Surprised that no one has suggested the .hack (dot Hack) game series. They were PS2 era single player RPG games, set in a virtual reality MMO. So it really tries to simulate the MMO experience of that era. There’s even an entire fake computer OS you can explore with news articles, forum posts, email, etc that all contributes to the world building and sometimes unlocks stuff in the “MMO” as you learn stuff ourside of it.

The plot is… ok. Kind of a tired one now and quite trope-y. Mostly because it came first and a ton of anime since “copied its homework”. The series is one of the first instances of the now semi-common plot of “players get stuck in VR MMO”.

The first group of games in the series is pretty easily emulatable, and carrying your save across the games lets you keep your progress and unlocks some extra stuff in subsequent games of the first batch.

The second batch of games in the series (widely believed to be considerably better in gameplay) got an official PC remaster with additional QoL and what amounts to a free story DLC. Probably better to start there, just know there’s some weird plot stuff with a semi-prequel anime. It was the style of the time to make these multimedia projects to try and cross market shit.

They just announced that the series is going to get a reboot/continuation too.

It’s also worth noting that there are some “pay once” MMOs like Guild Wars out there which have been running for a decade or more.

Part of the issue, admittedly, is that there’s a bunch. Many have outdated info as well.

NAACP guide seems written for a more peaceful era, but is a good place to start.

Rescue our Democracy similarly has some oversights when it comes to tech safety, but at least mentions wearing a mask.

I’m not finding the better guides right now.

The big things as far as reducing identification that I’m not seeing is that beyond face coverings and the like to prevent facial recognition, don’t bring your real phone and if you do keep it powered off in a faraday bag.

Phones are still traceable when in airplane mode, and while powered off, through bluetooth low power mode. This is what many countries used for covid exposure tracking. The only defense agaist this tracking is having your phone in a faraday bag that it doesn’t leave until you are out of the protest area, or simply not bringing it.

There are a few ways to get burner phones not tied to your identity. If you wanted to go that route, you’d want to do the opposite. Keep the burner in the faraday bag at home and only use it out at protest locations, alongside the advice from those two guides as far as disabling biometrics, etc.

I’ll try and find some better guides later today.

The protest safety guides need to be more widespread.

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Maybe spend a few minutes searching before throwing shade. Cynicism’s easy. Here’s what I found in about 3 minutes:

He founded the marine research non-profit Inkfish, and a custom yacht building company OceanCo that builds ships for it.

Depending on the source I’m finding that they have 3 ships/yachts in their fleet with a new one under construction, and the Leviathan has most or all of the normal luxury features swapped out for additional lab space, hospital, 3d printing and fabrication workshops. One of the ships carries a crew of 75 scientists.

Their mission statement includes the intent to share all their discoveries freely.

You can look up images of the ships. They look like what I’d expect of research vessels, not billionaire pleasure ships.

Additionally, I’m seeing that he also co-founded the “Heart of Racing” race team that raises money for childrens charities, he’s donated significant money to pediatric ICU in New Zealand (where he lives), and also co-founded foundry10 which is “a education research organization that funds and develops programs to improve youth learning.”

Again, I’m not saying the man’s a saint or our friend. Steam has a very positive track record, he is putting more resources into philanthropic endeavours than many others in his position, and he’s not crowing about it so much that everyone knows he’s doing the philanthropic shit.

Isn’t at least one of them actually a marine research vessel, run by a group he founded/funds?

I get that he’s not our friend like a lot of people think just because his company is less shit, but he seems to have at least a crumb of his soul left.

ELITE? Really, of all the things to name it?

Well I guess they know who they’re marketing to.

there is then zero switching cost outside

Tell me again how you’ve never supported an email service migration. I’m delighted that you haven’t, but it’s obvious.

Also, I love when people pull a “draw the rest of the owl” with tech they’ve never been up in the guts of.

Emails also come in standardized formats that can be downloaded and transferred to a new provider, too.

Oh, you sweet sweet thing. I remember when I believed that technical specs were reliable and things were interoperable because documentation said they were.

I can still see their tears.

Maybe it truly is that easy with other providers to switch from one to another, but Outlook, and especially the Exchange backend underneath (both the effectively discontinued self-hosted server version and the Azure-managed Exchange Online) are a special kind of jank.

There isn’t a special layer or kind of hell for whoever designed it. There isn’t even a specific hell in and of itself.

Whatever exists after death for the designers of Outlook and Exchange is something so much worse than hell that it’s categorically different from anything able to be conceptualized by humans. We don’t have words to even begin to describe the gulf between comprehendable human thought and what awaits for them.

There’s always plenty of garbage on Steam and itch.io

Not really well, at least to my knowledge. Neither of the options I’m aware of work with mobile apps for lemmy.

There was some site that would attempt to auto redirect to a person’s home instance, and there are a few userscripts for browsers that try to do the same thing with normal instance specific links like yours.

There is a lemmy redirector app for android that tried to work like the userscripts, and maybe I’m not using it right, but I’ve never gotten it to work on my phone alongside lemmy apps.

That’s shortsighted as hell. I cma understand not wanting to have multiple clients installed but there’s GoG at the very least.

Gog gives drm free installers, no laucher needed. Install it somewhere, go into steam, add non-steam game. Boom. Done.

Everyone was too concerned the AI would do it and wasn’t looking close enough at the C-Suite Execs.

Without any info on how they compile the “Top 50 viral” list, I’m not sure how significant this really is.

Never heard of that chart before, so this feels like it was just an easy article for click farming.

To anyone saying they like the battle system of “turn based with QTE/rythm” you might also like Super Mario RPG, Paper Mario (original N64 and Thousand Year Door), and the Mario and Luigi series (first three of them). Mother 3 also has a rythm element matched to the >40 battle tracks. Go emulate them rather than trying to track them down at scalper prices.

They all use turn based battles with timed button presses for extra damage with attacks, blocking/dodging, and specials. Definitely not as pretty, as good a story, or as complicated mechanics, but same sort of battle system.

Hell yes! I love this series, and the second one is even better than the first.

That said, from what I hear, the remaster of the first one is dissapointing. Hopefully this one is better.

Oh, all the screenshots are 4:3. Not the best sign if they aren’t planning on having widescreen.

There’s no reason it has to be post 2077. Silverhand was already an established character in the lore, there’s plenty of shit that could be adapted. 2077 was in part a time skip epilogue to a whole bunch of notable characters from the TTRPG, and I think there’s a decent amount of people who’d be down for the earlier stuff.

Hahahaha, they violated that well over a decade ago. It was supposed to give acceas to all future releases at one point, which died the moment it released on consoles. iirc people were pretty upset about it way back when.

Unfortunately the actual text of the alpha license terms appear to be lost to time, but you can find a number of posts online claiming the same thing, that it was worded in a way to indicate the license covered all future versions (across all systems), not just all future updates of java (and bedrock if you converted your account early enough).

Yeah, this Saudi deal was not a smart move to do when they finally have a competitor (inzoi) after decades of being the only game in town, so to speak.

He and his family were caught doing pretty serious charity fraud, iirc, amd he kept throwing out completely absurd excuses rather than owning up to it.

Entirely wrong youtuber. Sorry.

Document these incidents into quantifiable numbers and verifiable evidence, then take it to your manager.

Not to try and get him fired, but to emphasize that it has reached a point where “bob” is negatively impacting your abilities to fulfil your job duties, and that you wonder if there may not be a better place for him to fit.

Every team has members with different skills. I’m in sysadmin/systems engineering, but we do a ton of scripting out onerous system management duties. I have one co-worker who is fucking perfect for figuring out how to get big shit done by any means neccessary. Hacks together solutions out of pure black magic and esoterica. But holy shit I am never ever letting him script anything that has the potential to last beyond a few months, as it’s brilliant, but completely unmaintainable, impossible to debug, and generally can’t handle edge cases.

Myself? I either whip together intermediate solutions fast with no guard rails fast as shit, or spend an absurd amount of time making advanced level shit that is near bulletproof and spits out more logging than anyone could possibly need.

When I’m running a project, I do my best to keep this stuff in mind when I delegate. When I’m not, it’s my boss’s job, and he’s very plain and open about this sort of stuff and how it influences what he assigns to who.

Point is, it’s your boss’s job to figure out where all his people fit into the grand scheme of things. All you need to do is bring it to him in a soft tone, but with hard evidence. You aren’t trying to prove Bob is useless, just that his current role in the group is causing more work at the moment.