Frankly, when someone I follow makes a post using generative AI, whether it be text, an image, an animation or music, I lose a bit of respect for them. Not all of it, not from just one post, but it happens.
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John Harris
@rodneylives@mefi.social
hometown 4.5.18+hometown-1.2.1I'm JHarris on Metafilter! I went with rodneylives here because I kind of regret going with my actual name back when I joined. They/them. Searchable via tootfinder.
Writer for Set Side B. Sometimes game designer maybe. Metafilter member. Oldweb and blog enthusiast. I wrote @play long ago on GameSetWatch. I do Q&As for Game Developer. Other things too. BLM! Trans rights are human rights!
#roguelike #setsideb #blog #atari #arcade #nintendo #metafilter #oldweb #pixelart #nonbinary #fedi22
913 Followers
1462 Following
50 Posts
Joined November 16, 2022
Neocities:
Set Side B:
Exploring Roguelike Games (book):
Loadstar Compleat:
Y' kno, McDonald's has many things wrong with it, but every once in a while....
Hay eveybodie, They Might Be Giants is giving away a free download of Flood in America, a collection of songs from Flood as performed on live tours, for today and tomorrow only! Here: https://tmbgshop.com/collections/all/products/flood-live-in-america-download
NETHACK 5.0 is out. https://nethack.org/
I am literally crying right now.
Thinking about switching from Gmail to some other email. They've decided to move their purely Baynesian promotion filter under the same umbrella their AI features are under, so you can't have the first without the second, and I'm fed up. Any suggestions?
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@mrencyclopedia@retro.pizza A lot of people have drunk the kool-aid. I've learned, as I've gone through life, that cutting people off suddenly over one thing doesn't work for me.
I'll be getting a table at Vintage Computing Festival (VCF) Southeast 2026 this year in Atlanta! And it looks like I'll be able to present my talk on the history of Loadstar there too! https://vcfed.org/events/otherevents/vintage-computer-festival-southeast/
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@vga256@mastodon.tomodori.net @philpem@digipres.club Two years ago I had cause to be in the very nice multi-story library in downtown Atlanta, and I noticed they still have a print edition of Microsoft Encarta on their reference shelves.
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...introduced whole new categories of things to hate computers for like how AI security systems have caused Target to falsely accuse people of shoplifting, and caused countless companies to replace their usual shitty customer service chatbots with WORSE shitty bots...
...setting aside ALL of that, they also threaten to destroy entire categories of freelance work, making it even harder on people who already have a difficult time surviving.
BUT NO I'M A HATER. Phooey!
Seems bad, a mass surveillance act progressing through Congress, again in the name of "protecting children," bah
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/kids-act-would-require-age-checks-get-online
WIRED: "Chrome users were caught off guard by a 4-GB Google AI model baked into Chrome, sparking privacy concerns. The good news: You can easily uninstall it. The bad? You might not want to."
PLEASE DON'T PRESUME WHAT I WILL AND WONT WANT WIRED MAGAZINE
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@ComicContext "Ha ha! Behold my clever ruse! This robot is actually not trained to smash your camera! It's...
"...okay, it IS trained to smash your camera. But this OTHER robot...
"...is also trained to smash your camera.
"That's all I got. Camera smashers. It's not my fault, the electronics store was out of a lot of things!"
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@seabass@social.seabass.systems @kde@floss.social Furthermore: the only reason you can't access files on your phone as easily as if they're on a computer is because of the stupid walls between programs they erected in the first blinking place!
I mentioned Wrong People yesterday. I mean that, not just to mean people who say something incorrect, but people who, for whatever reason, _constantly_ say things that are incorrect. Of course different people will have different definitions of wrongness, but...
Often you'll find people who, for whatever reason, are _consistently_ wrong. Not randomly wrong, but you get the sense that they have ulterior motives for their wrongness. Maybe they're trying to push the discourse in some direction, for personal or professional reasons. Those are the Wrong People.
They cannot be right, because they have a vested, often hidden, reason for their Wrongness. Like, who in their right mind can honestly believe AOC is an antisemite? Yet some people push that line. They are the static before the signal. They are a fine target for the block button.
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@foone@digipres.club There's no PR team pushing Mastodon on folk.
People talk about organic publicity. Well, ALL of Mastodon's publicity has to be viral, because no one with money is backing it. Also, there's no articles to write on how Mastodon Boss has made some stupid decision.
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@LRRRonEarth@beige.party @BionicBeth@beige.party YOU CAN DO ANYTHING AT ZUUL.COM. THE ONLY LIMIT IS YOURSELF.
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@eniko@mastodon.gamedev.place @seldo@alpaca.gold All of this indicates that the underlying problem is stupid people have too much money.
I've been working on a silly little terminal game. Deliver the mail to the people in a small (one screen-sized) kingdom. Problem is, there's one randomly-placed live landmine left over from the recent war. Everyone has an idea of where it is, but not everyone is right.
It's not the kind of game where you deduce its location. It's the kind of game where you use what info you get and hope for the best. And if you lose, hey, it takes like five minutes to play.
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Yeah, it's been a long time since Slashdot was huge and sites could be taken down by "the Slashdot effect," but it's still a nice thing. Now I have had a total of two submissions published on Slashdot.
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And then, a new world opens up to you. It has its quirks too. You learn to keep your filenames short so more will fit on screen when you use ls, and not to add spaces to them because those multiply your hassles.
But there's so much power there, especially behind the two-letter commands.
ls. cd. cp. mv. rm. df. dd. if. vi. Linux pros love the command line but, humorously, they hate typing. Modern shells also have search and even autocomplete, and scrolling through previous commands with up and down arrows.
You don't HAVE to use any of this, pretty much ever. But it's there if you need it... or if, someday, you want it.
An excellent way to dip your toes into this world is with Julia "b0rk" Evans series of one-image explainers: wizardzines.com/comics/
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@ajroach42 Yay, Andrew! Your posts are always interesting!
I have an electric bike, and I've thought about taking a road trip somewhere with it. You're pretty far, but in-the-same-state far. I'm still mostly a beginner though.
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@fluttergirly
Yay, congrats! I'd offer to test but I'm not sure I could give it the time it deserves.
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@Monzz@elekk.xyz I personally don't think Nethack is nearly as formidable as its reputation suggests, I think DCSS is harder, personally.
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@cmconseils@mastodon.social
"Well doctor?"
"I'm sorry to break it to you... you have brainleaf."
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@tildetown@tiny.tilde.website Does anyone reply to these? I was working on a script/game when Town went down, is there any way I could get a copy of it to work on locally? I've already tried scp, it's down too.
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@256@mastodon.social While it's entered a period of neglect, Blogger and Blogspot continue rolling along.
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It looks though like it's only on its "Firehose," not its front page. Oh well!
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@ajroach42@retro.social
I feel like I should boost this entire thread but I've already visited three posts in it.
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I kind of want to show the world, but I'm also wary of Youtube assuming it must be good by any traffic I drive to it.
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@cramerd@mastodon.nl Yes, but can you tell me why is the world in love again? Why we're marching hand in hand?
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@going_to_maine@mastodon.social
Yes, auspicious! I think they skipped over 4.0 because a substantial variant took up the 4 number.
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@WesternInfidels Wow, that opened in mefi-social's interface, and is officially the longest "Mastodon" post I've ever seen.