thepaperpilot @ thepaperpilot @incremental.social

I'm a software engineer who makes games as a hobby. I love making tools for

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The loosely interconnected systems part makes me think of kittens game which has the whole religion system that feels like it's own little progression system, as well as gooboo which is funny since you mention it later on. It also makes me think of my own game, Kronos, which is part way through a rewrite but you can check out the TMT version here.

For the resource caps, you might be interested in orb of creation which has a similar system.

I like feeling productive, the sense of accomplishment when it's done, and seeing people enjoy a creation of mine. I think most people also just enjoy feeling creative, knowing that they can bring things into this world from nothing.

I started developing incredibly young. My first game was when I was 10 or so - a text adventure in Java. But I really wanted graphics and didn't know how to do that in Java so I switched to RPG maker XP (I've actually bought most RPG maker versions since then, even though I don't use them very often - very cool that they use JavaScript instead of ruby now!). Eventually I switched to flash to make other kinds of games, which is the first time I learned what classes and instances were! (Lowkey kinda embarrassing to have been programming for a couple years without knowing - the dangers of being self taught!). From there I went back to Java (using lwjgl this time), then to unity in college where I made many game developer friends including my wife, made my own engine called vecs, and now I mainly do web games, typically in profectus. Here and there I've also dabbled with pygame, Godot, and other engines.

Suffice to say, game development has been a primary hobby of mine for my entire life. I think I got started with it because I really enjoyed playing games, sort of looking up to developers, and thus wanted to become one myself. Over time I learned about the industry and decided I did not want to become a professional game developer (although after college I did apply to Id and a few other studios local to DFW), but continued developing on a hobby level. It's just fun I suppose, and it's a creative outlet I think I'm halfway decent at.

Honestly, these use cases all sound very cool, but I'm highly concerned about the idea of federating information that could effectively tie you to your physical location with a bunch of random servers. Even if all they see is a pseudonymous activitypub id.

To answer honestly, it's because the first sentence only uses common and easy to spell words.

I honestly think that philosophy is fine. Before the major social media sites all came about, the Internet was filled with much smaller communities that didn't need to be profitable or scalable - they could be run by an individual as a hobby project. I think returning to that (possibly with the use of federation so these small communities still have a good amount of content) could keep things free, ad free, and privacy conscious

Housing prices increase faster than inflation. Why do you think that is? Certainly not because housing is seen as an investment vehicle where corporations buy as much as they can just to rent out, increasing the demand and therefore price of housing beyond what the market rate would have otherwise been.

I think it's clear that landlords are making money (and even if they're not, they're at least gaining equity which will eventually make the whole thing profitable), with most of that profit coming from the mere act of owning the property and withholding it from those who need it in order to survive unless they pay - which is inherently coercive in nature, and a fork of violence against the working class performed by the owning class. Sure, there's a nominal amount of effort fees and effort, and I'm not going to knock property management, since that is actual work, but landlords primarily get their money from rent seeking (that is, however much they charge beyond their expenses).

I think the US would be a massively better place to live in if we massively taxed housing owned by corporations, or at least any properties owned by a single entity surpassing 1 or 2. The goal is to make it not profitable and not appealing as an investment, such that black rock et al see fit to unload most of all of their properties. The housing prices would and should crash, and finally be affordable again. The government might even buy a lot of them up and expand our socialized housing. Sure that last point might not be "fair" to existing home owners, but consider they are hy definition already well off enough to afford their own home and bought their homes during the time when it was still seen as an "investment" that by definition means it comes with some amount of risk. At least going forward, housing would no longer be a vehicle for investment and well on its way to becoming a human right, like it should be.

Oh, this game got posted earlier today. It didn't make it in time for April 1st, but is still an April fools game. https://turtletennis.itch.io/mole-transactions

Thanks for collecting all these! We're eating good this year - emoji recycler is unironically such a fun game

Also there isn't a game jam, rather Florian just likes to ask people to submit their April fools games to him so he can stream them. Only *man sent his games there this year though

This week's been pretty occupied with a non incremental game my friend worked on, called Millennia. It's been very time sucking, but in a good way.

I've also been working on mocking up this fictitious app about digital gardening, and in general improving how the Internet communicates with you, with the goal of making it healthier. The idea for this app is it would be able to connect to matrix chat, email, RSS feeds, and potentially other sources and then you can write rules to categorize these: stuff like direct messages, stuff about that school project you're working on, online content creators you follow, and perhaps a category for just stuff you're interested in but don't need to know about every update for. These categories will be able to be assigned priorities: basic stuff like whether or not to send notifications, but also whether or not to show a count of items in that category. Some categories might feel more like a todo list, like DMs, but others should just collect things for you to occasionally check up on, without the pressure of a number or unread dot.

You'd still be able to chat and email and stuff from within the app as well. It'd integrate concepts like chat glue in chat threads (when supported by the data source), and make it easy to copy data over to your personal "garden", which will work similarly to a personal wiki. The garden would be a collection of thoughts in varying states of growth - incomplete thoughts to entire articles, all collected in a way such that you can easily see related thoughts and navigate the garden like a web (to mix metaphors haha). Overall I think it's a cool idea, but one that'd be too big for me to complete. But the mock will help with giving something that can be spread around so people can get interested in helping out, or at least providing feedback on the idea. I'm quite excited about it!

To be honest, the feature unlocked at level 100 of check back mod kinda killed my motivation to continue playing. I think it might just be too idle for me

Good point, I guess we should just let the homes remain empty and the homeless on the streets?

I get that having your home squatted in sucks, and if you were only out for a week long vacation and come back to a break in then you have my sympathy, but the message here is ultimately pointing out that houses have been commodified and turned into vehicles for investing by the rich, rather than a right like they should be. We have more empty homes than homeless people, and that simply isn't just.

The "paradox of tolerance" has never legitimately stumped anyone. The initial act of intolerance broke the social contract, thus removing their right to tolerance themselves.

You've set up a false dichotomy. There are reasons to dislike AI besides capitalist propaganda. For example, moral concerns with training on data without explicit approval

Gotcha. In that case I've already set that all up in sonarr/radarr directly, using shared docker volumes.

I never heard of those tools, but I have a jellyfin server. By "support" for jellyfin, does that mean it has like a plugin or something to request media from within jellyfin?

Ngl calling nginx a contraction of "popular https server" is kinda wild

Yes it does. I even host a forgejo instance where you can only login via SSO and it works perfectly!

Edit: sorry, got my wires crossed with idp and SSO. But yes, forgejo can also act as an idp.

Funkwhale seems really interesting and I'd love to be able to listen to music without relying on a company's servers and getting tracked, and not being locked into that corporation's apps, but music specifically is just so hard to justify switching. I use YT music and it has access to soooo much music, and the recommendation algorithms are useful in letting me discover new music. There's just now way I'd be able to transition from something with effectively access to all music in existence to something with none. I kinda wish there was some service that could discover all videos tagged as music on YT, add them to funkwhale without downloading them, and then allow them to be in search and radios and stuff and just download the song with youtube-dl or something the first time they're requested. Ideally with some way to trim outros and such manually. I know even the first step of this (discovering "all videos" on YT) makes this completely infeasible though.

Yeah, I'd never vote for the Republican party but holy shit I'm going to pressure the DNC to give us a non geriatric candidate every moment I can. I will criticize the failures of the Democratic party so loudly and publicly because that's the only (non violent) way to get them to change. We need a better candidate, a better party, and a better country. I'd encourage everyone to send a message by telling polls they're uncommitted.

Both China and Russia have also called for cease fire. Stop justifying us spending ungodly amounts of money to bomb children. The US is actively engaging in arming a genocide despite the majority of its population supporting a cease fire. It's not complicated, it's clearly Biden supporting the industrial military complex over his own constituents. This horrific act is all for some rich assholes to become slightly more rich. It's unjustifiable.