Tbh the Matrix never made sense from that angle, metabolism uses more energy than it generates. I think the original script said humans being farmed for their brain processing power, not body heat, which would have made marginally more sense. (Also why not just keep people in a coma in either case; anyway I’ll stop poking at Matrix plot holes 😂)

Tbh I think Consider Phlebas is one of the weakest Culture novels, so I’d absolutely give Player of Games a shot! I started with that one, and it does a much better job at showing The Culture’s society than the mere outside glances we get from Phlebas.

With the possible exception of Phlebas, I recommend going through the series in publication order. But feel free to skip Inversions and State of the Art, imho they both mostly suck 😅 The rest of the books are great :)

thanks, I’ll check it out!

If I lived in, say, Iain Banks’s post-scarcity anarcho-communist utopia The Culture, I’d get a neural lace in a heartbeat. But living in this capitalist dystopia that most of us does, I don’t trust corporations to not use this sort of technology for domination over the populace.

For perspectives on how it might go (general vibes, not the same technology) I recommend HYPER-REALITY (6 mins short film) or David Brin’s Existence novel.

In a way, piracy can fix that problem too, since pirate servers existing for ongoing games means they’ll never actually die

That happened to Ragnarok Online. Iirc the early server code got leaked by hackers (it seems it’s still being developed on GitHub lol), so all throughout the game’s 20+ years lifetime it has had a flourishing private server scene with hundreds of servers still online, so I don’t think it will die in our lifetimes.

The theft was the scraping and regurgitating of art that then puts the original artists out of work.

found an online OCR:

autismjester - Apr 17

People still tend to lump JK Rowling in with the category of ~problematic artists~ and I need everyone to understand that is not the problem with her. She is not comparable to anyone who wrote a piece of fiction you hate, or someone who made rude comments in 2015 and has since learned better.

She is far more like Elon Musk. She is a radicalized person with an extreme amount of social and financial power, and for YEARS she has been using that power to try to influence her government into hurting vulnerable people, on purpose. And she has succeeded. THAT is the problem with her, and THAT is why spending money on her books is so dangerous, not because her books aged badly.

Critiquing her work is fine, of course (I personally was never a fan so I really don’t care) but you NEED to understand that fiction is not the main issue here. And I truly think acting like she’s the same as the rest of any giant list of ~problematic creators of the week~ waters down how dangerous she is.

decadent-trans-girl - 18h ago

MPREGMAFIA

@prettyliltakemachine.is-extremely…

Kineticist

every time HP Lovecraft’s name comes up in conversation we’re obliged to do a collective struggle session about his racism but J.K. Rowling is out here donating the proceeds of her IP to the Foundation For Putting Trannies In The Thresher and people are like ‘well her work means a lot to me’

May 17, 2025 at 2:10 PM

25,729 notes

Guild Wars 1 - last month celebrated its 20-years anniversary :) I only started it in 2018, but it’s a really solid game!

And both its developer and publisher are committed to keeping it alive as long as they can. It’s been mostly automated in 2013, so apparently it costs very little to keep the servers running.

fuck, I’m using the Pocket plugin a lot :[

not for proper bookmarking, just to mark where I was in longer videos and webcomics, 1 click on/off, easy

yeah, whenever I have to look at someone else’s browser and it’s an ad-filled hellscape I’m really grateful for uBlock. The internet would be completely unusable for me without it.

Same when people talk about how creepily the ads target them based on circumstantial stuff* it feels like an alien experience bc even if I get targeted despite employing quite a few tracking blockers, I never actually see the ads lol.

(* like that story of the father hearing about the daughter’s pregnancy because he got spammed with baby care ads after the daughter googled some medical symptoms)

+ bonus recommendation for those of us who still have to use Facebook: F.B. Purity is great

that’s beyond my IT skills, but AdGuard fortunately works for most apps

Yeah, that’s one of the memories I retained of my 12-years-ago playthrough that the first boss was the most difficult by far.

Another of my issues is that I’m a completionist and want to play every sidequest and get most unlockables. And that means either juggling 4 wiki lists while playing, or as I ended up having to do, unify them into a single spreadsheet for each chapter. Spending hours not actually playing the game 😑

or be like me, play Witcher 1, then play other stuff for 12 years, then start replaying it again to go through the whole series this time, then take a 6-months break 2 chapters in… 😅 (yea, I have issues)

I love its atmosphere and writing, but the jank…

I managed to forget about Kofola until now 🤢 I visited Slovakia as a kid, wanted Coca-Cola, they gave me Kofola and it tasted horrible 😅 (probably didn’t help that I was expecting a coca-cola flavour)

I wish Cyberpunk went under -60% off. I don’t tend to buy stuff over -80-90% sale, so more patience for me… 😅

deleted by creator

the app only has half the functionality of the web page

… and all the ads, that I can’t block outside the browser

Hungary has Traubi soda which is made of grape juice.

In Soviet times we also had the Bambi (yes, like the deer) soft drinks in various fruit flavours, which also had a characteristic tar flavour, that (as I just learnt), contrary to popular belief wasn’t because tar was one of the ingredients, but because they used expired orange oil. When the drink was reintroduced in recent times, some older customers said they missed that nostalgic tar flavour O.o (+ Bonus racist vintage ad poster from the '40s-'50s in that article.)

In my new home in Scotland we have Irn Bru, which has a strong metallic tutti-frutti flavour which I personally hate, but the locals love it 😬

Yeah, I still regularly visit Reddit because communities related to my specific games (GW2, Genshin) or countries (UK, Hungary) seem rather dead on Lemmy.

Also more story-based forums like AITA, TIFU or HobbyDrama, and of course my favourite, BestOfRedditorUpdates (whose Lemmy equivalent would need several active story-based communities to curate from).

Still a long way to go for Lemmy to completely replace Reddit for me 😮‍💨

no you don’t 😜