• 0 Posts
  • 27 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 9th, 2023

help-circle

  • A lot of people did jump to Mastodon, and apparently it had had another large influx of users yesterday after all the Twitter shenanigans. Not everyone stays though, obviously.

    I think part of the issue some have with Mastodon is the lack of Twitter’s algorithm. It’s absolutely true to say it’s harder to find people and topics to follow on Mastodon for the simple reason that you’re not getting anything shoved in your face, which is a massive plus point for many (myself included) but can also make it appear initially less appealing.


  • I loved season 3 of Enterprise, and while I didn’t think as highly of 4 as some, it was still a decent show at that point. It was a shame it was cancelled.

    I’m not sure there’s much reason to pick up where the show left off though, unless it’s for a one off limited series covering the Romulan War or something. Strange New Worlds is doing the regular Star Trek thing and doing it well, so it would need to be something that really justified returning to the setting.

    If I could wipe Enterprise from history and start over, I think I’d have liked it to lean more into the low tech stuff and make that the hook. The show very quickly seemed to drop that side of things, and even early on it mostly just replaced later Trek stuff with other stuff that did the same job. Polarised hull playing replaced shields, lasers replaced phasers etc. They even had a transporter. I’d like to see humanity taking its first steps to the stars without any of that stuff.




  • I think the bubble has certainly burst. COVID resulted in loads of new consumer investers, and the visibility of crypto had never been higher. Exchanges were being advertised by major celebrities on Superbowl ads!

    Then the market crashed, and all those investers realised what a mistake they’d made. I don’t think it’s a mistake many will make twice.

    It was such a bizarre time, with major governments talking about minting their own NFTs or even their own digital currencies. That all seems to have quietly gone away now, thankfully.


  • We have a cat called Groot, for no other reason than we’d seen Guardians of the Galaxy recently and my wife really took to the character. Our Groot’s a girl, but that’s okay because all Groots are Groot.

    We also have two rabbits. One’s called Peanut because he looks like a peanut (well, less so now he’s older), and one called, err, Jim. My wife’s a vet, and was looking after him at home on behalf of a pet shop during COVID due to a respiratory issue. Jim was the name the shop gave him. We both decided we wanted to keep him, and the name had stuck by that point. We got ourselves Peanut to keep him company.









  • I don’t use Apple products myself, although I do have an old iPad. My main issue with them isn’t a moral one though, it’s that Apple seem to design their products to work as slickly as possible with their own ecosystem to the detriment of everything else.

    If you use an iPhone, an iPad, an Apple Watch and a Mac then you’re probably enjoying a great user experience. If you want to use an Apple device with anything else you’re probably in for some amount of pain. I’m not against them, but they’re not for me.

    I do try and use FOSS software where I can, not least Lemmy and Mastodon, but my main devices are a Windows PC along with an Android phone and tablet. Windows is obviously closed source, and while Android itself is open source you can’t say the same for all the vital Google stuff on top. I have a plan to get my hands on a high specced Raspberry Pi when they’re finally back in stock and use it as my main home desktop for light use. If I had a laptop of my own I’d definitely be running Linux on it too.

    I think everyone should absolutely look into FOSS hardware and software, although in reality I doubt most people would care. If anything it’s just the “free” part they care about, but there’s obviously a huge benefit in software and hardware being free for others to build on, fork and improve. I’d love nothing more than seeing everything work on this principle, but that’s sadly not the world we live in.




  • The Starfield Direct showing really sold me on this. It looks like it comes the closest to my dream space game of anything released so far. Elite Dangerous nailed the feel of piloting your own spacecraft, but I didn’t get on with the actual structure of the game. No Man’s Sky continues to do amazing things, but its spaceflight feels a bit too stripped back for me and it still feels a little too aimless for my tastes.

    This looks like a perfect middle ground, all backed up with a full blown Bethesda RPG too keep me engaged. :D

    My only criticisms based on the Direct are that characters, and indeed character interactions still look a bit dated compared to more recent games, especially Cyberpunk 2077, and that the combat still looks a little janky. Don’t get me wrong, it looks a lot better than Bethesda’s older games, but still seems to be showcasing some rather basic AI and spongey enemies. Hopefully the RPG elements will make this side of the game feel more rewarding.