Ah! Totally misinterpreted your comment then, sorry 😅

I thought its discussion of how much Civilization focuses on conquest, colonization, and combat over most other systems, to the point of it becoming a bit ridiculous if you try to go pacifist, was interesting. The year it was written didn’t seem a detriment.

CEO’s are almost universally out of touch with reality, and usually chase trends thinking it will help them get higher profits and garner more investment. AI is just the newest bandwagon for them to mindlessly jump on.

It’s genuinely impressive how the whole ecosystem of proprietary software is speedrunning enshittification at an unprecedented rate. The net is tightening, and the only escape is FOSS.

Since it’s a native linux game, should work a treat on Steam Deck.

Older desktops can have a somewhat hefty idle power draw due to the overall system consumption contributing more than expected, such as the southbridge. According to this old review of the i7-2600k, the system idles at 74w, which at $0.12 per KWh, would cost you roughly $77 per year. Though you might want to confirm that with a Kill-a-watt meter if you can (libraries sometimes lend them out), since I’m pretty sure that total system power chart includes a discrete GPU, so the real number for a GPU-less system is probably around 40 or 50w at idle.

If that is accurate, you could potentially replace your i7-2600 with a used Dell Wyse 5070 thin client from ebay for about $40 (in the US), and that idles at 5w, which would only cost you $5 a year at the same rate.

Older thin clients and laptops tend to have much better idle power draws compared to desktops. For other people reading this, if you’re using a desktop for a low-power use case, it’s probably worth finding out what its idle power consumption is and doing the calculation to determine if it’d be worth replacing it with a more efficient used thin-client or office mini-pc.

If you play the OG deus ex, I highly recommend modding it with the revision overhaul, or GMDX. It’s very clunky without one.

If you like stealth games, I’d recommend the first two thief games (with fan patches to run well on modern systems).

I think you’re right, and they may be exaggerating a bit. From what I can tell, this would be almost act like a 4th setting between power-save and on-demand mode, so you still get most of the benefits of power-save mode, but without the need to switch back to on-demand when you do something intense.

also @[email protected].

I don’t know. Fascism hates art

Speaking of which…

Here’s hoping there’s a final push for SKG, then!

The campaign was designed to save all future games, The Crew was just a useful catalyst to launch from, since it was a very visible example of what they were fighting against.

But yes, saving games is pretty minor compared to stopping literal fascism. It’s just a shame that PirateSoftware fucked the campaign so hard, and stopped a big influencer from basically pressing the ‘win’ button by talking about it.

The first part seems to be for people who are unfamiliar with the games. The political analysis begins at 19 minutes.

The games go into:

• Discussion of monopolies, how they are used to exploit, and how they use state force to maintain their position to prevent competition
• The Carrot character is an anarchist in the first game, who infiltrates the weather factory of the second game to document the exploitation of its workers. He then gives the player a quiz about US economics so that you can infiltrate a board of directors, but when he becomes a member of the board himself, becomes a liberal reformist.
• In the third game, the devs put an easter egg only accessible by editing a config file with an obscure code, which adds police branded riot gear to the marching fascist candy soldiers, in a reference to the 1999 Seattle WTO Protests.

I really like the premise, though if I might suggest, y’all might want to tweak that trailer so the intense movie trailer music doesn’t stop abruptly towards the end.

Adding onto his recommendation to join or create unions:

Unionizing your workplace brings almost immediate benefits to you and your co-workers (a living wage, benefits, more time off), it also lets us fight back against the regime with an effective general strike, just as it worked in 1886 (they wouldn’t have fought us so hard back then if it didn’t).

Below are some resources to Unions from around the world who can help train you to become an organizer and form a grassroots union with your co-workers:

• 🌍 Global: IWW (Français) - (Español)
• 🇦🇷 Argentina: FORA
• 🇦🇺 Australia: ASF-IWA
• 🇧🇷 Brazil: FOB
• 🇧🇬 Bulgaria: ARS
• 🇩🇪 Germany: FAU
• 🇬🇷 Greece: ESE
• 🇮🇹 Italy: USI
• 🇳🇱 🇧🇪 Netherlands & Belgium: Vriji Bond
• 🇪🇸 Spain: CNT
• 🇸🇪 Sweden: SAC
• 🇬🇧 United Kingdom: UVW

You can play the game here on Archive.org, or you can download a copy from that page and play it in DOSBox Staging.

Here’s all the physical documentation you’ll need, such as the short story, how to play manual, and an in-world map (you’ll have to draw your own, but it’ll give you a rough idea of the land. If you find map making tedious, you could use a map someone else made).

Lastly, you’ll need this interactive copy protection wheel when it prompts you for a combination in game, right before entering a simulation.

Good luck! :D

A Mind Forever Voyaging, by Infocom.

It’s an old text adventure from the 80’s with a particularly cool and oddly relevant concept: You take the role of an AI that’s been meticulously raised in a simulation to truly become a general intelligence. The reason this project was undertaken was to eventually send you, the AI, into other simulations based in the near future to test the outcomes of various political policies of the new republican government, record your interactions, and report back to the engineers who created you.

The game’s designer said that he created the game in response to the despair he felt from Ronald Reagan being elected.

I haven’t gotten super far in it, but it has an incredibly well written short story in the manual that details all the events leading up to the start of the game, and so far the game itself is unlike anything else I’ve ever played.

If you’re not able to find an adequate solution for Obsidian, you may want to investigate TriliumNext Notes.

I’d actually never used Photoshop until yesterday (CS6 to be exact. Yarr! 🏴‍☠️ ), out of curiosity to see how it compared to this modded GIMP, so I don’t really have a good frame of reference on how they truly compare beyond what I messed around with briefly.

On a side note, I’ve seen on youtube that it’s possible to get the latest version of Photoshop working in WINE on Linux Mint, which could be an option if you decide to fully switch to Linux. I managed to get CS6 working in WINE, though it seemed to be a little slowish when making brush strokes (unsure if that was normal or not), and there was a couple minor visual bugs (a tooltip not going away), but nothing that would’ve fully prevented me from using it.

Woah! Had no idea. Considering that, I’m amazed this ability for GIMP isn’t more well known (or maybe it is, and I’m just unusually late hearing about 😅)

I figured I’d recommend the OG since it’s easily available from flathub, and even in maintainence mode, was likely feature complete for most needs. But cheers for mentioning TriliumNext as well, which hopefully will come to flathub as well soon!