ProdigalFrog
@ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net
- Comment on Patrick Stewart Reflects on 'Star Trek' at 60: Why He Wants More Spinoffs 3 days ago:
I’m pretty sure one of the creator’s/writer of voyager was really disappointed that it never actually fulfilled the premise at all, so he went and made the Battlestar Galactica reboot in 2003 as essentially what Voyager should’ve been if the premise was taken seriously.
- Comment on In a hearing on data centers, a resident of Tyrone Township, Michigan, asked a simple question: Have you signed a non-disclosure agreement? Officials refused to answer 4 days ago:
For people from the US reading this, here’s the steps we’ll have to take to avoid falling into a hellish fascist dictatorship:
Part 1: The big picture
The protests are good ways of meeting like-minded people in your community to form connections, as well as spreading awareness of local mutual aid groups so more can join or form ICE resistance groups who can join an encrypted chat to coordinate, alert neighbors, and talk strategy. It also is a good place for unions or union members to encourage others to unionize their workplaces, which can also ultimately work toward a national general strike, which is our most tangible and powerful collective action. The country would be brought to its knees if suddenly deprived of profit and labor, allowing us to directly demand real changes (such as ending the war in Iran, ceasing support for the genocide of Palestine, and Abolishing ICE). The General Strike 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. There are some concrete steps all of us can take toward enacting that hard-core general strike to make it more viable and bearable for us all. (the titles below expand if you click them).
Part 2: Learn First Aid
Violence is being used against those who resist and it will only continue. It extremely important to have the skills to be able to keep yourself and others alive if they get hurt. 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.
Part 3: 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. There’s also some projects you can do that help build community (and can be fun in themselves!), for more info, go here, and scroll down to the “Fun Projects to Build Community) section”
Part 4: Join a Union to help prepare for a General Strike
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 make a general strike possible. Once you are in a union you and your coworkers will need to pressure your leadership to prepare for a general strike, as well as pressure them to organize with other unions to enact a general strike. This is especially true if you are in a more traditional union that isn’t the IWW. Your local shop may need to organize directly with other unions if your union leaders are too cowardly to do so. 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). A General Strike is officially planned by the UAW for May 1st 2028, but it was planned before Trump was elected, and by then will be too late, so prepare now for one that may start sooner. You can contact the IWW with the link below: * 🌍 US/Global: IWW (Français) - (Español) 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 * 🇮🇪 Ireland: IWW Ireland * 🇳🇱 🇧🇪 Netherlands & Belgium: Vriji Bond * 🇪🇸 Spain: CNT * 🇸🇪 Sweden: SAC * 🇬🇧 United Kingdom: UVW
Part 5: 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).
I’d also highly recommend Full Spectrum Resistance to anyone who wants further info on how to resist (audiobook version here).
- Comment on In a hearing on data centers, a resident of Tyrone Township, Michigan, asked a simple question: Have you signed a non-disclosure agreement? Officials refused to answer 4 days ago:
The US has been designed to quell dissent as much as possible by making dissent endanger most people’s lives, as most are 1 or 2 missed paychecks from homelessness and losing their health insurance. It makes them less willing to risk forming a union, less willing to take a risk in forming a cooperative, less able to have the free time or energy to protest, and the country is too big for them to easily gather at their capital in protest.
In the EU, workers get 30 days of consecutive time off, workers can’t be arbitrarily laid off, free or cheap health care in most cases, housing and food assistance to unemployed in many countries, etc. So it’s generally easier to fight back there.
Saying all that, the US absolutely need to take steps to overcome all that regardless, just as the EU had to do to get all those protections in the first place. If the US does nothing, it’s likely they will become like Russia is today, with a population that is mostly too scared, apathetic, or brainwashed to fight back against their regime.
- Comment on Problem solved 5 days ago:
Hey Mickey, I ask this without intending or meaning to offend, but why do you enjoy “haha, hate my wife” boomer humor so much?
- Comment on What is it like being drunk? How much control do you have? 5 days ago:
I’ve only been properly drunk once. For myself, at no point did I feel out of control, and my reasoning ability still seemed perfectly intact.
It was interesting to observe the effects of the drunkenness on my balance and ever increasing ‘lag’ type feeling, and I did notice I was a bit less inhibited, though I was around friends I already was quite comfortable with so I wasn’t that inhibited to begin with, but even still I did catch myself saying something I might’ve held back or said in a less direct way. At that point I was satisfied with the experiment and didn’t drink any more that night.
The experience did make me wonder how other people could convince themselves to drive while drunk, as even while I was wobbling to the bathroom, I was fully aware that I was totally incapable of safely driving.
I also had no issues recalling that night, so I didn’t get drunk enough to get ‘blackout’ drunk.
- Comment on What's the difference between socialism and communism? Is there one? Or are the terms interchangeable? 1 week ago:
Humanity actually successfully implemented a decentralized egalitarian socialist society without dictatorships in 1936 Spain, which bore out that it’s possible for us to achieve freedom for all while also ensuring everyone is able to live a fulfilling life by providing free housing, food, transportation and healthcare.
Some very specific outside circumstances caused it to be halted prematurely (namely, an unusual amount of industrialized fascist states and the USSR ganging up against it all at once, with very limited industrial capacity of their own to effectively fight back), but they documented how their society functioned while it existed quite well, and over 3 million people participated in it.
For most, it’s as difficult to imagine to an end to capitalism as it was for peasants to imagine an end to the divine right of kings, yet it did happen.
- Comment on Poll: Will you buy GTA 6 when it launches on your platform? 1 week ago:
No. I find virtually all AAA games for the past decade or so to be unsatisfying. I only pay for indie games nowadays.
- Comment on #StopPayingGames 2 weeks ago:
No prob :)
- Comment on #StopPayingGames 2 weeks ago:
Stop Killing Games explicitly does not want endless support from a publisher. They are advocating for publishers to implement an End of Life plan during the development stages of a game that can be enacted after the publisher wishes to stop supporting a game, so that a player has a reasonable chance of continuing to play the game on their own, either by disabling Always Online DRM, removing the Online component of a game with a large single player campaign (like The Crew), or providing server binaries so the user can self-host a server.
- Comment on 🤔 Interesting 2 weeks ago:
Humanity actually successfully implemented a decentralized egalitarian socialist society without dictatorships in 1936 Spain, which bore out that Anarchist political theory is the most viable long-term solution we have to achieving freedom for all while also ensuring everyone gets what they need for free.
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to [deleted] | 0 comments
- Comment on "There's a Secret Backdoor in Netgear" Routers, ft. Wendell of Level1 Techs - GamersNexus 3 weeks ago:
Despite being cleared by the FCC to sell in the US, Netgear routers have a backdoor from the factory that is constantly listening for the correct SSH key, allowing anyone with it to infiltrate your network (likely for three letter agencies to use). Virtually all consumer router manufacturers have extremely poor security practices, but one way of combating this for now is to make your own router with something like OPNSense.
They also discuss the direction all of this is heading in, taking into account the new laws being proposed around the world trying to attach your identity to your device to remove anonymity, they suspect that eventually ISPs and governments may mandate the use of approved locked-down routers or wireless access points that have those backdoors in place, both for easier government surveillance and for the benefit of corporations, who would prefer to remove anonymity to access and gather more valuable user data to create more in-depth profiles for selling to advertisers, and to limit the user’s ability to block certain devices from accessing the internet, like modern TV’s that send screenshots every 3 minutes to the manufacturer to help identify what you’re watching.
- "There's a Secret Backdoor in Netgear" Routers, ft. Wendell of Level1 Techs - GamersNexuswww.youtube.com ↗Submitted 3 weeks ago to technology@beehaw.org | 5 comments
- Comment on Rough date 3 weeks ago:
Yeah, I mean, if they’re not into doing something a little out of the ordinary, how can you be compatible?
- Comment on 6 Tips for Finding Cheap Hardware for Self-Hosting | Hardware Haven 4 weeks ago:
The usage of commercial AI’s hosted in data centers encourages the growth of that industry with the construction of more data centers, which are hazardous to the populations that live around them, encourage pretty severe water waste in areas with already dwindling groundwater, and collectively use a tremendous amount of particularly polluting electricity since the local grids cannot adequately supply them, meaning many resort to using inefficient portable power generation on-site, and in many cases is causing energy prices to spike.
While I personally think that AI use is virtually always detrimental (since there is growing evidence that AI usage appears to cause people to atrophy their critical thinking skills, and many deferring to incorrect answers), for those that still insist on using it, using a self-hosted local LLM is the most ethical option, as it does not encourage the construction of more data centers, and avoids feeding multinational fascist corporations with more data.
- Comment on I still can't get over Skyrim. Are there any games that can replace it? 4 weeks ago:
The first game is glacial, but I found the 2nd game moved along pretty well even from the beginning.
- Comment on Ashes 2063 - An extremely polished post apocalyptic Doom conversion complete with drivable motorcycle, trading towns, a John Carpenter-esque soundtrack, and it's free! 4 weeks ago:
I noticed it there, but it seems like on the GOG page it says it requires Doom II to function, so I opted not to link to them. Do you know if it works without any tinkering for GOG owners who don’t own Doom II?
- Comment on Ashes 2063 - An extremely polished post apocalyptic Doom conversion complete with drivable motorcycle, trading towns, a John Carpenter-esque soundtrack, and it's free! 4 weeks ago:
Oh, cool! I had no idea this was a shared universe thing that others were contributing to. Looks like there’s yet another fan project called Ashes: Epoch, a prequel to the first game.
Man, tons of great stuff going on.
- Comment on Ashes 2063 - An extremely polished post apocalyptic Doom conversion complete with drivable motorcycle, trading towns, a John Carpenter-esque soundtrack, and it's free! 4 weeks ago:
The trailer for Ashes: Blackwater (I assume the 3rd game?) looks pretty rad.
- Ashes 2063 - An extremely polished post apocalyptic Doom conversion complete with drivable motorcycle, trading towns, a John Carpenter-esque soundtrack, and it's free!www.moddb.com ↗Submitted 4 weeks ago to games@lemmy.world | 7 comments
- Submitted 4 weeks ago to selfhosting@slrpnk.net | 13 comments
- Comment on Sentient 1997 Review: A Forgotten branching real-time narrative experiment 4 weeks ago:
Same here. It’s not the type of game that seems worth the time investment, but it makes for a great video essay!
- Ashes 2063 - An extremely polished post apocalyptic Doom conversion complete with drivable motorcycle, trading towns, and a John Carpenter-esque soundtrack, and it's free!www.moddb.com ↗Submitted 4 weeks ago to gaming@beehaw.org | 0 comments
- Submitted 4 weeks ago to gaming@beehaw.org | 2 comments
- Comment on Is the Glock 17V any good? 4 weeks ago:
They are very consistently built (good quality control) and their design has been slight modifications since the 80’s, so there’s no real kinks left to iron out, they are very reliable.
However, they have a very thick and squared off grip, which can make them harder to use for those with smaller hands. They are also known for having a lackluster squishy trigger that can make it harder to aim as accurately with until you get a feel for it.
- Comment on What do you think goes through an animal’s mind and POV? 1 month ago:
Most of the things you mentioned like insects and spiders don’t have a mind. Their brains are too small for anything resembling a mind.
Jumping spiders have an interesting amount of cognition, more than I would’ve thought, and especially for their size.
- Comment on Splinter Cell designer says “one of the difficulties with modern stealth games” is realistic lighting, as environments are now so much “harder to read” 1 month ago:
As a thief fan, Dishonored’s stealth system felt terrible in comparison.
- Comment on .ml has got to be the only place on earth where I'd get downvoted for a comment like this 1 month ago:
That’s the spirit.
- Comment on .ml has got to be the only place on earth where I'd get downvoted for a comment like this 1 month ago:
I’m not going to glaze the same ideology that murders their anarchists comrades whenever it’s convenient for them to establish a power hierarchy. Telling me I’m disrespecting the very people who would’ve put me up against a wall the second I didn’t obey them is like telling a victim they’re disrespecting their abuser.
- Submitted 1 month ago to gaming@beehaw.org | 0 comments