "This game is my apocalypse" - A thoughtful review of Terra Nil from a Solarpunk's perspectivewww.youtube.com ↗Submitted 1 week ago to games@lemmy.world | 2 comments
- Submitted 1 week ago to [deleted] | 0 comments
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to gaming@beehaw.org | 1 comment
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to [deleted] | 1 comment
- Comment on Is there a Paula Deen of the Midwest? 2 weeks ago:
Costco has some cream cheese in tubs, from what I recall.
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to videos@lemmy.world | 0 comments
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to [deleted] | 0 comments
- Comment on shut the hell up 3 weeks ago:
- Comment on At this point, what should we do about the ICE Agents and Trump and such? 3 weeks ago:
Here are concrete steps we can take to combat the regime with our last means of non-violent pathways (the titles below expand if you click them).
:::spoiler Learn First Aid! ⛑️
The future us likely to be violent, and It extremely important to have the skills to be able to keep yourself and others alive if they get hurt. You can never have too many medics.
Tacticool Girlfriend provides a great introduction to building a personal first aid kit, called an IFAK, which can deal with things like bullet wounds and other serious bleeding wounds. I also want to emphasize her recommendation of only buying medical gear from reputable sources (not Amazon!), such as North American Rescue to avoid fakes that could cost you your life.
But you’ll need to learn how to use that equipment, too. The best resource for that is to take a local Stop The Bleed class, which are pretty widely available in most places. They may cost a small fee, but can also sometimes be free. Alternatively, if you cannot access a local class, this video by PrepMedic will give you a solid understanding of how to use Tourniquets and Gauze for wound packing.
Injuries are less harmful if they are tended to early. Learning first aid can help conserve resources when healthcare becomes unaffordable. Having several medics in case of harm by police is an extremely powerful morale booster during a protest that may become a police riot. When you become comfortable with the basics of first aid, riot medicine is the next suggested step. :::
:::spoiler Establish or join local Mutual Aid networks ✊
If you haven’t already, get to know your neighbors. Mutual aid is a willingness to support and grow your community. This can include informal networks through friends, tenant/renter organizations, solidarity groups, and industrial unions.
These are groups using direct action to solve each other’s problems. Building strong communities makes it difficult for fascism to take root. The actions of the government are going to hit every community hard, and the ones who build trust in each other and work together are most likely to survive. We’ve been building a list of resources in !inperson@slrpnk.net to help you on your way. Also check out this handy guide to find existing groups in your area.
This isn’t only for your own community protection. Your ability to organize today will change the political landscape tomorrow. When revolution occurs, the social organizations that show the greatest resilience through the regime are the ones typically calling the shots when the dust settles. When it comes to elections, get out the vote drives are useless if most of the voters are fascists. At some point, you have to do grassroots political education if you don’t want fascist candidates winning elections. Mutual aid networks are excellent forums not only for teaching each other good political ideas, but demonstrating them in practice. :::
:::spoiler Join a Union and Prepare for a General Strike! 💪
The most effective non-violent action we can take is preparing and organizing for a General Strike.
The country would be brought to its knees if suddenly deprived of profit and labor. That tactic was extremely effective in Chile in 2019, and had they not fallen for the trick of liberal reform, they would’ve had a successful revolution on their hands with virtually no bloodshed.
If you aren’t in a union (or even if you are, it’s worth dual-carding), consider joining the IWW to unionize your workplace (bonus: you’ll get higher wages, better benefits, and more time off if you succeed!) to strengthen a general strike if we manage to enact one, as most unions have a strike fund that can supplement your income during a general strike to make it more financially bearable (you should also save as much money as you can reasonably do, so it can also be used to keep yourself afloat during a strike).
And for our international friends, you should join one as well, as fascism is gaining momentum globally. If your country isn’t listed below, just contact the IWW directly in the link above, and they’ll help you set up a new local branch.
- 🇦🇷 Argentina: FORA
- 🇦🇺 Australia: ASF-IWA
- 🇧🇷 Brazil: FOB
- 🇧🇬 Bulgaria: ARS, CITUB
- 🇩🇪 Germany: FAU
- 🇬🇷 Greece: ESE
- 🇮🇹 Italy: USI
- 🇳🇱 🇧🇪 Netherlands & Belgium: Vriji Bond
- 🇪🇸 Spain: CNT
- 🇸🇪 Sweden: SAC
- 🇬🇧 United Kingdom: UVW :::
:::spoiler Adopt Security Culture and Digital Camouflage 🛡️
Sometimes benign seeming efforts can turn into unexpected personal data collecting traps. Like an obscure website for exchanging contact info with other students turning into a global ad-tech surveillance network (Facebook), or innocent seeming online personality tests being use to harvest character profiles. Even Etsy, Reddit, Tinder, and Duolingo are feeding information to US Government Agencies like ICE.
Security culture is commonly used to describe the general awareness of such potential traps and how it can affect groups or entire communities. This goes beyond mere individual privacy efforts, as without joint efforts these often fail to work.
Especially in activist circles, security culture is paramount. For opsec reasons not everyone in the group might be aware of what clandestine efforts others are involved in, but with a general security culture many potential data leaks can be avoided.
Movements are made by the volume of their participants, and the easier and less dangerous it is to participate, the more people will get involved. As more people get involved, individual involvement becomes even less dangerous, creating a virtuous cycle.
We’ll start it off with some General Advice:
- Mentally wall off personal uniquely identifying info from your online presence, actively build a habit of opsec so that withholding information is your default mental state
- Be careful about who you meet online
- Use different, unrelated usernames, passwords & emails for every account. And try not to connect to those accounts with your real IP address (use Tor or a VPN)
- Be mindful that anything done online leaves a trail
- agents provocateurs may seek to find patsies willing to perform an ill-advised illegal activity in order to legitimize police repression. If someone is trying to pressure you, especially if you don’t have a long and proven history with them, be extremely wary.
For a full guide on what encrypted communications platforms to use, and how to stay off the radar, read the Digital Camouflage section within the Monthly Meta post here (you’ll need to scroll down. I’d add it here, but it won’t fit in this comment). :::
At this point, it may be advisable to equip yourself with more serious equipment if you haven’t already if all else fails. Tacticool girlfriend has good videos for beginners in that area on her channel, as does the YouTube channel Black Flag Civilian.
- Comment on ChatGPT is rolling out YouTube-style age prediction 3 weeks ago:
- Comment on Ubisoft target audience when they play a good game 3 weeks ago:
The problem is that the heavier weapons like the combine rifle are only introduced in the later part of the game from what I remember (I think I stopped somewhere around the antlions last time), where as it seemed like the first half was limited to the crappy weapons, interspersed with some magnum revolver ammo as a treat. By the time I would get access to the good weapons, I’d usually have already lost my enthusiasm to continue. If I had connected more with the story I could look past all that, but since that part just wasn’t engaging with me, the combat needed to carry the experience for me, which it just wasn’t able to do in my particular case.
- Comment on Ubisoft target audience when they play a good game 3 weeks ago:
I didn’t use the gravity gun as much as standard weapons since most of the objects available to shoot with it are usually quite large which obscured the view of the target (not a problem close up, but mid range and farther it’s not terribly viable), and I found it really janky to use in tighter spaces like hallways or smaller rooms, where the object being held would get caught up on the terrain or doorways.
handrails would also deflect objects shot with it, and a lot of the times when ambushed with a combat encounter, I wasn’t scanning the area for objects to pick up while being shot at, I would just engage immediately and return fire.
It’s a cool gadget, and perhaps others got past the issues I had with the gravity gun, but overall I preferred just using a standard weapon, and in that realm the ones that were fun to use had little ammo, leaving me with the very weak pistol and smg, which I didn’t find terribly fun.
- Comment on Ubisoft target audience when they play a good game 3 weeks ago:
As I said, there was never enough ammo to really use the revolver more than a few times in my experience, hence why I cheated infinite ammo for it.
I don’t have any nostalgia for the half life games as I didn’t play them growing up, but I also don’t think their age is really a contributing factor. Personally I found Half Life 1’s combat to actually be far more fun due to the enemies feeling a little less sponge-y, and the gunplay/guns themselves feeling more punchy and overall just better to me. HL2 I consider a step down.
There are shooters older than HL2 that I would consider to have much better combat, like Blood (1998) or Return to Castle Wolfenstein (2001) despite their age. I understand that HL2 was trying quite number of new things, but ultimately my gripes with the combat are mostly down to what I consider to be a poor choice of damage variables, but that’s just in regards to my own preferences for combat in games.
- Comment on Ubisoft target audience when they play a good game 3 weeks ago:
From what I recall, I didn’t really enjoy using the gravity gun all that much since bigger objects had a tendency to clip terrain if they weren’t aimed quite right, and thus miss the enemy I was aiming at, which prompted me to switch back to the other weapons to finish off a gunfight. Admittedly that might’ve been just a me problem, and others had more success using it (I know the sawblades with the gravity gun were quite accurate and easy to use in ravenholm, but they don’t think they show up much after that area).
I felt like most of the game doesn’t really give you enough ammo with the non-standard weapons to really use them outside of one or two bigger fights, then I’d be back down to the smg, pistol, or shotgun (which I also felt was a little under powered unless you used the alt fire, but that chewed through ammo too quickly to be viable most of the time).
- Comment on Ubisoft target audience when they play a good game 3 weeks ago:
As someone who hates open-world ubisoft style games, I’m personally not much of a fan of HL2 either. I tried it multiple times at different points in my life and each time found it to feel like a slog that I end up giving up on a few hours in.
I enjoyed the 1984 aspects of the world at first, but I ultimately can’t get past how bullet spongy enemies are. Virtually every weapon feels extremely impotent except the revolver, which has very limited ammo. I began to dread every encounter with enemies because it rarely felt fun to fight them.
On my last playthrough I cheated and gave myself infinite revolver ammo, which helped me get farther than before, but even then I was struggling to push onward after a certain point, just because it felt like endless waves of enemies being thrown at me with some mildly enjoyable physics puzzles tossed in between them.
Never felt a connection with any of the characters, and without that the gameplay itself just becomes repetitive to me, I stop having fun, and stop.
- Submitted 3 weeks ago to videos@lemmy.world | 0 comments
- Submitted 4 weeks ago to [deleted] | 2 comments
- Comment on My friends are by my side 4 weeks ago:
Floaters can drastically vary from barely noticeable (like in the meme), to extremely distracting (large black or gray dots floating around in the vision even when reading a book or using a computer), to even limiting eyesight almost like cataracts.
In the study below, one patient’s eyesight improved from 6/60 to 30/60 due to how severely the floaters obstructed vision.
And bear in mind, one of the physical alternatives to eliminating the floaters has a 7% chance of permanent blindness, whereas a cheap $16 bottle of concentrated pineapple enzyme can drastically reduce them with little to no side effects, and no chance of long-term harm.
- Comment on My friends are by my side 4 weeks ago:
AFAIK the enzymes only act upon collagen in scar tissue, not normal collagen in joints. If anything, there is some tentative evidence to suggest Bromelain potentially could be used to reduce the effects of some forms of osteoarthritis due to it being an anti-inflammatory.
From that study:
Bromelain has been used as treatment for a number of disease conditions, in addition to osteoarthritis of the knee and shoulder joints (Table 1). No serious adverse events have been reported with the consumption of either bromelain or pineapples in these studies. Adverse events that have been reported are mainly gastrointestinal (i.e. diarrhoea, nausea and flatulence), but have also included headache, tiredness, dry mouth, skin rash and allergic reactions (not specified).
Should be noted, however, that there was a conflict of interest announced at the end:
Dick Middleton is consultant to Lichtwer Pharma UK Ltd who manufacture bromelain. Steven Hicks was funded by Lichtwer for a post-graduate fellowship from 1998 to 2002.
Still, the research seems to indicate that as long as the daily dose is 600mg or lower per day, it should be well tolerated as long as you’re not allergic to pineapple. Even above that, there should be no long-term negative health effects, only potentially acute side effects.
- Comment on My friends are by my side 4 weeks ago:
I haven’t tried it yet, I was just mentioning the studies I’d come across. You can read this one here, which found that taking 3 pills a day reduced floaters in patients by 70%, with a B-scan ocular ultrasound seeming to confirm the results.
- Comment on My friends are by my side 4 weeks ago:
I read some studies a while back that showed taking a bromelain (pineapple enzyme) supplement on an empty stomach consistently each day will eventually reduce floaters fairly significantly by dissolving them.
- Comment on Gadgets For People Who Don't Trust The Government 5 weeks ago:
You yourself posted about how 31 people died in ICE custody. The video maker shows how privately owned Flock cameras which are installed around the country are used by ICE without a warrant to track and detain people; he has shown shown in the past how to effectively trick those cameras into not recognizing your license plate, and in OP video now how to detect the cameras.
And you’re calling him a conspiracy theorist without having even watched it? The hell dude.
