skulblaka

In the South? Yes, definitely.

1. The Mexico border is down there. This is worrisome, not because of the Mexicans, but because ICE gangs like to hang out near the border to try and catch runners. A lot of them are tied up in northern cities right now kidnapping citizens but I wouldn’t expect them to leave the southern border undefended.

2. It’s extremely hot as fuck right now. Further south you go the worse it gets. I’m ~600 miles north of Orlando and it was 109F outside today (that’s about 43C) with over 50% humidity. When you pass through my home state of Louisiana you’ll be seeing closer to 115F/80%. With heat that high and humidity content that high heat stroke becomes extremely easy. You’ll be dealing with this from Florida through around maybe Texas where it starts to become a drier heat, with lower humidity, but places like Arizona used to hit 120F/49C before we were all talking about global warming.

3. Southern Americans (as in, Southerners in the US, not people who live in South America, I know it’s confusing) are not all racist, but uh… you’ll see more who are, than aren’t. If you’re any shade of brown you’re going to have a rough time. If you speak with a “funny” accent you’re going to have a rough time. Armed racists populate huge swathes of the southern and midwestern US. This is statistically more likely to be just upsetting rather than directly harmful in most situations, but I wouldn’t want to roll those dice, it’s still very possible to find people who would just abduct and kill a foreigner they don’t like.

Currently speaking, your biggest problems in the American South right now as a foreign tourist are going to be local racism and ICE. The local racism has been around forever and is mostly tolerable if you don’t take offense easily, but you can probably expect to be called some slurs right to your face in more than a few small towns. ICE is a newer and probably bigger problem at the moment. They have orders from the president to capture and deport more people than they will possibly be able to accomplish, so anyone who looks or sounds foreign and doesn’t have three forms of ID on them to prove citizenship is increasingly likely to get bagged, tagged, and dragged to a blacksite somewhere. I’m not confident that a tourist visa (or even a work visa) is going to stop them, it’s already been proven that actual valid citizenship doesn’t stop them.

Flying in from outside the US during this time to then attempt to drive all the way across the South

Both. It’s both. I hope they stay safe. There are like 4 different major threats to a foreigner on that route.

If your hardware is lower end it isn’t useless. If I skip that then I get pretty bad stuttering in some games when new things are loaded in. If I let them cook in advance then that doesn’t happen.

If your GPU is good enough (or your game potato-friendly enough) to compute shaders on the fly without issue then yeah it’s pretty much useless.

It comes down to how much the publishers care about their own product. Devs shoveling third party kernel anti-cheat into their product often cause those games to be Linux incompatible. Devs bundling their own unnecessary launcher with the game and requiring it to run the launcher in order to run the game sometimes cause those games to be Linux incompatible. It often isn’t even the devs themselves making this decision, which is why I blame the publisher more than the developers in most cases.

But with how robust Proton has become these days there isn’t a whole lot outside of those two cases that will make a game not run on Linux. It’s pretty intentional at this point.

Yeah the Fediverse was built with specifically that in mind. Move to another community or instance, or create/host your own if you really can’t get along with anybody. If the admin of community@l.world is being a cock then just make your own community@fuck.you and come brigade everyone to go join that one instead. In real life Fediverse lore this has already happened at least once with the fracturing of 196. It’s an intended feature of the system.

This is going to probably sound like a stupid idea, but I mean this earnestly:

Can we just make Internet 2? Just a new underlying protocol with less restrictive browser requirements, sure you might need to use Chrome to log in to your bank, but we could just host everything else on the fedinet. Just like back in the old days, webrings hosted on closet servers and rented racks.

Google didn’t build the internet so why do they have so much clout about how it’s run? We can just start over again with self hosting. This time we even have all the knowledge we gained from already doing it the first time. I’m picturing an entire second layer of internet unlinked with the first one. Kind of like onion sites I guess, the more I think about this the more I’m realizing that the tor network is probably exactly what I’m talking about. Just that, but instead of hosting pirated content or weird porn or bitcoin assassins it’s just a low stakes noncorporate internet protocol. You probably won’t want to do a lot of transactions on it, but social media or personal websites or video hosting would probably be fine.

[…] that feels like the internet of old.

But this shit, this hatred, does not belong here.

Buddy I got some bad news for you about the internet of old, flame wars are some of the first things we ever got up to on the internet.

To be clear, I agree with you, fuck that noise - but I don’t think this is a hill you want to get too comfortable on. It’s best to just ignore them, or block them if you feel strongly about it. People have been and will continue to call each other stupid assholes on forums from the beginning until the end of the internet era.

Dealer torches their own stock that they can’t sell, blames protestors, and gets to write off all those cars with insurance payouts instead of just sitting on them

I mean, these are all real CIA documents being referenced, you can go read them yourself. It’s trustable in as much as you can trust the CIA to be straightforward within their own documentation that wasn’t declassified until 20 years later.

They made a pretty good case through a series of generally ethical experiments to prove that at least some forms of psychic phenomena like remote viewing are almost certainly real, if not exactly reliable or common. I thought that was pretty neat.

Other than that, no, I can’t think of much.

From the party who brought you “Keep your politics out of my [X]” it’s incredible how much time and effort they put into forcing politics into every fucking thing. Can’t play a video game, can’t watch YouTube, can’t watch the actual TV, can’t listen to a podcast, can’t even walk my dog down the goddamn street in my own neighborhood without being slapped upside the head six times with Reich-wing bullshit.

They’re banking on that happening so they can cry terrorism and swing emergency powers into full effect in response. Then they won’t even have to detain you they can just shoot you on the spot. They’re soft rolling the ethnic cleansing right now but if people start fighting back against it they’ll probably stomp the accelerator on it.

Similarly, when I tried to learn to play using a mute, it sounded like absolute dogshit because the mute changes a ton about how the instrument sounds and feels to play. You’re going to sound (and probably be) off key and the lung pressure feels different because you’re blocking part of the air flow out of the instrument. It requires a technique adjustment to sound right.

There is not a single piece of profanity in this entire post, get the fuck out of here with that bullshit

I don’t have a whole network setup like the rest of you guys, but I’ve been naming my desktop pc’s SHODAN ever since I built my first one. Secondary/partner’s pc is named XERXES. I’ll probably never change them.

I just mean one app that bridges all of that together. Having all those services as different tabs on the same window, so to speak. I want to be able to check Lemmy for news and memes, check Mastodon, scroll a couple of Loops, and settle on a Peertube video to watch while I eat lunch without ever leaving the mbin environment.

I didn’t even figure this was a realistic ask, so if they’re already doing it more power to them, and I might come check it out.

Shame, too, I actually first joined the Fediverse through Kbin and I quite liked Ernest when I heard from him. Hope he’s doing okay these days.

I wonder if the mbin team has plans to turn it into the all-in-one Fediverse app, that can reach out and touch Lemmy, Mastodon, Pixelfed, Loops, Peertube, et al. Seems like a neat idea. I’ll be especially tickled if they can pull that off before Elon Musk manages to do exactly that with X on the corponet side, since he’s been talking about wanting to do that for ages.

mbin is a fork of the (now abandoned?) kbin which integrates with Lemmy.

It’s pretty much the same as any other Lemmy client unless they added something I don’t know about, basically just a front end for the Fediverse.

but so far the number of dead children has dramatically decreased since Biden was in office.

The reporting on it has certainly decreased, but I don’t think either you nor I can say this is true with any amount of certainty.

Besides, “Israel is playing nice now that they have their ace in the White House” isn’t really the big win you make it out to be. Biden continued shipping armaments, Trump is doing that and more as well as actively making plans with Netanyahu for the expulsion and destruction of Gaza.

The only way we were ever going to fix this from our side of the ocean was by putting a warhead on Netanyahu’s forehead but that was never going to happen with either choice.