Arcadium 1 is about as linear as it gets. Its kind of like that game Aero Fighter from the 90s, mixed with Space Invaders. Just shoot the aliens and dodge their shots. On the way, there are gems and power ups that can make your future forays more rewarding.

This is a mobile game – it’s available on iOS and Android.

I suspect the real reason they are doing this is to condition the students to accept oppressive and unjust surveillance in future workplaces.

Too much responsibility, too many expectations. Even when I’m not working I feel it. I need a long vacation.

Nice. Take that, adware installers! Web exploits and phishing are still (minor) risks though, since they’re mostly platform agnostic.

That’s fair – it’s not great for your lungs if it’s smoked/vaped.

I was thinking of the other entheogens, but I admit those are harder to get a hold of because of our backwards and frankly, racist drug laws.

My back pain is returning. It woke me up at 5am, so I’m having an early day today. On the plus side, that meant a nice sunrise breakfast with the wifey. Overall I feel like I have a lot to be thankful for, but the state of the world and especially the thought of election day 2024 makes me feel uneasy. I try not to think about it.

there’s nothing wrong with getting high every now and again – as long as it’s with one of the good drugs and not the ones that can ruin your life

This would have been helpful in, like, 2014, but better late than never I suppose. Interestingly, a recent skeptoid episode covered a similar topic

nomachine works well in my experience; it’s pretty straightforward to set up. And it offers nice performance. It’s free (as in beer), but it is proprietary software – they make their $$ selling enterprise features on their website.

I taught myself some shell scripting and unix commands after being gifted an iMac running 10.3. I then decided I wanted to fully immerse myself, so I dual booted that thing with OpenBSD.

The installer back then was pretty barebones; I used a scientific calculator to set up the partitions. After install I was dropped into a root shell and had to recompile the kernel to apply the latest system patches, then set up my user account, sudo, and bootstrap the package installer.

Getting the latest Firefox meant compiling it from scratch, which took about a week. Setting up flash involved configuring a Linux emulation layer. It worked on most sites, but not others.

I began pining for the binary updates, native flash support, and huge package libraries available in Linux, not to mention the cool wobbly window cube that compiz fusion offered, so I made the jump to Linux.

I’ve switched distros and even switched to other unix-likes, but in the end Linux won for me.

bluesky is not that great. I can’t recommend it.

Oh, no! Billionaires with short term, selfish thinking might lose money! What a tragedy.

It’s pretty great - it has nice tooling and well structured problems to sharpen your programming skill on. One issue I discovered is, if you are studying a less popular language, the difficulty ratings tend to be inaccurate - things that are labeled medium might be super easy, while things labeled easy might be super difficult.

Also, just because something passes in your local doesn’t mean it will pass on exercism - the resources allocated to their cloud servers are skinnier than what you are likely running. This is part of what pushes problems another level up in difficulty.

deleted by creator

If you have an android, there are two games that did a great job with 2d space combat and trading - spacerpg3 and spacerpg4. 3 is definitely inspired by EV Override, while 4 is very much its own thing.

I have played all of those except for Ur-Quan. I didn’t like the combat or trade mechanics in Naev, but the storyline and the planet art is cool. I played endless-sky a lot, but at this point I just want to see the main storyline for it finished, but that will have to wait until MZ has the time to dedicate to it again. I have starsector, but it looks more complex than I would like.

Star Valor looks cool as hell. I can’t actually run it, since it’s Windows-only, but one of y’all might like it. If you liked the classic Escape Velocity games or endless-sky, this looks similar.

Welcome to the club. The more people who wake up to reality, the better. Food insecurity and socioeconomic collapse are honestly the scariest parts to me. I try not to think about it, since I can’t change it.

Check out exercism.org - it has sequences of projects in increasing difficulty level in 66 languages. It is very user friendly and provides nice structure for getting started, without the pressure and stress that a classroom environment might introduce. As for the language, pick whichever one interests you.