The Elden Ring Tiger Electronics LCD game is pretty fun.

I switched fairly recently. I was on Ting before, and they appear to be quietly sunsetting that service after Dish Network bought them a few years back. Hoping the same doesn’t happen to Mint. It’s been great so far. Incredible value!

Yeah, come to think of it, I think this is a larger issue I have in life: I always have to be working toward a goal or else I feel guilty. I can see your point of view too though. If there’s no beginning and end, there’s no minimum amount of time you need to play. The goal is just to enjoy.

My perspective is basically the opposite: if there’s no beginning and end, there’s no maximum amount of time I need to play. 😅

I don’t feel this way about open-world games because they do usually have an end and you can skip a lot of the open-world filler content. I get this anxiety about sandbox games. I hate it because I really enjoy games like Cities Skylines and I’d love to get into Dwarf Fortress, but I can’t play them anymore because I could spend 1,000 hours in one of them and never finish. That open-endedness keeps me from playing.

Greater transparency under capitalism is always a good thing. I have to admit, one thing Trump did that I liked was to force hospitals to publish their prices. I can’t think of a good reason people buying a thing shouldn’t know how much it costs beforehand.

Illucia: the town of Final Fantasy. This was a Final Fantasy fan site, but themed as a town from a Final Fantasy. This isn’t a town ripped out of a particular game though. Illucia was an entirely original town with original art created by fan Tatsushi Nakao.

Before the release of FF7, it was themed after a town from the 16-bit era of Final Fantasy. To navigate the town, the user was presented with a clickable server-side image map, where clicking on different buildings in the town would take the user to a page on the site that was thematically appropriate to the building.

Quick aside: a history lesson on image maps. Image maps were a technique that allowed for a single image to be linked to multiple different places based on where the user clicked it. In the later years of image maps, the web site developer (“webmaster” to use the period-appropriate nomenclature 😜) could define the different clickable areas in HTML and the browser would handle requesting the correct URL based on where the user clicked. This is a client-side image map. Before browsers had this capability though, browsers would instead send the clicked coordinates to a server-side script — often written in Perl, I think — which would translate the coordinates and send back the corresponding page.

Anyway, after the release of FF7, Illucia was reworked in that style. I believe in this iteration, the user would interact with it by using the arrow keys to walk an actual character avatar around the town and enter various buildings rather than clicking on a (relatively) simple image map.

Just like the FF series did, the site sorta lost its luster for me at that point. Final Fantasy had gone from an ensemble cast of quirky but warm characters and brightly colored pixel art to a blue and gray mess of blurry, pre-rendered environments and low-poly brooding characters that looked bad at the time and aged even worse. I pretty much stopped visiting, but I still fondly remember those old pixel art days of Illucia.

Sadly, I haven’t been able to find any trace of it online anymore aside from one brief mention in another online article. If anyone knows of anything, please send it my way!

Sliced turkey, pear, and feta 🤌

Sounds like you’re talking about Home Assistant maybe?

Maybe for future astroturfing?

I’m @RadDevon@techhub.social. My activity ebbs and flows over there, but my interests are games, urbanism, technology, and various other things.

What’s the best way to link to that? I don’t think I’ve done it right.

I would add to this community migration, which will be important as instances start going offline. User migration is great, but, whereas on Mastodon, the content lives on the user, I believe here it lives on the community.

I tried it as well, and it’s pretty simple if you’re comfortable in a terminal or on the command line.

On macOS, I used DB Browser for SQLite to view the data, and that works pretty well. Installed with Homebrew: brew install --cask db-browser-for-sqlite. Then, I just launched the new app and opened the reddit.db file. That file gets created wherever you run reddit-user-to-sqlite.

Yes, many parts of MGS 1, but some that stand out for me:

• Colonel Campbell breaking the fourth wall and telling you to look on the back of the game box
• Psycho Mantis moving the controller with his mind
• Psycho Mantis talking about your other Konami save data

Unnecessary, yes. In error, maybe or maybe not. Some people just may not want to come up with a name apart from the URL and decide to use the URL fragment as the name.

I’m guessing the user who created “/c/showerthoughts” named it “/c/showerthoughts”. You’re seeing the community names, and that one is named the same as the URL.

Oh, weird. What instance are you on?

No, communities are like subreddits. What you’re talking about is an instance. It’s like a whole other Reddit that can interact with all the other Reddits. If one Reddit starts misbehaving, the party’s not over because we can all just migrate to another one.

Hey, nice! Happy Cake Day to you too!

I’m hoping they can get an “exit strategy” in place so that communities and users can move off instances that might have to go away for one reason or another. Seems like key functionality on the fediverse. It’s been a really cool community so far though. Reminds me of the way early Digg and Reddit felt, before they hit critical mass.

I’m with you. I was shocked to see the little cake next to my name today. 😅